Next Expansion's Success: DRAGON FIRST!
I always had an idea that they should develop an airship battle for fighting the elder dragons. The Zhaitan fight would have been so much more intense if we actually took control of the airships and fought him midair, using a modified underwater z axis to simulate flight.
Each profession could have the same set of 5 attack skills but then unique heal/utility/elite, aka necros could summon flying minions to aid them.
I’d rather have maps than a dungeon (or Raid, as your suggestion sounds like, a bit). Lots more to do than run a single instance, over and over. I rarely repeat the Living Story instances.
Designing back to forward like this would let them showcase the fight early, that’s true. I’m just not sure how different that would be from normal adds etc… Most games don’t market and promote by showing what the devs consider boring fights and content.
I do strongly disagree with the idea of having the main story battles in a coming expansion be raid focused (it seems like this is what you are asking for). They should be accessible to all play styles.
Maybe have a challenge mote, or other achieves tied to more challenging ways to complete the fight. That would be 100% great, but the main fight in the story should be do able by the majority of the player base.
The problem with any kind of activity thats classed as a real challenge is that most of the player base wont be able to do it , so its poor design.
MMOs have to be designed so that most of all the content can be done by most of all the players, and if events fail on a regular basis because there arnt enuf players to do them, then the event design has failed.