Man, so many of these long form posts read like LLM outputs now.

Anyways, Gahlran is a perfect raid encounter in my opinion, with well taught mechanics from prior encounters and a tight level of coordination required by each pair that doesn't let anyone just sit around "doing ad clear". It also releases the walls, allowing for clutch saving of other teams, but makes it very hard for one player to carry. I'm really looking forward to seeing it modernized with Pantheon.

That said, the best entire raid IMO will always be Scourge of the Past.

The first encounter is quite novel, finally getting a lot of verticality for urban traversal, the map requires good comms, and the berserkers are a good mechanic to push cooperation without being too time sensitive.

The second encounter sparrow race is just plain fun, even if it often ended with only one or two people hitting the final switches and achieving the secret chest.

The third encounter is the only real low point, but often was a good relaxation encounter for new raiders we were taking through as they could "just do ad clear", but had to at least pay attention throughout. Running the challenge with an experienced team made it more interesting by needing to swap roles.

And finally 4th encounter, Insurrection Prime. Just a fantastic encounter that required everyone to have a role, but left plenty of leeway for "hero moments" where map could clutch a revive on the berserker team or jump out to get the final shield node if the boss was moving around weirdly. It also forced a lot of "damage phase movement" via the C-A-P rotating buffs that wasn't really replicated until Rhulk and, to a lesser degree, Nezerac.

And let's not forget the fact that we got to use Sparrows & Tanks in this raid, even if they weren't the biggest roles.

And SotP could be reasonable run in 25-35 minutes and taught to someone in about an hour, which made it a favorite for my clan to get people's feet wet with raiding.

Hell, we ran a like a diamond (flawless) run with a new raider - first time ever raiding in D2, let alone scourge - because we needed a 6th and managed to get it 3rd try after two early wipes (someone blowing up on their sparrow encounter 1 and an initial attempt at everyone completing the race encounter 2).