What Bart said, in my words: If a fight with your imba T10 group takes 10minutes then it is 30mins for us. A group with (at least some) players who barely did shards yet, most dressed in lvl 1-3 gear or lower. Watching videos I see the insane difference it makes to have only one hardcore-mage in, daily player, chaincasting with an epic or even legendary wand, there’s seemingly more dmg than, sometimes, all our dds do at once.
Or a tank who does not screw up one single provoke or block. Or healers who don’t miss, even from a great distance (which is vital with those huge raid areas). I could go on there, endlessly.
Sometimes I feel the whole game does revolve around the 3 or 4 elite guilds who dig thru content and I get tired of even posting on the forums, sorry. It feels like every little suggestion like making the cds separate for battle rez or lack of space or whatever has to be fought for and is instantly questioned because of course that’s another challenge - for the hardcore players - which has to stay.
I dunno it is also a matter of timezone likely, which makes it constantly hard to progress. Most players seem be american. In my prime time of playing there is 30 to 40 people on, in the entire game. When I searched for randoms via group tool and discord it can take an hour to get a 5th. Now with guild we frequently run shards with 4 people, lower levels or brandnew 20s. I saw many of these quitting the game right after they finally started to be a real help, which means, starting over and over again. The game needs alot of patience, with limited player resources.
Now raids are a fun thing, for now we even manage to get a full group, but they only stay fun if they are doable with reasonable time and effort, and some rewards in the end, even for lower groups, currently this is - likely - not the case yet.
thanks riley & team!