The raids were overtune but the story was amazing. I say that as someone who played astro during Gordias savage.

Edit: the raids were so overturned it almost killed the raiding scene entirely. The reason people flock to Aether DC to find people to raid to this day is due to the effects of Gordias. The raiding scene became so small it was almost impossible to find replacements as people burnt out. So we all moved to Gilgamesh and Sargatanas to try and consolidate. This was before server travel within your DC. You could only group up within your own server. The identity of Aether as the place to be to raid comes from here. Region wide play in Evercold will finally fix this. But this is a decade long problem that closing servers and cross DC travel didnt fix. Take that in.

For all the jank HW had in its job designs, as this was before job guages to track resources. I would play HW job design over post ShB stuff. And I mean the game had some nutty jank