So, this is winding down to a close, actually. It's been quiet recently since the things that have been changing haven't required a whole lot of input, but there's been stuff happening. Let's recap.
(1) The Void Worm has had more minor tweaks. We're in the minor tweaks phase now, so that's good. The AE damage might need a further tweak, but we'll see. It might be too high, or people might be dispelling too slowly. I'll have to have eyes on the fight to see, but at least it's pretty close now.
(2) A couple fights seem like I can put the "Done!" rubber stamp on them (Conglomeration, Iskkath's Experiment, Spires Duo). We can always re-evaluate later when another guild comes to do them on-tier, but I think they're about right now.
(3) Sanctum... really didn't need work. However, getting flagged for sanctum was a bit out of line. No, not the kill. No, not that every had to have the flag. The problem was the massive amount of time new guilds would have to spend in Inner Prison to get the ritual frags. Back when there weren't other zones to raid in, it was a reasonable time investment to get your guild a set of all the ritual spells. Nowadays, it just means backfarming IP. This is similar to archaic spells, but those frags can be farmed from other zones, and the ritual spell fragments don't make sense dropping elsewhere in my opinion. So, the droprate of the ritual spell fragments that drop from trash (not the ones that drop from bosses) has been increased.
(4) The Temple of Elael... the zone itself has a couple fun encounters, but accessing the zone is a bit more of a headache than was intended. From a vantage point where you see everything, the whole quest to access the zone seems really awesome. From a player's vantage point where you only see the parts where the NPCs are interacting with you (and not other players that might play while you're offline), it could be unclear. Also, nobody went with goblin faction instead of orc faction, so farming items from the orcs in tears of elael wasn't really an option. So, let's elucidate a little bit.
In order to open the zone for your raid, you need to do a quest that requires some faction grinding. The quest NPC then requires you do farm like 20 items for him in order to open the zone. The zone is then open for you and your raid for a set amount of time, and the zone has basically zero trash (the item farm to open the zone takes the place of trash for this raid content). When the zone closes, the quest NPC will offer the quest to open the zone again for 40 farmed items regardless of whether you were involved in the raid that did it with 20 items or not. The third time the zone would be opened would require 60 items, and so forth. This proved to be frustrating for players that went once with a requirement of 40 items then found themselves needing to farm 100 items in order to go back without an understanding of where those numbers came from. This was also frustrating for players that saw an indefinitely escalating number of items required to open the zone.
These issues needed to be addressed in a two-fold manner. First, we had to break tradition and decide to explain the process in a bit more detail publicly (that's what this post is doing now). The way the NPC interacts with multiple players/guilds/raids without doing things specifically per player/guild/raid for the farming quest warranted this explanation in a way most things are better done through quest dialogue or NPC emotes themselves. This explanation also needed to point out that there does indeed come a point where the farmed item requirement gets to be "too much", and that there's a means within the quest itself to reset the requirement to 20 items but only once the "too much" threshhold is met. Second, the "too much" threshhold needed to be lowered. It used to be either 200 or 220. (I forget whether you had to farm the 200 or whether you could reset it once the requirement was 200). It's significantly more reasonable now. If this is all really unclear, this thread is a great place to ask questions.
(5) The Ok`tar Tribe and Ju`bor Tribe seem to be working well now and dropping items properly. The Ju`bor Tribe is a pain in the neck to do, but it is also without rival in tome drops (always a class tome 3 and often both an opus1 and an opus2).
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So, that really just leaves two parts that require work still: Akarn and Lower Thaz. Akarn is still a mystery to me. At least it's the last such fight in spires to work on. Lower Thaz is really 8 encounters and trash sets that all have to be evaluated as "wing up through miniboss" and "wing as a whole including boss". They all also have their own devs working on them, kinda...
Lower Earth -- This wing is pretty polished and basically great. I'm a little iffy on one thing about the boss, but so is everyone else, and we're waiting to see it in action before we start changing it. (I have faith in the dev that made this wing, but I leave out the disclaimers that water/air have since I was involved enough with this wing to be trusted to make fixes to things I feel aren't working as intended.)
Lower Fire -- This wing is the only one that's been beaten. There's plenty of room to argue that CW didn't deserve the win, but they're also way overtier and would probably have killed the boss on their second attempt if that one thing that should have killed them had been working. A lot of work has gone into this tribe, and while there's still some questions about tuning specific trash mob HP and AE damage numbers, this wing is pretty close to just right, I think.
Lower Water -- This wing has had a couple guilds try it. The miniboss was intended to delay becoming active (similar-ish to failed golem), but it wasn't delaying, so the fight was indeed WAY too hard. That's been fixed, so the fight is now possible, and the difficulty of the fight can be properly evaluated. The trash is working as intended. Beyond that, all I can say is that the dev that made it retains all devvery rights, so I'm not touching it.
Lower Air -- This wing still has the smell of "new" on it so strong that even I don't know jack about it to the point that I'm still allowed to raid there. The dev that made this wing also retains all devvery rights to it, so I'm not touching it or jeopardizing my "can raid there" status for it. If you wanna give lower air a try, invite me along!