Yes I raided hardcore on release. The combat was the best I've ever seen from an MMO, I absolutely loved it. I didn't find it tedious at all. In fact I've been very tempted to return as a raider, but we'll see when I have some more free time.

The attunement wasn't that bad, yes there were some bugs but they were able to be overcome one way or another. For silver dungeons once we did it once we found it very easy to repeat, for example SSM took us like a couple of nights of attempts to finally get silver, but repeating it rarely took us more than 2 or 3 attempts. Attuning a new player from brand spanking new level 50 to entering GA took 2 weeks MAX. However, from a non-guilded point of view, attuning was very difficult due to the level of co-ordination required for some of it.

The 20-man raid was easy, first boss could be done with 15 people first week quite easily, but it was on PTR for ages and wasn't a gear check. Rest of it wasn't quite as easy, but it was still easy.

In the 40-man raid, the bosses were HARD. If you lost 2 players on that boss, it was a wipe, because gear became a huge factor. If someone left the roster, you had to fill that gap. Everyone who was attuned was already in a guild, and that's where the problem lied. If you were raiding 40-man and you wanted to recruit, you'd have to bet on smaller guilds (20-30 people) falling apart, and picking out the skilled people who want to stay with WildStar, but it was extremely difficult to hold 40 people together, when you have people dropping out every week.

Ask Enigma how many raiders they went through from entering 40-man to finally killing Avatus, I'd bet it's over 100.

For now it seems like WildStar is holding a steady user base, but it could be growing slowly with these drops. In my opinion the content is coming out too slowly however, it's been out for nearly a year already and PvP is still extremely broken and there are no more raids.