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.

I personally haven't tried any of these category's yet, but the way you explained how close LFR brings you to the final bosses makes the runs pretty pointless, With OS it has the excuse of it only having one boss anyways, while these other raids do not have that excuse, and thus imo dont need LFR category's.

I personally am not a fan of allowing LFR in speedruns due to the aforementioned reasons. It would make so many strats redundant and remove a good portion of what makes speedrunning fun.

If I remember correctly, what we planned to do with LFR was allow the LFR que so that individuals who were doing "All Raids" and the various "All Dungeons" categories to teleport/hop from instance to instance / dungeon to dungeon.

There was some discussion I think between myself, Sadruns, and maybe a few others on the forum/discord about a run that was using LFR to merely travel, nothing more. When we saw the potential to use it for travelling, we only allowed it to be used in that case, likewise, the Training Grounds glitch still hasn't been fixed (where players can glitch through Training Grounds to explicitly get to the end of raids), but we banned this glitch in this case to prevent from what you're mentioning, Venty.

Under what we assume is the current ruleset; LFR/Dungeon Finder Ques were only for travelling purposes only. I don't think we've verified a single run that used LFR / Dungeon Finder in Any%/All Bosses, or even a All Dungeons/All Raids run that went against using LFR/Dungeon Finder for it's "intended purpose".

We do have a few members in the community still looking for more skips, Shiekrunner has made a huge contribution, and also holds the records for most of the older/patched routes that no longer work. Wrong Warping is actually possible in the game, and we are looking for more applications of this : : if we can learn how to clip out in a majority of raids that have teleporters, we can mostly skip most raids anyways. It's only a matter of time until we learn a consistent way to do it, lol. (which, we do know how to do, it's just more about finding how to abuse the teleport system). check out : the first 30 seconds to see what we call the "Get Big" glitch. Pretty much, use any item that makes your character model grow in size, and force a client crash, upon reload your model clips out of bounds.

^ only for-mentioned because warping could skip a lot of raids anyways.

TL:DR, LFR/Dungeon Finder was meant as a travel means only, and I don't think we've verified a single run that used them out of this manner/respect. Wrong Warping is possible, among "Get Big" glitch (GBG), and really can destroy most of the raids/dungeons anyways, just a means of exploring possibilities at this point.

inb4 everyone rerolls DH ;)

The Get Big Glitch actually used to work differently until Cata came along, in many cases you didnt even need to force quit the game :D

There also used to be mount-clipping, in many areas, along with what Tamlordli mentioned. It was once possible to mount onto a Mammoth mount in the Dalaran Sewers, and one could clip behind the bank, get below the sewers into the "fake arena" under the sewer grates, and a ton more areas used mount clipping too.

I'm unsure of why it's required now to force the client to crash, but I can assume it's something to do with the model extending beyond the collision detection for certain textures, which wasn't "patched" pre-Cata.

Thank you so much for your update on how the rules work regarding LFR. I'm also pretty familiar with the Get Big Glitch, my friends and I have used it for years to glitch into places like the Karazhan crypts and the inside of the Wintergrasp base to access VoA even when your faction doesn't control it. Though performing the latter clip doesn't require forcing the client to crash to work, so it may honestly be on a clip by clip basis unless the trick changes inside of instances. Either way, thanks again for your reply and clearing this whole thing up. :D

Just to add in my two cents: LFR, on its own, does not make any sense, nor is it any fun, to consider a speedrun. But when used as a teleport device, or a means to get to another instance (Highmaul unloaded zone, Kara out of bounds, etc.), it is akin to using a wrong warp in OoT. The game intends for you to clear X raid in LFR, but we use it for our own devices, be it out of bounds, unloaded zones, what have you.

My main goal is to make categories fun and engaging to run, and I try to avoid "baby food" runs and categories as much as humanly possible.