Raiding is becoming less and less optional

[Iscah]

Your reply shows why you don't see this as a problem, one that'll drive away a LOT of players who don't raid when they can't play the MSW without enduring 24-man raids as 5.3 will force them to do .. likely SE simply wants to see more MSW boosts to those of us who don't raid, hate raiding and will cease playing if there's no way round it.

"Enduring" 24-man raids? How long are you thinking they take?

The higher-level ones take longer of course, but Labyrinth takes 15 minutes (I literally just got it in roulette and checked the time after) and I'm pretty sure Syrcus Tower is less than that.

As for difficulty... I was playing as healer, and the only time I had to heal anyone was during the skeleton phase of the Bone Dragon fight. Either the other healer was keeping everyone topped up on their own, or there was just that little damage being dealt.

There are of course millions of story-telling ways to achieve this without forcing people to do what many have chosen for 6+ years not to do .. I'll name one: THE ECHO!!!

The Echo doesn't make you remember things that happened to you that you don't remember doing.

Also, if you do that, then it gets even messier if the player decides to go back and do that content.

The writers have an established system for dealing with optional content, and it is not and has never been the Echo, but making a variable script to reflect your progress. It made some parts of Shadowbringers more stilted than they could have been, and presumably they've decided it's too restrictive on the story they're telling to keep writing it that way.

I'm nit surprised most of the replies in this thread are dismissive because many people posting on this forum are pin the small minority of MMO players who like large-scale group content (as in all MMOs pretty muc) and treat any one who doesn't as 'filthy casuals' no doubt.

That's quite the assumption.

And I wouldn't have thought there would be such animosity towards large-scale group content like it's some kind of burden.

This is the only MMO I've played. I did the raids because I followed all the blue quest markers I saw, and played all the side stories as they became available to me. (I tried to do Binding Coil and Thornmarch EX via duty finder as well but... yeah. I can see why nobody would want to be forced into those.) The CT raids don't seem anything special to me besides that there are more people in them. It's just another battle instance and a story I quite liked even before it became something more important in the grand scheme of the plot.

So again. What makes this so different and objectionable? Why is it so much worse than a dungeon? The label on the instance doesn't define its difficulty level anywhere near as much as you seem to be making out.