As you probably know, I’m a casual player. It means that I always played on easy modes in all games since Famicom consoles and I don’t have time or desire to participate in pre-arranged parties and challenge! So, my end-game content (that is: LFR Raids) is interesting to me only in 3 aspects:
- Dressing up my chars in cool pre-arranged sets of gear. That’s collector’s attitude – I need all 5 items that go together to look cool :=)
- Learning the storylines – being a lore-addict, I totally need to know what Garrosh did in his secret fortress and how it all ended.
- And – learning the boss fight mechanics. What to do, and what not. It’s very satisfying when you exactly know what’s happening in the raid encounter, and if you wipe, you totally know that it was not your fault at all.
Yesterday’s raiding for Zindari and Rottenshield has been very, very tricky. It seems that most of the raid didn’t know any tactics at all (including one of the tanks), and only one guy managed to ask about what to do BEFORE the encounters. Explanations didn’t help much as half of the raid seemed not to read chat. With least patient players gone, I stayed with the rest of the raid (first 2 quarters of SoO) till the end and discovered 2 things:
1. I felt that I could be a cool leader. I HATE performing leadership duties, but I appeared to stay calm in the most severe moments and managed to type small guides during all the encounters. When I started doing that, the silly mistakes vanished and we pushed through. Of course I cannot advise a tank or a healer, cause I’ve never acted like one, but well, it’s many dps who needed to be guided.
2. I was VERY surprised after guys were linking dps stats after the fights. I’ve never thought of myself as of a perfect or even a good dps – not for any of my 10 chars. But well, you can’t argue the stats: guys came and went, overgeared or leveling, and after each of the encounters I was in top 5 – top 8 in the dps list! And none of my characters has ilvl higher than 530. Now I know that I’m doing everything alright, managing my cooldowns and rotations and everything.
I think I discovered something new about myself. I’m still a casual player, but a GOOD ONE. Yay! ^_^
Gnomecore 
Grats on both leading and great DPS! As corny as this sounds, one of my favorite things in the game is helping people and it always rocks when you can tell that your advice actually worked!
Also, have you tried Normal (old Flex) raiding? I would highly suggest it. The players running them often know the mechanics much better so there are few fail groups. Also,at this stage in the game there are a lot of highly geared players running Normal for the fun of it, and many times you happen into a fast group because of this. Normals are not much more difficult than LFR and you seem to already have the gear and knowledge. I went from LFR to heroic pugging because of this, so I cannot recommend it highly enough. Try it out!
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The trouble is that I don’t like to devote much time finding a group. LFR is just fine, cause it happens automatically while I’m doing more interesting stuff and the boss fights deliver the same lore pieces like in more difficult raids.
People tend to curse violently during LFRs, saying “Well, what do you expect, it’s LFR” (as if they were not a part of it). But all in all it’s sheer luck. While you could find yourself in a group wiping 10 times during 1st boss, there’s also a good chance to party with experienced players who do everything alright. Once I was lucky and we blasted 3 quarters of SoO in less than an hour!
Pandaria is actually the first expansion when I managed to catch a raiding train. I never made the level cap in WotLK, then I started over in Cataclysm and managed to get my main only to try and run a piece of Dragon Soul when Pandaria hit us. In Pandaria, I was also busy leveling 9 alts from zero to 90, so I managed to do only LFRs for all of them so far.
So maybe in Draenor I’ll have time and will try more difficult raiding :)
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