Here is the issue. Let me explain with Vertus since I warm up on him daily and meet many new players who struggle against him.
Vertus has a stagger based teamwork mechanic, where he grabs a player, and the others must stagger Vertus to save the player. Due to how stagger works, each class has limited access to stagger damage, so the more members the team loses, the more challenging Vertus’s mechanic becomes.
I do not need to check any server data. I know 90%+ of groups fail Vertus because someone gets grabbed and nobody knows what to do. I see people try to spam random skills, some run around in panic. Vertus eventually kills his first victim, turns around and grabs a second snack, slowly the raid just turns into a slaughter.
Many new players simply lack the necessary keystone insights to win fights. And lets be honest, the game does a lackluster job at transitioning players from the invincible leveling experience to brutal end game contents. Most people do not bother with the training area, they just want to get into the action and do things, but the game offers little support in that style of learning. Vertus highlights this issue well, but the same is true for any other gatekeeping guardians or abyss.
And this is important so I would like to emphasize that the players complaining about guardian taking too long and those that struggle to clear these raids are not the same players. You can return HP to original numbers, thats nice quality of life, but you will not stop new players from getting frustrated and quitting the game until you find some way to smooth out and expedite their skill progression. Helpful in-game tips is an obvious start, but you must recognize that the original game was never released with all three tiers present at once. The need to quickly pick up foundational game knowledge and skill is an entirely new one that must be addressed properly, or the game will not recover from imo very questionable launch decisions.
Also, don’t nerf content. It’s terrible strategy. Lost ark does not have a traditional target based combat system, where the player stands and trades hp with the Boss. If you nerf Boss stats, players will just be misguided into brute force playstyles and be forced to jump off a higher cliff later when they try to facetank harder content with oneshots.
If you don’t nerf stats, but instead change or remove mechanics, it’s even worse of an idea. Lost Ark is a primarily PvE focused game. The PvE raids are the source of Lost Ark’s “content.” For a game that operates on the premise of providing players with consumable content, there is no quicker way to self destruct than to nerf away the raids. Content nerfs are not viable solutions.
Find ways to help your new players AGS.