I was talking last weekend to someone about how I’d probably love to be able to raid with a hardcore crew where I wouldn’t have to handle raid leading or tell people to gear up or any of the stuff I often have to do in more casual groups. That I’d love to only have to worry about my numbers, my gear and leave it at that. You might be tempted to tell me to find such a guild but I have a big problem… I simply cannot and don’t want to commit to a set schedule of raiding… and all the more serious raiding guilds do ask that you be present at the raids.
I started thinking about all of this, about how I’d love to be able to raid with people of similar skill level to mine but without having to follow a set schedule of raids. I started thinking that I’d love to be able to hit the LFR button and be matched with people of similar skill level and be able to run a few harder raids. I’m pretty certain I’m not the only one who would love that.
But how do we achieve this? Why not take a page out of RTS and Moba games and have a MMR (match making ranking) value for each of us? We’re already edging in that direction with the gear level requirements but why not take this further? Assign a value based on gear, on dps done, on unavoided damage and anything else relevant. Make it so that if my score is good enough I can queue up for hardmode version of the LFR.
I’m curious to see what everyone thinks about this. I know there’s some who will say it would split the community, would turn people into bigger asshats but still, I think the idea has some merit.
Interesting idea, though I wonder how it could be implemented. Each boss fight would need it’s own set of statistics to measure for each role, and specially healing could be hard to measure. Besides, players would need different ratings for different roles and specs. An excellent healer may make a poor tank or dps for example, and specs in a same class with the same role may play out completely differently and need different gear too.
If those hurdles could be overcome though, I’d love to see such a system implemented. I consider myself quite good at executing fights, but RL stops me from following a raiding guild schedule. A system that allowed me to test myself beyond the ease of present day LFR, but with its freedom of schedule and pairing me with other skilled players could be quite welcome. With PUGs you never know who you will end up getting paired with, and with fights in normal mode where a single player’s mistake can wipe a raid, it’s more often than not an excercise in frustration.
If this were the case, then LFR would fall apart. You’d have groups that could easily and quickly, groups that could muddle through the raid, and groups that couldn’t get past the first boss.
To elaborate, the first group would have very well geared and skilled tanks, healers that are capable of 30-50k hps, and the 17th DPSer would be putting up 80-90k. The second group would be made up of good tanks who know mechanics, but may not have the gear/skill to be really good at what they do. Healers would be solid, 20-30k HPS, which is more than enough for anything in LFR, and the last place DPS would be generally 50-60k, with the top dps at 70-80k.
And then there’s the last group. Tanks don’t know mechanics, like aggro swaps. Some may even have an issue holding aggro(DW Blood is fine!). Healers would burn out of mana around halfway through the fight, putting up 20k hps tops with 80% overhealing, and people dropping like flies due to poor healing. DPS would all be in the 20-30k range, not even remotely adequate to down a boss.
This is why it doesn’t exist, and shouldn’t exist. I’m not going to say that it wouldn’t be nice, as someone who is usually top 3 healing or top 5 dps to get groups always that just steamroll through the instance, but in practice it’s simply not workable for everyone else who isn’t as vested in maximizing performance.
I love this idea. It would provide motivation for people to actually pay attention to themselves and the mechanics in LFR to maintain their rank as well. My guess is that if you could queue for both “normal” LFR and “hardmode” LFR in the same week that you’d have enough decent people queuing to prevent a quagmire of terrible people unable to down bosses in “normal” LFR.
It seems like it would be pretty difficult to put into practice though.
I am choosing to take this post personally! Lol. Not really.
In all seriousness, it’s a great idea. One of the reasons I have not yet dipped my toes into LFR is because all I see on Twitter and in various blog posts are people who are in raiding guilds and raiding weekly bitching about how they have do LFR with idiots to get valor. I mean, it’s one horror story after another about how untalented and derptastic people in LFR are.
I am one of those untalented and derptastic players who loves to play the game regardless and would love to see content. Silly me, I thought this was exactly who LFR was designed to accommodate. It would be nice if something like your idea was able to be implemented so that the “real” raiders could enjoy themselves in LFR and so the rest of us could too without getting bitched about.
Man, I should make this a blog post.