Hi, I’m Venty. I’m a newer runner here in the WoW community, and so far I’ve been having a blast competing for world records in speedrunning individual raids and talking with a couple of you about speedrunning strats. However, there’s been an issue that’s been on my mind for about a week now that I think could cause some negative consequences for the future of individual raid speedrunning if left unchecked, and I’d like to talk about it here in a decently lengthy post.

A few months ago there was discussion about allowing runners to queue for LFR wings in order to complete an All Bosses or an Any% speedrun of individual raids. While I know that less than half of the raids in the game have LFR available for them, I honestly think allowing LFR for speedrunning creates many problems, and does not accurately depict completing a raid in both Any% and All Bosses, and creates an issue where many raids will feel exactly the same when it comes to speedrunning Any%.

While it may seem that if anything, Any% would be the most viable choice for LFR difficulty to be allowed in speedrunning, it literally turns almost every raid from WoD->Legion into the Obsidian sanctum Any% run. After WoD LFR released, the final boss of each raid has been available to queue individually via the raid finder. This would mean that for an any% run of Hellfire Citadel, you skip teleporting to and fighting Mannoroth completely, and spawn inside Archimonde’s room near the black gate about 200 yards away from him. The WR time requirements then become another race like Obsidian Sanctum of: “Who can engage and kill the boss 200 yards away from you the fastest?” Also, as a side-note, know that I don’t hate speedrunning OS at all, I think it’s good we do have a hyper sprint raid to speedrun like that, but what I don’t like is the idea of every raid after MoP being turned into OS by being able to queue up for the last boss via LFR.

While BRF Any% is already somewhat like this due to the unique nature of Blackhand’s skip, it would cause bigger issues in speedrunning Legion Raids in the future as well. Gul’dan and Kil’jaedan would both be two more Obsidian Sanctum cases of zoning in and shooting them the fastest in both Nighthold and ToS respectively. While Xavius would still have his short trash gauntlet if you queued for him via LFR, it would still be an extremely dull run of “Who can kill him and his scripted trash the fastest?”

I understand that this topic was specifically brought up in order to cut down on the time for clearing some longer instances. However, I honestly don’t see the need to allow LFR for Any% when almost every raid after Siege of Orgrimmar features a skip to the last or penultimate boss of each instance anyways. So even longer instances like HFC can be completed in a couple of minutes for Any% regardless.

For All Bosses, the act of queueing for every LFR wing of a raid almost always ends up cutting out a large portion of trash, movement, and RP, due to how accepting a queue for the next wing teleports you around the instance. This can either give a lot of unfair advantages to those running all bosses on LFR instead of running on normal (i.e. BRF, HFC, EN) or is just completely suboptimal due to some wings having very weird boss orders and/or because of other speedrunning tactics that only exist in the raid on normal or higher (i.e. Nighthold, ToS).

I don’t really feel like the definition of truly speedrunning a raid (even for Any%) is utilizing a queue to erase 95%+ of a raid’s trash, Bosses, RP, and movement, and magically teleporting myself in front of the last boss. It’s not completing the raid, it’s completing a dissected fraction of the raid that was sectioned off for the sake of queueing convenience for a super easy difficulty mode. It is also frankly not very exciting or fun to watch for a lot of people, nor do I personally feel it would be that fun to run either. Even as someone who speedruns with a class that would greatly benefit in getting WR times from a format where LFR is allowed (MM Hunter with our mastery that boosts shot range), I really hope that this topic is reconsidered and using LFR for speedrunning is not allowed.