Silidri wrote on Jun 11
th, 2014 at 12:44am:
Abbot wouldn't really be that much more difficult epic, most of the difficulty is finding a group who knows how to do the puzzles, can listen/follow directions and not get unlucky with lag. Giving the abbot a million more HP won't really change that (though people still refuse to pug abbot on elite for some reason, tiles and islands don't scale up, I don't think roids scales but I'm not as sure, and inferno doesn't last any longer on elite).
Better off with a new raid idea altogether
I don't think the drop rate for named stuff was/is enough to make people pug elite and all the tries you have to go through to find the people that could do the puzzles(some thought they could but couldn't or just wasn't up front with themselves,) people just didn't want to have to deal with that many pre-puzzle beat downs on elite. Once you found the people that could do it, you already were in on hard.
You needed a regular group or a reputation before you could get in on elite groups when I played. Not sure how it is now, I suspect it is worse than when I stopped playing. At least back then, you could get hard groups fairly regular. Puggers still sucked but it was common to see LFMs up. Formal used to have teaching runs quite often, occasionally I'd see a different group trying a teaching run, but pugs were more common and you could earn your reputation with guilds through the teaching runs.
Then there were the problems with wands, sometimes they just didn't work right or lag got them. I've wanded and aimed right where I was supposed to and the fucking thing shot across the water, well out of our range of jumping. Timing on inferno sucked, and if you got hit with lag right at inferno, party wipe. I hated that. Happened several times and we were half way through on the second beat down. At least if it was lagging that day, people were more likely to give it a second shot. Kind of depended upon how the server was behaving that day. Some days, it just wasn't going to happen.
I did want some of that loot epicd. Epic robe and litany would have been nice but I think Turbine would have fucked that shit up. That stuff may not be relevant anymore though. Was nice a few years ago for my pale master.