Dragon Soul LFR Testing Open (11/9)

The first half of Dragon Soul is now testable through LFR. If you're level 85 and have an average item level above 365, you will be able to queue for the Siege of Wyrmrest Temple. The second LFR entry for the later half of the raid is not yet available.

This is VERY much a work in progress, the UI is in an unpolished state right now. Give it a try though!

[Update 10/27] LFR is current unavailable while we do some 10 player Heroic testing today.

10/26/2011 10:17 PMPosted by Zumia

Need the ability to report AFK players not just kick them so it doesn't count against the group for kicking them.

As it stands, you should propose a vote kick if a player is AFK and the group wants a replacement. When the kicked player is AFK, the system does not count that kick against you.

2. Starting the raid is pretty frustrating. There is always that one dps that doesn't click into the Dungeon finder on live . . . well now that problem is exacerbated with 17 possible afks dpsers.

We are making a change that will cause the Raid Finder to launch the instance even if a few players in an assembled a group of 25 have not yet accepted. We feel confident at that point that we will be able to get the last few players into the instance before their absence becomes an issue.

3. Dealing with disconnected people/trolls/and ragequiters is absolutely terrible. Every single time we tried to que for replacements, someone would afk and we would just sit there for 5 minutes until the person would return from being afk and confirm their role. I want to reiterate that this issue is the biggest issue with the current system. You should not have to confirm your role every single time someone leaves.

Allowing the group to vote kick AFK players more readily will help with that. We are also removing the role check that occurs when somebody leaves. We will continue to tweak the degree that players who drop or are kicked are punished, so that groups can remove trolls or griefers but don’t have to stress that they themselves will be kicked because their DPS a tiny bit too low.

In addition, vote kick in Raid Finder requires N players to initiate a vote kick (N is currently set to 5). Only after that threshold is reached do we show the vote kick to everyone in the raid. This keeps you from being constantly spammed with vote kick requests. We plan to adding some UI that lets players know how close they are to initiating a vote kick request.

10/27/2011 12:06 AMPosted by Vreivai

365 seems somewhat low for the required ilvl to queue for this. Considering that 378 gear will be available for JP, and the new 5-mans give 378 gear, this doesn't really make sense progression-wise. It also makes it extremely easy to cheese the ilvl requirement with PvP gear, which is simply unacceptable in a raid.

The Raid Finder encounters are going to be a lot more forgiving than the normal difficulty encounters. We aren’t trying to set up huge barriers for entry. We don’t want a brand new level 85 who doesn’t know any better to jump into Dragon Soul the second they ding, but a PvP player who generally knows how to play their class and is interested in seeing more of the PvE content is a perfect customer for this new feature.

Also keep in mind that Raid Finder was just recently made available on the PTR. We still have some boss tuning issues to work out. The day 4.3 launches, there may be a lot of Raid Finder wipes, but once a few players understand the basics of the encounters (example: group up for Morchok’s stomp, then hide behind spikes to escape the black stuff), success rates will improve dramatically.