Heavensward raids will have a normal and hard mode

[Firepower]

What I would like to see would be casuals can farm for tomes to get gear that can be upgraded, raiders can get +10 ilevel gear from coil. (as we currently have)

Put in normal mode coil with same ilv as tome gear (non upgradable, similar to CT). Make the final boss drop from the normal mode coil a few upgrade pieces to upgrade tome gear and use perhaps a CT style restriction to 1 armor or accessory loot and 1 upgrade loot per week. Throw in some craftable and minions for normal coil and it will not be ignored but I can't imagine would enrage hardcore raiders as it doesn't hand out the highest teir of gear and only allows a small fraction of people access to the higher ilv loot after the final boss which could be tuned to be somewhat difficult.

I remember back in 2.0 the majority of people farmed coil 1-4 weekly and left 5 alone as the high allagan weapons were only i90 then plus twintania was very difficult in comparison to t4. You could have some kind of tuning similar to that for normal coil where teir 1-4 pose some level of difficulty but not overly too difficult and have the final turn require a much more co-ordinated effect, thus splitting your playerbase into a more equal standing.

Casuals - tome gear (upgraded at 0.5 patch with access to 24 man raid drops)
Mid teir turn 1-4 - tome gear + extra loot per week
Mid/upper teir - tome gear + extra loot + 1 upgraded to raid teir
Raid teir - tome gear + extra loot + 1 upgraded + raid drops

With approximately 6 weeks between patch starting and 0.5 coming out that would allow potential players to accumulate (assuming the same gear costs today):

casual - 2700 tomes = ~6 pieces of gear (depends on body/leg/acc choice of gear)
mid teir = 12 pieces of gear (full set of gear)
mid/upper = 12 pieces of gear, 6 pieces upgraded to raid teir (dependant on choices of tome gear selected, if a weapon is available and requires 3 weeks worth of tomes they would have weapon and a lesser amount of gear upgraded)
raid teir = 6 pieces upgraded to raid teir + raid drops which can vary wildly due to the lockout, progression of statics, bugs and RNG.

By that point release of the 24 man raid it would allow casuals and mid teirs to upgrade their gears by choosing to use their weekly lots on the upgrade items. The hardcore raiders should in theory be close to full max ilevel and doing raids for BIS gear or weapon drops. The assumption would be that the hard mode raid would also be tuned to be more difficult in gear checks to soften the acceleration of gear acquisition by hardcores by the introduction of the normal coil.