by JR Cook - 10 years ago     show comments

Maybe you started playing in November 2004, then got distracted by finals, or by another game, or adult life. Maybe you started in Burning Crusade or Wrath of the Lich King and then dropped off because your friends stopped playing or the economy made it impossible for you to keep up your sub. Either way, maybe you’re in a place now where you want to come back. From all of us at BlizzPro, welcome back to the World of Warcraft.

This week, let’s talk about finding a group to do content with.

Players from classic might remember standing about in the capital cities, spamming Trade to find a group for a specific dungeon. If you were trying to fill a crew to do the timed run on Baron Rivendare, or trying to clear quests in Blackrock Depths, it could be a long, frustrating wait before you got the player(s) you needed. And after that, you needed to actually get to the dungeon in order to start the instance.

As the expansions have rolled on, Blizzard has made a number of improvements in this area, making it so that getting players together to do content is as brief an experience as possible, and folks can focus on actually playing the game.

Dungeon Finder/LFD

In Patch 3.3 (about halfway through Wrath), the Dungeon Finder was introduced. This allows you, as a single player or as a group, to enter a queue that would match you up with players with the roles you needed. Since 5-person dungeons always need one tank, one healer, and three damage-dealers, and because every spec in the game falls into one of those roles, every player should be able to get through the queue and into a dungeon.

Once the LFD system has put a crew together, the whole party is teleported to the start of the instance from wherever they are in the world, which is where most of the quest-givers for the dungeon are located (if there are any for the instance). Once the final boss is killed and the group disbands, you’re teleported to wherever you were before you entered the instance.

To help mitigate the difficulty of the dungeons with a group of people who probably aren’t going to coordinate themselves using voicechat (or at all), there’s a buff called Luck of the Draw, which increases the health of each party member and the damage/healing they do by 5% for each player added to the group by LFD, up to a max of 15%.

You have the option of queuing for a specific dungeon within your level range, or choosing to go to a random dungeon. Going to a random dungeon will typically give you some bonus rewards, in the form of gold, extra experience, and occasionally a satchel that contains a piece of spec-specific gear to help you out.

While leveling through older content (as in anything prior to the current expansion) you can typically queue as any role and get into a group fairly quickly. Once you get into current content, you’ll start to notice that tanks and healers tend to have much shorter queues, since those roles are more demanding. Something that works in tandem with this is the Call to Arms system: if the LFD system determines that there’s an exceptional shortage of a role (whether that’s tanks, healers, or damage-dealers) it’ll offer a different satchel, which contains greater rewards and the chance at some exceptionally rare mounts.

Raid Finder/Looking For Raid

Introduced in Patch 4.3, LFR does for raiding for LFD did for dungeons, though there are a couple of notable differences.

Without going into details about the various dungeon/raid difficulties, suffice it to say that if you took a premade group into most dungeons, it wouldn’t be different in terms of difficulty then if you were matchmade into the dungeon by LFD. LFR, by contrast, is actually an entirely different difficulty setting compared to what you’d see if you walked into the raid with a raid group. Mobs and bosses in LFR have less health than in higher difficulties; some bosses even lose mechanics in the LFR version that change encounters substantially in other difficulties.

While queuing for a typical dungeon via LFD would give you a group that’s intended to carry through all the way to the last boss of the place, that’s not the case in most raids. Most raids in LFR are broken up into several wings, and you queue for those wings individually. These wings usually have something like 3-4 bosses, making each wing similar in time investment to a dungeon in LFD. Of course, dealing with trash or with multiple attempts on a boss might make a wing take slightly longer.

The Luck of the Draw buff from LFD isn’t in LFR; players in a group of 25 are already more powerful than they are in a group of five, because of raid-wide buffs. However, there is a buff called Determination, which does the same kind of increase in player health and damage/healing output. The way you gain stacks of Determination, though, is if your entire raid dies during a boss attempt. Like Luck of the Draw, it’s intended to help groups overcome a lack of coordination, but because LFR is already at a lower difficulty, Determination only engages if the system thinks the raid really needs the help.

The last major difference in LFR is that the gear it drops is several item levels (iLvls) lower than what you’d get in higher difficulties. For your average player, this difference in effectiveness isn’t really going to be noticeable at all; moreover, prior to Warlords of Draenor, LFR tier armor would have a unique color scheme in comparison to other raid difficulties. In WoD, Blizzard has opted to take tier armor out of LFR; instead, unique armor sets available only in LFR (still with the lower iLvl than other raid difficulties) will be the norm.

Ready For Action

To access the Dungeon Finder and Raid Finder tools, the default shortcut key is (I). You can also click on the greenish eyeball in the shortcut menu at the bottom of the screen.

Once in the tool itself, pick the content you want to queue for, pick your role, and then click on ‘Find Group’. You’ll get a Dungeon Finder icon attached to your minimap, which will tell you how long you’ve been in the queue, and in most cases, how long you can expect to wait before a group forms. Note that this is an average time; depending on what role you’re queueing as and what content you’re queueing for, it may take more or less time.

Once your queue pops, that minimap button will also allow you teleport in and out of the instance, though you should automatically be teleported there when the group is fully formed.

While LFD and LFR are the most popular methods that players use to group up for content, they’re certainly not the only ones. Stay tuned for our next Welcome Back, where we go into some of the other, lesser-known methods, and some notable exceptions.