LFR has a reputation for being a raid mode that’s already mindless and easy. LFR Raszageth was an exception, but we’ll chalk that to a one-off. With today’s release of the second wing of Aberrus, everyone’s queuing in for a shot at tier and trinkets. On a Tuesday morning, I see that many of the players are choosing to ignore some of the mechanics and I’m sure that’s okay to do if you’re already geared and can survive a few things. I do catch the odd player here and there who’s not sure what’s going on or struggling when they’re targeted with certain abilities. What if there was a way to teach and incentivize the players in LFR to do certain things correctly?
At the end of Shadowlands (Season 4), all expansion raids were back in circulation but with some new affixes. If you completed the mechanics, you’d gain a buff whether it’s to haste or throughput or movement speed. That was a neat way to add some extra challenge and reward. Why not take that concept and introduce it to a few bosses and abilities in LFR that are staple mechanics that can be commonly found on other bosses? What I’m suggested is if players execute a given mechanic properly, reward the raid with a positive buff.
On this Rashok screenshot above, you can see Doom Flames is in the progress of being launched. Some of them are soaked, but others aren’t. Normally, any missile that doesn’t hit a player results in the whole raid taking damage per missed attack. If all of the pools are soaked, let’s provide the whole raid with 10 seconds of haste.
In Assault of the Zaqali, players can hurl these boulders over the edge at designated spots with the red column of light indicating there’s a wall climber ascending. One idea could be that if the raid successfully eliminates five wall climbers with boulders, everyone’s attacks has a chance to be duplicated onto one nearby target for 6 seconds.
When raid mechanics get missed, the healers are often punished because it’s on them to heal through what (admittedly little) damage goes out. At least this way, it provides extra onus to the DPS players. Experiments last stage involves Rionthus’ Temporal Anomaly where he gets a shield if the orb doesn’t get booted away and I guess that sort of punishes DPS players a bit as they have to punch through a shield. Anyway, the point here is the idea that proper execution can lead to a small, minor performance boost and players can feel good about themselves in the process. Hopefully, this will encourage better play that could translate to normal raid difficulty and above.