Tonight I got into a reasonable LFR group for part 2 of Throne of Thunder. On the last boss, some warlocks ended up creating a mass of Demonic Gateways. Now, normally I would have thought that this would be a good way of handling the Down Draft and I might have tried a similar thing using my warlock. However, it turns out that if you put the Demonic Gateways far too close to the eggs, you can bug them out such that they despawn, practically making the rest of the Ji-Kun encounter undoable.
I did a little research on the Blizzard forums and learned that this bug has existed for some time and that some warlocks are actually exploiting this bug to purposefully grief people. In LFR, there isn’t any way to undo the damage of despawning the eggs. We tried wiping using the trash mobs on the way to Ji-Kun and teleporting out/in. Neither method worked. Pretty much the only to handle this situation is to leave LFR as it is impossible to reset the encounter when this happens. In normal mode, you need to leave the instance and reset the raid.
Since I didn’t realize that this issue would create a bug, I could not determine which warlock in our group caused this to occur. I don’t know if the warlock knew about the bug and intentionally attempted to grief the rest of the group. Since he didn’t immediately leave group, I have a feeling that he may not have known about it. However, it’s said that some warlocks intentionally will sabotage an LFR group by creating the Demonic Gateways.
Some residual effects of this bug is that people who immediately enter LFR may receive the deserter debuff if they try to leave. If your group does wipe and/or you’ve been in LFR for a good duration, you can leave the group without penalty. Otherwise, others will have to kick you in order for you to avoid the debuff. Lastly, it’s best for the entire group to leave at once since keeping the group around with the encounter unresolved may cause you to re-enter. I’ve read that some people tried leaving (after getting into this section in a 30 minute queue), only to leave getting the debuff then return 30-60 minutes later to find that the same group and situation is intact.
Hopefully, Blizzard does something to correct this issue because it’s a known problem since April of 2013. For myself, my patience endured and I ended up switching to other LFR sections, having more success and actually finding the crossbow from Durumu. In some way, that crossbow made up for the loss of time. Eventually, I’ll have to re-run my hunter through part 2 as he’s missing the valor. By the time I give it another shot, I hope to just deal with the last encounter without the despawned egg bug.
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