First of all, I have not played the raid nor do I plan to do so this weekend. I have also done very little research so please correct me if I got something wrong.
As opposed to WoW/SWTOR/FF14/etc style raids where there’s only ever a handful of relevant raids at any given point, you have to do those, severely limiting your options when you sit down an evening and go “Hmm…what should I do tonight? Oh wait, there’s only 1 raid I still need stuff from”
I am currently an active raider in Wildstar, which has two big raids and one small one. The order goes" Genetic Archives" (GA) – “Datascape” (DS) and “Initialization of Core Y-83”. The further you advance in these raids the better the gear is that drops obviously and DS requires you to be pretty decked out in GA gear…. Now even the people that have beaten Avatus (the final boss of DS) and Augmentors Hardmode (Boss of Initialization of Core Y-83) still clear Genetic Archives on a weekly basis even though there is no chance of them getting upgrades from the bosses. (ilvl 100 compared to ilvl 120"). They simply do it because the raid has amazing design and still remains challenging as interrupts / tankswaps are still as hard as ever. Only healing checks and DPS checks become significantly easier. Now all of this is obviously not relevant to GW2 but it shows how raids are ultimately supposed to be. They should have mechanics that are so fun that you do it for more than loot. Heck, by your logic there is no reason for me to step a foot into GW2 raids at all as my character is already decked out in fully Ascended gear and I have all the skins I could ever want
How would it be less work to create 3 versions of each encounter, rather than focusing on entirely new ones? And won’t we eventually learn the rotations and still just farm it afterwards?
I think his idea was extremely smart. Over on Wildstar there are encounters that are different every week. The fifth boss of Genetic Archives for example actually consists of 4 bosses that need to be killed at the same time. These 4 bosses are chosen randomly out of a pool of 5 bosses. Depending on which 4 you get you got to develop a completely unique strategy as all of them interfere with each other. For example the there is one boss that constantly sends out waves towards one of the other three bosses that basically one shot anyone who gets hit by them and need to be dodged. Every player that is on one of these three bosses needs to be extremely careful and there needs to be an increased about of communication in the party. All of these bosses also have a unique mid phase. There are 3 more bossfights of elemental pairs later in the second raid which are basically 2 random element themed bosses (water, earth, logic, life, air, fire) paired in one room. Every week these are going to be randomized across the encounters with all of the encounters feeling completely unique (kitten you Life/Logic).
Now what I want to say by all of this is that by just adding a few more bosses you can completely change up the entire experience for everyone and it saves you from having to design a completely new raid environment.