Don't do chaotic raid again

[ReynTime]

It's incredible they made this mistake for the 2nd time... First by having regular Criterion be savage difficulty, now with a new what is essentially a 24-man trial, which is a great idea, but they forget 24 players is a nightmare to coordinate, especially in a game where alliance design philosophy has been "you will be carried if you mess up don't worry" for 10+ years.

They don't realize there are more than turbo casuals and hardcore raiders desiring content to run.

I'm finding this almost as bad year 1 DR. Asking me to run challenging content with a group of players who were taught by your shit MSQ and Alliance gameplay that they don't need to learn to play well.

[Jeeqbit]

It's incredible they made this mistake for the 2nd time... First by having regular Criterion be savage difficulty, now with a new what is essentially a 24-man trial

They don't realize there are more than turbo casuals and hardcore raiders desiring content to run.

I do agree the difficulty goes too wildly in either direction.

But there is a very good reason they decided to make this content. BA and DRS are still done to this day, and Bozja CEs and their raids were very popular as well. Given people have managed to continue doing BA and DRS to this day, it made sense to make more of this sort of content since they may appreciate more variety than those they have been doing since 2019 and 2021.

There's also argument to be made that, although it may be hard to setup the content, once a successful run is organized, a lot more players benefit from it than do 8-person and a person might feel a bit less of a burden in terms of perfection when they are just 1 out of 24 people, provided they are actually trying.

they said in the LL that it would be equivalent of an early savage floor

My understanding is they intended it to be extreme level but it ended up early savage level. So they underestimated how difficult it would end up but it's hard to change something so chaotic and it's hard to be sure how players will interpret it (we could, even now, eventually conclude it's easier than it has seemed on day 1 when we later sync down to max ilvl and have more efficient strats).

many that were struggling in phase 1 were people who's highest content was normal alliance raids

Didn't actually see people struggling an unreasonable amount in my party considering we were blind progging. We were able to get to phase 2 pretty quick and even as people got replaced due to sleeping, the people that joined were pretty good at phase 2. But phase 2 is rough, chaotic and also random so it's not unreasonable that it was killing them since it takes getting used to and building muscle memory.

There's a lot to juggle in phase 2 even when you're putting in a good effort. For example, as a tank you're getting stacks and need to swap, whilst also doing knockback immunity and watching the environment, whilst doing your rotation, and watching for your deathhand timer, and being ready to be at your position for stacks and floodrays. And much of that can happen in a random order.

If the people joining were MSQ players, they'd probably be stuck at phase 1 getting cleaved by the melee area AoE and dying to the very first 2 mechanics in phase 2, but what I saw was a good effort for what was new content, completely blind guessing mechanics, with no muscle memory.