I had been procrastinating on doing the last leg of Throne of Thunder for a while now. But it wasn’t as bad as I had imagined. The Lei Shen fight was more annoying and a clusterfuck but I could see that it was definitely doable. Main thing is just making sure people were marked, communication is relayed to people who don’t understand the fight and in general just having a good group. My group downed it in one shot, which was great. In fact, the only thing done before the fight was marking a few people. Beyond that, everyone pretty much knew their roles. Probably, the only thing that was really annoying was the pushback effect on the last phase. But it wasn’t impossible.
Now, that I have that out of the way, I might start running it on the rest of my guys. Usually, once I run something like that 2-3 times, I’ll start seeing the basic patterns of the fight and most of it ends up becoming quite easy. Sure, it can still be annoying but the fights are just a matter of positioning and doing things at the right moment.
For the other two fights in Part 4, they weren’t really that bad, but again just annoying. Like Iron Qon for the most part is pretty easy. The difficult aspect is just watching out for the stuff on the ground and the phase where you have to move around to strike him with all the shields. Maybe the other aspect that can make a fight like that difficult is the damage output, but that’s more of an issue with the healers than something a DPS guy like myself has to handle.
The Twin Consorts weren’t bad either. Just tank and spank and again most of the encounter’s difficulty was avoiding things on the floor. Heck, I even managed to win the helmet token for my death knight on the reroll (which looks nasty and not in a good way). Sure, there are other mechanics that you need to be aware of but at least they are not enforced on you compared to say Amber Shaper Un-Sok encounter.
In having seen the overall LFR for Throne of Thunder now, I will say that most of it isn’t terrible. My main complaint is just that there’s just too much crap everywhere. When I was on Durumu a few nights ago, I lagged out so badly and I suspect that it’s because of the number of effects and elements that were going on simultaneously. The thing about these encounters is that the mechanics themselves are not difficult to understand but the UI is just so poor in communicating what’s going on to the players that it all meshes together in an incomprehensible manner. I realize that at times these encounters are designed to be distracting but visually it’s really overwhelming for no good reason outside of adding more shit that you can’t really appreciate.
Going back to the Lei Shen encounter, I get the feeling that Blizzard wanted to make the encounter feel really epic. Instead, I feel like I was on a Disneyland ride, even more poorly done than Dragon Soul in some ways. It feels very melodramatic in how Lei Shen constantly would proclaim himself as the “Thunder King” but all these things end up getting lost on me since I’m too focused on the encounter to really take in the experience. Everything is just so rushed that you can’t appreciate anything.
I know Hobbs hates LFR partly because of this issue. In this case, I really can’t blame him. You’re pretty much in a race the moment you enter just to get to the loot. Now, I have to admit to being a bit of a loot whore. But I enjoy gearing up. I don’t enjoy the constant farming. To me these encounters are really just loot pinadas. The encounters themselves aren’t challenging because of the mechanics; they’re more like endurance runs where they try your patience in having to do the same thing for a long time while periodically having the occasional curve ball tossed in.
I will admit that many of the newer encounters feel more dynamic. For instance, I really like the Horridon encounter. At first, I thought it was going to be impossible. But at the end, the fight is pretty exciting since you have the opportunity to fight all types of adds and must make quick decisions to tackle one add or another.
At any rate, I’m glad I’m done now in doing each wing and boss. I’ll definitely start farming these LFRs more often on my alts, especially with my other guys getting leveled to 90 and gearing up.
On another note, is it me or does it feel as though patch 5.3 rolled back the increased drops for stuff in pre-Throne of Thunder LFRs? I spent a great deal of time trying to gear my warrior for the past two weeks and just had an awful time getting anything, even on reroll. It’s really frustrating since I’m just one point off from being able to enter Heart of Fear. I did cheese a lot of her gear to boost it up, including retaining some tanking items in her bags. I suppose I could just do a bunch of dailies, get some rep and pick up an older piece of gear for the extra point. But it’s just so painful and I really don’t enjoy doing dailies at the moment.
I would like to get my mage up to 90 soon as well. Right now, she’s sitting at level 88 and I’m about to ignore the remainder of the Valley of Four Winds and take her straight to Kun-Lai Summit. I thought about just doing Krasarang Wilds to mix things up but that place is just so dreary. The good thing is that as a cloth wearer, I was able to craft most of her gear, which is mostly 415s. So there’s no real point in doing Krasarang Wilds just for gear. Even when I hit Townlonge Steppes, I should have enough gear to get me to 90. Can’t wait for that as I’ve got a lot of recipes ready for her.
After that, I just have to level my rogue and priest. Then I’ll focus my attention on high end content and probably pet battles. Looking forward to finishing all of that. Hope it won’t take that much more time.