I also haven't seen a bug in Callus, I think, ever. The psions shooting kind of early are a pain in the ass, though. I'm not sure what the actual design goal was there.
This is almost literally impossible to believe.
+11
ChanusHarbinger of the Spicy Rooster ApocalypseThe Flames of a Thousand Collapsed StarsRegistered User, Moderatormod
The raid is difficult and buggy and cheap in some ways (looking at you, Shadow realm Psions that won't flinch and start casting before fully spawning in) which all adds up to frustrating and hard to motivate for. We (NATburn's Thursday group) dedicated an hour to Prestige Calus last night and didn't kill him.
The fact that an all-pro team like NATburn, who have been doing multiple raids a week together for the last 3+ years, can bang their heads against a known encounter for an hour and not come away victorious is mind-boggling. It just screams bad game design to me.
I was in a pretty good raid guild back in WoW and we sometimes went an entire week (10 hours) without beating an encounter. I don't think this is bad game design. I'm glad they're finally giving people a serious challenge if they want it! And if you don't, hey there's normal mode and normal + challenge mode right there (plus all the other pve stuff like nightfalls/strikes/adventures/public events/etc).
If D2 Prestige raid weren't a design shift from D1 hard-mode raids, I'd be more likely to agree with you. So far as I'm concerned, I loved D1 HM raiding, but D2 Prestige raiding is two steps shy of horseshit.
I'm not certain why Bungie wanted to change the feel of their end-game PvE content, but I don't approve.
D1 hard-mode wasn't really any significant difficulty step up from D1 normal mode though, is the thing. You just needed a higher light level. It was pretty disappointing to me. If content were dropping faster I might care less, but if they're gonna stick to their slow pace I'd rather have more challenging stuff to do.
Strongly disagree, but I think at this point we're down to opinions/preferences (which is fine!).
D1 HM raids added mechanics. Challenges added to that.
It was the most fun to be had in Destiny 1 to me and not disappointing at all.
Oh I had a ton of fun raiding in D1, I was just disappointed with the difficulty level of the hardest content. The King's Fall Challenges in particular were...mostly doing the fight how we had already been doing it.
tbf your raid group kind of discovers on your own the hardest way to do things in the first place :P
The raid is difficult and buggy and cheap in some ways (looking at you, Shadow realm Psions that won't flinch and start casting before fully spawning in) which all adds up to frustrating and hard to motivate for. We (NATburn's Thursday group) dedicated an hour to Prestige Calus last night and didn't kill him.
The fact that an all-pro team like NATburn, who have been doing multiple raids a week together for the last 3+ years, can bang their heads against a known encounter for an hour and not come away victorious is mind-boggling. It just screams bad game design to me.
It is definitely bad game design.
It'd be one thing if it was just way more difficult, like prestige Baths. That took a lot of struggle to complete, but we eventually rose to the challenge, and crushed it our second time through.
Prestige Calus, on the other hand, is an RNG gauntlet of instant-kill obstacles and instant-kill enemies, under an instant-kill time limit. Throw in some physics bugs then sprinkle a few other bugs on top, and it's a miserable experience.
+5
Sir Landsharkresting shark faceRegistered Userregular
The raid is difficult and buggy and cheap in some ways (looking at you, Shadow realm Psions that won't flinch and start casting before fully spawning in) which all adds up to frustrating and hard to motivate for. We (NATburn's Thursday group) dedicated an hour to Prestige Calus last night and didn't kill him.
The fact that an all-pro team like NATburn, who have been doing multiple raids a week together for the last 3+ years, can bang their heads against a known encounter for an hour and not come away victorious is mind-boggling. It just screams bad game design to me.
I was in a pretty good raid guild back in WoW and we sometimes went an entire week (10 hours) without beating an encounter. I don't think this is bad game design. I'm glad they're finally giving people a serious challenge if they want it! And if you don't, hey there's normal mode and normal + challenge mode right there (plus all the other pve stuff like nightfalls/strikes/adventures/public events/etc).
If D2 Prestige raid weren't a design shift from D1 hard-mode raids, I'd be more likely to agree with you. So far as I'm concerned, I loved D1 HM raiding, but D2 Prestige raiding is two steps shy of horseshit.
I'm not certain why Bungie wanted to change the feel of their end-game PvE content, but I don't approve.
D1 hard-mode wasn't really any significant difficulty step up from D1 normal mode though, is the thing. You just needed a higher light level. It was pretty disappointing to me. If content were dropping faster I might care less, but if they're gonna stick to their slow pace I'd rather have more challenging stuff to do.
Strongly disagree, but I think at this point we're down to opinions/preferences (which is fine!).
D1 HM raids added mechanics. Challenges added to that.
It was the most fun to be had in Destiny 1 to me and not disappointing at all.
Oh I had a ton of fun raiding in D1, I was just disappointed with the difficulty level of the hardest content. The King's Fall Challenges in particular were...mostly doing the fight how we had already been doing it.
tbf your raid group kind of discovers on your own the hardest way to do things in the first place :P
It's more fun that way!!!!!!!! WHY DONT YOU GUYS HAVE FUN THE WAY I HAVE FUNNNNNNNNN
Please consider the environment before printing this post.
+1
Sir Landsharkresting shark faceRegistered Userregular
We have a single loot-driven person in our raid group and I feel bad for him sometimes but he mostly grits it out with us without too much complaining. We'll see how much prestige mode tests his patience though.
Please consider the environment before printing this post.
Would be cool if your precision damage increased as you out-light level content. Like, make prestige mobs be meaner and tougher but reward skilled play as well.
+1
Sir Landsharkresting shark faceRegistered Userregular
I never thought about it but everyone probably goes to a bunch of moons and planetoids because they're better hiding places than posting up on, say mars surrounded by cabal bases
0
ChanusHarbinger of the Spicy Rooster ApocalypseThe Flames of a Thousand Collapsed StarsRegistered User, Moderatormod
huh
i guess i only was running hard mode king's fall by the end so i totally forgot what was actually different about it
I also haven't seen a bug in Callus, I think, ever. The psions shooting kind of early are a pain in the ass, though. I'm not sure what the actual design goal was there.
Fake edit: that's not true - I did get Callus immune during final stand once.
I think my main problem was playing with 3 people from California while two of us were East Coasters and the 6th was in Florida.
Yay, no dedicated servers.
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0
Sirialisof the Halite Throne.Registered Userregular
I also haven't seen a bug in Callus, I think, ever. The psions shooting kind of early are a pain in the ass, though. I'm not sure what the actual design goal was there.
This is almost literally impossible to believe.
My favorite bug was when we were one damage phase away from beating prestige Calus, right at the skulls phase, ready to go.
And then for the throne room team, Calus got impatient and wiped everyone a good ~8 seconds too early.
I feel like once you have that many Oaths on your character, it should unlock a secret perk that lets you shoot Skyburner's Oaths out of your Skyburners Oath and have it change your enemies' guns into Skyburner's Oaths.
Would be cool if your precision damage increased as you out-light level content. Like, make prestige mobs be meaner and tougher but reward skilled play as well.
I don't think I've ever seen this suggestion, but I really like it.
(Destiny) Doot Doot, Shoot Brutes for New Boots, Woot Woot for Rad Suits and Phat Loots
it is funny to me how many D2 systems are already well known industry failures from, like, ten years ago at least
having all content scale with you regardless of what content you're doing or what level you are is a problem from, like, Oblivion, which came out in 2006?
It's not though. It keeps all the content relevant. It's why you can hang out on one of 4 planets instead of everyone being on Io for the rest of the game.
The problem is a lack of being underleveled for content before you are evenly leveled with it which gives you that sense of progression and a lack of reason to do new content you unlock. Because you can just keep doing the same thing and getting the same stuff and gaining meaningless light levels.
i dunno, i don't want EDZ to be a bunch of green mobs i can just faceroll constantly to the point of it being boring, but i feel like the fact the raid will never be any easier than it is now, or especially the prestige raid will never be any easier just as equally entices me to never go back to content once new content comes out
Yes, but the whole reason the raid will never get any easier then it is now is because you are already as good at it as you can be under the level system. You already progressed past it. By, like, doing public events or whatever for a week or two.
i feel like you're arguing three or four different things at once and conflating them
No, I'm talking about the same thing.
Like, you have a leveling system (power levels) where you can never really overlevel content. You can only underlevel content. This is actually good because it means all content is always relevant and usable and because it means once you reach level parity with the content, everyone is equal. Your top-level poopsocker and your brand new player are equally powerful (in the power level sense) doing the same content, which means your more casual player who doesn't have the time or your new player who just started or your player who usually can't find a group are not disadvantaged. Mr "Wait, what's a public event I've never seen this before" and Mrs "I have a drawer full of socks specifically bought for pooping in" are fully equal while running around doing the week's Flashpoint on Io. Mrs Raider just has weapons and armor and sparrows and ships and shaders and whatever Mr Newbie doesn't, but they are equally powerful. That's a good thing.
(and separately you totally want to provide other avenues for unique gear like that, like via planetary vendors or whatever so people who do mostly open world content get their own unique cosmetics and guns and such)
But you also want to provide a meaningful sense of progression because that's what makes things like raiding every week fun. I do this thing over and over and I get better gear that makes me better at it and so I feel more powerful. And you do that, in part, because you are X power level going in to the content and >X as you go along. But if you are already at the max power level possible compared to the content, this doesn't happen. You rob the players of a sense of progression as they do the content because they are already as powerful as they can be.
And it's not like this matters for the people who aren't there because you can't outlevel content. The raiders are no more powerful then the non-raiders because the game basically equalizes everyone once you hit the right level for the content. Like, when WoW was at it's peak basically no one was hitting top iLevel. You had to be the hardcorest of hardcore raiders doing like 25 man heroic mode raids to get that. But there was meaningful progression for people to make below that and people played that shit a ton because of it. And Destiny 2 already goes a step further to dealing with any issues with being under max level by eliminating most of the power inequality between the top and the bottom.
Basically I'm saying that one of the problems (but far from the only one) with the design of the current endgame is the generic nature of the progression, the fact you can get almost anything anywhere (except for all the shit locked behind Eververse), means you can't give players a sense of progression across new content. And that the inability to overlevel content means the game has already removed most of the inequality between people of differing power levels anyway, so it's not like that system is solving an issue either.
I miss LL meaning a difference in endgame PvP, even if it was minimal towards the end it meant you had to make choices on which guns to bring forward first. Now I level my PvE gear as a priority because it'll never matter in PvP.
I never thought about it but everyone probably goes to a bunch of moons and planetoids because they're better hiding places than posting up on, say mars surrounded by cabal bases
Yeah I'm excited for how much room they have to expand.
Earth and Nessus are the only two areas that really feel filled out. IO is tiny, or maybe just boring? Titan has a ton of potential with the Archology and the Sea Monster.
And that's not even talking about Mars or The Belt.
I hate raiding. I don't like having to rely on having multiple other people to be able to have fun and progress. Most of the time that I am online, there simply aren't enough people on, or who want to do a raid at that time, and honestly? I generally don't have that much uninterruptible time in a single sitting. Does that mean I want to get to a high level and have nothing to do but patrol? No! I would love to see some truly challenging soloable content at the top end. I'm sure you can make it just as challenging as a raid would be, but it would be accessible to everyone, not just those with tons of friends that all have the same time off to burn.
Would be cool if your precision damage increased as you out-light level content. Like, make prestige mobs be meaner and tougher but reward skilled play as well.
I don't think I've ever seen this suggestion, but I really like it.
I'm thinking about the relationship between player power and enemy threat.
Borderlands is bad at this in that their answer to higher difficulty was to give mobs more hp.
Good would be to make enemies in higher-difficulty activities (NF, prestige) hit harder and be tough to kill (be a bigger threat) but emphasise rewarding skilled play (make players feel correspondingly powerful).
Like, keep prestige mode mobs where they are now but scale precision damage to be the same % of health bar damage as in regular mode. Maybe make shield detonations do normal-mode amounts of damage. Things that would affect how players approach the challenge without making them just feel weak.
it is funny to me how many D2 systems are already well known industry failures from, like, ten years ago at least
having all content scale with you regardless of what content you're doing or what level you are is a problem from, like, Oblivion, which came out in 2006?
It's not though. It keeps all the content relevant. It's why you can hang out on one of 4 planets instead of everyone being on Io for the rest of the game.
The problem is a lack of being underleveled for content before you are evenly leveled with it which gives you that sense of progression and a lack of reason to do new content you unlock. Because you can just keep doing the same thing and getting the same stuff and gaining meaningless light levels.
i dunno, i don't want EDZ to be a bunch of green mobs i can just faceroll constantly to the point of it being boring, but i feel like the fact the raid will never be any easier than it is now, or especially the prestige raid will never be any easier just as equally entices me to never go back to content once new content comes out
Yes, but the whole reason the raid will never get any easier then it is now is because you are already as good at it as you can be under the level system. You already progressed past it. By, like, doing public events or whatever for a week or two.
I disagree!
It's still a challenge that's there for me when I get the courage up to risk trying to find a group for it. It is still absolutely content I'd like to see and experience, if for nothing else than the little bit of story and that taste of sweet victory.
The game isn't entirely about loot.
It's about being fun.
Except the reason you can't see the whole raid is almost certainly not being able to schedule 6 people. Which is what Chanus and seemingly you from your agree were talking about last page. And a lack of progression across the raid can never solve that issue.
Being able to hit max level for the raid before you even go in does not make the raid any more accessible. And not being able to do so doesn't make it any less.
+1
Sirialisof the Halite Throne.Registered Userregular
I hate raiding. I don't like having to rely on having multiple other people to be able to have fun and progress. Most of the time that I am online, there simply aren't enough people on, or who want to do a raid at that time, and honestly? I generally don't have that much uninterruptible time in a single sitting. Does that mean I want to get to a high level and have nothing to do but patrol? No! I would love to see some truly challenging soloable content at the top end. I'm sure you can make it just as challenging as a raid would be, but it would be accessible to everyone, not just those with tons of friends that all have the same time off to burn.
The Destiny 1 Nightfall would be this, if you ran it solo.
I thought it was fun to run them solo, it was usually really challenging too, but Destiny 2 introduced that Timer that just boots you to orbit when it runs out, so that basically killed solo Nightfalls for me.
I also haven't seen a bug in Callus, I think, ever. The psions shooting kind of early are a pain in the ass, though. I'm not sure what the actual design goal was there.
This is almost literally impossible to believe.
My favorite bug was when we were one damage phase away from beating prestige Calus, right at the skulls phase, ready to go.
And then for the throne room team, Calus got impatient and wiped everyone a good ~8 seconds too early.
Destiny 2 is where the singularity begun.
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The raid is difficult and buggy and cheap in some ways (looking at you, Shadow realm Psions that won't flinch and start casting before fully spawning in) which all adds up to frustrating and hard to motivate for. We (NATburn's Thursday group) dedicated an hour to Prestige Calus last night and didn't kill him.
The fact that an all-pro team like NATburn, who have been doing multiple raids a week together for the last 3+ years, can bang their heads against a known encounter for an hour and not come away victorious is mind-boggling. It just screams bad game design to me.
FWIW, Prestige Calus takes some serious practice for both home and away team to learn all the little intricacies, timing, and proper callouts. We initially beat it with @Erevar@Vagabond Booker @Baske@patrkslayzy23 and me after like 6 hours of learning and practice. This week, though, we reached Calus without Baske being there and @Brogey had to learn home left and much time so we only had half an hour or so to try complete it. Then when we picked it back up on Thursday, we had @Peen there instead of Booker, which meant that Peen had to learn away team, which might be an even bigger learning curve. Only an hour to beat it with someone learning the encounter is just not doable, imo. I expect us to be able to regularly down Calus once we can get through the other encounters quick enough and Bogey and Peen gets more comfortable with the encounter.
But we definitely wont be beating Prestige multiple times a week like we were able to do with all the other HM raids. Which I think speaks back to your original post that its super bad game design. Adding insta-wipe super finicky triggers across all 6 character roles in during an encounter is just stupid. Its not even so much that people can't die. We are used to having encounters where no one can die. I mean the Oryx encounter was hard as well and you really couldn't have anyone die during that encounter either. But in Oryx, all I had to do was make my jumps and learn the timing of adds and how to deal with unexpected add behavior. The other members of the team just had to learn to survive on their platform and kill their targets. The problem with Calus is that 4/6 of the team cant ever die during a really touchy, finicky, and randomized sequence of events all happening on top of each other and often simultaneously. I can't count the number of times I've been pulled through the barrier through no fault of my own. When that happens? Wipe. Or when Psions decide to insta cast their purple pop ability? Wipe. And when thats not happening, the encounter is expecting a completely perfect execution of 5 simultaneous actions (navigate, replace, callout, psion, projection) from each away team person at the same time that gets progressively harder 5 times in a row. And we have to do that twice. And the times we would do it perfectly has to match up with the few times we don't encounter the barrier or psion problems.
I went back and watch video from last night and a legionaire literally teleported past me and my super and waited it out and then killed me from behind. I tried to punch a dog for almost 30 seconds while it teleported around. That raid is buggy.
I went back and watch video from last night and a legionaire literally teleported past me and my super and waited it out and then killed me from behind. I tried to punch a dog for almost 30 seconds while it teleported around. That raid is buggy.
the teleporting mobs and coming back to life mobs are really obnoxious
i'm sure it's a connection issue at least in part, but
when you see something die and then you turn to shoot something else and out of the corner of your eye notice the thing that just died has reappeared with like 1/3 health
wtf man
Allegedly a voice of reason.
0
ChanusHarbinger of the Spicy Rooster ApocalypseThe Flames of a Thousand Collapsed StarsRegistered User, Moderatormod
i feel like the game could do better to acknowledge that relying on precision execution is just going to fuck people over a lot of the time
The raid is difficult and buggy and cheap in some ways (looking at you, Shadow realm Psions that won't flinch and start casting before fully spawning in) which all adds up to frustrating and hard to motivate for. We (NATburn's Thursday group) dedicated an hour to Prestige Calus last night and didn't kill him.
The fact that an all-pro team like NATburn, who have been doing multiple raids a week together for the last 3+ years, can bang their heads against a known encounter for an hour and not come away victorious is mind-boggling. It just screams bad game design to me.
FWIW, Prestige Calus takes some serious practice for both home and away team to learn all the little intricacies, timing, and proper callouts. We initially beat it with @Erevar@Vagabond Booker @Baske@patrkslayzy23 and me after like 6 hours of learning and practice. This week, though, we reached Calus without Baske being there and @Brogey had to learn home left and we only had half an hour or so to try and gel there. Then when we picked it back up on Thursday, we had @Peen there instead of Booker, which meant that Peen had to learn away team, which might be an even bigger learning curve. Only an hour to beat it with someone learning the encounter is just not doable, imo. I expect us to be able to regularly down Calus once Bogey and Peen get more comfortable with the encounter.
But we definitely wont be beating Prestige multiple times a week like we were able to do with all the other HM raids. Which I think speaks back to your original post that its super bad game design. Adding insta-wipe super finicky triggers across all 6 character roles in during an encounter is just stupid. Its not even so much that people can't die. We are used to having encounters where no one can die. I mean the Oryx encounter was hard as well and you really couldn't have anyone die during that encounter either. But in Oryx, all I had to do was make my jumps and learn the timing of adds and how to deal with unexpected add behavior. The other members of the team just had to learn to survive on their platform and kill their targets. The problem with Calus is that 4/6 of the team cant ever die during a really touchy, finicky, and randomized sequence of events all happening on top of each other and often simultaneously. I can't count the number of times I've been pulled through the barrier through no fault of my own. When that happens? Wipe. Or when Psions decide to insta cast their purple pop ability? Wipe. And when thats not happening, the encounter is expecting a completely perfect execution of 5 simultaneous actions (navigate, replace, callout, psion, projection) from each away team person at the same time that gets progressively harder 5 times in a row. And we have to do that twice. And the times we would do it perfectly has to match up with the few times we don't encounter the barrier or psion problems.
Bad. Encounter. Design.
Ok, well, I was actually with you guys the first week you did Prestige. All night Tuesday to get to Callus and then 2.5 hours on Thursday continuation before Baske switched in for me. I wasn’t around for the completion during the weekend, but I am comfortable with my role during that encounter. I was merely asking on Tuesday if you guys had changed anything for your kill strat, not having the entire fight explained to me.
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The raid is difficult and buggy and cheap in some ways (looking at you, Shadow realm Psions that won't flinch and start casting before fully spawning in) which all adds up to frustrating and hard to motivate for. We (NATburn's Thursday group) dedicated an hour to Prestige Calus last night and didn't kill him.
The fact that an all-pro team like NATburn, who have been doing multiple raids a week together for the last 3+ years, can bang their heads against a known encounter for an hour and not come away victorious is mind-boggling. It just screams bad game design to me.
FWIW, Prestige Calus takes some serious practice for both home and away team to learn all the little intricacies, timing, and proper callouts. We initially beat it with @Erevar@Vagabond Booker @Baske@patrkslayzy23 and me after like 6 hours of learning and practice. This week, though, we reached Calus without Baske being there and @Brogey had to learn home left and we only had half an hour or so to try and gel there. Then when we picked it back up on Thursday, we had @Peen there instead of Booker, which meant that Peen had to learn away team, which might be an even bigger learning curve. Only an hour to beat it with someone learning the encounter is just not doable, imo. I expect us to be able to regularly down Calus once Bogey and Peen get more comfortable with the encounter.
But we definitely wont be beating Prestige multiple times a week like we were able to do with all the other HM raids. Which I think speaks back to your original post that its super bad game design. Adding insta-wipe super finicky triggers across all 6 character roles in during an encounter is just stupid. Its not even so much that people can't die. We are used to having encounters where no one can die. I mean the Oryx encounter was hard as well and you really couldn't have anyone die during that encounter either. But in Oryx, all I had to do was make my jumps and learn the timing of adds and how to deal with unexpected add behavior. The other members of the team just had to learn to survive on their platform and kill their targets. The problem with Calus is that 4/6 of the team cant ever die during a really touchy, finicky, and randomized sequence of events all happening on top of each other and often simultaneously. I can't count the number of times I've been pulled through the barrier through no fault of my own. When that happens? Wipe. Or when Psions decide to insta cast their purple pop ability? Wipe. And when thats not happening, the encounter is expecting a completely perfect execution of 5 simultaneous actions (navigate, replace, callout, psion, projection) from each away team person at the same time that gets progressively harder 5 times in a row. And we have to do that twice. And the times we would do it perfectly has to match up with the few times we don't encounter the barrier or psion problems.
Bad. Encounter. Design.
Ok, well, I was actually with you guys the first week you did Prestige. All night Tuesday to get to Callus and then 2.5 hours on Thursday continuation before Baske switched in for me. I wasn’t around for the completion during the weekend, but I am comfortable with my role during that encounter. I was merely asking on Tuesday if you guys had changed anything for your kill strat, not having the entire fight explained to me.
Oh, yeah, I forgot you were with us for the painful learning curve through that initial 4-5 hour block. I wasn't implying you were the reason we couldn't complete it on Tuesday. The main reason we didn't complete it on Tuesday was that we only gave it a couple attempts and then called it since we had taken so long on CM Gauntlet.
We really need to get you a Prestige completion considering how long you banged your head against that encounter with us.
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This is almost literally impossible to believe.
tbf your raid group kind of discovers on your own the hardest way to do things in the first place :P
It is definitely bad game design.
It'd be one thing if it was just way more difficult, like prestige Baths. That took a lot of struggle to complete, but we eventually rose to the challenge, and crushed it our second time through.
Prestige Calus, on the other hand, is an RNG gauntlet of instant-kill obstacles and instant-kill enemies, under an instant-kill time limit. Throw in some physics bugs then sprinkle a few other bugs on top, and it's a miserable experience.
It's more fun that way!!!!!!!! WHY DONT YOU GUYS HAVE FUN THE WAY I HAVE FUNNNNNNNNN
It did, they were just rather bland.
The Door had new yellow-bar sword knights at around the halfway mark.
Warpriest got a new attack after you went through a damage phase.
Golgoroth got Unstable Light.
Oryx got the Light-Eater Knights that you had to kill before they got to the light orb thing.
i guess i only was running hard mode king's fall by the end so i totally forgot what was actually different about it
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My favorite bug was when we were one damage phase away from beating prestige Calus, right at the skulls phase, ready to go.
And then for the throne room team, Calus got impatient and wiped everyone a good ~8 seconds too early.
I don't think I've ever seen this suggestion, but I really like it.
(Destiny) Doot Doot, Shoot Brutes for New Boots, Woot Woot for Rad Suits and Phat Loots
No, I'm talking about the same thing.
Like, you have a leveling system (power levels) where you can never really overlevel content. You can only underlevel content. This is actually good because it means all content is always relevant and usable and because it means once you reach level parity with the content, everyone is equal. Your top-level poopsocker and your brand new player are equally powerful (in the power level sense) doing the same content, which means your more casual player who doesn't have the time or your new player who just started or your player who usually can't find a group are not disadvantaged. Mr "Wait, what's a public event I've never seen this before" and Mrs "I have a drawer full of socks specifically bought for pooping in" are fully equal while running around doing the week's Flashpoint on Io. Mrs Raider just has weapons and armor and sparrows and ships and shaders and whatever Mr Newbie doesn't, but they are equally powerful. That's a good thing.
(and separately you totally want to provide other avenues for unique gear like that, like via planetary vendors or whatever so people who do mostly open world content get their own unique cosmetics and guns and such)
But you also want to provide a meaningful sense of progression because that's what makes things like raiding every week fun. I do this thing over and over and I get better gear that makes me better at it and so I feel more powerful. And you do that, in part, because you are X power level going in to the content and >X as you go along. But if you are already at the max power level possible compared to the content, this doesn't happen. You rob the players of a sense of progression as they do the content because they are already as powerful as they can be.
And it's not like this matters for the people who aren't there because you can't outlevel content. The raiders are no more powerful then the non-raiders because the game basically equalizes everyone once you hit the right level for the content. Like, when WoW was at it's peak basically no one was hitting top iLevel. You had to be the hardcorest of hardcore raiders doing like 25 man heroic mode raids to get that. But there was meaningful progression for people to make below that and people played that shit a ton because of it. And Destiny 2 already goes a step further to dealing with any issues with being under max level by eliminating most of the power inequality between the top and the bottom.
Basically I'm saying that one of the problems (but far from the only one) with the design of the current endgame is the generic nature of the progression, the fact you can get almost anything anywhere (except for all the shit locked behind Eververse), means you can't give players a sense of progression across new content. And that the inability to overlevel content means the game has already removed most of the inequality between people of differing power levels anyway, so it's not like that system is solving an issue either.
Yeah I'm excited for how much room they have to expand.
Earth and Nessus are the only two areas that really feel filled out. IO is tiny, or maybe just boring? Titan has a ton of potential with the Archology and the Sea Monster.
And that's not even talking about Mars or The Belt.
I'm thinking about the relationship between player power and enemy threat.
Borderlands is bad at this in that their answer to higher difficulty was to give mobs more hp.
Good would be to make enemies in higher-difficulty activities (NF, prestige) hit harder and be tough to kill (be a bigger threat) but emphasise rewarding skilled play (make players feel correspondingly powerful).
Like, keep prestige mode mobs where they are now but scale precision damage to be the same % of health bar damage as in regular mode. Maybe make shield detonations do normal-mode amounts of damage. Things that would affect how players approach the challenge without making them just feel weak.
Except the reason you can't see the whole raid is almost certainly not being able to schedule 6 people. Which is what Chanus and seemingly you from your agree were talking about last page. And a lack of progression across the raid can never solve that issue.
Being able to hit max level for the raid before you even go in does not make the raid any more accessible. And not being able to do so doesn't make it any less.
The Destiny 1 Nightfall would be this, if you ran it solo.
I thought it was fun to run them solo, it was usually really challenging too, but Destiny 2 introduced that Timer that just boots you to orbit when it runs out, so that basically killed solo Nightfalls for me.
Destiny 2 is where the singularity begun.
Law and Order ≠ Justice
Depends. What're your kids' respective K/Ds?
I honestly really loved this map/mode combination the first two weeks.
FWIW, Prestige Calus takes some serious practice for both home and away team to learn all the little intricacies, timing, and proper callouts. We initially beat it with @Erevar @Vagabond Booker @Baske @patrkslayzy23 and me after like 6 hours of learning and practice. This week, though, we reached Calus without Baske being there and @Brogey had to learn home left and much time so we only had half an hour or so to try complete it. Then when we picked it back up on Thursday, we had @Peen there instead of Booker, which meant that Peen had to learn away team, which might be an even bigger learning curve. Only an hour to beat it with someone learning the encounter is just not doable, imo. I expect us to be able to regularly down Calus once we can get through the other encounters quick enough and Bogey and Peen gets more comfortable with the encounter.
But we definitely wont be beating Prestige multiple times a week like we were able to do with all the other HM raids. Which I think speaks back to your original post that its super bad game design. Adding insta-wipe super finicky triggers across all 6 character roles in during an encounter is just stupid. Its not even so much that people can't die. We are used to having encounters where no one can die. I mean the Oryx encounter was hard as well and you really couldn't have anyone die during that encounter either. But in Oryx, all I had to do was make my jumps and learn the timing of adds and how to deal with unexpected add behavior. The other members of the team just had to learn to survive on their platform and kill their targets. The problem with Calus is that 4/6 of the team cant ever die during a really touchy, finicky, and randomized sequence of events all happening on top of each other and often simultaneously. I can't count the number of times I've been pulled through the barrier through no fault of my own. When that happens? Wipe. Or when Psions decide to insta cast their purple pop ability? Wipe. And when thats not happening, the encounter is expecting a completely perfect execution of 5 simultaneous actions (navigate, replace, callout, psion, projection) from each away team person at the same time that gets progressively harder 5 times in a row. And we have to do that twice. And the times we would do it perfectly has to match up with the few times we don't encounter the barrier or psion problems.
Bad. Encounter. Design.
Clan Trials Engram hype!
the teleporting mobs and coming back to life mobs are really obnoxious
i'm sure it's a connection issue at least in part, but
when you see something die and then you turn to shoot something else and out of the corner of your eye notice the thing that just died has reappeared with like 1/3 health
wtf man
XBox LIVE: Bogestrom | Destiny
PSN: Bogestrom
Also I love the Trials map. whoever is in charge of the world design for trials stuff is a hero and pretentious in a very awesome way.
https://medium.com/@alascii
Oh, yeah, I forgot you were with us for the painful learning curve through that initial 4-5 hour block. I wasn't implying you were the reason we couldn't complete it on Tuesday. The main reason we didn't complete it on Tuesday was that we only gave it a couple attempts and then called it since we had taken so long on CM Gauntlet.
We really need to get you a Prestige completion considering how long you banged your head against that encounter with us.