Have you ever been one of those players that have been told “Sorry, you’re just not good enough to come on this raid?” Have you ever realized that you’re Healing or DPS numbers aren’t keeping up with everyone else to the point you don’t even want to be involved with raiding? Or maybe it’s always been as simple as you don’t want to commit to anything because you never know what life is going to throw at you with your busy life style? We’ve all been there, even me.

In a recent update, Patch 4.3, we have been blessed with many new features that were screaming to be addressed. The same amount of Valor points for running normal heroics as the new ones, Transmogrification, Darkmoon faire upgrades, and much more. While I could sit here and talk about all this forever, my focus is on the new Looking for Raid finder.

Looking for Raid has been through a fair few iterations over WoW’s history, from Vanilla’s “guilds only” approach, through the global Looking for Group channel (aka Looking For Spam), through several different iterations of a manual raid listing system in TBC and WoTLK (one of which no-one ever used), and now finally to an automated matchmaking system like the Looking for Dungeon tool.

Last night myself and 8 other brave souls decided to dive into the LFR tool and see what we could pull out.  As most everyone in the guild should know by now next Sunday, December 11th, we’ll be attempting to take advantage of this new tool as a full guild. My impressions of it are exceedingly good. The nine of us entered into the raid, and while we did manage to wipe, we cleared all four bosses in less then an hour. Many of the raid mechanics in the fights remained unchanged to the principles that they were designed around, but it was a lot more forgiving. We had players with PvP gear on, we had confused Panzer running in circles, and we had Blarghe AFK for Baby agro mid fight. Normally these kinds of things would be the end of a 5 man dungeon let alone a raid!  The loot from the instances was slightly below that of the Valor vender, making it appealing to run even if you are fully geared.

In a nutshell: Blizzard took their new raid and created a new difficulty. While I could almost make fun of the new version of it, I prefer to look at it this way. LFR -Normal, Hard, and Nightmare modes. So now everyone should be able to see the fall of Deathwing without having to pre-stack a raid like we had to in WoTLK. The new LFR is a much needed tool for this game and I personally welcome it and what it can do for our community.