Thanks for starting this up, it's a great way to get some feedback on what could be a very interesting battle system! I find myself completely in agreement on the detection system, especially since it can be somewhat strange at times; there are occasionally times where I can go in on BST and sic my pet on it to try and draw the lamia away (and hopefully encourage other players to jump in without getting myself killed), while other times I barely enter the battle zone and I'm Drawn In and eat a Glacial Breath or a hail of arrows/nukes from the lamia. These are, obviously for Ru'aun in particular. To add to the discussion:

Is there a way that we can get things rolling without having wait and hope someone comes on Paladin? I'm not saying like thrown an army of pets at it (and in fact, the huge range of Gregale Wing discourages this as it can hit most of the battlefield and paralyze pet commands), but maybe something like scaling the number of adds with the number of participants? Since he respawns adds, perhaps make it that during those respawns it does a check of how many people have the elvorseal and adjusts respawns based on that? It might make starting a little less rough for a start, while still maintaining the same general difficulty throughout battle. Once things get started it's usually pretty straightforward, but until that ball gets rolling it's just a constant death-fest, and that tends to discourage people from joining.

As another note, while I agree with Jeanpaul's proposal of partial rewards and/or time extensions, I want to look at the flipside of this; I've seen people who have literally jumped in at the last second, cast a single spell or something, and be rewarded as much as everyone else. Is it possible to make it somewhat like Reives, where you have to at least make a certain impact on the fight (even just killing the adds) in order to be rewarded?

And finally, one last thing to discuss: one of my linkshell mates got knocked out of the battlefield zone and killed by an attack during a Naga Raja, and before he could be raised, the battle ended. Because he was outside of the light due to knockback, he didn't get any rewards. While we shouldn't be hiding/idling near the zone line, a system to prevent that (something like resistance for running through characters like we used to have, to prevent you from just flying out without actively aiming to leave) would be nice.