Guild Wars 2

That’s definitely true, and I don’t think there is any way around it. At the same time, the original philosophy of GW2 seemed to be a conscious rejection of that the sort of min/max thinking that underlies a game like WoW, where ensuring that the encounter is of the exact same difficulty for all raids is of utmost concern. It seemed, rather, that GW2 simply cared about presenting a compelling, fun experience for the players.

So, my reply is: if the encounter is 5-10% harder for a 12 person raid compared to an 8 person raid, who cares?

The design philosophy which seemed to undergird the entire main game of GW2 was to rethink what was entailed in an MMO, and that philosophy clearly stands out in most of the design decisions in the main game. HoT, on the other hand, seems to have abandoned this philosophy in many ways, and it makes me wonder whether this was a conscious move on the devs part. In any case, I wanted to submit a suggestion of the following for consideration, as the possible application of that original design philosophy to future content going forward:

Make raid size capable of fluctuation, even if that fluctuation is only slight (i.e. 8-12 players). Obviously, if the raid size fluctuates, so does mechanics (i.e. boss hp, and damage of abilities), but not boss difficulty.

Limiting raid size to exactly 10 members is, in my estimation, the epitome of the opposite of that original GW2 design philosophy of rethinking typical MMO mechanics. I played WoW for several years, and one of the most frustrating things during that time was always getting precisely the right amount of people together for a raid. The pure logistics of getting the right people with the right amount of time together for one or more nights a week was just plain terrible. Now that same problem is all-too-apparent once again in GW2. But why not rethink this design decision, ala the original GW2 design philosophy?