WoW Raid Finder Arrives in Patch 4.3
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Blizzard is rolling out their newest feature, the Raid Finder, similar to their Dungeon Finder, that will allow players to quickly organize pick-up raids. When the Raid Finder launches with patch 4.3, it will only be available to use on the Dragon Soul raid (25 players) where players will battle against Deathwing. However I’m sure in the future this will be expanded to including more and more raids in the future.
The Raid Finder will introduce a new difficulty level, which is easier than normal or Heroic and will reward players with lesser drops and rewards. In fact, players will not be able to use the Raid Finder to access the higher difficulty tiers so those will still need to be manually organized with friends or guildmates.
Since the announcement I’ve read some negative posts in the MMO blogosphere about how the new Raid Finder feature is making World of Warcraft less social or how it won’t be very useful, but I can’t say I agree with either author. If anything the Raid Finder will make players more social, joining in on raids they normally wouldn’t have if they happen to be a solo player or in a small guild.
As for not being useful, the Raid Finder’s greatest benefit is that it will allow players to practice Raids much more often in pick-up groups. Then when they run the Raid in normal or Heroic with their friends or guild, they’ll already know what they should be doing. Half the problem with running raids is people don’t know what to because they’ve never ran it before. So this will give players a lot more practice, plus there is no instance lock when using Raid Finder, so you can really run it as often as you like.
I personally love this feature and think every MMO should implement a Raid finder. I’ve always been a solo player or part of a small guild where it was difficult to get enough people to run raids, but with the Raid Finder this solves those problems and still allows Raiding guilds to keep their higher level items and rewards. Kudos to Blizzard on a stellar idea and implementation.
