Have you ever been in the situation where you wanted to run a 10-man with your group but you were the 11th player? Or, conversely, you wanted to run a 25-man raid but only had 22 people? Well, World of Warcraft patch 5.4 brings with it the introduction of Flexible Raiding.
What is Flexible Raiding?
It’s a way for players who are in groups of 10-25 to run raids with friends, family, and pug players that scale to match their group size. This means that if your cousin wants to join your group, he can if you run a Flexible Raid.
If you are a heroic raider but your LFR level friend wants to join you, you can raid together. There is no item level cap meaning that even fresh 90s will be able to join your ranks (although that might not be advisable.)
This tier of raiding will be released wing-by-wing like LFR, except it will be done on an accelerated time table so that players will have quicker access to more content than those using the raid finder system.
If you run both LFR and normals already and are worried this will lock you out of one of them, fear not as it is on a separate lock out system. This means that you can try to get achievements for the meta achievement Glory of the Orgrimmar Raider at least three times a week as a normal raider.
The loot distribution for flexible raiding in WoW 5.4 will be the same as it is in LFR. Each player will have a chance at their own loot for their own class. You won’t have to worry about fighting with your friend’s friends over who gets what loot.
Speaking of loot, the item level for the gear you will be getting is somewhere between LFR and normal. This might even make it easier for some guilds to switch to normal raiding.
All in all, I can’t wait for World of Warcraft 5.4 to try out Flexible Raiding. I rarely ever get a chance to raid outside of LFR. It’ll be fun to give this a shot.
