My Eureka Concept

[Shurrikhan]

You still run into my issue though. How do you successfully tune this content to be as engaging as I am going for, with respect to such a large group? It's like world bosses in WoW or normal mode raiding. You just brute force them. There's no real mechanics or coordination required because if there was suddenly its mythic raiding and pugs aren't clearing it. It's simply do X DPS and Y healing throughput and step out of glowing circles/lines.

Splitting the raid by having "boss packs" or adds is still functionally identical to current 24 man raids, which you know I'm not a fan of.

See, I don't see why, given only the same leniency, that would be the case any more than in, say, an 8-man, or even a 4-man. The only significant bonuses are via additional transferable resource or toolkit redundancy (e.g. having more rez-capable people available, or one team being able to fill in for another ONLY if one team is facing a lesser threat than the other). When constraints are already tight, those may reduce the chance for an instant wipe to single- or few-target attacks, but they then come at a cost of resource sustainability, and as the deviation one must account for shrinks as the player count increases, that sustain becomes vitally important. If damage taken potential, for instance, increases with each player added — ToS or A4S levels of if one person fails, everyone's in pain — then necessarily an even scalar cannot be used, but if that damage remains mostly proportionate, it's really not an issue, and you don't need to add exorbitant amounts of leniency just to make the content doable.

I think we're just working off two different assumptions as to the tuning necessary for large-scale content. If one leaves the tuning scalar effectively untouched, and follows a flexible mechanics tables based on the player count (or even gear- or achievement- or whatever-count) per role, I don't see why large-scale content would have to be any more zerg than small-scale. More chaotic-yet-(short-term)-forgiving, perhaps, but no more "zerg".