Raids have had flexible size scaling since 5.4. But there are people who do not like rehearsing the same scripted storyline each week over and over. There have been requests for an endgame where you go out in the world and just walk up to and fight a strong enemy with no story script attached. FF11 had Voidwatch which was just that where you and your raid walked into a zone and used an item to spawn a raid boss and fight it, and only your party could hurt it to prevent zerging from trivializing the challenge. This seems to be WoW's version of that, but instead of taking place out in the world it instead takes place in an instance. M+ also had the same issue of people not wanting to do the same story over and over, so we got delves as an alternative (though they don't gear you as far) which have barely any story attached and is just pure gameplay.mynameismortis wrote: ↑ June 21st, 2026, 07:14Raiding is that dead ? This lairs sound to me like strike missions from Guild Wars 2
FF14 was the one that started the single boss fights thing with their Trials, though that was due to the framework of their book-esque story where it usually did not make sense to make a lot of 2 hour long raids and series of nonstop boss fights. GW2 started doing strikes as a replacement for raids because no 3rd expansion was greenlit and Anet was putting GW2 into managed decline as they pulled developers off to the mobile project, so the remaining devs were not able to make full raids and had to transition to making just the individual boss fights. For WoW these one off boss fights are not a replacement for raids but are in addition to it and provide an alternative for people who don't want to clear trash or go through a 2+ hour long commitment. We already had a single boss raid in this expac and it is pretty popular since you are in for 5-10 minutes and then you are out.






