I hate raiding. Or more properly, I hate the type of "raiding" that makes up most of raids that exist in AoC.
What exactly is the reason for having "raiding" when most of those "raids" involve at most one groupful of players doing something interesting while all others just sort of stand still nearby? What exactly makes having an enemy with a million hp being beaten up by 6 people executing some sort of tactic while 18 others just hang out nearby and press their default rotation buttons superior to the same enemy with a hundred thousand hp being beaten up by 6 people executing the exact same tactic?
This thing bothers me and I find the whole concept of this specific type of PvE content to be stupid old junk from UO/EQ days where the technical ability to create something seemed a good enough reason to include that thing, later on set into stone by WoW and its bottomfeeders. I have nothing against "social event" bosses, the type of giant monster that has nothing to its name except a bajillion hp to be burned by dozens of people while they drink beer and smacktalk each other on ventrilo. Those offer a certain type of fun completely different from "hardcore PvE content" that involves those complicated tactics and build minmaxing and whatnot. These two things are completely different with zero overlap (aside from "involves many people") yet they're forced to exist side by side in our "raiding".
Aside from a few (awesome) raid battles, nothing in game really justifies having all those people around. All of T1 and T2, and most of T3 and T4 could be done with just a single group of 6. That is, if there weren't billions of hp that'd take hours for just 6 people to burn through. If you cut hp of everything down to 25% (and maybe lower damage output for higher tiers a bit so 2 good tanks could survive) with no other real changes, majority of all raid encounters would instantly become a group encounter. Very very few of the "raid encounters" in game have any good reason in their design that requires the presence of more than 6 people (note: mob hp/dps bloat is not a good reason). T1? Already doable. Yaremka? Any tank could survive for the 6 seconds it'd take for everyone else to go use the orbs and come back. Leviathus? Have 1 runner go back and forth between bowls. Athyr Bast? Have everyone except main tank rotating on the imp. Gyas? Just eat the impels. Brothers? Kite the pom. Garden imp? Split the group in two. Entity? Log your ranged alts. Etc etc.
Sure there are the exceptions like Chatha, Thoth Amon, General Sheng, Emperor, Archfiend of Gore or Bat of Nergal but they're too few (also they're awesomeness incarnate, proper encounter design that justifies having all those dudes around makes them %300 better than ordinary group encounters). In one given large scale encounter, you either do justice to hardcore PvErs or to socializers. When you attempt to do both, the end result is always PvErs having to carry casuals. Then you piss off both sides the moment difficulty passes a certain threshold. PvErs get sick of carrying the dead weight and casuals get sick of being insulted. Remember how many guilds got ruined over T3's difficulty? Have you counted how many left their own guilds to join up with raider guilds? Did those guild jumpers stayed in their new guilds or left the game completely soon afterwards? Most of that crap could've been avoided with nonschizophrenic content design.
Bygones are bygones, but the basic question remains: What is the point of forcing 24 players to participate in an encounter if there isn't any point other than number bloat to include that many people? The more is not the merrier when things get exponentially harder. So why does this specific kind of schizophrenic group content exist?
Preemptive protip for the illiterate: I'm demanding every raid encounter be more like either General Sheng or Vistrix and less like Hollow Knight.
Final note: **** Hollow Knight. HK is an embarrasment.