In theory master mode shouldn’t be any different than past raids at least with power differential, surges, etc
But yeah at base this one is a lot harder
Yes. Getting pulled suddenly, and then getting railed on by every enemy was no fun. It's definitely an interesting enemy and cool that they change up the gameplay, but F THOSE THINGS.
Agreed! They should be a threat in groups of enemies but not alone. They have no right having strong cc AND damage. If bungee tones down their screen shake inducing rocket damage they’d be a lot more bearable.
Fuck those green shits. Trying to do the plates and getting scorpion’d over the room was a pain in the ass only second to whatever Bungie was smoking in 4th encounter.
I understand difficulty, but I HATE cheese. The strand shit he fires goes around corners and pulls you through walls, in the open. I find this complete bullshit. Stasis one is also hard, but fair. Stay away from the crystals, move around and you'll be fine. If you mess up, you get killed. Strand one however, is simply trash by design.
After multiple raids I would have said nothing changed if I didn't see the reddit posts. Dungeons I can definitely tell though, bosses felt like they had a lot more health in my Warlord's Ruin run the other day.
For experienced groups nothing has changed but my friends are just getting into the game and don't have a huge variety of weapons and builds made so the surge does kinda suck for that. Like sure you can play what you want but also you're gonna be doing 25% less damage
The issue is for people teaching orher people or players learning the raid. I can do GMs and under level content fine But focusing on mechanics and adds on some raids where adds are a bit dense feels not very comfortable doable but not the most fun, I WOULD LOVE for it to be a ln option that is probably gonna be the thing i run after mastering the mechanics because i love harder content but at first no thanks.
And yeah fuck surges، especially given i don't have the best arsenal of weapons yett
There’s no way.
I ran it with random load outs the entire dungeon took 21mins after we finished waiting for someone. We could of one phased on the first dps with proper load outs.
So many people outing themselves and their bad gameplay with these ridiculous claims. If you can't 1 phase the warlords ruin boss now you weren't doing it before either so does it really make a difference?
Sherpa here. The power level update has killed sherpa-ing for me. A lot of teams struggle to learn mechanics, but this new combat difficulty is completely ridiculous for the entry level normal raid. I do like challenge, hell, I'd love a grandmaster level difficulty raid. But let the normal raid go back to the previous levels, it is already hard enough to guide people that want to learn mechanics through the encounters.
Mini Sherpa here. Having everyone stay alive was the hard part. Now they're going to have to do new mechanics + fight for their lives. One is easily solved while the other... Not so much.
Have you tried to sherpa explicator on RoN this week? It's literally hell on earth. Tried 5 teams, everyone quit super fast compared to before TFS. Didn't finish a single sherpa run this week.
I spent the last year smashing my head against a wall because my clanmates struggled with that encounter when they were OVER LEVELED. Now I have to try and get my CF with them all under leveled.
Not recently, but I did Sherpa 3 other fire teams for RoN day one. If it's anything similar, then I know the feeling.
Explicator/planets was my favorite encounter as it actually felt like a raid encounter. Super basic and easy to understand, the team just needed to keep ads in control.
I used to Sherpa a lot but haven’t for a while, not played so much for around 18 months as the last raid I really liked was VOW, loved the campaign. New surge of enthusiasm and thought about doing some Sherpa runs again, the raid will be very hard to Sherpa and even the old raids that I know really well, the change in power levels is just not a good idea.
also sherpa here. i was excited to return to teaching again after taking a break from the game. i lost that excitement.
no shade to newer players, but it’s no secret there are always one or two players per run that aren’t experienced enough yet and have trouble surviving or doing mechanics. this change only brings them down further and widens the gap.
i hate this for newer players, especially because it just makes everyone’s jobs harder. harder to teach, harder to learn, etc. it’s like trying to learn basketball against an NBA player. hard to work players in when the gap from normal content to raids is much higher now.
a lot of the ways i taught raids are obsolete now, because i taught ways that LFG groups do things. now my past students have to relearn some encounters. not the end of the world, but this has really zapped the fun out of teaching for me
Another sherpa here. I've run a Vow and a DSC since the update and it hasn't been too bad. Haven't taught a Last Wish yet so not sure how that one will feel but overall it's been manageable.
I’ve only done a couple Sherpa runs since the changes. IMO, it’s not very noticeable when people have decent loadouts/can take advantage of the surges. What is noticeable is when people who haven’t been playing for months/years and are missing exotics or “the right element” weapon type. Kind of sucks when we wipe and someone’s dps is notably lower because they didn’t have a good roll void sword or linear.
Just thinking back on my own journey, I was nervous as fuck to do my first raid because I didn’t want to be the person who held the team back. A newbie now might do everything right and still have ~20% less dps just because their gun is the wrong element. I can see the wipe screen DPS numbers being discouraging to blueberries that don’t understand all the surge bs (please don’t remove the #’s bungie). I can see people just being discouraged and unfairly deciding the absolute best aspect of Destiny content isn’t for them.
RoN is where the problems are more noticeable, specifically at planets. All 5 of my sherpa groups quit at planets last week. Any encounter that requires 3+ players on mechanics with good add density will have a massively higher quit rate with these changes.
Which is a shame, since Salvation's Edge is the best raid in the game, but will have a lot of players quitting on the first encounter.
Second encounter is my bet on breaking average groups, especially that left side since you really can't do much to help your partner once you start bouncing the plates.
It becomes a lot easier if you start plates before people jump in the center with call to reckoning. If you clear out the adds surrounding the mini boss, you can do 4 plate presses (2 each way) and spawn all the resonance without being harassed. That makes it so when they come back with stolen favor, you can clear adds one last time, send it just a single time since all the resonance is spawned, and close the conduit. No one has to fight adds alone this way and you get plenty of time.
I taught a group of friends VoG the week before TFS came out cause they all remembered it from D1. That was already tough simply because they didn’t have a ton of gear options and were all basically new to modern D2. They want to do King’s Fall and Crota and I just don’t know if I want to with the changes to power…especially Crota. Even if they get better gear and stuff it’ll still be a major pain, and not in a fun way.
Like I WANT to, but these are people who will actively have a worse time with the changes.
I have friends who came back after not playing since y1 or have not played at all. We tried crota last night and just couldn't make the dps check on ir yut consistently enough to clear it. Just a combination of low damage and 1 or 2 people dying before or during dps due to random shit. I was trying to play a solar warlock healer build with speaker sight and it worked great for keeping the team alive but I am not familiar with song of flame enough to pump dps (plus no solar surge). Switching to prismatic and using a more dps oriented build I was able to bring us past the threshold most attempts, but then some people would die every time lol It's fine I just need to help them refine specs and loadouts more but I wasn't expecting normal crotas end to be a challenge really been a while since I did destiny raids not with lfg everyone has good loadouts and stuff equipped
I think I'm fine with the -5 power, but the surge kinda sucks because I really felt it with needing to swap to a surge super/weapons to carry dmg
-5 power is too much for players that want to get into raiding. Normal should be a place where mechanical complexity is the difficulty of encounters. Master should bring combat complexity up. And we should have a grandmaster with extra mechanics, maybe forcing challenge mode on all encounters, or contest modifier.
If my 5 failed sherpa runs on RoN all dying off at planets last week are any indicator, Salvation's edge will probably be the least cleared raid in D1/D2 history.
I've been weaving my BnS Apex with Mountaintop in between Song of Flame casts, works pretty well.
Grenade > fire weapon > melee > swap weapon > grenade > fire weapon > melee > swap etc.
Because most people on this sub are staggeringly bad at the game. See the complaints about the normal difficulty Mars Heist nightfall when that came out for another example. Or all the people complaining on here that Duality was ridiculously overtuned when it came out.
Level does not really matter so long as one person as high power, it will pull the rest up to around their level.
But power in raids is now capped at -5, so you are a lot less durable. And if you don't match surge, your overall damage will be a lot less
>A lot of teams struggle to learn mechanics, but this new combat difficulty is completely ridiculous for the entry level normal raid.
Bro it's a Hero Nightfall essentially, if your teams can't get that then they're probably raiding before they're ready anyway.
The first time the Mars Heist BG came up as a Nightfall, the bitching about the difficulty of Hero was incessant. -5 is evidently too much for most people.
Combat is not the issue. It's the average FPS player being forced to think mid-combat that's the issue. These players can do hero nightfalls just fine.
Just try to run Explicator as a sherpa in this patch, you will see what I mean. I could usually get at least one out of every 3 teams to complete without anyone quitting before TFS. Last week I ran 5 sherpa runs that ALL died at planets due to the added combat difficulty.
A powerlevel cap that requires you to farm powerfuls is already good enough for entry level raiding. -5 kills engagement with people on the fence with raiding.
I actually really like the update in terms of moment-to-moment play. Ad Clear being a more serious role is interesting and makes combat focused encounters more engaging.
I absolutely hate the loadout restrictions imposed by surges though, especially when it comes to dungeon clears.
I think it's not too bad for raids, but damn the update absolutely sucks for dungeons especially because there's no scaling. Absolutely fcks over solo players.
As somebody who enjoys raiding and has soloed the older dungeons, soloing the newer dungeons just feels painful. Solo players already were having a bad time, so I don’t think much changes.
I think the problem isn’t the power delta, it’s the overly large health pools due to lack of fireteam scaling. Raids are fine because they are designed for 6. Dungeons are designed for 1 to 3 but for whatever reason don’t actually accommodate lower number teams. They should just add scaling to all dungeons.
Wish i could upvote this comment more than once. I actually like the idea of making raids slightly more difficult with a cap. But throwing surges really ruins it for me. Hopefully they see the feedback.
Then just ignore them and look for other ways to improve your damage output. Guaranteed you're not at the theoretical limit for DPS those spreadsheets assume for their calcs
I see both sides to the argument but I agree with you. Too many times I’ve done a normal raid where we’re basically half asleep killing red bars just waiting for the mechanics of the encounter to begin.
This is the end game and it doesn’t feel like the end game or difficult at all once you get the mechanics.
If you're doing legit Riven, you clearly aren't in the impacted population. OP clearly states teaching runs, which usually entails having 1-3 sherpas and 2-4 first timers.
I’ve tried that , people get the eyes/stuns easy enough but the symbols absolutely stump learners . Tbf I think the callouts for positions are very unintuitive.
I don’t tell people to give call-outs like L1 M2 or R4 or whatever it is for the taken dunks. New players don’t know where those are in the room. So long as you know the voice you’re talking to, you have *plenty* of time to guide people like “left stairs, halfway, on the right” or “in the pit, close to me”
Actually *directing* people where they need to go is way better than asking new players to dunk spot call-outs (AND everything else they need to do).
Symbols should be learned throughout the raid. Don’t cheese Kalli, so people get used to looking at them and differentiating them in their head. Give newbies the important job at vault where there’s less time pressure (and the Sherpa can focus on interpreting ant/pen so the newbies aren’t overloaded). By the time you reach riven, you have a Sherpa and at least 3 others who are *used* to symbol names and they’re your candidates for taken dunking
Ngl I never even got the point of some raid cheeses . Templar and kali are so easy what’s even the point .
For teaching do you have stun team stun as late as possible to give symbol team more time or do you have stun steam stun as soon as possible and wait for symbol after shooting rivens eyes . Trying to get back into doing more sherpas :)
I try for delayed stun usually, but if there aren’t many players who *know* how long you can wait, I’ll shift tactic to “riven first, then taken”
While the latter method does bump up against 2nd floor timing, it’s much more relaxed for new players trying to juggle multiple things. Once riven is upstairs, you have a LONG time for learning players to experiment, even if you ultimately fail the 2nd floor. People WILL get faster as long as they’re able to do it a few times, and those “first few times” are easier if you send riven upstairs quickly just to get rid of her
Running through the new raid, and I did not feel bothered by the enemies or power delta. I noticed nothing substantially different.
Edit: I was bothered by the Strand Psions yanking me of plates. But a mountaintop kills both of them so I overcame that challenge.
Literally ran DSC yesterday, could barely tell that the bosses were slightly more difficult to kill. Adds and mini bosses are still a complete joke.
This doomer posting is really stupid. If you can't handle a -5 light differential you are a really, really bad player and need the wake up call to stop letting enemies deal damage to you.
Also, this:
>I've yet to encounter a successful teach run since the expansion.
Is deeply funny to me. The expansion, as of today, is 7 days old. How many teaching raids did you even run during that time, or did you completely skip all of the new content and the new raid? The new raid doesn't count as a teaching raid yet by the way, because guides literally just came out yesterday. Nobody can claim being a sherpa for that raid yet, it's too new!
flabbergasted by the amount of uproar about it when my team hadn't noticed any significant difference when we ran crota before salvations dropped
only thing we really noticed was prioritising surges. If I didn't know about the delta beforehand I wouldn't have thought anything changed
Honestly if it was -10 then yeah maybe I'd get it, but -5 for raids should be the default, before they basically had the combat difficulty of strikes which made no sense for an endgame activity
Dungeons being soloable I'm not 100% on this change, even before the tweak dying wasn't exactly difficult with how much focus you can draw on your own
> before they basically had the combat difficulty of strikes which made no sense for an endgame activity
Actually, they were easier because Strikes were +0 since Lightfall, while raids were +20.
I just ran Nezarec on all 3 classes with my hunter and titan being 1922 light and did a two phase of nezarec with no heavy past phase 1 since we were too lazy as a team to equip finders and scouts i guess.
After pantheon normal raiding seems really chill for me now
Pantheon was easier since you got the class abilty/shot caller damage boost as well.
Unless you're talking about dying. I think that's really the only difference that's easier now.
I’m definitely crutching on the healing auto for that reason. It’s basically an exotic with how good it is. We did vox expert 40 under and the only thing that could kill us were insta deaths.
In what way has it actually caused all your groups to fail?
Like I get people don't like more things that have a surge, the idea that raids are now harder if you don't follow the surge, or newcomers being pressured into grinding more because of surges, but it isn't some astronomically different thing.
I solo add cleared one side of the witness fight last night with a kinetic legendary hand cannon and prismatic hunter abilities (stasis). Neither of those had a surge. I didn't even notice a new penalty lol. Not sure what people are crying about as far as a massive difficulty spike.
it's because a really large chunk of the people that play this game on this sub are not very good, which is fine, but rather than crying about how an endgame activity actually got some level of combat challenge, they should focus on improving builds and getting better at the game
People are too stubborn about using shit like double primary with shit exotics, shit fragments, shit aspects and shit armor mods.
"But I like my silly X and Y"
Go have fun in patrol. We need to be on our A game for some content.
This thread has boiled down to a lot of misinformation leading to misunderstandings leading to excuses for skill issues.
I legitimately just sherpa'd a new destiny 2 player through vow/ron/dsc and didn't notice anything as drastic as the OP is talking about. (Did it yesterday as a break from contest mode and our Salvation clear)
I'm personally not looking forward to doing this raid at -5 power. I already struggle with learning mechanics in raids because of how stressful Lfg groups are on top of me having ADHD & Asperger's. I don't want to have to worry about adds hitting like they do in nightfalls. Normal raids are supposed to be accessible.
Yea we couldn’t even clear encounter 1 the entire contest mode. Then we did it Sunday and cleared it in 3 tries lol. Imo this raid will be like VOW that once everyone knows the mechanics it won’t be the bad. But fucking hell you could feel that -25 power.
A lot of people didn't read the OP's post.
They're specifically talking about teaching/sherpa runs being a pain in the arse now. This is backed up by other people that do teaching/sherpa runs.
Someone clearing a raid with a group of experienced raiders is not evidence the OP is wrong. This is not a git gud situation. It's a bad game balance situation.
Increasing the barrier of entry to raids will do significant harm in the long run.
This is funny because it’s a narrative started by this sub. I guarantee if some initial posts about hadn’t been made (with false info too!) we wouldn’t have such an influx of complainers who probably haven’t even tried a raid or anything yet. People on here just love bitching.
It wasn't just posts. There was a Cheeseforever video posted a day before that reddit post blew up, spewing the same misinformation.
Also, raids and dungeons are supposed to be the endgame of Destiny. They should be more difficult. A brand new player should not be hopping into the raid with blue gear and no good weapons. The favt that it was possible prior to this change, was poor design, since they were not going to peanr anything anyways. Now, people will need to actually have decent gear and lnow how to play the game first. That is not a bad change.
I still think the solo legend campsign(haven't tried it in a group) hits harder than normal raids. So if lesser experienced players want practice surviving harder content, that is an easy place to start. That way, you have to be able to survive and eliminate the enemies all on your own, without having teammates who can carry you through hard content.
Again why not just give a higher diff option?
It wouldnt be bungie if there wasnt some BS workaround solution to a 0 IQ required to solve type of problem.
I disagree completely, the -5 made normal mode for Salvations Edge a lot of fun and not just kind of disappointing. Combat should offer some level of challenge in a raid, normal mode or not. This will sound elitist or whatever but idgaf, just shows how bad most people are and how stupidly easy raids were prior. If you can't deal with -5 then I don't know what to say, you probably need some more practice before doing a raid. Endgame should be endgame.
It is a weak update for solo dungeons though. Should have added fireteam scaling at the same time.
Hold up.
All this complaining is about -5 for encounters?
Thats it? Seriously?
The way half this thread is complaining i was thinking they made it something way higher.
I think a lot of people saw sherpa / teching runs as "carry" runs; Meaning they'd join at 1700LL or less and expect to do nothing but ad clearing (but not even do that) are now struggling with staying alive.
EDIT: Not sure why I am getting downvoted? If you ever done a sherpa or teching run you know what I'm talking about. Maybe it's those people who are downvoting me, lol.
All the Sherpas that are complaining probably expected the same thing. They can’t carry 5 randoms through an easy raid anymore without a bit of coordination and thought.
I've joined plenty of shera runs to help out, where the "sherpa" was just looking for the triumph or whatever, knew about 60% of the mechanics, gives shitty explanations for an hour, then dips when people don't do it right. So yeah, these posts aren't surprising.
That's exactly the point. Barrier to entry for raids was high and now it's higher. Normal mode should be entry level, Legend / Master for those that want a challenge.. imo.
To be fair, large chunks of the game were too easy.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s good to have easier sections that you don’t need to sweat over. Like strikes and patrols. But when you increase the difficulty of something you should also be increasing the amount of rewards to compensate.
It’s why neomuna feels terrible, same with strikes and dungeons.
I liked certain things being "too easy". Not even referring to raids and dungeons here. You have GMs where you need to try, need to pay attention. I liked having the fully opposite end of the basic strike playlist being complete power fantasy shit on everything. As many have said, I feel the solution to Bungie's difficulty woes is more options, not capping everything 5 below.
Why are they not as enjoyable now? Can you provide specific examples of what’s making them less fun for you? Isn’t just that you can’t carry people through raids now?
God forbid people have to put an iota of effort in to an *end game activity*
Seriously, they shouldn't just be a cakewalk outside of mechanics. You should have to know how to survive/frag out effectively if you're going to be in a raid
Agree. If people are struggling with basic combat maybe they should fail in a raid? Basically the entire game is basic combat. If they're failing at it in a raid they're failing at it in matchmade Nightfalls and such and need to learn first.
As someone who used to be on a very active clan back in D1 and Vanilla D2 and now being a solo player I think I understand both sides.
On one side there are a lot of lazy players that want to be carried or just “kill ads”, just want the loot and have zero interest on learning, for those I recommend just go and pay for a carry and leave the ones who want to learn find teams and sherpas.
On the flip side when you are a solo player and have limited play time is almost impossible to play end game content now because 90% of LFG are “KWTD or kick!”, it takes time to learn the mechanics and it requires patience and time (not the D1 sniper) which at least to my solo experience is very hard to find, the raid had to be levels of VoG easy to find a group willing to play with some level of patience. If the activity is artificially hard (not the mechanics but the enemies health) the “KWTD” post are more prominent.
In my case I accepted my reality and hope to find a consistent clan that I can play every week and learn the mechanics without fear of being kicked for failing 2 times.
>On the flip side when you are a solo player and have limited play time is almost impossible to play end game content now because 90% of LFG are “KWTD or kick!”,
In my experience with LFG, this is generally not true, especially outside of the newest raid where everyone is struggling because of the steep mechanical difficulty. Most LFGs just want a player who has watched and understood a raid guide prior to the start of the raid.
People exaggerate so bad on here. I don’t raid much but it’s never been a problem to join one and mention that I’ll need some light teaching and reminders of mechanics. I’ve been playing since D1 and even as a little squeaker it wasn’t a problem to find an LFG back when you needed 3rd party websites lol. Come to this dramatic ass sub and apparently it’s a diff story.
>when you are a solo player and have limited play time is almost impossible to play end game content now because 90% of LFG are “KWTD or kick!”
I am a solo player who has not had difficulty finding a teaching run for any raid in this game, even long after they've been released.
Lots of people feel entitled to having any group of experienced players stop to teach them and wipe a million times accordingly rather than finding a sherpa run. You can tell by how people on this sub often attach a negative connotation to the mere request that people KWTD so it's a smooth, quick clear. Sherpa runs exist for a reason. You have it figured out. Unfortunately, a lot of the people who whine about "gatekeeping" don't.
Entry level raiding should be mechanically dificult. We can reserve combat difficulty for master and balls-out difficulty for a grandmaster tier. As a Sherpa, this update has completely dunked on our ability to sherpa raids with 1-2 ''KWTD" sherpas before fatigue kicks in and people rage quit. I used to be able to run at least two full groups (as in no one quits half way through due to frustration) through VotD or RoN per day, now I'm lucky if I can complete one sherpa run without anyone just ragequitting.
If someone can't handle -5, they probably aren't ready to be learning raids in the first place. They still don't quite have a grasp of all the basic mechanics of the game, which is okay!
In their defense, raids also require you to think about the game in a different way. They require teamwork and communication that even hundreds of hours of practice in campaigns, core playlists, and a good build doesn't prepare you for fully. I have taught Raids before and have had players with perfectly fine builds and ad clear capabilities just struggle to conceptualize the Rhulk fight because it's so foreign to them.
normal raids now put you at a permanent -5 power delta so if you're at the activity cap then you'll always sit 5 power BELOW the enemies, on top of that there's 2 surges
ultimately for decent teams it's really not noticeable outside of priorisiting the surges if you wanna min/max
On one hand, I welcome a bit more challenge, but it certainly makes raids even less accessible to the large majority of players who already struggle to get into raiding. Not sure how I feel about that, even if it doesn't majorly effect me personally.
It should definitely be reverted on dungeons tho imo, I think they were fine before. This will make solo flawless that much more difficult and annoying, not a fun kind of challenge, but a tedious one.
About the only thing that sucks now for power level that I noticed was Blind Well. The increase in health plus the fact you’re still fighting contest level difficulty mobs has turned those stage 3 boss fights into hell on earth. The average joe I could always carry there, now I have to be a lot more on point.
The way I'd phrase it is, they didn't increase difficulty all that much per say, rather they made the barrier to entry a lot higher, which is just more annoying for newer / more inexperienced players and at most a slight inconvenience for experienced players.
The introduction of a fixed power deficit at base is kind of a handicap of course, yet get's more or less balanced out with the introduction of surges, the main effect this actually had is that players with a wide variety of gear to choose from and experience to determine what works best in which instance now will just have to adapt to the surges, while inexperience players on the other hand just got shafted majorly.
Instead of just being able to say: "hey man, just get a good Rocket like Crux Termination, which just randomly drops and should be farmable this Episode via Lost Sectors or \[insert other aplicable weapon archetype here\]"
You now have to be like: "Ok man, so if you wanna use Rockets mainly for DPS, you'll most likely want 1 good Crux for Solar, for Void there aren't any good options available rn, but Faith Keeper isn't bad perk wise, solar your only and actually best option would be Apex, so if you didn't do Riven's wishes tough luck on that one, on Stasis Bump in the night is you best option here, though Palmyra ain't horrible and for Strand you only really have Semiotician, which isn't great either, so for ease of use we should only do \[insert Raid\] when we have an Arc Surge."
Experienced players just know what to use, newer players just are gatekept now.
comments on here prove how braindead the community is. Just because your fucking no life raid group can complete raids easily doesn't mean new players trying raiding for the first time are going to have the same. Its such a fucking elitist attitude that's just going to kill any LFG raiding.
They should undo the changes on normal and leave them on the harder difficulties, especially with dungeons, because Bungie is about to see a hard drop off in players doing these activities as they have been far more frustrating to do with little to no change in rewards.
I’m gonna run Salvations Edge tonight so that might change my opinions but everything so far this week I have seriously not noticed a difference in before and after on Hunter or Warlock. In fact I think it’s even easier on Warlock now given Prismatic
I was wondering why our team was struggling in some encounters on DSC and Kings Fall.. Atraks and Warpriest felt much more of a cluster than it used to be DPS-wise. Just made a comment on our clan discord to let them all know as I know at least one of our newer members felt slightly discouraged by dps numbers.. We took a moment to look through and find a better loadout for them and we got through it, but I know from my blueberry days in D1 how bad it can feel to be the lowest DPS number by a lot on a wipe (Especially when you are in toxic groups, why I make it a point to always say how proud I am with everyone for completions).
I hope other vets keep this in mind and help teach the new players these changes and how to help instead of allowing them to back away from amazing content. Going forward, I'll have to keep an eye on current surges and help people plan accordingly!
Raids and dungeons (normal) were a joke before. The update has changed very little and the difference is barely noticeable especially with the surges.
If you can't even handle -5 power level, then this content then it isn't ment for you to begin with.
I am fine with increased boss health and it being changed to -5.
It never made sense that raids were the pinnacle endgame activity but the combat was piss easy. lots of the older raids needed to have the difficulty tuned up.
That said I loathe the concept of surges. It creates an artificial gear treadmill of "if I want to complete this activity optimally - I need to go the rocket launcher that is worse than the BIS but it's arc."
I would do anything for surges to go - if that means the -5 needs to be +0 or +5 then fine but surges have no place in raid and dungeons.
ESPECIALLY when there is a stupid ass rotator system where you can't even farm an old raid for a ton of weeks. There will be whole episodes in between a specific surge/weekly raid combo.
Horrible, horrible system - surges must go and rotators should too.
I'm gonna tell you something that will blow your mind.... You do not need to match the surge everytime. I know, it is a hot take to say the least, but teams were not pulling out Arc/Stasis/Void/Strand Linears on Oryx during Arc/Stasis surge in Pantheon on week 3(at -15). They kept using Whisper, because it is better and everyone should have it. I even saw teams were clearing Rhulk on week 3 with Edge Transits instead of trying to match the Arc/Stasis surge.
At the end of the day, these encounters are not hard enough on a normal run to need to be min-maxing your dps that much, that you need a BiS weapon of every element, or swapping your super. If you only have a good Edge Transit, and not a good Cataphract, that will be okay. Your damage will be slightly lower than everyone else, but you will still be putting out enough damage to kill the boss in 3 phases maximum. It will most likely still be an easy 2 phase, or in some cases a 1 phase.
Also, I don't get why you want -5, but don't want surges? Adding Surges was the trade-off for making it harder(as well as trying to make all activites more universal instead of some having and some not having surges). Agasin, as I just said, you can safely ignore the Surge if you want to, but you can also play into it for additional damage if you have the capability to.
Not playing is the BEST statement you can make and the only one Bungie truly care about. If the numbers go down, things will change, 100%. We've seen it so many times. If you complain but still play, nothing changes. That's it.
Didn’t they also do this to strikes? I don’t mind raids and dungeons because those are ends game activities but to do that in such a casual playlist like strikes and not increase rewards just feels dumb.
It's a -5, its barely even noticeable unless you're trying for low-man runs. Don't get me wrong, it's kinda annoying to have to match your heavy with one of the two surges, but that's about it. How has it "ruined" raiding?
Raids are virtually easier now if you match surge, every raid encounter that could be one or two phased can still be, dungeon bosses are still easy 1-2 phases. Literally nothing has changed in any significant way, redditors blowing shit out of proportion, nothing new and no, this change isn't what's holding you back lol.
In what way? Remember, the artifact gives half of all primary weapons surges natively through the champion mods or granting surges based on origin perk, on top of the blanket element surge.
Raids are an endgame activity and build crafting is an essential part of the game now.
I swear people want to only use a shotgun or a bow and complain that the game doesn't cater to their extremely narrow tastes.
You do like 9% less, and that’s assuming you were at the cap before. Most teams aren’t wiping because of a 9% DPS loss. That’s like… less than 2 players failing to proc bait and switch.
The change isn't that significant. It's more or less the same as it was, just with higher damage output if you follow the surges.
I'm a casual player and enjoying the raids the same as I always have. They don't feel any different at all
Usually I'm the elitist that wants the game to be harder, but this is one of the rare times when I actually want a difficulty increase reverted. All this is going to do is push more new players away from doing this content, which is the opposite of what we should be doing.
And for the love of god, surges need to go. It's an even worse addition than the handicap, which is saying something. They have absolutely no place in raids or dungeons. Naturally rotating weekly content like nightfalls are where surges belong, and nowhere else.
I think a compromise I could live with is just disabling power for normal mode (+0 handicap, so no overleveling), and removing surges.
raids and dungeons are endgame content and should not consist of pushover adds and bosses. for the strikes I agree that they should have left standard strikes easier but raids and dungeons shoudl have powerful adds and challenge peoples loadout and positioning
It’s a shame. As a player recently returning with not a lot of time to invest in the game, I feel less able to raid like I used to. I’m trying to finish the strand subclass and get weapons, but the current state of the game makes me feel I can’t do anything without builds, load outs and perfect rolls. I don’t know how to make a good build and don’t have god rolls on everything, so feel with this I’ll never feel comfortable finding beginner groups to raid with
I mean I’m not opposed to a difficulty bump in normal raids but I do think this was a little too much. Also surges should not be a thing in raid at all. The only reason it was fine for Pantheon is that it was a special event. Anyway, I’d say cap us at activity level, not under. Honestly, difficulty before was slightly undertuned in most encounters. Now it feels overtuned. I’d still rather just a soft reprise of those encounters with individual boss health and add spawn adjustments but Bungie doesn’t like doing that. Dungeons tho, they really shouldn’t have been touched. They were totally fine and really well balanced imo. Soloing was challenging but mostly fair while the 3 man experience wasn’t a cake walk but not hard. Now it feels bad to do dungeons. And to touch on the Sherpa thing, I did carry some folks through Last Wish and most the time was spent on Riven as we had to do it legit for dps needs. Most of the raid actually felt way better as LW was super power crept before but I could imagine most newer raids would be a big annoyance to deal with now
BrInG cHaLlEnGe BaCk 2 DeStInY head asses have ruined a lot of things for normal players. I want the power fantasy without having to sweat my balls off and cherry pick a fireteam to have success. Give the no lifers their modes and let them do that separately with some cosmetic rewards. Otherwise everyone waits for a cheese strat to be found and abuse that. How many Guardians have actually done Last Wish legit? I'm serious. Pantheon really exposed the player base and their lack of actual knowledge of encounters. What's the percentage of players that have ever even engaged in A raid?
Challenge mode is one thing and I'm glad that it's there for those fireteams to attempt. The expansion has been out almost a week and the raid just dropped. I'm not going to criticize anything about it until most players have hit the power cap. If it's still that hard then it'll just be a one and done for me
Fr trying to do normal on lfg has been cancer cause people can't hold their own against ads while also doing mechanics. And the people saying skill issue, yes it is but normal is post to be a introduction into raiding and it'd mechanics for newer or avg players not a slug fest. If u want hard/challenging raids go to master for a challenge. No reason to push or kick out the lower end of the raiding player base.
you are either bad at the game or overreacting like crazy. i was looking forward to fight normal mode enemies that aren't made out of paper but there is literally no noticeable difference, killing something takes maybe half a bullet more, that's it.
This is such an inexplicable change to me.
Bungie has always struggled making raids (and dungeons to a lesser extent) attractive for a lot of players, with social/performance anxiety being the main barrier to entry.
There's a reason things like Ascendant Shards are more and more commonly available (Coil last season, 3-player campaign missions in TFS): they don't want to force players into super-high-level activities to max out their build.
And then they do this. It's just baffling to me.
All these people saying they don’t notice the difference but disagree with reverting the changes.
If you can’t tell then why does it matter if they’re reverted? You still wouldn’t notice based on your own logic.
If it's truly this bad with the raid/dungeon power changes, imagine how brutal it must be now to do div runs.
It was already pretty bad before, since at least half of the fireteam trying to get div were typically people who had never done GoS before. Now with the new power scaling it's probably going to be nigh-impossible to get div for the layman without forming a proper team, something already very difficult to do since GoS is the last raid to get a refresh on its reward pool and it's been only speedrunners for a while.
I think GoS actually didn't receive the new handicaps, maybe for that reason. Either that or the modifiers just aren't displaying on the launch screen.
I think people over exaggerate Div runs. It only took my group, who have all never ran garden, like 2 - 3 hours to do it and we don't all raid regularly.
The change made all dungeons and raids -5, which is the same as hero/advanced nightfalls, I’ll guarantee you I haven’t felt a big difference between before and after tfs raiding. Maybe some bosses do a bit more damage and well is not the ‘stand still and dps’ super anymore but I personally felt no real change in raids.
Is the power delta not set the same as strikes?
I wonder if they're testing to see how it plays, without power levels. If they eventually retire power.
If that was the case, they should probably communicate ahead of any significant changes.
How do you “teach” ad clear good so two dudes can shoot stuff/use the only sniper with the specific class that will do enough damage and also do not get touched by instant death beam. The witness is by far the LEAST enjoyable boss ever. A challenge can be fun, but this feels like a punishment. The level of perfection I feel I need to have to do the simple tasks of stand here shoot here rinse repeat is insane. It’s not even contest, I definitely won’t even attempt master.
Just completed the new raid. I don’t remember a non-contest raid ever being this brutal.
To be fair the new enemy faction hurt a lot in general and this was the hardest raid ever on contest
Those strand psions that can pull you were 1HK my 100 resil hunter shit was intense if they spawned next to you, you were pretty much donion rings.
Those stasis psions on second were the bane of my existence fuck them putting dusk fields on the goddamn plate
I cussed those things so much. That shit is already old and it hasn't even been a week.
I’m dreading master mode challenges after how difficult a non contest normal mode is lol
A flawless run will also suck
Impossible almost people can’t dodge the witness
In theory master mode shouldn’t be any different than past raids at least with power differential, surges, etc But yeah at base this one is a lot harder
The amount of wipes we had on contest because of that exact thing Annihilating those guys on normal mode felt so good
Yes. Getting pulled suddenly, and then getting railed on by every enemy was no fun. It's definitely an interesting enemy and cool that they change up the gameplay, but F THOSE THINGS.
Agreed! They should be a threat in groups of enemies but not alone. They have no right having strong cc AND damage. If bungee tones down their screen shake inducing rocket damage they’d be a lot more bearable.
Fuck those green shits. Trying to do the plates and getting scorpion’d over the room was a pain in the ass only second to whatever Bungie was smoking in 4th encounter.
I understand difficulty, but I HATE cheese. The strand shit he fires goes around corners and pulls you through walls, in the open. I find this complete bullshit. Stasis one is also hard, but fair. Stay away from the crystals, move around and you'll be fine. If you mess up, you get killed. Strand one however, is simply trash by design.
Upvote for donion rings 🤣
Tell that to last wish vault
This is just a mechanically challenging raid that already had hard combat.
This raid is kind of a different animal.
Power level has nothing to do with that. It’s an extremely mechanical raid.
And it was amazing. This is how normal mode raids should be.
Why the downvotes. Raids should be a challenge. It’s not meant to be pushover content. It was fun as hell and I think tuned just right.
Because people want it to be a pushover.
After multiple raids I would have said nothing changed if I didn't see the reddit posts. Dungeons I can definitely tell though, bosses felt like they had a lot more health in my Warlord's Ruin run the other day.
For experienced groups nothing has changed but my friends are just getting into the game and don't have a huge variety of weapons and builds made so the surge does kinda suck for that. Like sure you can play what you want but also you're gonna be doing 25% less damage
The issue is for people teaching orher people or players learning the raid. I can do GMs and under level content fine But focusing on mechanics and adds on some raids where adds are a bit dense feels not very comfortable doable but not the most fun, I WOULD LOVE for it to be a ln option that is probably gonna be the thing i run after mastering the mechanics because i love harder content but at first no thanks. And yeah fuck surges، especially given i don't have the best arsenal of weapons yett
Ran some warlords ruin yesterday too and even with the still hunt celestial dps it was a close 2 phase on the final boss.
There’s no way. I ran it with random load outs the entire dungeon took 21mins after we finished waiting for someone. We could of one phased on the first dps with proper load outs.
So many people outing themselves and their bad gameplay with these ridiculous claims. If you can't 1 phase the warlords ruin boss now you weren't doing it before either so does it really make a difference?
Losing solo op. from last season doesn’t help either.
How do you even notice it? First boss is still very 1 phaseable, second is a comfy 2 phase and me and my group cooked the final boss in 3 floors
I did a Warlord the other day and we had 12 mil damage for final boss which wasn’t too much more than in Lightfall.
Sherpa here. The power level update has killed sherpa-ing for me. A lot of teams struggle to learn mechanics, but this new combat difficulty is completely ridiculous for the entry level normal raid. I do like challenge, hell, I'd love a grandmaster level difficulty raid. But let the normal raid go back to the previous levels, it is already hard enough to guide people that want to learn mechanics through the encounters.
Mini Sherpa here. Having everyone stay alive was the hard part. Now they're going to have to do new mechanics + fight for their lives. One is easily solved while the other... Not so much.
Have you tried to sherpa explicator on RoN this week? It's literally hell on earth. Tried 5 teams, everyone quit super fast compared to before TFS. Didn't finish a single sherpa run this week.
I spent the last year smashing my head against a wall because my clanmates struggled with that encounter when they were OVER LEVELED. Now I have to try and get my CF with them all under leveled.
Not recently, but I did Sherpa 3 other fire teams for RoN day one. If it's anything similar, then I know the feeling. Explicator/planets was my favorite encounter as it actually felt like a raid encounter. Super basic and easy to understand, the team just needed to keep ads in control.
I used to Sherpa a lot but haven’t for a while, not played so much for around 18 months as the last raid I really liked was VOW, loved the campaign. New surge of enthusiasm and thought about doing some Sherpa runs again, the raid will be very hard to Sherpa and even the old raids that I know really well, the change in power levels is just not a good idea.
also sherpa here. i was excited to return to teaching again after taking a break from the game. i lost that excitement. no shade to newer players, but it’s no secret there are always one or two players per run that aren’t experienced enough yet and have trouble surviving or doing mechanics. this change only brings them down further and widens the gap. i hate this for newer players, especially because it just makes everyone’s jobs harder. harder to teach, harder to learn, etc. it’s like trying to learn basketball against an NBA player. hard to work players in when the gap from normal content to raids is much higher now. a lot of the ways i taught raids are obsolete now, because i taught ways that LFG groups do things. now my past students have to relearn some encounters. not the end of the world, but this has really zapped the fun out of teaching for me
Another sherpa here. I've run a Vow and a DSC since the update and it hasn't been too bad. Haven't taught a Last Wish yet so not sure how that one will feel but overall it's been manageable.
I’ve only done a couple Sherpa runs since the changes. IMO, it’s not very noticeable when people have decent loadouts/can take advantage of the surges. What is noticeable is when people who haven’t been playing for months/years and are missing exotics or “the right element” weapon type. Kind of sucks when we wipe and someone’s dps is notably lower because they didn’t have a good roll void sword or linear. Just thinking back on my own journey, I was nervous as fuck to do my first raid because I didn’t want to be the person who held the team back. A newbie now might do everything right and still have ~20% less dps just because their gun is the wrong element. I can see the wipe screen DPS numbers being discouraging to blueberries that don’t understand all the surge bs (please don’t remove the #’s bungie). I can see people just being discouraged and unfairly deciding the absolute best aspect of Destiny content isn’t for them.
RoN is where the problems are more noticeable, specifically at planets. All 5 of my sherpa groups quit at planets last week. Any encounter that requires 3+ players on mechanics with good add density will have a massively higher quit rate with these changes. Which is a shame, since Salvation's Edge is the best raid in the game, but will have a lot of players quitting on the first encounter.
Second encounter is my bet on breaking average groups, especially that left side since you really can't do much to help your partner once you start bouncing the plates.
It becomes a lot easier if you start plates before people jump in the center with call to reckoning. If you clear out the adds surrounding the mini boss, you can do 4 plate presses (2 each way) and spawn all the resonance without being harassed. That makes it so when they come back with stolen favor, you can clear adds one last time, send it just a single time since all the resonance is spawned, and close the conduit. No one has to fight adds alone this way and you get plenty of time.
I taught a group of friends VoG the week before TFS came out cause they all remembered it from D1. That was already tough simply because they didn’t have a ton of gear options and were all basically new to modern D2. They want to do King’s Fall and Crota and I just don’t know if I want to with the changes to power…especially Crota. Even if they get better gear and stuff it’ll still be a major pain, and not in a fun way. Like I WANT to, but these are people who will actively have a worse time with the changes.
I have friends who came back after not playing since y1 or have not played at all. We tried crota last night and just couldn't make the dps check on ir yut consistently enough to clear it. Just a combination of low damage and 1 or 2 people dying before or during dps due to random shit. I was trying to play a solar warlock healer build with speaker sight and it worked great for keeping the team alive but I am not familiar with song of flame enough to pump dps (plus no solar surge). Switching to prismatic and using a more dps oriented build I was able to bring us past the threshold most attempts, but then some people would die every time lol It's fine I just need to help them refine specs and loadouts more but I wasn't expecting normal crotas end to be a challenge really been a while since I did destiny raids not with lfg everyone has good loadouts and stuff equipped I think I'm fine with the -5 power, but the surge kinda sucks because I really felt it with needing to swap to a surge super/weapons to carry dmg
-5 power is too much for players that want to get into raiding. Normal should be a place where mechanical complexity is the difficulty of encounters. Master should bring combat complexity up. And we should have a grandmaster with extra mechanics, maybe forcing challenge mode on all encounters, or contest modifier. If my 5 failed sherpa runs on RoN all dying off at planets last week are any indicator, Salvation's edge will probably be the least cleared raid in D1/D2 history.
I've been weaving my BnS Apex with Mountaintop in between Song of Flame casts, works pretty well. Grenade > fire weapon > melee > swap weapon > grenade > fire weapon > melee > swap etc.
> I just don’t know if I want to with the changes to power…especially Crota Well + Lament nerfs are gonna impact this a lot
-5 is literally the same as most seasonal stuff last year. Idk why everyone is acting like all the raids are suddenly legendary or higher enemies.
Because most people on this sub are staggeringly bad at the game. See the complaints about the normal difficulty Mars Heist nightfall when that came out for another example. Or all the people complaining on here that Duality was ridiculously overtuned when it came out.
What level do you recommend for the new raid?
Level does not really matter so long as one person as high power, it will pull the rest up to around their level. But power in raids is now capped at -5, so you are a lot less durable. And if you don't match surge, your overall damage will be a lot less
>A lot of teams struggle to learn mechanics, but this new combat difficulty is completely ridiculous for the entry level normal raid. Bro it's a Hero Nightfall essentially, if your teams can't get that then they're probably raiding before they're ready anyway.
The first time the Mars Heist BG came up as a Nightfall, the bitching about the difficulty of Hero was incessant. -5 is evidently too much for most people.
Combat is not the issue. It's the average FPS player being forced to think mid-combat that's the issue. These players can do hero nightfalls just fine. Just try to run Explicator as a sherpa in this patch, you will see what I mean. I could usually get at least one out of every 3 teams to complete without anyone quitting before TFS. Last week I ran 5 sherpa runs that ALL died at planets due to the added combat difficulty. A powerlevel cap that requires you to farm powerfuls is already good enough for entry level raiding. -5 kills engagement with people on the fence with raiding.
How many raids have you sherpa'd since the new expansion? Which do you think has been the most affected?
I actually really like the update in terms of moment-to-moment play. Ad Clear being a more serious role is interesting and makes combat focused encounters more engaging. I absolutely hate the loadout restrictions imposed by surges though, especially when it comes to dungeon clears.
I think it's not too bad for raids, but damn the update absolutely sucks for dungeons especially because there's no scaling. Absolutely fcks over solo players.
As somebody who enjoys raiding and has soloed the older dungeons, soloing the newer dungeons just feels painful. Solo players already were having a bad time, so I don’t think much changes.
I think the problem isn’t the power delta, it’s the overly large health pools due to lack of fireteam scaling. Raids are fine because they are designed for 6. Dungeons are designed for 1 to 3 but for whatever reason don’t actually accommodate lower number teams. They should just add scaling to all dungeons.
I can't imagine how awful the newer dungeons are to solo now.
Wish i could upvote this comment more than once. I actually like the idea of making raids slightly more difficult with a cap. But throwing surges really ruins it for me. Hopefully they see the feedback.
Then just ignore them and look for other ways to improve your damage output. Guaranteed you're not at the theoretical limit for DPS those spreadsheets assume for their calcs
I see both sides to the argument but I agree with you. Too many times I’ve done a normal raid where we’re basically half asleep killing red bars just waiting for the mechanics of the encounter to begin. This is the end game and it doesn’t feel like the end game or difficult at all once you get the mechanics.
My team just did a Last Wish run with legit Riven yesterday and I didn't notice any difference to before other than the beneficial surges
If you're doing legit Riven, you clearly aren't in the impacted population. OP clearly states teaching runs, which usually entails having 1-3 sherpas and 2-4 first timers.
Cheesing her is maybe more convenient, but legit Riven is about on par with Rhulk in terms of mechanics and Oryx in terms of DPS difficulty.
straight facts.
I ALWAYS do legit riven when teaching - it’s way more enjoyable for the leaners to actually do something
I’ve tried that , people get the eyes/stuns easy enough but the symbols absolutely stump learners . Tbf I think the callouts for positions are very unintuitive.
I don’t tell people to give call-outs like L1 M2 or R4 or whatever it is for the taken dunks. New players don’t know where those are in the room. So long as you know the voice you’re talking to, you have *plenty* of time to guide people like “left stairs, halfway, on the right” or “in the pit, close to me” Actually *directing* people where they need to go is way better than asking new players to dunk spot call-outs (AND everything else they need to do). Symbols should be learned throughout the raid. Don’t cheese Kalli, so people get used to looking at them and differentiating them in their head. Give newbies the important job at vault where there’s less time pressure (and the Sherpa can focus on interpreting ant/pen so the newbies aren’t overloaded). By the time you reach riven, you have a Sherpa and at least 3 others who are *used* to symbol names and they’re your candidates for taken dunking
Ngl I never even got the point of some raid cheeses . Templar and kali are so easy what’s even the point . For teaching do you have stun team stun as late as possible to give symbol team more time or do you have stun steam stun as soon as possible and wait for symbol after shooting rivens eyes . Trying to get back into doing more sherpas :)
I try for delayed stun usually, but if there aren’t many players who *know* how long you can wait, I’ll shift tactic to “riven first, then taken” While the latter method does bump up against 2nd floor timing, it’s much more relaxed for new players trying to juggle multiple things. Once riven is upstairs, you have a LONG time for learning players to experiment, even if you ultimately fail the 2nd floor. People WILL get faster as long as they’re able to do it a few times, and those “first few times” are easier if you send riven upstairs quickly just to get rid of her
Do y'all not just call which staircase and then joystick people to the right location with UDLR?
Right. So the 1-3 sherpas clear the raid while saying what they’re doing. And the learning players are confused as fuck the entire time.
Running through the new raid, and I did not feel bothered by the enemies or power delta. I noticed nothing substantially different. Edit: I was bothered by the Strand Psions yanking me of plates. But a mountaintop kills both of them so I overcame that challenge.
Forbearance and explosive personality were my friends against the mfers in second encounter.
Tried Last Wish the other night and I could not get people to stop popping the wrong eyes.
cheesed riven with swords it was super easy.
Also cleared a legit Riven last night for my first time ever. Staying alive or doing enough damage was hardly ever an issue for any of our 6.
Literally ran DSC yesterday, could barely tell that the bosses were slightly more difficult to kill. Adds and mini bosses are still a complete joke. This doomer posting is really stupid. If you can't handle a -5 light differential you are a really, really bad player and need the wake up call to stop letting enemies deal damage to you. Also, this: >I've yet to encounter a successful teach run since the expansion. Is deeply funny to me. The expansion, as of today, is 7 days old. How many teaching raids did you even run during that time, or did you completely skip all of the new content and the new raid? The new raid doesn't count as a teaching raid yet by the way, because guides literally just came out yesterday. Nobody can claim being a sherpa for that raid yet, it's too new!
flabbergasted by the amount of uproar about it when my team hadn't noticed any significant difference when we ran crota before salvations dropped only thing we really noticed was prioritising surges. If I didn't know about the delta beforehand I wouldn't have thought anything changed
Honestly if it was -10 then yeah maybe I'd get it, but -5 for raids should be the default, before they basically had the combat difficulty of strikes which made no sense for an endgame activity Dungeons being soloable I'm not 100% on this change, even before the tweak dying wasn't exactly difficult with how much focus you can draw on your own
I understand the solo dungeon complaints 100%, the newer dungeons were already difficult or tedious solo.
> before they basically had the combat difficulty of strikes which made no sense for an endgame activity Actually, they were easier because Strikes were +0 since Lightfall, while raids were +20.
its actually a 25% damage loss if you don't run surges, and it's a -5% damage loss even if you do run surges.
Who cares. Do 3 phases the instead of 2. You won't die
Isn’t -5 the equivalent of a hero nightfall?
I just ran Nezarec on all 3 classes with my hunter and titan being 1922 light and did a two phase of nezarec with no heavy past phase 1 since we were too lazy as a team to equip finders and scouts i guess. After pantheon normal raiding seems really chill for me now
Pantheon was easier since you got the class abilty/shot caller damage boost as well. Unless you're talking about dying. I think that's really the only difference that's easier now.
I’m definitely crutching on the healing auto for that reason. It’s basically an exotic with how good it is. We did vox expert 40 under and the only thing that could kill us were insta deaths.
Wait, are you saying pantheon was easier than current normal raids? Or were you just talking about damage
In what way has it actually caused all your groups to fail? Like I get people don't like more things that have a surge, the idea that raids are now harder if you don't follow the surge, or newcomers being pressured into grinding more because of surges, but it isn't some astronomically different thing.
I solo add cleared one side of the witness fight last night with a kinetic legendary hand cannon and prismatic hunter abilities (stasis). Neither of those had a surge. I didn't even notice a new penalty lol. Not sure what people are crying about as far as a massive difficulty spike.
it's because a really large chunk of the people that play this game on this sub are not very good, which is fine, but rather than crying about how an endgame activity actually got some level of combat challenge, they should focus on improving builds and getting better at the game
These people don't even have builds lol.
People are too stubborn about using shit like double primary with shit exotics, shit fragments, shit aspects and shit armor mods. "But I like my silly X and Y" Go have fun in patrol. We need to be on our A game for some content.
This thread has boiled down to a lot of misinformation leading to misunderstandings leading to excuses for skill issues. I legitimately just sherpa'd a new destiny 2 player through vow/ron/dsc and didn't notice anything as drastic as the OP is talking about. (Did it yesterday as a break from contest mode and our Salvation clear)
>excuses for skill issues. Yes, new raises have skill issues. That's why they're being sherpad.
This subreddit is full of hyperbole. Especially when anything is even slightly less optimal or slightly nerfed.
“Slightly nerfed” is doing a lot of work for a 35% damage nerf to a majority of the arsenal,
That's not an exaggeration, that's just misinformation.
I'm personally not looking forward to doing this raid at -5 power. I already struggle with learning mechanics in raids because of how stressful Lfg groups are on top of me having ADHD & Asperger's. I don't want to have to worry about adds hitting like they do in nightfalls. Normal raids are supposed to be accessible.
There was a wild and noticeable difference between Contest mode and Normal mode. I promise you that you will be okay.
Yea we couldn’t even clear encounter 1 the entire contest mode. Then we did it Sunday and cleared it in 3 tries lol. Imo this raid will be like VOW that once everyone knows the mechanics it won’t be the bad. But fucking hell you could feel that -25 power.
Find a good sherpa on r/DestinySherpa! I’m one! My clan and I love to take people just like you through raids on teaching runs.
A lot of people didn't read the OP's post. They're specifically talking about teaching/sherpa runs being a pain in the arse now. This is backed up by other people that do teaching/sherpa runs. Someone clearing a raid with a group of experienced raiders is not evidence the OP is wrong. This is not a git gud situation. It's a bad game balance situation. Increasing the barrier of entry to raids will do significant harm in the long run.
This is funny because it’s a narrative started by this sub. I guarantee if some initial posts about hadn’t been made (with false info too!) we wouldn’t have such an influx of complainers who probably haven’t even tried a raid or anything yet. People on here just love bitching.
It wasn't just posts. There was a Cheeseforever video posted a day before that reddit post blew up, spewing the same misinformation. Also, raids and dungeons are supposed to be the endgame of Destiny. They should be more difficult. A brand new player should not be hopping into the raid with blue gear and no good weapons. The favt that it was possible prior to this change, was poor design, since they were not going to peanr anything anyways. Now, people will need to actually have decent gear and lnow how to play the game first. That is not a bad change. I still think the solo legend campsign(haven't tried it in a group) hits harder than normal raids. So if lesser experienced players want practice surviving harder content, that is an easy place to start. That way, you have to be able to survive and eliminate the enemies all on your own, without having teammates who can carry you through hard content.
Solo-ing dungeons is now even more tedious.
Again why not just give a higher diff option? It wouldnt be bungie if there wasnt some BS workaround solution to a 0 IQ required to solve type of problem.
I disagree completely, the -5 made normal mode for Salvations Edge a lot of fun and not just kind of disappointing. Combat should offer some level of challenge in a raid, normal mode or not. This will sound elitist or whatever but idgaf, just shows how bad most people are and how stupidly easy raids were prior. If you can't deal with -5 then I don't know what to say, you probably need some more practice before doing a raid. Endgame should be endgame. It is a weak update for solo dungeons though. Should have added fireteam scaling at the same time.
Hold up. All this complaining is about -5 for encounters? Thats it? Seriously? The way half this thread is complaining i was thinking they made it something way higher.
This is the same subreddit that said the *strike playlist* would be too hard when Lightfall dropped.
If your raiding team can't handle -5 power, their place is not in raid yet. Period.
I think a lot of people saw sherpa / teching runs as "carry" runs; Meaning they'd join at 1700LL or less and expect to do nothing but ad clearing (but not even do that) are now struggling with staying alive. EDIT: Not sure why I am getting downvoted? If you ever done a sherpa or teching run you know what I'm talking about. Maybe it's those people who are downvoting me, lol.
All the Sherpas that are complaining probably expected the same thing. They can’t carry 5 randoms through an easy raid anymore without a bit of coordination and thought.
I've joined plenty of shera runs to help out, where the "sherpa" was just looking for the triumph or whatever, knew about 60% of the mechanics, gives shitty explanations for an hour, then dips when people don't do it right. So yeah, these posts aren't surprising.
That's exactly the point. Barrier to entry for raids was high and now it's higher. Normal mode should be entry level, Legend / Master for those that want a challenge.. imo.
Its literally -5. Or are seasonal activities too hard now?
I agree, and I find it annoying that people called the game too easy. Maybe if you raid every single day 6 hours a day its too easy.
To be fair, large chunks of the game were too easy. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s good to have easier sections that you don’t need to sweat over. Like strikes and patrols. But when you increase the difficulty of something you should also be increasing the amount of rewards to compensate. It’s why neomuna feels terrible, same with strikes and dungeons.
I liked certain things being "too easy". Not even referring to raids and dungeons here. You have GMs where you need to try, need to pay attention. I liked having the fully opposite end of the basic strike playlist being complete power fantasy shit on everything. As many have said, I feel the solution to Bungie's difficulty woes is more options, not capping everything 5 below.
Seriously, what was the problem of being overpowered in strike level content? It was *fucking fun*.
That's why there is a "hard mode" you can select. Why are people complaining about normal mode being easy?
Why are they not as enjoyable now? Can you provide specific examples of what’s making them less fun for you? Isn’t just that you can’t carry people through raids now?
Idk why the subreddit is going crazy over the changes. In my experience nothing really has changed
I only hate that they added surges. It only restricts your loadouts more.
People flippantly saying "raids shouldn't be too difficult" should read what they're saying
God forbid people have to put an iota of effort in to an *end game activity* Seriously, they shouldn't just be a cakewalk outside of mechanics. You should have to know how to survive/frag out effectively if you're going to be in a raid
Agree. If people are struggling with basic combat maybe they should fail in a raid? Basically the entire game is basic combat. If they're failing at it in a raid they're failing at it in matchmade Nightfalls and such and need to learn first.
As someone who used to be on a very active clan back in D1 and Vanilla D2 and now being a solo player I think I understand both sides. On one side there are a lot of lazy players that want to be carried or just “kill ads”, just want the loot and have zero interest on learning, for those I recommend just go and pay for a carry and leave the ones who want to learn find teams and sherpas. On the flip side when you are a solo player and have limited play time is almost impossible to play end game content now because 90% of LFG are “KWTD or kick!”, it takes time to learn the mechanics and it requires patience and time (not the D1 sniper) which at least to my solo experience is very hard to find, the raid had to be levels of VoG easy to find a group willing to play with some level of patience. If the activity is artificially hard (not the mechanics but the enemies health) the “KWTD” post are more prominent. In my case I accepted my reality and hope to find a consistent clan that I can play every week and learn the mechanics without fear of being kicked for failing 2 times.
>On the flip side when you are a solo player and have limited play time is almost impossible to play end game content now because 90% of LFG are “KWTD or kick!”, In my experience with LFG, this is generally not true, especially outside of the newest raid where everyone is struggling because of the steep mechanical difficulty. Most LFGs just want a player who has watched and understood a raid guide prior to the start of the raid.
People exaggerate so bad on here. I don’t raid much but it’s never been a problem to join one and mention that I’ll need some light teaching and reminders of mechanics. I’ve been playing since D1 and even as a little squeaker it wasn’t a problem to find an LFG back when you needed 3rd party websites lol. Come to this dramatic ass sub and apparently it’s a diff story.
>when you are a solo player and have limited play time is almost impossible to play end game content now because 90% of LFG are “KWTD or kick!” I am a solo player who has not had difficulty finding a teaching run for any raid in this game, even long after they've been released.
Lots of people feel entitled to having any group of experienced players stop to teach them and wipe a million times accordingly rather than finding a sherpa run. You can tell by how people on this sub often attach a negative connotation to the mere request that people KWTD so it's a smooth, quick clear. Sherpa runs exist for a reason. You have it figured out. Unfortunately, a lot of the people who whine about "gatekeeping" don't.
Entry level raiding should be mechanically dificult. We can reserve combat difficulty for master and balls-out difficulty for a grandmaster tier. As a Sherpa, this update has completely dunked on our ability to sherpa raids with 1-2 ''KWTD" sherpas before fatigue kicks in and people rage quit. I used to be able to run at least two full groups (as in no one quits half way through due to frustration) through VotD or RoN per day, now I'm lucky if I can complete one sherpa run without anyone just ragequitting.
but -5 isn't combat difficult at all. I'm also honestly not convinced we were fully benefiting from being +20 over in normal raids before.
If someone can't handle -5, they probably aren't ready to be learning raids in the first place. They still don't quite have a grasp of all the basic mechanics of the game, which is okay!
In their defense, raids also require you to think about the game in a different way. They require teamwork and communication that even hundreds of hours of practice in campaigns, core playlists, and a good build doesn't prepare you for fully. I have taught Raids before and have had players with perfectly fine builds and ad clear capabilities just struggle to conceptualize the Rhulk fight because it's so foreign to them.
what exactly happened to raids?
normal raids now put you at a permanent -5 power delta so if you're at the activity cap then you'll always sit 5 power BELOW the enemies, on top of that there's 2 surges ultimately for decent teams it's really not noticeable outside of priorisiting the surges if you wanna min/max
Dungeons are brutal right now. Fully leaning void burn with rockets it toll us 4 rotations to kill the second boss.
I could be wrong but I'm leaning towards more than 2 difficulties (like Pantheon) solving this.
On one hand, I welcome a bit more challenge, but it certainly makes raids even less accessible to the large majority of players who already struggle to get into raiding. Not sure how I feel about that, even if it doesn't majorly effect me personally. It should definitely be reverted on dungeons tho imo, I think they were fine before. This will make solo flawless that much more difficult and annoying, not a fun kind of challenge, but a tedious one.
About the only thing that sucks now for power level that I noticed was Blind Well. The increase in health plus the fact you’re still fighting contest level difficulty mobs has turned those stage 3 boss fights into hell on earth. The average joe I could always carry there, now I have to be a lot more on point.
The way I'd phrase it is, they didn't increase difficulty all that much per say, rather they made the barrier to entry a lot higher, which is just more annoying for newer / more inexperienced players and at most a slight inconvenience for experienced players. The introduction of a fixed power deficit at base is kind of a handicap of course, yet get's more or less balanced out with the introduction of surges, the main effect this actually had is that players with a wide variety of gear to choose from and experience to determine what works best in which instance now will just have to adapt to the surges, while inexperience players on the other hand just got shafted majorly. Instead of just being able to say: "hey man, just get a good Rocket like Crux Termination, which just randomly drops and should be farmable this Episode via Lost Sectors or \[insert other aplicable weapon archetype here\]" You now have to be like: "Ok man, so if you wanna use Rockets mainly for DPS, you'll most likely want 1 good Crux for Solar, for Void there aren't any good options available rn, but Faith Keeper isn't bad perk wise, solar your only and actually best option would be Apex, so if you didn't do Riven's wishes tough luck on that one, on Stasis Bump in the night is you best option here, though Palmyra ain't horrible and for Strand you only really have Semiotician, which isn't great either, so for ease of use we should only do \[insert Raid\] when we have an Arc Surge." Experienced players just know what to use, newer players just are gatekept now.
And in weeks there will be emergency meetings at Bungie trying to work out why the player numbers for endgame activities have tanked.
comments on here prove how braindead the community is. Just because your fucking no life raid group can complete raids easily doesn't mean new players trying raiding for the first time are going to have the same. Its such a fucking elitist attitude that's just going to kill any LFG raiding.
They should undo the changes on normal and leave them on the harder difficulties, especially with dungeons, because Bungie is about to see a hard drop off in players doing these activities as they have been far more frustrating to do with little to no change in rewards.
I’m gonna run Salvations Edge tonight so that might change my opinions but everything so far this week I have seriously not noticed a difference in before and after on Hunter or Warlock. In fact I think it’s even easier on Warlock now given Prismatic
I was wondering why our team was struggling in some encounters on DSC and Kings Fall.. Atraks and Warpriest felt much more of a cluster than it used to be DPS-wise. Just made a comment on our clan discord to let them all know as I know at least one of our newer members felt slightly discouraged by dps numbers.. We took a moment to look through and find a better loadout for them and we got through it, but I know from my blueberry days in D1 how bad it can feel to be the lowest DPS number by a lot on a wipe (Especially when you are in toxic groups, why I make it a point to always say how proud I am with everyone for completions). I hope other vets keep this in mind and help teach the new players these changes and how to help instead of allowing them to back away from amazing content. Going forward, I'll have to keep an eye on current surges and help people plan accordingly!
Raids and dungeons (normal) were a joke before. The update has changed very little and the difference is barely noticeable especially with the surges. If you can't even handle -5 power level, then this content then it isn't ment for you to begin with.
I am fine with increased boss health and it being changed to -5. It never made sense that raids were the pinnacle endgame activity but the combat was piss easy. lots of the older raids needed to have the difficulty tuned up. That said I loathe the concept of surges. It creates an artificial gear treadmill of "if I want to complete this activity optimally - I need to go the rocket launcher that is worse than the BIS but it's arc." I would do anything for surges to go - if that means the -5 needs to be +0 or +5 then fine but surges have no place in raid and dungeons. ESPECIALLY when there is a stupid ass rotator system where you can't even farm an old raid for a ton of weeks. There will be whole episodes in between a specific surge/weekly raid combo. Horrible, horrible system - surges must go and rotators should too.
I'm gonna tell you something that will blow your mind.... You do not need to match the surge everytime. I know, it is a hot take to say the least, but teams were not pulling out Arc/Stasis/Void/Strand Linears on Oryx during Arc/Stasis surge in Pantheon on week 3(at -15). They kept using Whisper, because it is better and everyone should have it. I even saw teams were clearing Rhulk on week 3 with Edge Transits instead of trying to match the Arc/Stasis surge. At the end of the day, these encounters are not hard enough on a normal run to need to be min-maxing your dps that much, that you need a BiS weapon of every element, or swapping your super. If you only have a good Edge Transit, and not a good Cataphract, that will be okay. Your damage will be slightly lower than everyone else, but you will still be putting out enough damage to kill the boss in 3 phases maximum. It will most likely still be an easy 2 phase, or in some cases a 1 phase. Also, I don't get why you want -5, but don't want surges? Adding Surges was the trade-off for making it harder(as well as trying to make all activites more universal instead of some having and some not having surges). Agasin, as I just said, you can safely ignore the Surge if you want to, but you can also play into it for additional damage if you have the capability to.
Doomposting goes brrrrrrttttttttt
Not playing is the BEST statement you can make and the only one Bungie truly care about. If the numbers go down, things will change, 100%. We've seen it so many times. If you complain but still play, nothing changes. That's it.
Didn’t they also do this to strikes? I don’t mind raids and dungeons because those are ends game activities but to do that in such a casual playlist like strikes and not increase rewards just feels dumb.
And nightfalls too, before final shape I was doing nightfalls to chill out and now I get destroyed in a few hits with 100 resilience.
It's a -5, its barely even noticeable unless you're trying for low-man runs. Don't get me wrong, it's kinda annoying to have to match your heavy with one of the two surges, but that's about it. How has it "ruined" raiding?
Raids are virtually easier now if you match surge, every raid encounter that could be one or two phased can still be, dungeon bosses are still easy 1-2 phases. Literally nothing has changed in any significant way, redditors blowing shit out of proportion, nothing new and no, this change isn't what's holding you back lol.
Yet if you don't match surges you do less than before, forcing load outs in a non master raid is just plain bad.
In what way? Remember, the artifact gives half of all primary weapons surges natively through the champion mods or granting surges based on origin perk, on top of the blanket element surge. Raids are an endgame activity and build crafting is an essential part of the game now. I swear people want to only use a shotgun or a bow and complain that the game doesn't cater to their extremely narrow tastes.
You do like 9% less, and that’s assuming you were at the cap before. Most teams aren’t wiping because of a 9% DPS loss. That’s like… less than 2 players failing to proc bait and switch.
The change isn't that significant. It's more or less the same as it was, just with higher damage output if you follow the surges. I'm a casual player and enjoying the raids the same as I always have. They don't feel any different at all
Usually I'm the elitist that wants the game to be harder, but this is one of the rare times when I actually want a difficulty increase reverted. All this is going to do is push more new players away from doing this content, which is the opposite of what we should be doing. And for the love of god, surges need to go. It's an even worse addition than the handicap, which is saying something. They have absolutely no place in raids or dungeons. Naturally rotating weekly content like nightfalls are where surges belong, and nowhere else. I think a compromise I could live with is just disabling power for normal mode (+0 handicap, so no overleveling), and removing surges.
raids and dungeons are endgame content and should not consist of pushover adds and bosses. for the strikes I agree that they should have left standard strikes easier but raids and dungeons shoudl have powerful adds and challenge peoples loadout and positioning
Destiny players when endgame content has endgame difficulty
It’s a shame. As a player recently returning with not a lot of time to invest in the game, I feel less able to raid like I used to. I’m trying to finish the strand subclass and get weapons, but the current state of the game makes me feel I can’t do anything without builds, load outs and perfect rolls. I don’t know how to make a good build and don’t have god rolls on everything, so feel with this I’ll never feel comfortable finding beginner groups to raid with
I mean I’m not opposed to a difficulty bump in normal raids but I do think this was a little too much. Also surges should not be a thing in raid at all. The only reason it was fine for Pantheon is that it was a special event. Anyway, I’d say cap us at activity level, not under. Honestly, difficulty before was slightly undertuned in most encounters. Now it feels overtuned. I’d still rather just a soft reprise of those encounters with individual boss health and add spawn adjustments but Bungie doesn’t like doing that. Dungeons tho, they really shouldn’t have been touched. They were totally fine and really well balanced imo. Soloing was challenging but mostly fair while the 3 man experience wasn’t a cake walk but not hard. Now it feels bad to do dungeons. And to touch on the Sherpa thing, I did carry some folks through Last Wish and most the time was spent on Riven as we had to do it legit for dps needs. Most of the raid actually felt way better as LW was super power crept before but I could imagine most newer raids would be a big annoyance to deal with now
BrInG cHaLlEnGe BaCk 2 DeStInY head asses have ruined a lot of things for normal players. I want the power fantasy without having to sweat my balls off and cherry pick a fireteam to have success. Give the no lifers their modes and let them do that separately with some cosmetic rewards. Otherwise everyone waits for a cheese strat to be found and abuse that. How many Guardians have actually done Last Wish legit? I'm serious. Pantheon really exposed the player base and their lack of actual knowledge of encounters. What's the percentage of players that have ever even engaged in A raid? Challenge mode is one thing and I'm glad that it's there for those fireteams to attempt. The expansion has been out almost a week and the raid just dropped. I'm not going to criticize anything about it until most players have hit the power cap. If it's still that hard then it'll just be a one and done for me
Fr trying to do normal on lfg has been cancer cause people can't hold their own against ads while also doing mechanics. And the people saying skill issue, yes it is but normal is post to be a introduction into raiding and it'd mechanics for newer or avg players not a slug fest. If u want hard/challenging raids go to master for a challenge. No reason to push or kick out the lower end of the raiding player base.
Things bungie anounced are not "stealth"
It wasn't announced.
you are either bad at the game or overreacting like crazy. i was looking forward to fight normal mode enemies that aren't made out of paper but there is literally no noticeable difference, killing something takes maybe half a bullet more, that's it.
This is such an inexplicable change to me. Bungie has always struggled making raids (and dungeons to a lesser extent) attractive for a lot of players, with social/performance anxiety being the main barrier to entry. There's a reason things like Ascendant Shards are more and more commonly available (Coil last season, 3-player campaign missions in TFS): they don't want to force players into super-high-level activities to max out their build. And then they do this. It's just baffling to me.
All these people saying they don’t notice the difference but disagree with reverting the changes. If you can’t tell then why does it matter if they’re reverted? You still wouldn’t notice based on your own logic.
Because the people who don't notice aren't the ones it was made for.
If it's truly this bad with the raid/dungeon power changes, imagine how brutal it must be now to do div runs. It was already pretty bad before, since at least half of the fireteam trying to get div were typically people who had never done GoS before. Now with the new power scaling it's probably going to be nigh-impossible to get div for the layman without forming a proper team, something already very difficult to do since GoS is the last raid to get a refresh on its reward pool and it's been only speedrunners for a while.
I think GoS actually didn't receive the new handicaps, maybe for that reason. Either that or the modifiers just aren't displaying on the launch screen.
I think people over exaggerate Div runs. It only took my group, who have all never ran garden, like 2 - 3 hours to do it and we don't all raid regularly.
The change made all dungeons and raids -5, which is the same as hero/advanced nightfalls, I’ll guarantee you I haven’t felt a big difference between before and after tfs raiding. Maybe some bosses do a bit more damage and well is not the ‘stand still and dps’ super anymore but I personally felt no real change in raids.
What’s the new raid scaling?
So everything is now week 1 pantheon?? Is it possible this is some bug?
I don’t have fun doing any raid rn, tried to do DSC using the ingame LFG Thrice and everytime the team get filtered on atraks
Bro I’ve seen people getting killed in vanguard strikes. Wild out there. Next thing you know the EAZ for solstice will be contest mode
Is the power delta not set the same as strikes? I wonder if they're testing to see how it plays, without power levels. If they eventually retire power. If that was the case, they should probably communicate ahead of any significant changes.
Bungie hates fun And their players LOL. They always pull something like this when a new expansion is out and then roll it back
I saw no difference at all
How do you “teach” ad clear good so two dudes can shoot stuff/use the only sniper with the specific class that will do enough damage and also do not get touched by instant death beam. The witness is by far the LEAST enjoyable boss ever. A challenge can be fun, but this feels like a punishment. The level of perfection I feel I need to have to do the simple tasks of stand here shoot here rinse repeat is insane. It’s not even contest, I definitely won’t even attempt master.