While I agree with your points there are some exceptions. We were going back to do EoK achievements and having people able to gate out and run back during the vault's 30-70% mana check is a thing. Zones like PoFire were you can spend 30+m clearing trash or send in mage to coh your raid and then plant a banner so late comers can banner in. The bot 'groups' can already do that. If you can bot 6, its not hard to bot 12. Have them all in the same guild and drop a banner. Not to mention those bot groups often just have mages to CoH or just plain use hacks to warp.
Why not just have people maintain between 30-70% mana? It seems a lot easier than gating out and zoning back in.
We've done this recently on casual raids. It's not an issue with the inflation of dps that has happened since content was current. (well, maybe it would be if the entire raid messed it up, but 4-5 failures is no biggie).
I think better would be to add a raid banner rather than a modification of guild banner. Guild portal set to raid banner ports you to the raid banner of whatever raid you are a member of. Would be great for casual raids which at least on bristle have at least 7 guilds participate reliably but on a good turnout day only 2 of them can plant a banner. Usually only 1. Everyone else has to hoof it.
Porting is only 1 benefit of the banner there is another. The stat boost can make a difference in raids, especially for PuRs and alliances, most of which need every little bit of help they can get. I know it's the same as fellowships, but it's not always the case that people have enough in the raid in their fellowship for a campfire either.
I agree Maz, defiantly not making excuses for the lazy. But that doesn't change the fact that this would be nice. For many reasons. It's not just lazy people either, sometimes people can't make it on time due to RL. Being able to have them port in right away and not have to wait for everyone to run would be awesome. Then their is the stat benefits as well, for everyone. Also, loot! Not having to wait forever for every Alt to zone in and loot real fast would be a godsend, period. Should they have them their and ready? yes. Do they most the time, no. It is what it is. I've ran Pu's for many years and it doesn't matter how many thousands of times you remind people of this, it happens EVERY single week. So that's a minimum of 5 good reasons this would be nice. 1. Get the lazy in fast 2. Get the late / LD in fast 3. Get people in to loot fast. 4. Stat effects for all 5. Quickly swapping classes for what's needed for each raid.
Not sure why devs would need to commit resources to this when the fellowship campfires can perform this function just fine. They can provide stats, they come with a portal clicky (albeit, a delay), they are not guild specific. I'm assuming I missed something you were looking to get out of it besides having the masses all function under 1 single banner vs. all the campfires it would take.
Most raid instances do not let you use a fellowship to port into them. AND Campfires require 3+ people to drop. It is not uncommon for folks to be unable to set them. You also have a 24 hr timer on leaving and joining.
In a PU / Alliance raid of multiple guilds, those 10 may be ALL of the members of that guild, making it impossible for them to drop a banner at all.
Another useful thing about banners. We often use them as visual aids. Tank the mobs at the F'n banner. Run to the banner when you get called for bad mojo, etc. Would love to hear something from the EQ team about this idea.