Aberrus LFR

After my pretty positive experience with Vault of the Incarnates in LFR, I thought I might as well continue seeing Dragonflight's raids in LFR while they are the current tier. I did hold off on Aberrus just a little bit initially, partially because I wanted all the wings to be out so that I'd have the option to do the whole raid in one go if time permitted, partially because I knew that doing a whole raid in LFR was still going to be a pretty significant time commitment and I needed to not have anything else more urgent going on for a few hours.

Well, this Saturday I finally did it! I got up reasonably early, queued up for LFR once I'd taken care of a couple of things, and managed to get the achievement for raid completion by about lunch time.

It felt to me that the bosses were somewhat more varied than in Vault of the Incarnates, as there was more than one boss that made me go "huh, that's actually kind of interesting mechanically". I liked how it felt very organic to have the raid split in half for the Zaqali Assault for example, and on Rashok I wondered what kind of plan people must be coming up with on the higher difficulties to deal with the Lava Vortices. Echo of Neltharion's gimmick with splitting the room was also kind of intriguing. I felt pleased with myself when at one point a warlock cried in chat that they'd been trapped and I was able to pull them out with my Rescue ability - I think I did that successfully at least... it's not like I could actually see properly amidst all the spell effects going off.

On Magmorax, I looked at the boss abilites in the adventure guide and thought that the handling of the Magma Puddles would surely be interesting, but then it turned out that in LFR they don't matter at all as they disappear mere seconds after being dropped! I'd heard that this raid tier was one of the easiest ones in years, and this simplicity also seemed to be reflected in LFR. We one-shot all the bosses, with zero explanations, no wipes and very few deaths.

Until we got to Sarkareth that is. We did pretty well on him as well at first, with the raid eventually wiping to attrition as his health got lower, but I figured hey, it's the last boss, it's okay for him to be a bit harder. However, somehow, things only got worse on the next few attempts, with people occasionally blowing up the whole raid with Void Bombs for example. Interestingly, nobody felt the need to explain the mechanic despite those wipes... instead there was just endless complaining about someone using Bloodlust too early. Some people started to drop out and we stood around for quite a while waiting for replacements. At one point we had to wait twelve minutes to fill a single dps slot.

"What have I just joined?" a dps asked after looking at our four stacks of Determination.

"You have no idea," sighed the pally tank.

However, on the fifth attempt we did finally get the boss down, though it was an extremely close thing yet again, with only the two tanks and a rogue left standing for the last five percent or so. Good thing that tanks have such overpowered self-healing nowadays...

I myself did pretty terrible on all attempts to be honest, never getting the "hide behind a rock" one-shot mechanic quite right. I knew what I was supposed to do in principle, but I didn't immediately twig that I wasn't supposed to hide from the boss, plus the position of the rocks was often awkward and on at least one occasion the "wind" sweeping across the platform pushed me off the edge while I was trying to squeeze into the small space between a rock and the edge. My only comfort was that I was far from the only one this happened to, as the bodies of all who fell to their deaths got teleported back to the middle of the platform, and we had quite a "pile of shame" going at some points.

Either way, despite all of that it was quite a fun experience again. Sarkareth is perhaps a bit overtuned for this mode, but for the other bosses I fully support making them this easy in LFR. If you have a difficulty setting that's meant to be a dedicated tourist mode, there isn't really any point in making people wipe that many times.