WOW got around this by making tiered difficulties of the same raids, so that just about anyone could experience a version of the raid content and all the storyline stuff that went along with it. I get the impression they're going that way in HW, with "normal" Alex being pitched at somewhere around CT-level difficulty, and the hard version being the "actual" raid content. But yeah, I'm bad and lazy and will probably never get around to doing coils either, so that's a huge chunk of storyline I'm missing out on.