Please don't make me do LFR!

Okay, it's sad but I know right off the bat I have to make sure you all realize that I understand that nobody is truly forcing me to do anything.

Now that we have that out of the way, on to business. Every Tier I've felt compelled to run LFR, but Tier 15 has been absolutely the worst.

Let me give you a little backgound on me and my guild. We're a group of people who have mostly been playing WoW since the beginning. Since WoW has been out almost 9 years a lot changes and most of us are now married, full-time jobs, kids, etc. That is to say we all have limited time to play. We're all easily the types who could have thrown in the towel at organized raiding and just become LFR heroes, but we didn't. We formed this guild for late night, busy player and we raid 6 hours a week.

We know we'll never clear full heroic content or try for server firsts and we're completely fine with that. I like to believe we're the type of guild that Blizzard would like to see thrive and complete a tier on normal mode before the next patch hits. We're close....9/12 now, so I think we will down Tier 16 before Patch 5.4.

Why did I say all this? Simply because we don't want to do LFR. LFR is largely the cesspool of the WoW community. In all my years playing WoW I've never seen as much rude and obnoxious behavior as you find commonly in LFR. Add to that the fact that as DPS you need to sit in a 45 minute queue and then spend another 1-1.5 hours in LFR and at the end of the day you've spent 2 hours just for one wing.

So, if I hate it, why do I feel compelled to do it? Because Blizzard tied too much into the ToT raid to make it feasible to skip LFR, particularly for a casual group such as ours. First of all they made the Shado-Pan rep only obtainable through the ToT raids. Secondly they made it so that you can only obtain Titan Runestones from the last 6 bosses in LFR.

For a group like ours that progresses more slowly then a lot of groups, you feel like you need to get every upgrade and advantage you can in order to help the team and be the best you can be. The only guaranteed upgrades come from the Shado-pan rep and if you're only downing a couple bosses in normal (like we were for a long while) the only other way to get the rep (and some 502 upgrades) was to grind LFR. If you're on the epic quest chain like me, and your guild just started clearing past Durumu, like mine, there was no way to get the titan runestones without running the last two wings of LFR.

I'm not arguing for the removal of LFR so nobody get all twisted over that. LFR has its place and I'm happy it's here for those who like it. I would just like for Blizzard to figure ways to de-ensentive it for those of us casuals who are working on normal raiding.

For one, for the next tier please do not tie rep in exclusively with running the raids, LFR or normal. Go back to rep coming from dailies or if you must have rep tied to raids please give double rep gains for normal raids and triple for heroics if you want and have them share teh lock out with LFR so that those doing normal modes don't have much insentive to have to do LFR.

I would apply the same logic to epic quest drops. Give normal and heroic mode raiders guaranteed drops and just give LFR random chances to drop like now and then lock them from each other, so again, raiders don't feel as much insentive to have to run LFR.

Deflector shields activated...flame away!