From the feedback I got while playing through, there were too many Fragments which both made parts of the dungeon feel monotonous, and made it more difficult to reach Talratha with a reasonable amount of time remaining.
I wonder what happened during your raid that highlighted the spire Fragments as a monotonous affair. Except for a few noteworthy (albeit unsavory) raids, destroying those Fragments would come out more as a chore, especially to those that completely depend on a specific Archetype to get the job done. It's not monotonous at all. Everyone had to be extra careful including the Archetype, and they were much easier to destroy prior to v434.
After v434, however, they are slightly more difficult to address now. And everyone who aids in destroying the Fragment gets a piece of its wrath -- in the way of 5 assorted Wisps with an innate ability to cast in quick succession a short range AOE skill.
I have a hunch as to why this change was applied, but it is purely a hunch. For one, I would agree to the change regardless if my hunch is correct. I just don't agree that instead of 24 additional minutes as potential raid time, we now have 20 minutes, and for certain raid groups that haven't been pre-assembled with specific classes, it may take more than 2 minutes to destroy one of the new 'come feel my wrath' Fragments.
But as the objectives of the change are unclear to me, I suppose it would be better that someone from development -- or perhaps the entire development team -- find the time to raid Sea of Dawn in an assorted raid group to see if what they needed to address indeed was and that the raid can still be cleared even by a team of their skill level.
A minor change has been made to the sword's spawning frequency which should be applied next patch to address this. The swords are supposed to spawn fairly frequently, but they are currently spawning a little too fast. If you are having issues with being overrun with swords, I would recommend coming up with a strategy to move around the room as a tight group so that the swords spawn in a localized area, instead of being spread out and causing the swords to spawn all over the place.
The strategy would work only if the team had a sufficient amount of movement speed, prior to the change you plan to apply. And even then, it would require that the raid group had breezed through the Fragments, the Wisps, and the Wrealiths like a typhoon with monsoon and La Niña strength, so as to give them the additional time to employ hit and run tactics -- quite possibly more running than hitting. Valor PvM armor does not provide movement speed in any way, and crafted ones of specific substats to provide this are not only substantially more expensive, but they also come short of 4% in PvM bonuses.
Another issue now is that with v434, certain classes are no longer desired as groupmates and are asked to leave or are kicked, and this change has made the raid more exclusive to the richer, and quite possibly the elite bracket, who still get away with raiding a purely PvM map donned in specifically fine-tuned PvP gear. True, such a phenomenon has little effect to those who've taken the time and effort to invest in PvM armor of their own when PvPers breeze through with lesser difficulty that a PvMer does. But when the PvP donned PC gets loud and bossy during a raid...
Are there any plans to augment the bonus values of each gear to magnify their exclusive use in PvP and PvM appropriately? The negative bonuses seem to not feel as much as a detriment to their efficiency, so perhaps doubling them would better emphasize what you should and should not do with such gear.
Again, thank you for reading. And thank you for your reply.
