First things first: After playing since the end of BC and taking a break at the end of Legion, I came back to BfA a few months back. At the end of WotLK, through Cata, the end of MoP, through WoD and the start of Legion I often raidet nhc, hc and even mythic – in between I took breaks or was satisfied with some LfR “raiding”.
When I decided to come back to BfA before the start of Shadowlands, I thought it would be the same; leveling Alts, happily doing LfR and waiting for SL. What a disappointment!
Mind me, I’m not talking about BfA as a whole, just the LfR part of it: Hours of waiting for all queues irrespective of the selected role (ok, I didn’t try tank, but not every class can tank and I would never enter a raid I don’t know as a tank) … and now with Ny’alotha it’s just an endless wipe fiesta. What happened!? I’m not even asking for loot, I just want to experience the story part of the raids at least once!
LfR before BfA:
short queues, even for older raids
easy kills (maybe not in the first week, but definitely afterwards – and for fast legendary upgrades)
fast progress (you could see the content – as intended)
“good” gear / rewards as a step above heroic dungeons or open world content
LfR now:
long queues (→ why? I would say because ppl prefer playing one character and running M+ instead of gearing Alts through old and current raids of the addon)
slow or impossible progress (→ too much waiting / wipeing, LfR has lost it’s main purpose)
bad gear / rewards (→ emissary quests and horrific visions grant you far better loot and easier)
Solution: Turn LfR into Raid-Scenarios
queues: you can enter solo or as a group with up to three ppl (like in MoP), the rest of your raid group (10 ppl) is filled up with NPCs that fulfill the missing roles (similar to the proving grounds in MoP)
content difficulty: easy, you basically can’t die – boss abilities are mostly visual effects with only tickling damage
progress / content experience: the main purpose is to allow casual players to have a look at the inside of the raids, hear the NPC dialogs, see the cut scenes or do simple raid quests
loot: no gear, instead you can loot either whole items from the bosses that only look like the real thing, but don’t have any stats on them (you can switch the loot-mode between nhc, hc and mythic)… or you can loot neutral “echos of raid xy” which you can trade for look-alike-gear with an NPC (mythic pieces cost more “echos” than nhc stuff – mind, still without stats!)
Why Raid-Scenarios instead of LfR?
→ casuals can – once again – actually experience the raid content of an expansion fast and easy
→ a – with the introduction of world quests – unnecessary level of “raiding” (gear) can be discarded
→ fixes the non-raider transmog-problem: you can now reach mog-items of the current content without having to wait two years till it becomes legacy content
Another benefic of Raid Scenarios:
It can be used in future expansions for players leveling throught that expansion to see all the story of the expansion while leveling, because the conclussion of the story happens inside raids.
Raid scenarios to allow more casual players experience raid in some way would be a huge props but it requires more work on blizzards side = more resources = not gonna happen.
LFR is a joke and past legion queues are long cause more experienced players have no reason to sign up for that torment. In legion you could farm legiondaries and in bfa lfr nzoth drains sanity ingame as well as in real life.
I think introducing raid scenarios would be an amazing middle ground for people who want to get rid of lfr and people who do lfr to see story behind raiding tiers.
/edit: this is an amazing idea actually. holy moly it would fix a lot of issues with gearing too. blizzard ples
Great idea, this would solve a lot of the reasons why people play LFR. I think the Loot should just be quest greens, instead of raid transmogs, this will keep the different transmogs a sign of completing that content relevant.
Cheers to this! Im with you all the way!
Wouldnt even need any loot reward at all, just gettin the Q done and see all the stuff would be enough!
Seriously Blizz! Get this DONE!
Legion was also slightly more alt friendly. Still had the AP grinds but you could atleast get a specific piece of gear relatively easy. Unlike Rng for Azeroth
This sounds like a genius idea. As someone who had to tag along with mythic mog runs just to complete legion quests, this would probably be my favourite feature.
But it should not have any rewards tied to it. You said it yourself, it would just be to experience the plot and complete quests. I’d actually like to see a reward that poked fun at the mode (in a friendly manner of course), such as a shirt that said “I completed x raid and all I got was this lousy shirt”.
Also TF and tier sets and trinkets that were BiS all expac like the Agi one from Emerald Nightmare .
Atm we dont have
TF
Legeies
Tier
OP trinkets
To farm not even mount from BoD is worth queuing for .
We had far better incentives in cata,mop and legion to farm LFR.
WoD had same problem as today nothing to go back for at all .
Ok, let’s say that maybe the queues might have been better in the past, they always sucked a bit for DPS though.
Now the nearly unkillable bosses/slow progress bit, well if you remember MoP then you must remember those. Garalon for example, most groups just left after the second boss. They even had to remove the part when you joined the raid and it told you how many bosses were dead already because if it was 2/3 then people just hit decline.
MoP had a few more bosses that wiped the floor with LFR groups. The history of LFR in MoP is an absolutely huge list of nerfs to every LFR.
So I don’t know what people mean about ‘MoP difficulty’, do you mean when the raids were literally too hard for the groups to get past certain bosses and people just gave up all the time? Or do you mean after the months of pages of nerfs had been applied?
Anyone else remember when they had to nerf ToT LFR, about a year after it came out? Because that was the first thing you could queue for when they first brought in boosted chars and you couldn’t complete it with a group mostly filled with people on fresh 90s with base gear and absolutely no clue how to play their class.
The gear was better in the past true, mostly due to tier sets and good trinkets. But i’d hardly look to Cata LFR for that when everything was traded between groups who queued together or just needed on by people who didn’t need it just to either screw people over or hand it out to those they deemed worthy of it.
Why people have this ‘afk’ or ‘slack’ all the time It never happens in my groups. And LFR was an amazing way to learn the raid, get experience and get ready for higher difficulties
no Legendary chances, no AP, no mission board quests that reward loot on par of your hardest progressed version of given raid. No high titanforging.
Some actually raid for catchup, especially on things that may be limited like a weapon, trinket, azerite armor. But yes, they could re-think what LFR is so that more people goes there. Do note that the Legion reasons why people went LFR meant that the queue was half filled with people much better at the game and they could carry.
I’ve been suggesting this as ‘Story Mode’ for a while now, so yes, I am with you.
However, I don’t think it should be added instead of LFR, but rather as a new option. Then LFR can be aimed towards being the ‘raid introduction’ some people want it to be.
I’m not quite sure if I got your point right, but nowadays the look of your gear isn’t much of a sign of your raid progress anymore anyways - gearscore is everything. Most ppl run around with mogged gear all the time.
On the other hand, it’s a shame that a lot of nice designs are locked behind content that many ppl don’t even have a chance to aproach in a current expansion and they have to wait till one or even two expanisons later to reach them. So why not allow these ppl to get at least the look of those items, if not the feel?
Not so much about showing progress but more about identifying gear vs content when acquiring it. For example when BoD came out I remember seeing someone with full Mythic Cloth gear, I knew where and how they got it by just looking at it. My personal opinion is if you start mixing how specific gear is acquired it all becomes a bit of a blur.
Appreciate your comments about players acquiring only specific gear during current expac along with people only look at progress score. On the flip side to this there are many transmogs runs already going for current content which is quite easy to get into.
Just Raid scenarios would leave a gap in the difficulties.
I would split LFR into Raid scenarios for “story” and a winged flex mode without (or less stacks of) determination.
This way one separates the guys who cannot learn to click a freaking action button to refill their sanity and complain the quest got them here from those who can
It never happens in my groups. And LFR was an amazing way to learn the raid, get experience and get ready for higher difficulties 
