Patch 4.3 Raid Finder introduces a new opportunity for casual players and semi-hardcore alts to experience end game content.
Blizzard have decided to gate access to end-tier gear. You can’t buy tier 13 with valor points. You have to raid to get the gear.
Will Raid Finder Work?
Are you serious? Does dungeon finder work? Sure, I’ve had some great pugs, with everyone pulling their weight and treating each other with respect. But they’re rare.
Usually I get lumbered with new 85s, lazy angsty nubs who delight in ninja looting, ninja pulling, sleeping in the fire and randomly going AFK. When you’re not even wearing any raid gear, but are doing 40% of the dps, despite stopping to combat res the fire hugging healer, you know 4 nubs are being carried. Again.
Blizzard’s answer is to dumb down their content further, which drives me even crazier.
Is there an antidote to Raid Finder?
If patch 4.3 raid finder is as bad as dungeon finder tool then we’re going to need a solution. Sure, you can dump your bf/gf, sell your children, pack in your day job and rejoin that hardcore raid guild. Or join a “brand new” social-raid guild composed of 20 dps and 1 healer.
I think a better solution is to resurrect GDKP, gold dkp.
With GDKP, you can be assured that your pug members will be buffed, prepped, and focused. Players are less likely to stand in fire when they hear the sound of their gold burning.
Are you going to be using raid finder?
Posted by
The Gold (dkp) Queen
Sadly what I predicted in the post you linked came true – GDKP is dead due to the 10/25 loot and lockout merge. IMO it will remain dead until raiders have more than one lockout available per week. Decent players are not going to waste their only lockout with a GDKP run that may or may not turn out when it means they then can’t run with their guild. You need players from raiding guilds to be the backbone of a GDKP – otherwise nothing will be killed. Even with good/experienced players GDKP runs are typically less progressed than guild ones (because people aren’t used to working with each other), but they’re complete failures without people there who already have these bosses on farm. Doing progression in GDKP is a horrible idea.
If you manage to find a ton of raider alts who have decent gear but for whatever reason still want to go on the GDKP run it might work, but I don’t see that happening often, and I don’t see it happening without a lot of planning. If I were to try this, I’d post on the realm forum a week or two in advance, find the best time for interested and qualified players, and set up something officialish. I was going to suggest using pugplug.com, which was actually designed for this specifically… but it’s gone now.
Alternatively, if they’d let you set up the LFR raid loot rules however you want if you go into it as the leader of a majority of the raid, GDKP would work in there just fine.
I think the LFR has potential to be a lot better than many people expect. Yes, if you get 25 people in there who all joined individually, it’s probably going to suck. But my 10-man raiding guild will almost certainly be using it for our casual Saturday runs – where usually we just run old content for achieves.
Imagine you get in an LFR raid with 15 people who have raided together before (10 of whom do so every week), have a raid leader, have tanks and healers of their own, and many of whom outgear the place… of course that’s an extreme, but even if you have a group of maybe 6-8 people in there, who couldn’t quite get enough guildies together to raid on their own – that core group of people is going to make a huge difference. And since you’ll only be able to get loot the first time you kill the boss, people aren’t going to want to kill the first boss or two and then have the raid fall apart.
Though honestly I haven’t had bad experiences with pugs for the most part. Since 4.1 added the Zul tier I’ve had only two really bad ones…
I think its gonna take some time before Raid Finder actually starts to “work”. The average wait time on my PTR server is 1.5-2 hours. Hopefully this wont be as bad on live servers. The second problem on PTR is that the new raids require 372 item level gear. Not many people have that so they are stuck dumping their 359/365 PvE gear for the new 377 PvP crafted gear. I fear the first couple of weeks of raid finder is gonna be a nightmare, but I hope it gets better as time goes by.