Questions before i return to game

hello all, recently i decided to come back to the game after a 2(?)ish year break and am in the process of re-leveling a ranger to get back into the feel of things. i left the game shortly after "beating" nightfall and i own the 3 core games, but have yet to pick up eotn as i have a few questions about the state of the game that i would like answered before making a "full' return.

I would consider myself a primary PVE player, who also dabbled in PVP when in the mood. What made the game great for me was the running of the "elite missions", The deep , Urgoz, realm of torment, even running UW/fow and tombs(barrage groups FTW ). My first question is, Do these missions still attract groups? i would love to find a guild or at least regular groups for these missions, hard mode or otherwise.

The second question is, with the changes to the favour system(which i still dont quite understand) how has HoH changed? Is organized PVP providing any sort of reward (besides ranks)?

Tyvm for any help you can provide.

Deep/Urgoz/Tombs=Dead, you will never find a pug
DoA= Almost dead possible pug.
UW/FoW= Speedclears, using very specialized builds to generally solo different parts of each area to produce quicker paths to the new end chests in each which drop good loot after you beat every quest in the area. Speedclears are VERY popular and there are tons of PuGs.
I would suggest getting into a guilds that does these things, even SCs as PuGs dont have the highest success rate.

As for favor it is now based on Maxing titles. Not HA. HA never really was about winning favor and is still a rankfest. But no there is no reward besides rank and possibly the HoH Chest.

Its really sad to hear that tombs/urgoz/deep are dead, i loved running those. im hoping that eotn introduced new elite missions that replaced them? As for UW/FoW, im very experienced in solo/duo farming(at least i WAS, im sure some things have changed) but the idea of speedclearing sounds kindof fun. can you elaborate more on how they work? im taking from your description that the group splits and takes on different parts of the zone independantly? And from your (or anyone elses) expereince, is a ranger primary still viable?

Eye of the North introduced the new elite dungeon "Slaver's Exile" and is more populated than the other elite areas in the game. The dungeon consists of four separate rooms apart from the main entrance. Three of the rooms contain one or two bosses that must be killed in order to gain access to the main dungeon boss.