I miss HW

[Shurrikhan]

The problem is modern raid encounters are just the boss room...because players have increasingly complained when they aren't. People don't like Fausts or 3rd Coils. They want to zone in, start punching a boss after the preliminary light party/stack/spread marker business, and then leave.

I'm not so sure it had to be either-or, though.

They could have gone with a more WoW-like design (ICC comes to mind, though there are of course other examples) with some serious trash fights that act as still-challenging encounters but with a greater/different degree of player agency (with the "boss" toolkit being reducible by killing or suppressing the particular mobs responsible for those particular actions or auras, kind of like pre-nerf Mog Ex without the King himself) and typically more intuitive parts.

And they could have still kept the core fights separately queuable atop that, for those who lacked the time. All they really needed to do was (A) provide commensurate rewards for the rest of the raid, and (B) to allow players both to queue into the raid and directly to the boss fights, where any full-raid matchmade group that had reached a boss but had players drop could optionally refill from those doing queuing just for that specific fight.

I would love to see a return of full raids, ideally with a good 6-12 rewarding and challenging non-boss fights across the 4-floor tier.



Heck, another great way to keep those raid experiences fresh would just be to reward minimum item level runs and move that from being a hidden option to being a mainstay one (e.g., a second checkmark, alongside the first, with both being queuable simultaneously). Say, the more your ilvl is reduced, the greater portion of rewards you get; where the bonus rewards are time-gated or have already been capped, comparable value is given through non-time-gated rewards.

So, if you want to actually challenge yourself doing the Normal Mode raids (or, the full raid together)... that's a ton of a gil and tomes while they're still time-gated, or you can catch/gear up quite a bit faster atop some bonus tomes after the time-gating has been removed (since your party would have a proportionate chance to additional loot-table items).



And with that, players could get a truer-to-form/intent challenge with commensurate reward --regardless of how many weeks it's been since the tier's release-- and without any chance of feeling like a burden to their party over being late-comers... or they could just speedrun through the time-locked stuff, to be done as a cohesive experience or just piecemeal, as they please.