Weapons have always been gated behind raids. The only exceptions were the relic in 2.0 and the eso i200 weapon at the beginning of HW (you directly bought it from the NPC with Tomestones, you only needed savage if you wanted to upgrade it to i210). It's not new, it's been like that since SCoB days.

On top of that, if you don't do raids, you don't need the new weapons for any kind of content.