Post by DarkFenris
LFR Gear Drop Makes Gearing Up Luck Dependant:Seeing people getting 3-6 items from LFR the first two weeks, and many that just didn't get any gear. It seems that luck is now the main factor for gearing up fast enough to join the raid group group in your guild. It looks like it is quite unbalanced.
Welcome to WoW. Pretty much
all gear that you obtain has a component of luck (or RNG) to its acquisition. Dungeon drops, raid drops, BoE world drops, etc. If you were truly a raider you'd understand this already and not count on it; you would be doing everything you could to prepare while mitigating any RNG-dependent factors.
Normal MSV (the first raid in this tier to open up) was tuned to require only blues from heroics (ilvl 463) to enter. You could help your overall ilvl with crafted gear or rep gear if you were able to grind it up quickly. But once you started raiding it you could get lucky with the ilvl 489 drops in there, which was enhanced with the
Elder Charms system.
Factions Reputation Gear:Even if you did all the daily quests you could to increase your reputation. It still takes about 2 weeks to get them to a point where the gear is matching the LFR. Not to mention the time you have to use on it. This is much more balanced than the LFR and also a lot more time consuming (unless very unlucky in the LFR)
VP gear is not on the same level as LFR gear. LFR gear is either ilvl 476 or 483; VP gear is all 496, which is the same level as normal HoF and ToES. Therefore, it is OK that it takes longer, since unless you are doing heroic raiding you won't be getting anything higher this tier.
The fact that the grind is more arduous is Blizzard's reaction to players complaining about not having enough to do in Cata; now you have lots of options and gearing paths.
I am too lazy to look it up right now, but I have seen posted many times a link to a blue stating that VP gear is not meant to completely outfit your character, but fill in the holes which aren't supplied by raid drops (see: RNG). You can't get your tier set from VP or rep; Blizzard is encouraging people to, you know, raid, if you want raid-quality gear.
Too Late Gear Just Makes A Burden:I think that implementing a new faction at the same time a new raid instance opens. Is just keeping all the people that try to get gear from reputation factions, one or two steps behind as they have been the hole time. If everyone had to do about the same amount of dailies, then I could see the logic. As it is now. The ones being unlucky in LFR, are the ones getting punished even further.
It's not implementing a new faction when a raid opens. These are the major factions that will last all through MoP, just like previous expansions. Soon enough you will have them all at exalted, just like before, and then you won't know what to do because you won't have to grind rep with them anymore through dailies. Sure there might be a few more that are added in patches, but that is the continual grind that comes with playing an RPG game.
Again, if you want raid gear, the easiest path to obtain it is to raid, preferably with a guild group. Your whole post dealt with talking about LFR so I am going to assume you haven't raided normal or heroic mode yet. If all you are worried about is raiding LFR, you don't need any VP gear or crafted gear; LFR is easy enough to snooze through and then briefly awaken to see if you got a loot drop off each boss, which again can be enhanced through the Elder Charms. I never understand why someone who isn't pushing heroic progression needs all the "best" gear, and complains that they don't get it fast enough (i.e. two weeks or less). It's this mentality that is ruining the community.
Reflecting on Cataclysm:I got 3-4 items in the first week of LFR in Cataclysm (yes, I was lucky). To make it short, that pretty much got me a raid spot.
Reflecting on Mist of Pandaria:Got 1 item the two first weeks of the LFR. I therefore had to get a bunch of expensive materials to get something crafted. Besides that I had to do dailies for about two weeks straight (about 25-30 a day). After two weeks, I started to get really annoyed and I was considering to stop playing...(I still am).
One anecdote doesn't constitute hard data about the variances in RNG from one expansion to the next. So you got lucky in 4.3, but not so much in 5.0.4-5.0.5? What's your point?
Am I the only "sad panda" or are there other people feeling the same way out there?
To echo previous posters, you just sound like a whiny, entitled, lazy panda.