Looking Back at Flex Raiding: A Personal Experience in Flex

by - 10 years ago     show comments

Raiding is one of the driving factors behind the success of WoW as it gives PVE (player versus environment) players something to strive for, their ultimate goal. However, a big problem that comes with raiding is how tied it is to the main story that drives change in the game. To understand many of the events in that happen in Azeroth you have to follow what happens in raids as each tier progresses the story in some manner. There is also a great deal of time and resources spent in the development of raid content encounters, and Blizzard has been trying to make them and the story as accessible as possible.

At the end of Cataclysm, the accessibility of raiding content was made possible with the introduction of LFR (Looking for Raid), a 25-man version with a toned-down raid difficulty, where people could queue up and get some inferior versions of the normal raid loot. It helped a lot in giving people the opportunity to participate in these raids, especially those who never dreamed of experiencing end-game raiding content.

When Mists of Pandaria launched, the LFR difficulty was part of every raiding tier in the expansion. With the legendary quest introduced by Blizzard it also gave a chance for anyone who was willing to put the effort to be rewarded with a sweet legendary cloak and other rewards along the way. LFR did come with some problems though which were not as apparent on its release.

Some players found LFR to be the end-all, be-all of WoW. It created the illusion that you were actually completing the content once you killed the final boss of the tier at this difficulty and because of its fairly easy nature, it left a lot of people with not much to do or strive for. For some people, myself included, LFR was a step to getting gear and experience to jump into higher difficulties of raiding. I did my best throughout Mists of Pandaria to be as competitive as possible and to get into a raiding guild that did Normal or higher on a weekly basis. When applying to guilds, only having LFR experience and a couple of normal boss kills made me look bad, and I was rejected every single time. The very few times I found a group of other people in the same situation as me, that were starting a fresh raiding guild, would fall apart a few bosses into Normal and never reform, since the players were more accustomed to queuing up at their leisure rather than sticking to a rigid schedule.

Having to farm LFR Throne of Thunder for the legendary quest became more like a job than anything else. I was paying my subscription to WoW just to log in, feel frustrated at my bad luck in random drops and then complain about the “bad” players I was being grouped with. It was not what playing a game should be, and I hoped for this to change in some way.
Patch 5.4 was released on September 7th, 2013, and it brought one of the biggest changes to raiding in World of Warcraft:Flex Raiding. This was the big change that I was looking for. The first week the patch went live I began looking for a group to begin my journey into Flex mode, but after seeing how many people where doing the same thing in chat I decided to start my own group, and try to lead it myself. I invited some friends and killed all four bosses of the first wing in Siege of Orgrimmar. It was challenging, and people had to know the mechanics. There was a bigger sense of accomplishment, and even the loot we were getting felt more deserved, even if it was only marginally more powerful than LFR loot.

(Fun in Flex)

After that, I went on making and joining various groups of people and have done countless flex raids. I soon joined a guild and helped them all gear up through flex, and we are now moving on to clearing normal and soon heroic bosses. Some of the people I raid with were at some point heroic raiders in top guilds in the world; some of them are just playing WoW for the first time, while some are somewhere in between just like me, but flex raid has never discriminated against any of us, and it gave us that boost in experience and gear necessary to better enjoy and fulfill our goals with the game.

From my own experience flex raiding is the glue that keeps the casual and the competitive raiders together. It gives us a chance to bring as many people as we want or need from different realms, and achieves the goal of being content that everyone can experience. LFR still has its place in World of Warcraft and it will continue being that way for the times to come, but the introduction of flex raiding will be the change we look back on and feel happy about.