There’s a long-running joke amongst gamers and developers: It’s not a bug, it’s a feature! Usually it’s a self-aware joke — some bug or glitch disrupts the game either visually or even functionally, but it’s sometimes entertaining enough to keep in or consider a part of the experience. For once, I find myself telling that joke with a straight face. That teleporting trick in Destiny‘s final raid boss fight? It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Vault of Glass raid, allow me to explain. When you make your way through the mazes and puzzles and dozens of enemies all the way to the raid’s final boss — Atheon — you and your team of five other Guardians still have a challenge to face. You’ll have to fight off Vex enemies and protect yourself against Atheon, all while intermittently teleporting through two portals to kill more enemies while demolishing Oracles. That’s the most basic rundown of how the final fight in the raid goes down.
My raid team and I had a strategy locked down. We had fireteams on specific duties. In fact, throughout the raid, for areas that included combat, each of us always had a role to play out. We agreed on roles for each other based on class, level, and weapon loadout. It was part of the strategy. Those lucky enough to have the sniper with regenerating ammunition would perch themselves atop a large column to help fend off suicidal Supplicants and even take a few shots at Atheon in between. We learned who was best at wielding the relic, and who best at shooting down Oracles quickly. We were able to consider the factors that might contribute to people’s strengths or weaknesses and decide on their roles from there.
But in the latest patch, Bungie decided to fix a crucial, tactical feature in this boss fight. Three players must be teleported through to one of two different areas at a time (known as either the past or future), so that they can grab a relic and destroy oracles and make their way back to Atheon, and then use the relic to help defeat him. But whereas before a team could decide who would be best to send through to grab said relic — after first figuring out how to even position themselves to make that happen — those players are now selected at random. When three players are teleported, they have to immediately decide which of the three of them will grab the relic, and which will tackle the oracles. Those lost moments of deciding, bickering, discussing could potentially be crucial. You already have an incredibly limited amount of time to get the killing/destroying done in those areas, let alone when a pre-fight conversation is involved.
Now, to be clear, I haven’t played the raid under these new circumstances myself, and my colleague Jason says it didn’t feel as debilitating as perhaps some people feared. Though there have been many complaints about new, missed bugs that players are frustrated to have to deal with while the Atheon strategy was honed in on to be removed.
Some players have even found strategies around this complication. One Redditor shared a system dealing with rankings: teammates’ relic-holding abilities would be ranked 1-3, hopefully making the determination easier when the transport happens. Here’s part of that tip:
Once everyone knows their own number it’s simply a matter of either calling out your number upon teleporting in or just looking around. The highest ranked player picks up the relic and the others focus on Oracles. The majority of the time we always had a 1, 2, or 3 teleport so it actually went much more smoothly then we anticipated.
Bungie’s community representative, David Dague, who goes by Deej on their forums, explained their reasoning for going against player wishes on this one, emphasis mine:
I talked a lot to the developers about your opinions on the matter. You don’t want to be selected at random. You want to choose who gets to fetch the Relic under fire from those nasty Oracles. I spoke on your behalf. Your voice was heard. We discussed your concerns.
I even said “Why not just change Hard Mode and leave Easy Mode alone?”
I was told “The Raid is never supposed to be easy.”
At that point, I recalled all the times I stood and delivered the line “…the most challenging encounter we’ve ever created.” It was hard to disagree. As a veteran of Cairo Station on Legendary in Halo, I had to admit that I had been carried through the Raid like luggage assigned to my clan. I did my own carrying later, but carrying had been done.
This is an activity that was designed to be undertaken by a hardcore team that is ready and willing to adapt and improvise to changing battle conditions. Like the moment when the Templar shields random players, the Final Boss was supposed to be extremely dangerous. While we’ve been working on some of the other things for which you’ve been asking (i.e. better exotics, voice chat in matchmaking, more bounties), the designers who made the Raid have plugged the holes that you showed them.
If you got in on the ground floor of this thing, we thank you. If you understand the mechanics for how to beat Atheon, it’s still a thing you can teach your friends. If you’re all up to the challenge, the Raid is waiting for you.
I think the problem I and a lot of other players have with this reasoning is that the Atheon battle is still plenty difficult without ceding to randomness to achieve that same effect. Knowing who would be teleported never felt like an exploit, it felt like it was designed to let players strategize around that discovery effectively.
In Bungie’s own words (as pointed out by a Redditor): “Any time you have a game system which players cannot understand, it might as well be random. No matter how fair the tiebreaker may be, if a single Assault Rifle bullet can slip by and decide the outcome, it might as well be random. And randomness is a poor substitute for tactics and skillful execution.”
The idea of introducing randomness to the Atheon fight is something that Luke Smith, the lead designer on the Vault of Glass raid, spoke to in an interview with Kirk earlier this month.
The goal for this raid, Smith said, was to make it feel like a “final exam,” a sort of final challenge that every other Destiny challenge — particularly those experienced in the raid up to its final boss — was leading up to. That actually makes a lot of sense to me, too. Here’s another quote where Smith goes further into this idea versus that of a more organised fight:
Our goal was to have an encounter where each player in your raid needed to be able to do each job from the entire raid. So, to allow players to have some freedom over choosing or selecting who’s going to do what job, while that’s strategically interesting, and it’s led to a bunch of really cool strategies, it actually doesn’t align with the goal for the encounter.
But unfortunately not every player is specifically best-geared or leveled for certain encounters. The idea of the Vault of Glass always felt like a system built around teamwork, and that made sense. Certain groups would break off into three and threes, and sometimes two and two and twos. Certain players would gravitate to others, play best with them. If you didn’t lead each other through the Gorgon’s maze, you’d screw the entire team. Everything hinged on helping one another out. Each player has a weakness and a strength that they can try to balance out through teamwork.
As one Redditor put it: “I don’t mind rising to a challenge that requires me to practice more, react quicker, and play smarter. But now the challenge is ‘find better teammates.’ That challenge sounds exhausting.”
Then there’s another angle. One Destiny player on Bungie’s forums brings up another good point on the issue of scraping the timestream patch:
The current “fix” to the Atheon VoG fight is contradictory to the established Lore of VoG.
According to the Lore, the Vex are trying to rewrite the laws of time/space. The Gorgons and Oracles are the Vex processing nodes that handle the rewriting of the laws of Time/Space. Kabr smashed the crap out of a Gorgon, and subverted the it’s processing core so that he could use it’s ability to rewrite the laws of Time/Space to fight the Vex. This Gorgon core is the relic.
Thus, during the Atheon fight, Atheon is trying to hide the relic from the players by sending it into the future & past. However the Relic itself is fighting this, which is why the players also get teleported back/forward in time along with the relic.
Oracles then show up to try and write the players near the “hidden” relic out of Time/Space which is why you kill them (to stop them).
Given the lore, it makes no sense that Atheon would send random people back/forward in time. Atheon doesn’t want to send ANYONE back/forward in time, just the relic. The reason why players get sent back/forward in time along [with the] relic is that the relic itself is a Time/Space Rewriting processing node and is interfering with Atheon.
Either way, it makes absolutely zero sense why random players would be sent back/forward in time. The most sense is proximity to the Relic, the second thing would be Proximity to Atheon. The least sense is random.
The specifics for the lore are up for debate/interpretation, but it’s certainly an interesting perspective and addition to the camp of “bring back organised teleporting.”
So what do you guys think? Bug or feature?
Picture: Jason/Twitter
Comments
35 responses to “People Aren’t Crazy About The Latest ‘Fix’ To Destiny’s Toughest Boss”
Sounds like WoW. Mother Shahraz for example teleported 3 random players together which damage chains and if you didn’t run AWAY from each other, you’d die. Which direction do 3 random ppl go? Think fast and communicate!
The problem with this is the teleported players are the more strategic part of the fight, it’s more like if a boss has a cleave that needs to mitigated by both or 3 tanks you send 3 random members (could be healers, could be dps) to take the dmg instead.
Well the way I see it is it’s like a sniper is a hunter. Are they just supposed to sit on the one spot and pewpewpew for free? If Bungie changed it, they obviously feel that the boss deserves a higher amount of effort. Also teleporting people into a cleave is fine if they don’t get one-shotted… it likewise means that ppl can’t afk brain and profit. I don’t think teleport cleave one shots happen in Destiny or WoW.
No they don’t, I’m not comparing it to something that actually happens in wow I’m comparing it to blizzard changing something does in wow to something that wouldn’t make sense based on roles.
I Agree the boss needs to be more difficult but what Bungie did to fix it is the cheapest, laziest and least fun way of doing it. Instead of fixing the fight to be fun and difficult for both the portal and non portal teams they just chucked rng at it.
If you can think of better ways to fix “exploits” like camping on top of a pillar or to address rebalancing while simultaneously making it more fun, then maybe you should toss them your ideas and maybe get paid for it. If they remove the pillar, snipers might just find another cubby hole to set up shop. RNG is simple. WoW has mechanics all over the place… the 3 ppl furthest from the boss get the debuff, ppl need to be equally spaced… people who get teleported get a debuff so you need to cycle and share the love.
Nobody likes being hit with a nerf stick, but Destiny’s thing just sounds tame.
It’s just a lazy fix, they decided atheon was too easy (and on easy it really is once you know the deal) and instead if implementing an interesting, skill based fix they chose the laziest game design option available, randomness
Weren’t Bungie trying to prevent the ‘cheesing’, then they implement the lazy fix, as you described?
The fix described above has nothing to do with the cheesing fix that also came with it, which was being able to knock him off the platform
I don’t understand your last argument. When you have an option of forcing players into unfamiliar roles outside of their comfort zone or simply stacking on some more HP and damage to the enemies, I would’ve thought the latter would be the laziest.
I said interesting who said anything about beefing up hps or damage? This is also an extremely lazy fix, the problem with the fight is that being out of the portals is easy, stand above the harpies, kill till portal team is done, this needed to be addressed in some way that actually made it a task to complete, they didn’t they went for (one of) the simplest and laziest possible solutions.
I don’t see randomness as a lazy game design for difficulty, if anything it’s the opposite it promotes awareness and adaptability a lot of the RNG boss fights in WoW ended up making me a better player since I was thrusted into different scenarios and had to adjust or face defeat.
Yes, but those wow rng moments never messed with player roles, which is an essential element to raids across all mmo type games, Bungie removed class roles and now are removing raid roles, it makes for a shitty raid experience, if nobody knows what they have to do it devolves into chaos 90% of the time. It’s poor design
I really don’t understand the criticism of this. It’s supposed to be the hardest thing in the game, and test your versatility. Everything they said about the raid in the lead-up to it before we knew the specifics was pretty much on-point about that.
Whenever we were trying to figure out raid mechanics ourselves from scratch, my personal reasoning process around any particular technique was always, “OK, so what’s the hardest, most challenging thing they might want us to do?” Sometimes I overestimated how difficult things should be (like having to grab the green debuff from the fanatics and do something to the Templar with it, or time-team needing to have both portals open at once when collecting the relic for Atheon), but for the most part was pretty bang-on.
The complaints I’ve seen all seem to fall into the following categories:
1) This is a change and we hate and fear change.
2) This makes it harder than it was.
To which… yes?
The fact is, when we were learning the fight without any guides or walkthroughs, we actually thought the teleporting was random already. It was important to us that everyone learn how to use the relic so we could adapt to the situation. Adaptability seemed pretty important, rather than coasting by on predictable roles within everyones’ comfort zones.
Challenging you to use different weapons, having a more versatile load-out than simply what role you want, needing to balance the pros and cons of the weapons against the types of enemies you may be facing under changing circumstances… isn’t that what makes the raid more challenging than simply adding more HP to the enemies and having them hit harder? Isn’t that what was celebrated about its difficulty?
TIME TEAM!
Edit: I agree though, I found our teams initial two runs before any of us read any online material and found out that you could choose who gets teleported much more interesting.
Every time the teleport happened we had to quickly size up our two teams and delegate roles.
I absolutely agree that randomness can be lazy but it doesn’t have to be and certainly isn’t by default.
I found the team work required with the random selection a much more rewarding experience.
We all know who the real heroes are.
Well. That’s a little unfair… it’s not exactly heroes plural.
It’s hero.
ie: The guy who kills endless waves of minotaurs and keeps them from sacrificing themselves while nerds are dicking around being time-tourists.
ily…. time team…..
I honestly don’t have a problem with the change itself, I’m more offended by Bungie constantly referring to it as a mistake that they’re fixing.
How do you “accidentally” program the game to send the furthest three people if it was supposed to be random? I’m not an experienced programmer, but I know enough to know that picking three names out of a hat is easier to code than calculating the who’s furthest from the boss.
While that is true, developing in a real time engine can have many odd results. If they were simply grabbing a list of the active players and picking three at random then sure that should work. But there could be many elements that are effecting it actually making it a bug. They probably already have a list of players actively through the raid which could have other functions acting on it, doing some odd sorting.
It could even have been to do with Aethons targeting logic, sending players through the portal may have been setup as an ability for the boss and while it was meant to be selecting random targets it was being unwittingly weighted by distance.
Speaking from experience looking for bugs that you don’t expect to be there is pretty difficult. Get a few million people on the case and they will find it.
While it seems like a simple thing to get right from the outside, real time engines are pretty complicated things.
That’s possibly true. Obviously the engine is doing a lot more at the time than just figuring out who to teleport, but as far as I can see, there’s nothing else in the encounter (or anywhere else for that matter), that has any kind of comparative proximity test, so I think it’s highly unlikely that it was a function for something else that got mixed in.
I think @ryvman’s response is more likely; that they didn’t think players would figure it out, and it was an intentional choice that was supposed to force hiding/lower level players into the fight. But again, that’s not a bug; that’s a design choice that players are using to their advantage (and why shouldn’t they?).
That last para idea rings pretty true, given what they did to the sniper platforms once players cottoned on to using them.
I do tend to agree, it does seem like it was put in as a conscious decision. However was just trying to point out that there is room for it to legitimately be a bug within targeting logic, and that it isn’t always as black and white as it may seem.
When you set something up and it is seemingly working as intended (my group believed it to be random until we were told otherwise) you will generally stop developing it further.
I assumed their mistake was not programming but instead wrongly anticipating player behaviour.
While very speculative of me to say, I can imagine a design meeting whereby it was discussed that the choice to teleport the furthest would mean that player’s who were hiding trying to recover health were suddenly pushed into a more dangerous situation. The result being that it didn’t play out how they wanted it to because they underestimated player’s ability to figure it out.
I agree with you though, highly unlikely to be a programming error, not that I’m a programmer either.
But it’s artificial difficulty, not designed difficulty. RNG is the lowest common denominator and while it’s not insulting to have in any game, changing a part of the raid to fall back on RNG is a little bit lazy. Meanwhile, our raid group has encountered a glitched templar about every run, so it seems that Bungie might be focusing on the wrong things.
You’re right though in that their original plan was to create an environment where everybody would have to be ready to take on all jobs. So it contradicts a little of what I said since they’re just going to back to what they originally envisioned. Makes it confusing, though. Why didn’t they just originally set it up like that?
Seeing a lot of ‘lazy’ accusations thrown around, but I’m still not sure why that’s a bad thing. Laziness with a good result is otherwise known as efficiency. So sure, call it laziness if you like, I don’t see why it’s bad, or why people are surprised or upset other than that it’s pushing them out of their comfort zones.
Bungie stated time and time again that their goal is for the raid to be something that can’t just be winged by a pick-up group. Something that requires coordination and a test of skill.
It really seems to me that relying on every raid member being able to fulfil multiple roles with multiple loadouts (or at least versatile loadouts) and communicate effectively when circumstances change is what they originally intended.
Consistent with the original message, which was why there was originally no automated match-making. ‘Devolving into chaos 90% of the time’ was exactly the trap that the unprepared and uncoordinated were meant to fall into, exactly where skilled raiders who communicate effectively as a team would succeed where all others would fail. That really does seem in-line and consistent with their goals for the raid. (I rate consistency pretty highly.)
Learning new mechanics, such as the relic which doesn’t exist anywhere else, was supposed to be part of the design, too. The Templar fight lets you choose who learns how to use it, the Atheon fight restricts (but still doesn’t dictate – out of the three who go, two people still have an option not to do it) that a little more and throws in some random variables to adapt to.
I think the right seasoning of randomness is good design. We don’t complain that the choice between brown and green is random, do we? Because that’s good randomness. It’s not like they’re randomly spawning Fallen and Hive or anything… there’s consistency within the expected ruleset. It’s simply choosing your roles for you and forcing you to adapt to that.
It’s an element of control lost, and I strongly suspect that is the burr under so many saddles.
Efficiency matters to the people creating the experience and not people going through it. I’m not opposed to how the RNG effects the difficulty of the teleporting system; ultimately in the long run it’s a minor hurdle- but the general inclusion of it is mildly discomforting. RNG is never a good substitute for good game design- I have never encountered a situation where I’d say “Oh, RNG! Wow, that’s neat!” instead, I treat as a hurdle, and it should be treated as a hurdle, because in this case while it might contribute to how the developers want players to treat the raid as a whole, where situations have be made on the fly rather than planned out beforehand, it doesn’t actually add any enjoyment.
So really, this is me disagreeing with their original plans for the raid. And as I said before, I don’t even care about that all that much- but fixing (and by fixing Bungie means changing the paradigm that serves only to increase difficulty and not the actual enjoyment of one’s playthrough of the raid) this while there are still numerous bugs in the raid overall is what ruffles my feathers.
IT’s lazy because see my comment below, its bad because they went against their own design decisions/mantra in a quick fix effort to make something arbitrarily harder that does nothing but negatively effect the encounter and the player base as a result.
For instance I can no longer carry my friends through the raid on atheon without getting “lucky”. I’ll be honest, I’m far better than the average player. I have played games at top levels, have a strategic mind and have hardcore raided wow so the content bungie has put out seems very easy to me.
My friends on the other hand don’t pc game have never raided in their life and only know how to shoot like cod. Great they can hit critical points but they don’t know whats going on around them, they can’t pin point jump to dodge shots, they can’t predict the flow of combat and they don’t learn things at any reasonable pace. (hell I play with a few people in their 50’s, Im younger than some of their children).
IF I tell them where and how to shoot at xy then z they can do it, but anything else takes forever. So previously I could just do the relic part and we could down him easily enough it wasn’t instant, we still wiped but I could effectively get them through it, now that is not going to happen.
My point is there are always the good and the bad players, even on a world class team some people will be better. There is no upside in locking more players out of raid content, because that is all this does. The vast majority of people wont want to carry their friends when you “that guy” has to grab the relic or kill oracles because its just not fun wiping on a boss because 2 people are so holding you back this gets even more annoying when previously it didn’t matter how bad they were all they really had to do was stay alive.
Anyway I probably haven’t explained it that well.
@ Transient mind I will try to explain to real reason people are angry. Though yes there are alot of people who are mad because “harder”.
The problem with this is first and foremost they are lying. The random teleport was not “Bugged” into selecting the 3 furthest back because that is utter bullshit and would have been noticed on the very first play test, ever. So already we have bungie bitch slapping its player base with more PR bullshit, which surprise surprise pisses people off and puts them on the back leg so to speak.
But the worst part of this is what this says about Bungie, the design choice and what they have said previously. Because unlike what you have stated this change flies directly in the face of what they themselves said they wanted it to be. They stated they wanted you to be a team, a team with strengths and weaknesses taken into account where people have certain roles, im grossing paraphrasing but this is what they said.
The problem here is that there are no pre determined roles everyone is all damage all the time so ALL “roles” must be raid roles only. I.e. You have the “relic guy” and have the Hunter oracle/add killer. you might even have a titan go through to give weapons of light so you can kill those oracles and adds in HM. Those are defined roles for the raid. These roles also have specific weapons, basically an oracle killing weapon (maybe atheons epilouge or corrective measure and possibly a fusion rifle for instant burst).
The problem then becomes what are the outside guys using ? Well they have determined roles too, they are going to want a long range weapon such as a scout or accurate auto rifle to hit supplicants on the other side plus they are going to want rockets + sniper for best boss damage because they can get easily 3-4 crit sniper shots on him before he even starts moving when the portal team is on there way back.
IT doesn’t matter if one job was easy, it doesn’t matter that this made the encounter “too easy” because that was its design. For people to have determined roles.
The problem then becomes what happens when we make it random? Well shit, suddenly EVERYONE has to have an oracle killing weapon, you need to have at least 4 people who can use the relic ( I’ve had 3 designated relic guys all not be teleported) and it does take time to learn how to use it and not die especially when the Minotaur likes to regen its hp and ignore attacks/knock-backs.
So because of this random teleport, now we have people outside who likely have fusion rifles and oracle weapons, what are they going to do now? What if the only oracle weapon they had was corrective measure and now they need a rocket launcher? opps they lose all that ammo and there is a count down timer on synth packs, same goes for sniper and eveyr other weapon.
The point is the raid no longer has defined roles, if everyone must know everything sure it makes it harder in a stupid technical sense but all it really does it make the entire aspect bland boring and stupid and the exact opposite of what Bungie said they wanted it to be.
The other and LAST problem I have is the raid is already hard enough as is not because the way it was designed but because of the literal 20 odd bugs in every encounter. They should not be making content more difficult before they even get their slack asses up to fix blatantly broken pieces of your game.
Things such as:
– Teleporting only 1/2 or 4 people into the relic area.
-Having rockets not go through the relic shield.
– People not being cleansed inside the cleanse area.
– People not going through the portals multiple times.
– Respawning adds, adds that regenerate health.
– Oracles that spawn without making noises, oracles that wipe the raid that don’t exist, oracles that wipe the raid the instant they spawn and oracles that wipe the raid when they died 5 seconds earlier and well before the regular wipe time.
Along with other annoying things such as:
– Getting 1 shot by hobgoblins, or boss/minotuar shots.
– Dying when contained because your off the ground, glitching through the containment barrier.
– Having the enemies the in the relic teleport knowing you are there before you shoot them. ( I have literally been teleported to relic side walked to the steps and died as soon as my head was in firing range to 3 simultaneous line rifle shots, there were no grenades attacks or otherwise and I was the first there).
There is an astounding amount of bugs,9 times out of 10 when my group wipes in hard mode it is a bugs fault.
This is why I have a huge problem with what bungie has done so far not to mention the fact that they should have fixed all boss cheats in the first week instead of failing to fix it 7 weeks later and now i see lvl 27 scrubs who can’t even complete the raid on normal running around with raid helmets and mythlocasters. Which honeslty is disgusting, if it had happened on wow it would have been hot fixed the veyr next day and the people who did it would have there loot taken.
But no bungie let it slide for almost 2 months and still failed to fix it. I’m not annoyed that bad players have loot, it makes me slightly jealous I can admit, when they get something I want. But having terrible players have the best loot in the game undermines and cheapens all the effort legitimate players have gone through and belittles that sense of achievement.
All this is from someone who has completed the Hard raid several times and we even killed atheon post “Random buff” legitimately, I say this because you can still push him off.
*edited for formatting and lastly the change was lazy the laziest thing I have ever seen in an mmo.
Basically it was an excuse to make it harder and they took a a piss ant cheap way out. There were many things they could have done such as make it so the relic shield doesn’t block incoming fire. They could have made it that only 1 portal can be opened at a time instead of both open simultaneously. I spent 30 seconds thinking of these and they have a whole team dedicated to this shit, put simply it WAS lazy there is no excuse.
That quote about randomness is spot on.
Games are a system, and we gamers win by learning, testing and mastering that system.
Randomness in games is a lazy substitute to designing a better, more complex system.
Dark Souls didn’t become popular because of it’s random mechanics – it was awesome because it is not random at all. Dark Souls is a expertly crafted, challenging non-random system.
And that’s why people love it – not just because it is hard but because it is also fair. And it is fair because it always stays true to it’s own system and never throws in randomness to artificially disrupt the players mastery of that system.
Tl:dr Build a better system, don’t just add cheap randomness.
But mostly it’s them backtracking on their own game design and shifting goalposts while calling it a bug, again.
Honestly, it’s really not that hard. Learn how to do both jobs (being teleported or staying behind) and you’re set. It’s really that simple.
Personal I think Bungie shouldn’t have changed it. If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it
It isn’t really that hard agreed, but it doesn’t bode well for the future of content. They should have looked at making meaningful change to the short comings of the fight (namely for people not going through portals) instead of the hack job that was implemented.
100% agreed, the glitchy teleporting should be a priority, my team has failed a few times at the hands of those buggy gates. Teleporting random players versus the furthest 3 are both make for viable strategic boss fights so I don’t think any change was needed.
If I was Bungie my thoughts would be: whoops, it was supposed to be random, but people have been planning and strategizing around the furthest 3, what a fun surprise! Changing it now would be a bit inconsistent.
It’s put players out of their comfort zone which is what people are having gripes with. Myself, I’m not too fussed. Yes it makes people learn more than one role for the final fight, but that’s a good thing imo. Before the patch the raid was becoming predictable and on normal difficulty, nothing more than a long weekly strike to smash out in an hour or so. That’s not what I expected from what’s supposed to be the ultimate challenge in the game. This has changed it up a bit and put in an air of unpredictability. It’s not randomly killing people, it’s forcing people to think quick on their feet.
What does annoy me about the patch though is that a lot of bugs have creeped back into the fight now. We ran it yesterday and the first time he opened the timestream only 2 people got teleported. Another time I got bored and snuck behind him at the beginning and danced between his legs until he squashed me with his foot. He chose that time to teleport people and I got teleported even though I was dead. People were also going through the portal and being sent to the ‘wrong’ side of the portal. One time that happened the whole portal team ran straight into a supplicant and BAM, game over. Not their fault, the game was bugging out.
Fix the bugs and it wouldn’t be so problematic, but like I said, people don’t like being taken out of their comfort zone
The ‘randomness’ certainly keeps you on your toes. It’s almost ‘exciting’, since you don’t know if/when it will be you that gets the call up, so to speak.
Funnily enough, I didn’t play or complete it before the update so the new way is all I know. So, I’m indifferent. The old way seems like a walk in the park. 😉
Surely the “lazy” thing to do would be not fix it at all?
Atheon needed too be fixed, but not the spawning, Bungie themselves described the vault as needing an organised team to defeat it…. Random teleporting kinda takes away the “organised” part of the vault, should of just trialed it with atheon patched so he couldnt be pushed off & see how that goes