My Experience in Amirdrassil LFR

As of today, Dragonflight has the (dubious?) honour of being the first WoW expansion since Cataclysm in which I (technically) saw and cleared all the raids while they were current content, even if I only did so in LFR. I say "technically" because, well... we'll get there.

I had set it as a pre-Christmas goal for myself to do all of Amirdrassil in LFR, and with me being off work already, today seemed a good day to do so in order to secure some boss kill credit for next week's great vault. I decided to putz around planting seeds in the Emerald Dream while waiting in the queue, but pops were so quick as a healer that I never got to finish a full growth cycle between wings.

Wing one was nothing too special or exciting. The bosses fell over with no great difficulty and despite my usual habit of going in blind, I wasn't too confused about what was going on, except for having no idea what to do with Igira's spears, as DBM telling me "Spear!" was not particularly helpful. I just tried to imitate the people around me in placing them in a loose circle around the boss.

Wing two initially made me raise an eyebrow as wing one finishes with you killing Smolderon, and then wing two starts with said boss suddenly being back to life and yelling things. Why, Blizzard? I get that LFR isn't the priority when it comes to designing a raid, but surely you have the power to group the bosses together for LFR wings in a way that makes more narrative sense? I just don't get it.

That aside, this wing was probably my favourite. The Volcoross fight was very atmospheric, with the looming tail coming out of the lava to smash people during the trash already and then being a mechanic during the boss fight as well. Mechanically, I really enjoyed Larodar, Keeper of the Flame, and how it gave healers something slightly different to do by asking us to heal NPCs to trigger certain mechanics. I just thought that was neat.

I was just thinking about how much I was enjoying myself with everything going so smoothly and the colour palette being unusually easy on the eyes for a raid, when I ran into my first hiccup in wing three, where my group wiped twice on Nymue for reasons not entirely clear to me. If group chat was to be believed, it was because one of the tanks moved one of the tree adds into a bad place (twice). This wasted some time, but ultimately wasn't too bad. I just found myself wondering why we were killing the bosses in this wing in the first place, as they didn't seem like bad guys or even "corrupted" in the way WoW bosses so often are.

Then it was time for the final wing! Now, I'd learned during Dragonflight's previous tiers that the last boss of a raid could be quite a shitshow even in LFR, so I tempered my expectations, but what actually happened still caught me by surprise.

We started the fight with "T. Swift" (as Calcas calls him) and after a bit of skirmishing he flew away. Everyone around me jumped on their dragonriding mount and I followed suit as quickly as I could. I'd heard mention of there being a fight that involved dragonriding and kept muttering "oh no" to myself as I had no idea what I was doing, but I made it to the next platform just fine. Here the cycle repeated, except when the boss flew away again and everyone mounted up to follow, my mount icon remained greyed out. I ran in circles for a few panicked seconds, when I suddenly remembered a reddit post in which I had seen this fight mentioned, where someone had made a comment about needing to run over a feather. Those fiery things that looked evil and like you should definitely not stand on them? Yup, touching one finally unlocked my mount and I raced after the rest of the group as quickly as I could.

However, I had lost too much valuable time already and suddenly found myself dismounted in mid-air. I could see that I was close, and being a dracthyr, I was hopeful that I'd be able to safely glide down to the platform with the rest of the raid on it, however a painful damage-over-time effect kicked in and killed me before I could land, leading to me plummeting to my death just under the platform.

The boss died anyway, and I waited a few seconds to see if I would get a revive, but I wasn't sure whether that was even possible with me being dead on the ground underneath. Anyway, no res indicator popped up, so I released and found myself back on the last boss's starting platform, seeing no other option to get off than to talk to the nearby green dragon, however that just took me back to the previous wing, so I had to immediately revert.

I couldn't think of anything else but to mount my own dragon and try to manually find the platform on which the boss had died, but the map was completely useless and of no help. Someone did a ready check, which I obviously declined, followed by him immediately pulling the boss. Someone else did gripe about that in chat briefly, something along the lines of "dude, WTF do you pull when not everyone's here" but I seemed to be the only one affected so they did just fine without me.

After a bit of flying I was suddenly killed mid-air again and got an achievement for dying to Fyrakk. My body appeared next to the corpse of Mr. Swift (whom I'd been unable to locate until then) and which was sparkling at me tantalisingly. Annnd... that's where I spent the rest of the raid, never even seeing Fyrakk until the raid completion achievement popped up. This is why I said I "technically" saw all the bosses at the start of this post, because in reality I never even saw him. I'm not sure whether I should go back and re-do this wing at some point just to actually see the fight.

I'm glad I've got a blog to spin this into an amusing tale, because otherwise I might've been somewhat annoyed by how that last wing went. The postmaster didn't even send me whatever loot I had on Mr. Swift, and I didn't get loot credit for Fyrakk at all (which is fair but was still a bit annoying as well since I did get the lockout). Once again LFR delivered on an experience that was mostly inoffensive in terms of gameplay but also a terrible way to experience the story. I'm just glad I was able to tick all the raid boxes for an expansion for once, considering how much importance WoW still places on this content above all else.