First off, because it is ontop of the largest/best farming area in the game, you get most of the people happily farming away on the bottom side of the map leaving no players to actually do the gauntlet. This means no one to resurrect you when you inevitably fail for the 30th time on Liadry.
Second. Liadry’s orbs are bugged to some classes. Ex I cannot hit them with shortbow basic attack on thief. It says obstructed.
Third. Why base entry into the gauntlet on getting tickets? If I want to do the boss rush and I don’t want to farm, why do I have to go farm and grind for the tickets? Isn’t this against anet’s policy? As it is on a non-overflow, there is often ONE or TWO out of the six arenas being used.
These just add to the aggravating difficulty behind bosses like liadry.
What I would much prefer is an instance like Mad King’s Clocktower. was it challenging? Yes! Did the environment force you to PAY to play it? no. It allowed you to retry it until you were able to defeat the content. There were other players that would help you and you could see where to go from the other players. This is why in my opinion the clocktower was much better designed than the gauntlet was.
maybe the ticket usage each try/gambit makes it to keep the number of players doing gauntlet from getting too big since there’s only 6 domes per pavillion (wait time). If the Group arena + gauntlet is stressing the servers already, I understand why it takes so long to warp/run back/repair/gambit/repick opponent =>add time to reduce queues.
I do feel like there’s a bug though when you die you get warped back outside next to repair kodan, as if npc were either meant to revive players/nearby downed npcs OR warp back alive but damaged (and thus use his kodan repair).