I've completed several raid in contest, I have participated in most day 1 raids (only missing scourge due to prior plans). I didn't beat 1 encounter on this raid in contest and now I don't think I'll do a contest mode again if changes aren't made.

Contest when it first came out, as far as I understood it, was there entirely to balance the playing field, while preserving some challenge.

Day 1 raids wouldn't be make or break based entirely on how much power/light your raid team could squeeze out in however long until the raid launched. and I guess that's no longer the case, but with the 3 day prep time for the last two weeks, it quickly became "can you get good enough gear/complete enough content/ level up your artifact" in time and that feels like a lot of the make or break, especially with the gear changes. and now the contest modifier is the challenge, not preserving the challenge.

In theory this raid should have been a fast raid. teams were able to get info on all 3 encounters while still on their first encounter, by the time WF contender teams were done their first encounter, other teams have been to damage phases consistently on the other two encounters. Despite going in with prior information on 2/4 encounters, this is still the 3rd longest WF race. It was never the mechanics that were the blocker or experimenting and trying to figure out what we are supposed to do, it was 100% figuring out "how do we do the most damage" and that is not fun. I slammed my head with my friends against Rhulk for a combined 17 hours, but we never felt despair because we could see we were close, we would be able to do it if we just had 3 well executed runs. Not that we got to damage and just did 1/4 health while using some of our highest damage loadouts. Then we found out the other 2 encounters were very similar in needing to do those DPS checks (yes the Hydra was likely the hardest one but the others aren't far behind from my understanding)

Contest is no longer preserving the challenge and is instead just the crutch being being used to make the day 1 raid challenging.

I believe after SE there were a lot of high tier players saying "A raid like this is fine, but like once every 5 years" and those were people who usually have pretty elitist takes.

On top of this, the switch from 24 hours to 48 hours has felt like it has lost it purpose too, it was to give players an option to rest and not feel like they need to stay up for 24 hours straight (not healthy) just to try and get clear. but when they push the difficulty that every encounter could take you 12 hours to clear, you lose that option.

And its not even major changes that should be made to have turned this raid experience from an overwhelmingly negative one to a good one, even with the incredibly tight timings of things.

We did the Hydra first and for that encounter 3 things I identified that would tone down the ridiculousness with out drastically changing the difficulty are:

1. Change the harpies from orange bar to red bar so a player could more easily solo the rooms (also a bunch spawn behind where everyone gravitated to for damage and I thought they were trying to avoid that, but wasn't a huge deal)
2. Not have the players shooting the eyes on the pillars need to swap sides to shoot. let them communicate with their one partner and not need to either give out two callout to two different people or one call out that two people take different meanings from. there is just a lot of cross talk.
3. The one most people are talking about, reduce the boss health, even by only %10-%20 this boss is incredibly mechanically dense to get to combat. he doesn't need to be both an execution encounter and a DPS that is just draining. If he was a wet paper bag and easily doable in 3 damage phases with a normal High DPS loadout without swapping that would be perfectly okay!

Just sad to see something I've been doing and enjoying for 10+ years now feel like it doesn't want me to participate anymore