When Looking for Raid was introduced, players had to be level 85 to use the feature. The system arrived in World of Warcraft patch 4.3, the Cataclysm update known as Hour of Twilight.
Looking for Raid, commonly called Raid Finder or LFR, was designed to let players join a large raid through automated matchmaking. Unlike traditional raids, it assembled players across realms and divided them into roles such as tanks, healers, and damage dealers. Its difficulty and rewards were lower than normal or heroic raiding, making major raid stories more accessible.
The first LFR raid was Dragon Soul, Cataclysm’s final raid and the conclusion of Deathwing’s storyline. It provided a 25-player version of the raid and included encounters against powerful figures such as Ultraxion and Deathwing himself.
The level requirement is easy to confuse with later expansions’ caps. Cataclysm raised the maximum level from 80 to 85, so level 85 was both the expansion’s cap and the entry point for its endgame raid queue. Later expansions changed the required level as character-level caps increased.