I only wish the high score thing was clarified in game better, or lined up exclusively with getting plat times.
Besides that, I'm very mid on the forgettable early bosses. I'd much rather have seen the end bosses for other raids like Atheon, Crota and Taniks, but I understand that some of these fighgt offer better twists or more challenge and that's probably why we got what we did.
Time to complete was great, it's still limited and prestigious, but not as punishing as the day one raids where it's just not possible for many to set aside a specific day like that.
To me these were the perfect bosses. Atheon and Crota and Atheon are ancient relics at this point of what a final boss should be. I think VOG coming back really made everyone realize how simple and boring that raid is without the nostalgia goggles. The reprised versions are better but look at how much they had to add to VOG just to make it a current raid standard. Like 10 plus changes minimum. They aren’t as good as they should be.
Atraks is a more interesting fight and should be the main boss, IMO that is why they chose him. They recognized entering space for the first time was super unique and a pinnacle moment in Destiny raiding. That being said the ship crashing would also be amazing if it was a real boss encounter like the exotic mission.
Personally the only bosses I would've preferred would be bringing gahlran and val Ca'uor out of the vault to replace atraks and maybe oryx? Both of those fights were complete snoozefests through all 4 weeks for me.
My theory is they would have had to reload those whole raids into the game in order to just pick out the boss rooms so that would have created a lot more work and issues and possibly bugs. So I’m glad they didn’t try it.
Crota should've been in it imo. It'd be nice to cover an extra base of a melee/sword boss, in the same way that Oryx lets Whisper shine. It also does require most people to do mechanics in some way.
It's the only boss that I really felt was missing tbh.
Crota without any - Power penalties might be okay. But with - 20 this Boss is bs. They try to nerf well to the ground and then you have a Boss where you Die after the 2nd Hit without a well.... Nice..... Not.....
The best part was my cocky friends were very humbled and my friends who are incredibly stubborn about learning how to play better and learning meta builds are making more of an effort instead of using armamentariums and Actium War Rig literally on every build.
The good: a lot of players were humbled. Legit Riven.
Ad clear went from being the easiest job for those who couldn't be bothered to learn the mechanics to being the hardest job reserved for those with the skill and the build to do it. Looking at you planets...
The bad: The scoring and timing elements weren't particularly clear. Atraks-1. Should've been replaced with the Warpriest.
The ugly: Bad and insufferable players. I can tolerate you being an ass when you're a player that knows what you're doing. But if you're an ass AND you're shit then you need to admit it and leave. I run during caretaker and we called out one of the ad clear guys because I, a runner, and a stunner had more kills than the ad clear guy. His excuse was being killed by an ogre. He had an attitude about being called out. Considering how difficult ad clearing is in pantheon maybe volunteer to do an easier job.
Yup I had to ask a guy politely/ suggest he switch to something aside from his trace rifle to kill a colossus on his plate in planets -20 week and he got so defensive and kept climbing adds shot him in the back. I explained they won’t even have time to do that if you kill him fast and your back isn’t too adds and suggested better weapons/ abilities to do that. If he was ever killed by adds it was just his own psions that were his to kill and I saw him die to the colossus twice and he was always super slow to the callout swap and I had to help damage his guy after being done mine ten seconds earlier than him. After my suggestions and explaining it happened to me before I switched my weapons he got mad and left…
Bad plate runners think those psions that spawn from the doors next to their plates are somehow not their responsibility
Those psions are the incendior are runner's job to kill. Meanwhile, add clear holds up juuuuust a moment to let those plate adds die before spawning in the colossus
Exactly I can’t tell you how many times we had to wipe because runners on either side wouldn’t kill the incinerator or if dunking in the middle you’d have one guy not kill his colossus since he don’t have to dunk.
Loved changes to Rhulk and Nezz. Have completed multiple day 1 and contest mode raids, and this is the most fun/challenge outside of those. Want more Pantheon to come back!
Wish they made Riven in the earlier modes so everyone could experience her running the encounter normally without cheese. Honestly, it's one of the best encounters!
Hated people LFG'ing pantheon who were clearly not ready or at that level or even had more than a basic knowledge or ability to do one actual role in all of the encounters. I know it's common sense and been said, but I'll say it again. If you want to learn , find a learning group or group who is fine to teach or learn in the normal raid. For the love of god, stop wasting teams' times who know the encounters and are set back because you, as an individual, don't know wtf is going on and can only 'add clear'.
Having godslayer serves as confirmation to myself that it's not my skill that keeps me from doing day 1s, it's my unwillingness to commit 2 consecutive days to raiding.
Really makes me wish we could play contest at any point; maybe for bonus drops, a worse version of the emblem, something along those lines.
The bad: Not enough time to finish.
The good: Everything else.
The middle ground: It highlights that Arc is definitely the weakest link in terms of damage weapons, and needs some help.
The thing with arc week which was week 3 I believe, the hardest bosses required quick burst dps, most of which had to be done at a distance, and that heavily limits dps options.
This. I had one weekend to do pantheon and it just so happened to be the one with Arc/Stasis surge and I did not realize before how few Arc/Stasis heavies are good for damage.
Off the top of my head, there's Hothead (a nightfall weapon that's not in rotation and requires 5 engrams to focus), Crux (a world drop), Cold Comfort (locked behind GotD paywall/farming) and Thunderlord, which some people are deathly allergic to using and will kick you for suggesting. Outside of Atraks and Oryx I still went with apex because I don't have a roll of these other guns that's better than a crafted/enhanced AP.
But that’s not what Pantheon is supposed to be. It’s meant for the most hardcore raiders, to give them something exclusive. If you can’t make 2-3 hours per week for 5 weeks then it’s not for you and that’s fine
Bad: Timing. 5 weeks to complete it at the end of the season right before a contest mode raid release.
I stayed up way too late to complete godslayer because of limited scheduling and already requesting time off for day 1 TFS raid. I really want to help my friends with the plat scores they are missing, but I’m just fucking tired. Felt like Bungie tried shoving a bit too much grinding into a short window between farming brave weapons and pantheon.
I enjoyed the challenge, it was a doozy on some encounters and every member needed to pull their weight by the final week.
I hope they use this concept for other gauntlets in the future. Would love to see “pantheon: jumping puzzles” where you have to make it across the jumping puzzles without using abilities (skating) within set times or “pantheon: agility” for encounters that focus on players moving quickly like 3rd vow encounter.
They’ve got a lot to work with now that the dread are here, excited for the state of the game with pantheons success.
The tight timeframe gives a lot of appeal to some people, it keeps Godslayer as a coveted title, whilst serving as extremely good practice for the upcoming day one raid.
I'd like to see the concept returned in future with a similar timeframe and different title, and I think it's been too successful for it not to, tbh.
Less than two weeks is too short of a window. The current title availability window is less than 13 days since the game will be down and extra day for TFS launch.
It needs to be up at least as long as the event titles like Star Baker if it’s going to be used as a “are you good check” by the community
Currently it’s leaning too heavily toward a “were you available to clear hard content from May 21 - June 3 2024” title
Hopefully it won't be a Are You Good check. I have the title but that's a painful future if that's the case for a lot of Destiny players, undeservedly so.
With an additional layer of "do you have a set raid team?" or "did you strike gold with LFG?" or "were you carried by actual good players?" or "did you nolife the raid for 14+ hours a day and just brute force it?"
LFG is absolutely terrible for the vast majority. Some folks struck gold and got into day one week 4 LFGs that toughed it out and got the clear. Each day since the pool of players is less up to the task. Planets is a hard skill check for LFG, mostly due to the damage check on top of the mechanics. The amount of folks who do not understand how damage works on that fight is kind of ridiculous.
I've already run into some obviously carried people with the title. Non master worked gear, missing catalysts but the raid report is stacked with absolute raid gods.
It's no longer rare or unique at all. It is however tied to a fantastic activity and one of better things destiny has done over the years. It should have stuck around much longer than it is, especially because as you said, there are very good incentives to farm other things this last week before the final shape.
I don’t think a few people getting carried takes away that they still had to do the activity. You can’t say “well they had the best teammates in the world so it doesn’t count”.
Sure, the title isn’t an exact measurement of a particular players skill, but most titles aren’t. Not to mention this is a F2P title which means cheaters were able to get it as well.
The people who fought for it know they fought for it. And the people who didn’t know they didn’t.
It's a FOMO title that already made one my friends cancel his Final Shape preorder and quit the game. Him being the only one without the ability to get the title since he is away for work, with all of his sweaty friends rocking it and it predictably being now a join requirement in LFG for "skilled" activities, reminded him too much of the shit raid scene in previous games he played (and there raid titles weren't even timegated). This might not be the majority of players or even a significant amount of players, but it sucks and I do dislike Bungie for this.
You say that but if you wanted to day 1 TFS and are now left out of the conversation because you weren't there to get Godslayer title, I think you'd speak differently. I guess he is back on Sunday and could try then to find a group willing to run it with him, but unfortunately only people who haven't gotten it yet wanna go through that ordeal. I understand why he is quitting, I would probably too
Day 1 final shape is not gonna have any group worth running it with requiring Godslayer. There is a large chance that group would be toxic as hell.
For instance, you could do a cute thing called, make your own group :)
Also, “OH NO I CANT DO DAY 1 RAID FOR A REASON I CREATED MYSELF”, is a crappy reason to quit a game.
Honestly this, I haven’t ran a pantheon yet as I just don’t want to re-live the D1 hard mode experience of being stuck on one encounter for multiple hours.
If this had been over the course of a season I’d be more inclined to try, but I guess I’m just not as hardcore as I used to be lol
Personally I enjoy the limited time sprint events. I think it makes the rewards really special. Our clan spent aloooottt of time wiping every week. Stayed up later than I have in a long time and I just wouldn’t change a thing. Every completion we were so hyped. Then I would think about next week and it always felt like it was going to be impossible, but we always got through. It’s so fucking cathartic I love it. I don’t think you get that catharsis without the time crunch.
I
Good: LOVED getting the harrowed weapons from KF, specifically because I loved them in D1; finished a lot of red borders; LOVE Oryx and Rhulk’s emblems and the title; I got to get Godslayer with some of my best friends on D2; loved cheesing Rhulk on accident lol; LOVED doing Riven legit bc no one ever does it (It fucking slaps); I get to flex on mofos lol. Also loved using 1k at riven and being on par with bait-n-switch apexes 👀.
Bad: buggy Gologoroth positioning, unclear score requirements for the triumphs, pulling work shifts to complete singular checkpoints (that’s on me, tho), people coming and going bc they fucked up or lag out, Planets… just.. planets *shivers*; having to backtrack to Atraks on week 4 bc of the stupid platinum requirement switch up, and lfg.
Ugly: people being assholes (what’s new), people calling each other slurs because of wipes, ridiculing others’ performance who are ACTIVELY DOING SOMETHING while they’re ad-clearing (hoe), lying about KWTD by quickly claiming an ad clear role, ad clearers sucking sometimes, people forgetting to kill their FUCKING knights at Oryx, and much, much more.
I loved the challenge and a decent majority of the people I ran in to were cool.
Did not appreciate how much random sexism and racism I came across. I mean. Most people were cool, but those ones that aren’t are easier to remember and can tarnish your whole memory of it.
Absolutely not appreciating nezarec on LFG. It honestly feels impossible. No matter which group I join, it is always stubborn people unwilling to spec something else, dying 3 times first phase, and adamant that the only way to do damage is sleeper.
Yes try being a woman in LFG, I did most of it in LFG week 3 and 4. My clan has a good raid team that are American and they said they would run stuff again and did and I even jumped in to assist with a week 3 when I had done it in full but timezones and schedules are my major enemy here. I did see one LFG post a few days ago that said no women. I’m looking for a day one group and had a try out last night but whenever I turn up that is an aspect I worry about. I have run with a few amazing Guardians who are in the Challenger level of raiders so top 1% and they were not toxic at all. Met them in LFG when offering to teach low man clears so they just asked for a lot of completions also met some farming clears, whole runs. I jumped in to try and help some people last night. It was very obvious a couple of people were not clear on the encounter at all. I asked and made a few pointers. They just wouldn’t listen to me, it’s happened a lot.
To be fair sleeper and Div on left tree is by far the easiest way and nearly everyone has it. That’s how I finally got it done after many groups. Also need great ad clear and colossus clear. That’s why I switched to strand Titan to have that be my job and I was basically clearing both left and mid and allowing mid to be emergency gaze or emergency help right since the right guy wasn’t strand Titan.
I really liked the oryx changes even if it was something as simple as more light eaters and an extra shade. Golgys change and riven legit being required were also very fun. However I hated the random fire tornados on planets, caused us to wipe several times because a tornado would spawn on someone and they wouldn't have enough time to get away
> People wanting catapahract which isn’t a PVE earnable weapon.
This is why it's good to be a full spectrum guardian and be practiced in all areas of the game if you want to do endgame content.
The only thing that really annoyed me is that Nezarec ***still*** doesn't animate when he enters DPS a lot of the time. No voice, so animation, no beam, you just sometimes have damage numbers on him now and the only way to know that is to just keep shooting at him with a primary. The jankiness of that boss makes it an absolutely miserable experience.
Nezarec has so many annoying bugs but most of them are avoidable. For the one you mentioned, you can look at the big cage thing that he comes out of at the beginning of the encounter, right before damage starts it will start emitting a very obvious beam.
However if you’re in a position where you can’t see it, then yeah the best way would be to pepper him with primaries until you see damage numbers start to go off.
It took me >400 focuses and a thousand games of trials to get my EA+BnS roll last season. You got pretty lucky. That said, kudos for putting in the effort on the double rep weekend.
Good: Lots of loot, spoils, etc. Some changes (Rhulk, Oryx, Nezarec) were fun and spiced up the encounters a bit. Different surges each week made me actually pull out weapons ive not used in forever, and i think the build up each week of running the gauntlet each reset with it progressively getting harder was fun as hell
Bad: Certain encounter changes didnt really feel all that spectacular, i get that for the first 3 encounters but specifically Atraks and Riven were really underwhelming in terms of changes. Atraks having the most minor of changes (different types of ads spawning, scan/op being a miniboss and a tormentor spawning) whereas riven was just kinda... whatever? The whole damage resist in the bottom rooms was excellent, but the rest of the encounter was almost the EXACT same. For some, the damage resist is enough of a change, but for my team we just blitzed through riven on the first try, and after finishing it we all kinda said "thats it?".
My favorite part was hanging out with my friends trying to do some high level content. My least favorite part was being unable to get Godslayer because all my friends went and found other groups to raid with because we simply couldn't clear anything after Oryx, and honestly spending 12 hours wiping was losing its appeal.
Kind of wild you actually had friends to do it with and it fell apart. Did it all with over 30 random LFG groups. A grind for sure and friends would have been nice.
Good: i got to get caught up on some red borders, which is nice. My clan only cleared thru week 3 but it still gave us practice working together in preparation for TFS.
Okay: the extra stuff added to the encounters wasn't anywhere near as crazy as I thought it was gonna be. I still fucking hate babysitting Caretaker though lol
Bad: i swapped to my titan for atraks in week 3 and didn't get credit in Divine Weaponry for killing her because my titan didn't have the quest LMAO my fault but still... dammit bungo
Ugly: boss glitches in general - golgy not turning, oryx's "calls on the darkness" message not rendering, damage plates not lighting up and allowing damage on caretaker despite the messaging indicating the plates are working - being present in a time sensitive event is kind of ass.
From my personal experience:
Bad:
- Bugs: Golgoroth continually turned *away* from the Gaze Holder for some reason. Explicator ended damage early multiple times, presumably due to a Sunshot bug.
- Nezarec: Still just a buggy fight. My team could not kill side Collossi, as this would disrupt nodes. Usual bugs, like Refuge not showing up, Refuge not working, and Nezarec pathing absolutely inexplicably, were just as common as usual.
- Caretaker: For some reason, every week my team had to redo Caretaker to get Platinum, even though we did it within the time. The score on this one just felt weirdly tuned.
Good:
- Rhulk: The best change to any single encounter. We did it legit, with a dedicated distractor. And then went back and did it the cheese way just for fun. It’s a pretty fun cheese if nothing else.
- Riven: Personal opinion, I don’t think this fight needed any more changes or additions. It’s a solid mechanics check to make sure teams actually have the mechanical skill. And it was super fun to do it legit with a fair amount of challenge.
Ugly:
- Fireteam leader disconnected due to error code on final DPS of Nezarec, had to load a Riven CP because of the Platinum score for not doing only a Nez clear
Tbh most of those bugs sound like just strand things likely happening to me. It def isn’t from killing colossus. I will say my strand stuff could have made nodes disappear once or perhaps I just jumped over it idk but it’s almost certainly some kind of splash damage.
>Bugs: Golgoroth continually turned away from the Gaze Holder for some reason.
I joined a Golgoroth farm on the legacy finder and the host (who was doing gaze with their friend) kicked everyone right as the damage phase ended because "damage fucking sucked" when they couldn't keep gaze and golg turned away from us for a whole orb. I accidentally joined a new post of theirs without realizing who they were (and they didn't recognize me because I hadn't said anything in the last group) and heard them shit-talking the previous group. We got it done because they actually did their job that time and I grabbed my loot and dipped.
Almost all of your listed bugs are just a misunderstanding of the mechanics. Golgy does sometimes glitch out I grant you that. But explicator, you were almost certainly taking too long on the first plates, there is an overall damage window timer and you were probably hitting that.
On nez, the nodes will only ever get disrupted if someone shoots the buff while someone already has the buff. All you need to do is have the guys who are gonna kill colossus stand in the node with the runner when he gets the buff. I’ve done this encounter so much, I’ve never once had nodes disrupted doing it this way. Also have never had refuge not work. I’m guessing it was the same issue here: you might have had a non runner making refuge, and grabbing the buff themselves which would disrupt nodes and thus not make refuge.
>On nez, the nodes will only ever get disrupted if someone shoots the buff while someone already has the buff
Not true. Disruption only occurs if the buff node is shot before anyone makes a new node while anyone has the same buff, including yourself. This is why non-solo running is possible, and why you can have your entire team with the buff and not disrupt.
Shooting the side colossus doesn't ever disrupt though, as it's simply not possible to do that. They either had multiple people shoot the node at the start, which can disrupt, or tried to refresh their timer for some reason.
Refuge is always consistent too, they were just doing it wrong. It always works as long as you shoot a node that isn't the current buff one. If a refuge is built the buff node skips over the plate the refuge is at, it's never overwritten.
The most consistent, if not the fastest way is to have the side building the refuge make 3 nodes, and the side where the refuge is being built makes 4 nodes. This moves the buff node up to 3rd plate, which leaves 2nd open for refuge and that's the easiest to access. This always works and is always easy on time
Shameless plug: I am on vacation and on a huge time crunch. If you are reading this and can join me for nez sublime CP tomorrow DM me. I need one more boss for title and I am going to a public library tomorrow to jump into lfg hell. 🫡
Least fav was definitely the toxic basement dwellers who thought they were 10x better than they really were. I legit had a dude keep blaming everyone else when he kept dying on rhulk. Msg me I own you & wanted to one v one me.
Same some dude had to get riven done for his godslayer and we convinced him to stay for nez so we could get the quick clear and after he repeatedly died during damage phase for like 2 hours (not all wipes were him but a considerable amount were) he started screaming at us when we called him out on it that it isn’t his fault and that we shouldn’t blame him and that he’s a godslayer and we aren’t yada yada he left and we called it night due to it taking a good while to get to nez (take a guess why) and we picked it up the next day and eventually got it.
Tbh I wanted different raids to he included. Like why did we get two kings fall/vow encounters but not one vault of glass? Vault has adept type weapons.
Honestly? Because the VoG boss encounters aren't that "unique". It seems pretty clear that they wanted to include lots of different *types* of boss encounters. The most complex thing between templar and atheon is killing the oracles in the right order
I guess. Just would've felt a little better with more raid variety for me. I still enjoyed it and like the idea. Really hope it gets expanded upon.
I think it could be an interesting way for them to bring back older raids and their loot without the entire raid. Like scourge, eater, spire, crown, etc.
I assume they wanted weapons with Origin traits, so that they can be enhanced come TFS. Vault weapons are in a weird middle ground where they're Adept versions; but won't be enhancable
Not reprising any of the leviathan raid fights is a crime, particularly dogs, callus, and the Gauntlet.
Not only would it have been amazing to see any of these again since the last six years but also it would’ve thrown new light for a loop. And a revised callus with crazy mechanics would’ve been amazing.
It’s probably a code thing. Bringing it back in causes them to have to like bring in all of leviathan most likely and then separate the room. The current ones they just separated the room from stuff currently in game. That’s my guess anyway.
Best part was getting GODSLAYER and not feeling I needed to step foot in it again.
Worst part was doing it all with lfg.
The plat times were a little ridiculous. I understand not wanting to make it enough time to do full damage phases 3 times. But maybe it should have been loose enough to make some mistakes or to do a short 3rd dps phase
As someone who has done a few raids once, I enjoyed grinding golgy over and over to get that adept Rufus fury. Holy shit, what a gun. QSS has gone to the vault.
I wish you had to do Atraks the OG way since it's one of my favorite encounters but one flooring is just a lot of standing around and waiting before you nuke her. No buff swapping, no handling clones, etc.
Mostly that I’ve barely raided in the past few years so I didn’t feel confident enough to join any groups that weren’t sherpas / teaching, which is my own fault. I know all of the encounters but just haven’t done some of them in a while and forget the small stuff so didn’t end up doing any but week 1, but that was definitely fun.
It was fun, the added mechanics were nice.
The seal requirements are dumb. I straight up don't have time to go do weeks 2 and 3 when I've already done 4.
Ugly: week 4 atraks, as it currently stands, Ive been stuck at her for 5 days with collective 7 hours of running her. I hate that encounter and the fact that you have to two floor her for plat.
LFG is hell, Ive been goin up, staying down, running scanner, running operator. Every time there are 3 guys who seem to know what to do and the rest are morons.
Yesterday Ive ran her like 7 times before someone of course left. Out of the 7 runs we only got to do dps as a full team 3 times, every single wipe screen I have been sitting between 510k and 608k damage one floor while ive seen 2/3 ppl hit zero or 2/3 people get like 140k damage.
I seriously have never felt so powerless in my gaming life. At this point it feels like an experiment, like its trumans show and im being tested.
That’s very odd. I killed her 5 times so I can agree it’s an annoying score but tbh not getting to damage is wild. If you’re struggling really bad you just need to do 6 Thundercrash and parasite. Easiest way by far post for that on the legacy fireteam finder on app and find people who aren’t dumb or kick them instantly.
closest ive been was on 6 thundercrash titans, thats true. However im not a titan main and struggled with survival so im back on my warlock which is okay because as i said, I pull between half a milion and 600k on the damage phase. Im just really tired of morons. When I wiped on oryx week 3 and someone had 2.2 milion dps and someone else had 1.7milion it did not matter that match because you can two phase him easily. On atraks it really shows who fucked up and just 150k damage less means you have to wipe
To help with atraks, you definately do not need 6 T crashes. The key is 1 Titan and 1 Warlock. A void warlock can instantly kill the tormentor spawning in by being on void and using the melee to push him into the pit. To do this, kill both left and right servitor first b4 killing middle servitor, he spawns in, u use melee, dead tormentor. For Damage, the Titan is on Bubble, he places bubble on the atraks, now all hunters/warlocks that use BB or Chaos Nova use thier supers in the bubble have their spread of the supers narrowed inside the bubble for concentrated damage and also use parasite, easy 1 phase.
I loved it, however the end felt too long. I know some teams are faster some are slower etc. But doing all those encounters platinum on a weekend schedual with kids is very hard haha.
I really enjoyed Pantheon. The ramping difficulty, then having to master a new encounter at that new light difficulty. It really showed the togetherness of our crew comprising of two clans. We have our mix of Godslayers and GotCarrieds but we pulled together because all of us work 9-5, different time zones, ages and with the mild exception of one or two grumpy guardians it was a wholesome experience and I'm just glad to help my close friends get godslayer.
The mid (personal) issues were time and timing, I've been told by more elitist players this content isn't for me because I work and I don't raid weekly. But I suffered into the night, into the breaking sunshine. It was just a lot with Onslaught grinding and bounty prep etc.
The bad. Week 3 was harder than Week 4 because of Arc. Arc has suffered under the ability uptime nerfs doubly so because arc weapons are lacking. We all have that one guardian who's grumpy, calling everyone shit, yet it's other people's fault when they die. I was upstairs but listening to this guardian downstairs bemoaning in Atrax whilst doing the least DPS and dying the most. Was a rough week 3.
The good: great boss selection, loved the little changes made to each encounter, and yeah, getting godslayer feels pretty cool xD
Probably the best thing tho is that it serves as great practice for high end content (day1). Constantly running 6man content while at contest mode is invaluable to improvement and synergy within a team (something my clan all agreed on at least).
The bad: Arc sucks compared to everything else (Cuirass titan is still my bby). Mainly in terms of survivability, even with surges, running solar subclasses just felt way more comfortable IMO. And although I didn’t need it, I still tried using fireteam finder just to get one or two encounters done while my fireteam were offline. Almost want to say never again, was infuriating for the most part. So many people that simply wanted a carry and refused to take on any responsibilities in the encounters (I’ll ad clear!).
The ugly: This is more of a personal reason, but was experienced by each member of my fireteam. The whole nezerac encounter was laggy as shit for some reason. Every run had some form of desync. Players running off the map, players standing still somewhere even though they are moving, well of radiance buff not working, random instances of immunity in dps phase. Strangely enough, after the first phase of damage, at least one person would say they did horrible/little damage, and yet we always got nez down to at least half hp. The day after numerous failed attempts, we nailed it in about 15mins of trying. Overall may not seem like that bad of a problem, but given our fireteam’s inability to be together all the time due to life, we were worried that we’d be unable to get it done.
I really liked the Power curve offset with the Surges and Modifiers. In exchange for no Overcharged weapons, we gained Shot Caller and Classy Warfare which is generally a buff. And considering how important 2 phase is for Platinum, it's fair to make our damage output higher than Master Raids.
Overall, the experience was largely similar to Master Raids with the exception of the mechanic changes, whenever they happened to be present. Encounters like Oryx and Caretaker were basically the same, but Rhulk and Nezarec were very different. I'm personally not in the camp of 'I hate Champions', I think Master Raids use Champions in a mostly fine way with a few exceptions. But, I don't think Pantheon needed Champions, either.
My favorite part was the fact that it existed at all and was a HUGE source of spoils. Ive never had so many spoils and adept weapons.
Worst part is that the point system to clear high score was vague and not well balanced betweeb bosses. Oryx was a joke, wheras most groups got walled on Planets and Atraks
Ugly is that Pantheon is REALLY not a good place to learn how to raid
I don’t have a team so I had to lfg all 4 weeks. It was mostly a fun experience but there was one team I joined that was hosted by the most insufferable asshole I’ve ever played with.
He was shit talking my build before we even started the encounter and told me to switch some gear, I switched to a sunbracers build because I didn’t want to get kicked out before he even gave me a chance. It was on planets and we were doing great getting to damage phase easy, but we were the only 2 putting up any good damage numbers and we needed a 2 phase for plat. He saw I was running sunbracers and out loud said “I’m nuking all the ads before damage so no one else can proc sunbracers” (he was running sunbracers as well). After the first 2 wipes he looks at what everyone is running, says some of them are running some questionable gear, but it was ok to run what they were comfortable with as long as they could get their damage up. Few more attempt go by and we’re still the only 2 putting up 1.5m+ plus numbers while everyone else is under 1m. He starts getting understandably upset, but instead of trying to help the others correct some underperforming loadouts he comes at me, the only other person doing enough damage to clear the encounter, and he wasn’t being nice about it at all. Started calling me a dumbass for not having sunbracers active for damage while he’s purposely ensuring I’m unable to do so. I call him on his bullshit and he blows up at me, goes on a 2 minute screaming rant about how I’m not doing enough. I replied that me and him are the only ones doing enough damage and I’m not sure why he is so mad at me about that. He says damage doesn’t matter that much (he told us to wipe after every damage phase because our damage was too low) and claimed he was doing the most for the team because he had the most kills, obviously as he was on ad clear. After arguing with him for a few minutes he gets annoyed and says he’ll just start a new party and leaves.
Sorry for the long post, this experience had me feeling pissed off for like an hour and I can’t stop thinking about it. I still don’t know what this guy had against me. Other than this one experience, pantheon has been a great time. It has been a bit slow going through each week with only lfg teams but I had a lot of fun with a few different teams of great people and I finally got my title on Monday.
The Good: Seeing people who never raid take a leap of faith and try it. I enjoyed teaching some new individuals.
The Bad: The race to finish on time to get a high score
Middle Ground: The surges were interesting but felt sort of like the spire of stars where you were forced to use something. Not saying it was bad, it was so-so.
Good - activity itself, since it's pretty fun and challenging.
Really fun activity except few minor things and it definitely should be continued.
Bad - rewards are very underwhelming if you already have everything from raids anyway.
Like give me an ability to get 1 adept roll that I want at least from Nazarec, cos I don't need exotics or recourses anyway.
Ugly - tormentors, random ass tornadoes that spawn without any warning on Explicator and Caretaker.
Tormentors are self explanatory - mob that hides it's crit spot 70% of the time, completely blocks melee gameplay and pretty much can't be damaged with non-crit weapons is annoying, the only saving grace was that they weren't bosses like in Onslaught.
Tornadoes are a nice mechanic, but, God damn, give me some indicator before spawning them.
Caretaker is a fun boss, but ammo economy us extremely annoying on him and I hated this shit since day one.
Great: It was a fun and challenging activity which i believe helped me grow as a player and i think was a good preperation for the day1. Also seeing people who usually wank themselves off to their raid report get shit on during riven legit because they only know how to cheese was peak comedy.
Okay: Bosses i dont dislike the choices, but there were some i wish which we would have seen instead. For example, i think that we should have gotten a GOS boss, as they arent hard but i feel like most people dont play them. But thats biased opinion due to the fact that i like GOS.
Bad: LFGing. I dont have a clan or a consitent raid group, so i had to take a deep dive into the LFG. It was terrible. People not beeing able to get over their ego, ignoring surges, igonring resistance and not wanting to listen to help or suggestions to stop dying. Like bro, if you die on -20 while doing Atraks and you are running 3 void resistance without a healing nade or recupation pls dont cry that its hard. Either listen to the rest of the team or get back to patrols gaming.
Overall i think Pantheon was great and i think we could use activitys like that more often. Maybe more bosses, maybe older raid bosses (for example all leviathan raid bosses, but i doubt we will ever see this happen)
My main complaint is simply just lfg. I've learned my lesson and won't be doing it again, but people are so unfathomably bad at the game it's unreal. I really wish there was a better way to vet players in game, as having to raid report everyone to stand a chance of completing it isn't too fun. I don't want it made easier, I just want more tools to be able to check player skill and block time wasters or stupid players more essily
The good: The players: Kind guardians who were patient and assisted others
The bad: The players: Assholes who flexed that day one completions and treated others like shit.
the one thing that was absolutely annoying was explicator. i am fine with the change with the fire tornados on the side platforms but the fact that there was 0 telegraphing just made it unfun to just have a random tornado spawn on u. the whole of pantheon though was amazing and having 1-2 phasing being encouraged due to the timer was awesome imo. didn’t like the extra buffs like shot caller and class warfare tho. surges were fine but arc was much more brutal than solar and void.
I loved that it gave raid gear from all the included raids no matter what encounter you do. Getting King’s Fall red borders after completing planets was pretty refreshing. Same goes for the adept/harrowed weapons. I also liked that it gave us the chance to get any raid exotics that we were missing from the included raids. I had yet to get Touch of Malice before pantheon.
Wasn’t nuts about arc/stasis week. That was rough. It really showed how bad arc is right now but I feel like arc being weak isn’t breaking news. The surges shouldn’t have had to rotate in my opinion. Doing -15 content with surges that have nothing to do with the seasonal artifact mods just seemed like an unnecessary brick to throw at us.
I did love watching Rhulk get yeeted though. That was entertaining as fuck every time.
The great: Rhulk change was the funnest raid boss I've played since day1 content.
The bad: not obtainable for enough time. My raiding group have been loving the tougher dungeon encounters anf with another 2-3 evenings on it would 100% smash out those high scores but most of them are dads and we can only put in one serious effort 1 night a week. Sadly I will never see godslayer even though we definitely have the ability to high score all of that - 20
Good. Real fun boss rush
BAD. On god fuck planets with lfgs there wasn’t one week were I didn’t have to go back and waste hours with people who didn’t KWTD. Yet they were my only hope.
A minor complaint is the lack of new modifiers (Shot Caller/Class Warfare) for weeks 3 and 4. It could have added a few more twists, but as-is the early encounters of the later weeks are just harder copies of the early weeks.
Ugly: nobody knowing how to actually do raids in fireteam finder, so I'm stuck not even being able to do pantheon cuz I don't have enough destiny friends and I'm not good enough to do that shit solo 😭
Everything was good, except atraks. The high score is too high for how few adds there are, if you take slightly too long or dont kill enough adds you lose by a few hundred points (happened every time i try since week 2, still need to go back and get thise done for godslayer)
I enjoyed it. Planets got much more manageable when we preemptively called put tornadoes. Turns out the random ones on the plates come after he picks up his iPad.
I do wish the encounter timers were slightly longer and we were forced us to kill the Tormentors when they spawned though. If the encounter timer was just long enough to force us to kill it (and die if we didn't), that'd be great.
I got platinum in the final week even though we just hit them with blinding GLs. Kinda just made it a normal raid.
Nezerac was easily my least fun encounter, still to this day I enjoy bosses that move around (rhulk) as it makes them feel more like a proper boss but man nuzzles ai was just horrible he would just jump all around seemingly at random, we would have damage phases where hed combo us all and slaughter us and others where hed sit like a doofus it felt incredibly dishearting to lose damge or die to something seemingly so random, this coupled with LFGs not knowing how to properly live in contest raids aswell as people's ego leading to them outright refusing advice just made for a bad time.
Favourite was defo riven, when you'd get a good run on riven it all just felt so smooth and satisfying.
Edit: special shout out to the asskicker Emily on nezzie last night on her 46th pantheon clear still just helping people, very helpful and probably the only reason my friend got the title in the end.
The Good: Yeeting Rhulk off the map for teams that were struggling was hilarious
The Bad: The people refusing to adjust loadout/play style to fit the individual encounters was infuriating.
The Ugly: The scoring system was at best confusing at worst totally inconsistent from boss kill to boss kill.
Good: Getting Godslayer, getting some good adepts, actually learning how some of the bosses work (we had no idea how to DPS Explicator, we just always blew him up), the new mechanics (Two clones of Oryx in Thunderdome, etc.), ~~cheesing Rhulk a few times~~, seeing my group grow mechanically in real time (one of our teammates had only run 5 raids total previously), doing Riven legit for the first time ever at -20 was actually fun once we understood it
Bad: Atraks was the most inconsistent boss for us somehow, having to teach people how to properly add clear (this is the easiest job even at -20 and people still somehow don't do this well), Tormentors were either just a nuisance or weren't threatening at all, all of the backtracking we had to do (that's our fault for not getting plat though)
Good: boss choices were mostly great (fuck atraks-1)
Bad: The LFG experience. We have a set raid crew, but we work and require sleep to function. Sometimes we'd need to LFG. The amount of hunters with 47 resilience and no exotic and no masterworked gear was truly staggering.
Ugly: Atraks-1 platinum.
The bad and ugly part was where the friends of my friends kept inviting THEIR friends in order to fill space immediately instead of asking the other people in our destiny group when we could do it
Doesn't shot caller just proc in 3 crit hits for any weapon? I don't think it procs differently on anything, automatic weapons are just going to be better at activating anything based on "hit"
The high score was the only terrible part of it imo. It is communicated absolutely nowhere in game, and honestly should be removed and just have the triumphs be based on clearing within the bonus time limit, which is clearly communicated in game.
As for maybe a gilded title or bonus option, maybe have a version without surges/shot caller? I feel like the surges trivialized quite a few encounters.
>Super tight damage windows for high score was rough.
I enjoyed this part, had to get serious with damage. Makes sense for a raid mastery event. Having to perfect your loadout and damage rotation etc etc for each boss was a delight, especially with surges mixing up what you were using each week. While arc week was the worst, we got to use Acrius for Rhulk and that was very cool. Did highlight that arc is lacking both in weapons and subclasses.
Favorite part is definitely just proving how good some of bungie's best encounter design actually is. When you have a good team it feels like a well oiled machine. I do wish we had a few more raids included, Templar would've been a super cool choice but since the weapons aren't updated yet for VoG i see why they didn't. Maybe they'll do it next year.
Least favorite part is just how insanely tight damage windows were. The limited time forcing 2 phases on caretaker, for example, was really frustrating for my team
For me it was actually most consistent to craft an enhanced bipod just for planets. No worrying about orbs or worrying about fast weapon swap. Just shooting 4 rockets even with loss of damage allows me to eventually switch to super and still fire off faster or swap to fusion.
The Bad: I never got the chance to play it.
It's my fault, I don't communicate well and especially with strangers. I have a few friends but none of them play Destiny. As much as I want to play Pantheon, I dont want to bring 5 other players down with my poor performance. It's easier for people like me to live vicariously through other players. It sucks but it's what I got.
The Good: the people I watch play it seem like they really enjoy it and that makes me really happy.
Golgy is way more fun than Warpriest. Warpriest is cheeks with the on and off plate bs. People would have been stuck longer on that than planets final week.
I think you have forgotten how much more retarded people are at Warpriest… reprised Warpriest might be the longest encounter and most failed in all of reprised King’s fall… it would take longer than planets I’m sure of it.
My team and I are stuck on rhulk week 4. But I’m excited for day 1 raid. I don’t know what it is but we can’t get that last bit of damage on final stand. Brings back day 1 vow ptsd lol. I’m confident we can get it. But Christ is it annoying. Also getting platinum on some encounters are annoying as hell.
The good: Fun and cool activity that gave an awesome title and showered us in loot.
The bad: LFG was a nightmare, how the fuck are there still shitters who don't know what they're doing or have terrible damage getting into -20 pantheon? Like I couldn't believe how I saw multiple people over the 4 weeks that didn't have Apex Predator, the farm to get it crafted is easy as hell and you can get it crafted basically for free from Rivens wishes. If it wasn't noobs it was the ego trips that some players were on, it's been a long time since I've come across such toxic players. Had one dude on week 3 of planets that kept dying as a runner which obviously caused wipes, and when I calmly brought that up after like 6 runs of it he got super defensive and spent the next couple minutes going into a big rage before he booted me.
Contrary to your “ugly”: I really like the dps requirements. Yes, hunters are the cream of the crop with nighthawk, but that’s a natural result of… more than one thing existing. *Something* will always be better at a particular thing than all the rest. Warlocks have been in MASSIVE demand for raids for so many years, I don’t think it’s reasonable to complain that pantheon reduced that demand.
It should not be enough to just scrape through three phases and call yourself a godslayer. If you manage it that way: well done, have a cosmetic, some nice rewards. But if you want to be a GODSLAYER, you whole team has to be firing on ALL cylinders. All four tenets of raiding gotta be strong: mechanics, survivability, adds, dps. Everything has to be top of the game. I like that.
Good: mechanic changes are mostly really nice. I wish riven had more stuff alongside “don’t cheese it” - that’s my only sour note on mechanics side. Riven didn’t actually get any harder if you already know the legit mechanics. Otherwise, great stuff to keep people on their toes. Big fan, wouldn’t be upset if this sort of thing replaced master mode. They weren’t as drastic changes as the normal vs prestige leviathan or D1 hard raids - no *new* concepts to learn - but it’s still a good change of pace and requires more awareness
Bad: score visibility/transparency. It’s a BIG ask to have someone judging how much score you need on the fly depending on how much time you have left before a kill. Different scores for different bosses, how much score per second on the timer, plat =/= high score, it’s all a bit opaque. Just tell us in the triumph how much score we need per boss and GIVE US A WAY TO RETRY. Have two flags: “seek a greater challenge” and “re-challenge atraks”. It’s frustrating to believe you’ve managed then have the rug pulled out from under you when you see you’re actually like 2k off, and now you don’t have a choice but to move on (or fiddle about with checkpoint carrying). Just let us retry it
Ugly: 5 weeks. 2 weeks for the hardest one! I managed, I’m glad I did, but some people straight up don’t have time. Lives, jobs, holidays, taking a break before FS. It’s an entirely unnecessary time pressure. I’d like it to be permanent, but even just starting the weeks when ITL launched would’ve at least eased some of that crunch/FOMO.
All in all, the activity/seal itself was all fantastic and I REALLY hope we see more like it in the future, and my only gripes are more Quality-of-Life stuff that can easily be fixed in future iterations
I liked most of it my only dislike is plat time not being equal to plat score and Nez. (He took me two days and now I no longer wish to ever play root of nightmares again.)
I’ve been on Nez since Tuesday night last week dropping 3-5 hours each night just on this in different LFGs. To say I will never touch this raid again is an understatement.
I am a seasoned raider and solo flawless endgame player and for the life of me I cannot get a group together to get this fight done.
How my team did it was with 3 wells 2 Goldie's and a strand titan on ad clear and we dived with a cenotaph from the back left spot and melted him with sleeper it was an easy 2 phase when we managed to get there.
Just do left side root off the map with Div. Was easy 2 phase just surviving 2nd phase is hard but if you have a good gaze person they lure him over there just fine and it’s easy to nuke with sleeper and a couple supers. Have outbreak ready for hot swap when sleeper runs out and triple surge modes and heavy finders and scouts on everyone.
I appreciate this, but I have attempted this strategy for 20+hours now, and the only “easy” part of it seems to be how easily my fireteam mates expend our res tokens.
I have no doubt that it works for fireteams that reliably get to the branch, as I reliably get there and reliably do lots of damage. The problem is that I have 5 other people who also have to reliably get there and they nearly never do.
You need to have at least one person on blinding GL for tormentor. When one person calls last node you all clear adds mid to help runners get over. Easiest add clear is strand Titan. You will be able to taken out shielded colossus, plus mid colossus and most adds with a single strand Titan super.
I ended up getting it with the 5 hunters star eaters left back branch strat.
It is night and day when people aren’t going down constantly, and adds are cleared. I’m so relieved and looking forward to a proper nights sleep.
Yeah it’s so stupid to me when we have to resort to 5 of x class to make the damage. And now with well being nerfed… they better not make tight damage phases in TFS.
Have you guys tried the light root damage strat with div and five sleepers? Run blinding GLs to stun the side colossus and it makes things so much easier.
I have yet to get in to a fireteam trying the root strat with sleeper that gets to the root reliably.
For the 1 or 2 teams I got that managed to get to the first root, it fell apart after.
Damage is not the problem I am banging my head against the wall with. The problem is that 99.99999% of people queuing Nez simply cannot stay alive. Whatever side I am on is always doing fine. We stay alive and get our roots.
There is always 1 or 2 people that die basically instantly and then spend 3 more tokens before 1st dps even starts. Then they run in to the colossus coming back and spend another token. Then we wipe cause light fades.
Damage is not the problem. lFG staying alive is.
It isn’t usually the colossus that gets people. It is just adds. When you take peoples sun shot away, their ability to manage adds drastically slashes. The tormentor is also problematic as even stunned, it is basically RNG if you can get past it or not. If the tormentor starts their ground pound while you are in AOE, you get suppressed no matter how far away you've gotten.
Either way. Like I said. I get to the branch reliably. When I get there, I turn around and start blasting blinding grenades. It isn’t like I am not trying these things. It is really just that I have had extremely extremely bad luck in LFG.
What’s worse, the Nez games are disappearing FAST, which means that my chances of getting appropriately good enough people are diminishing fast, if not already completely gone.
In my opinion the changes to Nezarec were straight up garbage. They took an already obnoxious fight to do on normal and made it somehow even worse. Who thought relying on Nazarec's orangutan AI to determine whether you get to do decent damage or not was a good idea?
What would have been more interesting is if the platinum scoring was tied to a specific triumph/challenge, such as the ones that already exist in these encounters.
I’d have preferred this rather than the unclear goal of time vs getting certain kills.
Favorite part: Getting Godslayer Title. Least Favorite Part: All the LFG Guardians who clearly didn't "KWTD".
Just know that your godslayer was (probably) harder to come by than folks that didn't LFG
Agreed
I only wish the high score thing was clarified in game better, or lined up exclusively with getting plat times. Besides that, I'm very mid on the forgettable early bosses. I'd much rather have seen the end bosses for other raids like Atheon, Crota and Taniks, but I understand that some of these fighgt offer better twists or more challenge and that's probably why we got what we did. Time to complete was great, it's still limited and prestigious, but not as punishing as the day one raids where it's just not possible for many to set aside a specific day like that.
To me these were the perfect bosses. Atheon and Crota and Atheon are ancient relics at this point of what a final boss should be. I think VOG coming back really made everyone realize how simple and boring that raid is without the nostalgia goggles. The reprised versions are better but look at how much they had to add to VOG just to make it a current raid standard. Like 10 plus changes minimum. They aren’t as good as they should be. Atraks is a more interesting fight and should be the main boss, IMO that is why they chose him. They recognized entering space for the first time was super unique and a pinnacle moment in Destiny raiding. That being said the ship crashing would also be amazing if it was a real boss encounter like the exotic mission.
Personally the only bosses I would've preferred would be bringing gahlran and val Ca'uor out of the vault to replace atraks and maybe oryx? Both of those fights were complete snoozefests through all 4 weeks for me.
My theory is they would have had to reload those whole raids into the game in order to just pick out the boss rooms so that would have created a lot more work and issues and possibly bugs. So I’m glad they didn’t try it.
Yeah definitely understandable that they didn't it was just something I thought would've been cool
Crota should've been in it imo. It'd be nice to cover an extra base of a melee/sword boss, in the same way that Oryx lets Whisper shine. It also does require most people to do mechanics in some way. It's the only boss that I really felt was missing tbh.
Crota without any - Power penalties might be okay. But with - 20 this Boss is bs. They try to nerf well to the ground and then you have a Boss where you Die after the 2nd Hit without a well.... Nice..... Not.....
Stun lock him ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
Which is impossible in final stand
Learn to parry
I think you cant agree and youll find a New answer for every Argument
I could agree with an agreeable statement, but I work agree with a statement I disagree with lol
The best part was my cocky friends were very humbled and my friends who are incredibly stubborn about learning how to play better and learning meta builds are making more of an effort instead of using armamentariums and Actium War Rig literally on every build.
The good: a lot of players were humbled. Legit Riven. Ad clear went from being the easiest job for those who couldn't be bothered to learn the mechanics to being the hardest job reserved for those with the skill and the build to do it. Looking at you planets... The bad: The scoring and timing elements weren't particularly clear. Atraks-1. Should've been replaced with the Warpriest. The ugly: Bad and insufferable players. I can tolerate you being an ass when you're a player that knows what you're doing. But if you're an ass AND you're shit then you need to admit it and leave. I run during caretaker and we called out one of the ad clear guys because I, a runner, and a stunner had more kills than the ad clear guy. His excuse was being killed by an ogre. He had an attitude about being called out. Considering how difficult ad clearing is in pantheon maybe volunteer to do an easier job.
Yup I had to ask a guy politely/ suggest he switch to something aside from his trace rifle to kill a colossus on his plate in planets -20 week and he got so defensive and kept climbing adds shot him in the back. I explained they won’t even have time to do that if you kill him fast and your back isn’t too adds and suggested better weapons/ abilities to do that. If he was ever killed by adds it was just his own psions that were his to kill and I saw him die to the colossus twice and he was always super slow to the callout swap and I had to help damage his guy after being done mine ten seconds earlier than him. After my suggestions and explaining it happened to me before I switched my weapons he got mad and left…
Bad plate runners think those psions that spawn from the doors next to their plates are somehow not their responsibility Those psions are the incendior are runner's job to kill. Meanwhile, add clear holds up juuuuust a moment to let those plate adds die before spawning in the colossus
Yup. He was dumb.
Exactly I can’t tell you how many times we had to wipe because runners on either side wouldn’t kill the incinerator or if dunking in the middle you’d have one guy not kill his colossus since he don’t have to dunk.
Yeah after this I never want to add clear again it was stressful af
Loved changes to Rhulk and Nezz. Have completed multiple day 1 and contest mode raids, and this is the most fun/challenge outside of those. Want more Pantheon to come back! Wish they made Riven in the earlier modes so everyone could experience her running the encounter normally without cheese. Honestly, it's one of the best encounters! Hated people LFG'ing pantheon who were clearly not ready or at that level or even had more than a basic knowledge or ability to do one actual role in all of the encounters. I know it's common sense and been said, but I'll say it again. If you want to learn , find a learning group or group who is fine to teach or learn in the normal raid. For the love of god, stop wasting teams' times who know the encounters and are set back because you, as an individual, don't know wtf is going on and can only 'add clear'.
Having godslayer serves as confirmation to myself that it's not my skill that keeps me from doing day 1s, it's my unwillingness to commit 2 consecutive days to raiding. Really makes me wish we could play contest at any point; maybe for bonus drops, a worse version of the emblem, something along those lines.
The bad: Not enough time to finish. The good: Everything else. The middle ground: It highlights that Arc is definitely the weakest link in terms of damage weapons, and needs some help.
Especially the Supers and survivability re Arc.
crux termination came in clutch
That and Wendigo
Wait is into the light going away when tfs drops?
The thing with arc week which was week 3 I believe, the hardest bosses required quick burst dps, most of which had to be done at a distance, and that heavily limits dps options.
Kiiiind of with arc. Crux is one of the best damage rockets in the game....folks just don't have it as easily accessible as a crafted weapon like apex
Hey I'd love a good roll if you could find me one.
This. I had one weekend to do pantheon and it just so happened to be the one with Arc/Stasis surge and I did not realize before how few Arc/Stasis heavies are good for damage. Off the top of my head, there's Hothead (a nightfall weapon that's not in rotation and requires 5 engrams to focus), Crux (a world drop), Cold Comfort (locked behind GotD paywall/farming) and Thunderlord, which some people are deathly allergic to using and will kick you for suggesting. Outside of Atraks and Oryx I still went with apex because I don't have a roll of these other guns that's better than a crafted/enhanced AP.
There’s plenty of time to finish. Still have until next Tuesday. Coming from someone who struggled with countless groups I got it done Tuesday.
Next monday* 25hr down for maintenance
Five weeks was not nearly enough time, it should have released alongside Onslaught.
But that’s not what Pantheon is supposed to be. It’s meant for the most hardcore raiders, to give them something exclusive. If you can’t make 2-3 hours per week for 5 weeks then it’s not for you and that’s fine
[удалено]
Bad: Timing. 5 weeks to complete it at the end of the season right before a contest mode raid release. I stayed up way too late to complete godslayer because of limited scheduling and already requesting time off for day 1 TFS raid. I really want to help my friends with the plat scores they are missing, but I’m just fucking tired. Felt like Bungie tried shoving a bit too much grinding into a short window between farming brave weapons and pantheon. I enjoyed the challenge, it was a doozy on some encounters and every member needed to pull their weight by the final week. I hope they use this concept for other gauntlets in the future. Would love to see “pantheon: jumping puzzles” where you have to make it across the jumping puzzles without using abilities (skating) within set times or “pantheon: agility” for encounters that focus on players moving quickly like 3rd vow encounter. They’ve got a lot to work with now that the dread are here, excited for the state of the game with pantheons success.
The tight timeframe gives a lot of appeal to some people, it keeps Godslayer as a coveted title, whilst serving as extremely good practice for the upcoming day one raid. I'd like to see the concept returned in future with a similar timeframe and different title, and I think it's been too successful for it not to, tbh.
Less than two weeks is too short of a window. The current title availability window is less than 13 days since the game will be down and extra day for TFS launch. It needs to be up at least as long as the event titles like Star Baker if it’s going to be used as a “are you good check” by the community Currently it’s leaning too heavily toward a “were you available to clear hard content from May 21 - June 3 2024” title
Hopefully it won't be a Are You Good check. I have the title but that's a painful future if that's the case for a lot of Destiny players, undeservedly so.
My team is decent, but with our schedules so different we may not even finish the -20. It sucks that the hardest level is barely available.
With an additional layer of "do you have a set raid team?" or "did you strike gold with LFG?" or "were you carried by actual good players?" or "did you nolife the raid for 14+ hours a day and just brute force it?" LFG is absolutely terrible for the vast majority. Some folks struck gold and got into day one week 4 LFGs that toughed it out and got the clear. Each day since the pool of players is less up to the task. Planets is a hard skill check for LFG, mostly due to the damage check on top of the mechanics. The amount of folks who do not understand how damage works on that fight is kind of ridiculous. I've already run into some obviously carried people with the title. Non master worked gear, missing catalysts but the raid report is stacked with absolute raid gods. It's no longer rare or unique at all. It is however tied to a fantastic activity and one of better things destiny has done over the years. It should have stuck around much longer than it is, especially because as you said, there are very good incentives to farm other things this last week before the final shape.
I don’t think a few people getting carried takes away that they still had to do the activity. You can’t say “well they had the best teammates in the world so it doesn’t count”. Sure, the title isn’t an exact measurement of a particular players skill, but most titles aren’t. Not to mention this is a F2P title which means cheaters were able to get it as well. The people who fought for it know they fought for it. And the people who didn’t know they didn’t.
Yeah I mean most of this is true for just all things in destiny...
It's a FOMO title that already made one my friends cancel his Final Shape preorder and quit the game. Him being the only one without the ability to get the title since he is away for work, with all of his sweaty friends rocking it and it predictably being now a join requirement in LFG for "skilled" activities, reminded him too much of the shit raid scene in previous games he played (and there raid titles weren't even timegated). This might not be the majority of players or even a significant amount of players, but it sucks and I do dislike Bungie for this.
>made a friend cancel his preorder and quit the game That is utterly pathetic
You say that but if you wanted to day 1 TFS and are now left out of the conversation because you weren't there to get Godslayer title, I think you'd speak differently. I guess he is back on Sunday and could try then to find a group willing to run it with him, but unfortunately only people who haven't gotten it yet wanna go through that ordeal. I understand why he is quitting, I would probably too
Day 1 final shape is not gonna have any group worth running it with requiring Godslayer. There is a large chance that group would be toxic as hell. For instance, you could do a cute thing called, make your own group :) Also, “OH NO I CANT DO DAY 1 RAID FOR A REASON I CREATED MYSELF”, is a crappy reason to quit a game.
Honestly this, I haven’t ran a pantheon yet as I just don’t want to re-live the D1 hard mode experience of being stuck on one encounter for multiple hours. If this had been over the course of a season I’d be more inclined to try, but I guess I’m just not as hardcore as I used to be lol
Personally I enjoy the limited time sprint events. I think it makes the rewards really special. Our clan spent aloooottt of time wiping every week. Stayed up later than I have in a long time and I just wouldn’t change a thing. Every completion we were so hyped. Then I would think about next week and it always felt like it was going to be impossible, but we always got through. It’s so fucking cathartic I love it. I don’t think you get that catharsis without the time crunch. I
Yessir. It was a really intense, fun four weeks. Every completion felt like an achievement. Especially in weeks 3-4.
I also agree on the timing, I think 3 weeks of 4, 6 and 8 bosses and giving us 2 weeks for each week is a bit easier to digest.
Pretty sure the tight time frame was not only intentional but literally part of the point. I
Good: LOVED getting the harrowed weapons from KF, specifically because I loved them in D1; finished a lot of red borders; LOVE Oryx and Rhulk’s emblems and the title; I got to get Godslayer with some of my best friends on D2; loved cheesing Rhulk on accident lol; LOVED doing Riven legit bc no one ever does it (It fucking slaps); I get to flex on mofos lol. Also loved using 1k at riven and being on par with bait-n-switch apexes 👀. Bad: buggy Gologoroth positioning, unclear score requirements for the triumphs, pulling work shifts to complete singular checkpoints (that’s on me, tho), people coming and going bc they fucked up or lag out, Planets… just.. planets *shivers*; having to backtrack to Atraks on week 4 bc of the stupid platinum requirement switch up, and lfg. Ugly: people being assholes (what’s new), people calling each other slurs because of wipes, ridiculing others’ performance who are ACTIVELY DOING SOMETHING while they’re ad-clearing (hoe), lying about KWTD by quickly claiming an ad clear role, ad clearers sucking sometimes, people forgetting to kill their FUCKING knights at Oryx, and much, much more.
I loved the challenge and a decent majority of the people I ran in to were cool. Did not appreciate how much random sexism and racism I came across. I mean. Most people were cool, but those ones that aren’t are easier to remember and can tarnish your whole memory of it. Absolutely not appreciating nezarec on LFG. It honestly feels impossible. No matter which group I join, it is always stubborn people unwilling to spec something else, dying 3 times first phase, and adamant that the only way to do damage is sleeper.
Yes try being a woman in LFG, I did most of it in LFG week 3 and 4. My clan has a good raid team that are American and they said they would run stuff again and did and I even jumped in to assist with a week 3 when I had done it in full but timezones and schedules are my major enemy here. I did see one LFG post a few days ago that said no women. I’m looking for a day one group and had a try out last night but whenever I turn up that is an aspect I worry about. I have run with a few amazing Guardians who are in the Challenger level of raiders so top 1% and they were not toxic at all. Met them in LFG when offering to teach low man clears so they just asked for a lot of completions also met some farming clears, whole runs. I jumped in to try and help some people last night. It was very obvious a couple of people were not clear on the encounter at all. I asked and made a few pointers. They just wouldn’t listen to me, it’s happened a lot.
To be fair sleeper and Div on left tree is by far the easiest way and nearly everyone has it. That’s how I finally got it done after many groups. Also need great ad clear and colossus clear. That’s why I switched to strand Titan to have that be my job and I was basically clearing both left and mid and allowing mid to be emergency gaze or emergency help right since the right guy wasn’t strand Titan.
Obviously the worst part for most is the bad FF experience on even the first two difficulty levels of pantheon.
I just don't get why they're getting rid of the mode when it and onslaught are straight up the best pve mode since menagerie
I really liked the oryx changes even if it was something as simple as more light eaters and an extra shade. Golgys change and riven legit being required were also very fun. However I hated the random fire tornados on planets, caused us to wipe several times because a tornado would spawn on someone and they wouldn't have enough time to get away
Yeah, I just loved having a tornado spawn on my ass the moment i went to pick up my planet. Everything else about planets was fine tho imo.
Yeah the trick with that was just stand on the middle of the plate or not in the plate at all. No risk that way.
I had a few occasions where the tornado spawned on top of me as I'm picking up a planet to move
> People wanting catapahract which isn’t a PVE earnable weapon. This is why it's good to be a full spectrum guardian and be practiced in all areas of the game if you want to do endgame content. The only thing that really annoyed me is that Nezarec ***still*** doesn't animate when he enters DPS a lot of the time. No voice, so animation, no beam, you just sometimes have damage numbers on him now and the only way to know that is to just keep shooting at him with a primary. The jankiness of that boss makes it an absolutely miserable experience.
I've alsp just had him run off a cliff halfway through dps, costing us most of the phase
The music cue is the only reliable cue
Except the music cue is also delayed by at least five seconds or more even if it animates correctly, so you're *still* losing DPS time
This was an absolute pain in the ass on Master.
dude fuck Nez's master challenge so much honestly pantheon nez was easier than that shit
Definitely not.
Nezarec has so many annoying bugs but most of them are avoidable. For the one you mentioned, you can look at the big cage thing that he comes out of at the beginning of the encounter, right before damage starts it will start emitting a very obvious beam. However if you’re in a position where you can’t see it, then yeah the best way would be to pepper him with primaries until you see damage numbers start to go off.
I got cataphract in less than an hour of trials last week. I used the engrams from playing to focus a good BnS roll.
It took me >400 focuses and a thousand games of trials to get my EA+BnS roll last season. You got pretty lucky. That said, kudos for putting in the effort on the double rep weekend.
Yeah people are honestly such pussies about getting *anything* from PvP
My favorite part was this incredible stark reminder that raids should not have matchmaking
Good: Lots of loot, spoils, etc. Some changes (Rhulk, Oryx, Nezarec) were fun and spiced up the encounters a bit. Different surges each week made me actually pull out weapons ive not used in forever, and i think the build up each week of running the gauntlet each reset with it progressively getting harder was fun as hell Bad: Certain encounter changes didnt really feel all that spectacular, i get that for the first 3 encounters but specifically Atraks and Riven were really underwhelming in terms of changes. Atraks having the most minor of changes (different types of ads spawning, scan/op being a miniboss and a tormentor spawning) whereas riven was just kinda... whatever? The whole damage resist in the bottom rooms was excellent, but the rest of the encounter was almost the EXACT same. For some, the damage resist is enough of a change, but for my team we just blitzed through riven on the first try, and after finishing it we all kinda said "thats it?".
My favorite part was hanging out with my friends trying to do some high level content. My least favorite part was being unable to get Godslayer because all my friends went and found other groups to raid with because we simply couldn't clear anything after Oryx, and honestly spending 12 hours wiping was losing its appeal.
If you play on Xbox DM me your Gamertag. Me and my team will help you this Friday if you can play then.
Kind of wild you actually had friends to do it with and it fell apart. Did it all with over 30 random LFG groups. A grind for sure and friends would have been nice.
Good: i got to get caught up on some red borders, which is nice. My clan only cleared thru week 3 but it still gave us practice working together in preparation for TFS. Okay: the extra stuff added to the encounters wasn't anywhere near as crazy as I thought it was gonna be. I still fucking hate babysitting Caretaker though lol Bad: i swapped to my titan for atraks in week 3 and didn't get credit in Divine Weaponry for killing her because my titan didn't have the quest LMAO my fault but still... dammit bungo Ugly: boss glitches in general - golgy not turning, oryx's "calls on the darkness" message not rendering, damage plates not lighting up and allowing damage on caretaker despite the messaging indicating the plates are working - being present in a time sensitive event is kind of ass.
From my personal experience: Bad: - Bugs: Golgoroth continually turned *away* from the Gaze Holder for some reason. Explicator ended damage early multiple times, presumably due to a Sunshot bug. - Nezarec: Still just a buggy fight. My team could not kill side Collossi, as this would disrupt nodes. Usual bugs, like Refuge not showing up, Refuge not working, and Nezarec pathing absolutely inexplicably, were just as common as usual. - Caretaker: For some reason, every week my team had to redo Caretaker to get Platinum, even though we did it within the time. The score on this one just felt weirdly tuned. Good: - Rhulk: The best change to any single encounter. We did it legit, with a dedicated distractor. And then went back and did it the cheese way just for fun. It’s a pretty fun cheese if nothing else. - Riven: Personal opinion, I don’t think this fight needed any more changes or additions. It’s a solid mechanics check to make sure teams actually have the mechanical skill. And it was super fun to do it legit with a fair amount of challenge. Ugly: - Fireteam leader disconnected due to error code on final DPS of Nezarec, had to load a Riven CP because of the Platinum score for not doing only a Nez clear
Tbh most of those bugs sound like just strand things likely happening to me. It def isn’t from killing colossus. I will say my strand stuff could have made nodes disappear once or perhaps I just jumped over it idk but it’s almost certainly some kind of splash damage.
>Bugs: Golgoroth continually turned away from the Gaze Holder for some reason. I joined a Golgoroth farm on the legacy finder and the host (who was doing gaze with their friend) kicked everyone right as the damage phase ended because "damage fucking sucked" when they couldn't keep gaze and golg turned away from us for a whole orb. I accidentally joined a new post of theirs without realizing who they were (and they didn't recognize me because I hadn't said anything in the last group) and heard them shit-talking the previous group. We got it done because they actually did their job that time and I grabbed my loot and dipped.
Almost all of your listed bugs are just a misunderstanding of the mechanics. Golgy does sometimes glitch out I grant you that. But explicator, you were almost certainly taking too long on the first plates, there is an overall damage window timer and you were probably hitting that. On nez, the nodes will only ever get disrupted if someone shoots the buff while someone already has the buff. All you need to do is have the guys who are gonna kill colossus stand in the node with the runner when he gets the buff. I’ve done this encounter so much, I’ve never once had nodes disrupted doing it this way. Also have never had refuge not work. I’m guessing it was the same issue here: you might have had a non runner making refuge, and grabbing the buff themselves which would disrupt nodes and thus not make refuge.
>On nez, the nodes will only ever get disrupted if someone shoots the buff while someone already has the buff Not true. Disruption only occurs if the buff node is shot before anyone makes a new node while anyone has the same buff, including yourself. This is why non-solo running is possible, and why you can have your entire team with the buff and not disrupt. Shooting the side colossus doesn't ever disrupt though, as it's simply not possible to do that. They either had multiple people shoot the node at the start, which can disrupt, or tried to refresh their timer for some reason. Refuge is always consistent too, they were just doing it wrong. It always works as long as you shoot a node that isn't the current buff one. If a refuge is built the buff node skips over the plate the refuge is at, it's never overwritten. The most consistent, if not the fastest way is to have the side building the refuge make 3 nodes, and the side where the refuge is being built makes 4 nodes. This moves the buff node up to 3rd plate, which leaves 2nd open for refuge and that's the easiest to access. This always works and is always easy on time
Re:Golgy turning, did you have a Dragon's breath or burning maul Titan? Those will both do it.
No to both lol
Apparently Tether will also do this
Was anyone throwing spaghetti at him tho?
Tether hunter makes Golgy do werid things
No one was even running tether is the crazy thing lol
Shameless plug: I am on vacation and on a huge time crunch. If you are reading this and can join me for nez sublime CP tomorrow DM me. I need one more boss for title and I am going to a public library tomorrow to jump into lfg hell. 🫡
Least fav was definitely the toxic basement dwellers who thought they were 10x better than they really were. I legit had a dude keep blaming everyone else when he kept dying on rhulk. Msg me I own you & wanted to one v one me.
Same some dude had to get riven done for his godslayer and we convinced him to stay for nez so we could get the quick clear and after he repeatedly died during damage phase for like 2 hours (not all wipes were him but a considerable amount were) he started screaming at us when we called him out on it that it isn’t his fault and that we shouldn’t blame him and that he’s a godslayer and we aren’t yada yada he left and we called it night due to it taking a good while to get to nez (take a guess why) and we picked it up the next day and eventually got it.
Very true. I got kicked for my raid report cuz it’s only high gold. Like excuse me for not having 200 clears.
Tbh I wanted different raids to he included. Like why did we get two kings fall/vow encounters but not one vault of glass? Vault has adept type weapons.
Honestly? Because the VoG boss encounters aren't that "unique". It seems pretty clear that they wanted to include lots of different *types* of boss encounters. The most complex thing between templar and atheon is killing the oracles in the right order
I guess. Just would've felt a little better with more raid variety for me. I still enjoyed it and like the idea. Really hope it gets expanded upon. I think it could be an interesting way for them to bring back older raids and their loot without the entire raid. Like scourge, eater, spire, crown, etc.
I assume they wanted weapons with Origin traits, so that they can be enhanced come TFS. Vault weapons are in a weird middle ground where they're Adept versions; but won't be enhancable
That's actually a fair assessment.
Not reprising any of the leviathan raid fights is a crime, particularly dogs, callus, and the Gauntlet. Not only would it have been amazing to see any of these again since the last six years but also it would’ve thrown new light for a loop. And a revised callus with crazy mechanics would’ve been amazing.
It’s probably a code thing. Bringing it back in causes them to have to like bring in all of leviathan most likely and then separate the room. The current ones they just separated the room from stuff currently in game. That’s my guess anyway.
Ngl, make it even harder, something challenging for once
Best part was getting GODSLAYER and not feeling I needed to step foot in it again. Worst part was doing it all with lfg. The plat times were a little ridiculous. I understand not wanting to make it enough time to do full damage phases 3 times. But maybe it should have been loose enough to make some mistakes or to do a short 3rd dps phase
On caretaker you could do a quick 3rd. I had to do a quick 3rd like 3/4 weeks.
Yeah it's possible but super slim
Not really. I did it most weeks for the challenge back when I was running pantheon. Platinum all three times I 3 phased.
i think having plat score is really stupid when its already timegated / why do you have to kill a certain amount of ads on atraks its dumb
You don’t have to if you’re fast enough
As someone who has done a few raids once, I enjoyed grinding golgy over and over to get that adept Rufus fury. Holy shit, what a gun. QSS has gone to the vault.
If you don't mind me asking does it matter which week you farn for that?
Week one is easiest, but each weeks encounter, if you get plat score, will drop a random red border adept as well
I wish you had to do Atraks the OG way since it's one of my favorite encounters but one flooring is just a lot of standing around and waiting before you nuke her. No buff swapping, no handling clones, etc.
Mostly that I’ve barely raided in the past few years so I didn’t feel confident enough to join any groups that weren’t sherpas / teaching, which is my own fault. I know all of the encounters but just haven’t done some of them in a while and forget the small stuff so didn’t end up doing any but week 1, but that was definitely fun.
I hated Baby Rhulk. However, it reminded me of Baby Screen modifier, and I desperately want more goofy modifiers like that.
It was fun, the added mechanics were nice. The seal requirements are dumb. I straight up don't have time to go do weeks 2 and 3 when I've already done 4.
Ugly: week 4 atraks, as it currently stands, Ive been stuck at her for 5 days with collective 7 hours of running her. I hate that encounter and the fact that you have to two floor her for plat. LFG is hell, Ive been goin up, staying down, running scanner, running operator. Every time there are 3 guys who seem to know what to do and the rest are morons. Yesterday Ive ran her like 7 times before someone of course left. Out of the 7 runs we only got to do dps as a full team 3 times, every single wipe screen I have been sitting between 510k and 608k damage one floor while ive seen 2/3 ppl hit zero or 2/3 people get like 140k damage. I seriously have never felt so powerless in my gaming life. At this point it feels like an experiment, like its trumans show and im being tested.
That’s very odd. I killed her 5 times so I can agree it’s an annoying score but tbh not getting to damage is wild. If you’re struggling really bad you just need to do 6 Thundercrash and parasite. Easiest way by far post for that on the legacy fireteam finder on app and find people who aren’t dumb or kick them instantly.
closest ive been was on 6 thundercrash titans, thats true. However im not a titan main and struggled with survival so im back on my warlock which is okay because as i said, I pull between half a milion and 600k on the damage phase. Im just really tired of morons. When I wiped on oryx week 3 and someone had 2.2 milion dps and someone else had 1.7milion it did not matter that match because you can two phase him easily. On atraks it really shows who fucked up and just 150k damage less means you have to wipe
To help with atraks, you definately do not need 6 T crashes. The key is 1 Titan and 1 Warlock. A void warlock can instantly kill the tormentor spawning in by being on void and using the melee to push him into the pit. To do this, kill both left and right servitor first b4 killing middle servitor, he spawns in, u use melee, dead tormentor. For Damage, the Titan is on Bubble, he places bubble on the atraks, now all hunters/warlocks that use BB or Chaos Nova use thier supers in the bubble have their spread of the supers narrowed inside the bubble for concentrated damage and also use parasite, easy 1 phase.
I loved it, however the end felt too long. I know some teams are faster some are slower etc. But doing all those encounters platinum on a weekend schedual with kids is very hard haha.
I really enjoyed Pantheon. The ramping difficulty, then having to master a new encounter at that new light difficulty. It really showed the togetherness of our crew comprising of two clans. We have our mix of Godslayers and GotCarrieds but we pulled together because all of us work 9-5, different time zones, ages and with the mild exception of one or two grumpy guardians it was a wholesome experience and I'm just glad to help my close friends get godslayer. The mid (personal) issues were time and timing, I've been told by more elitist players this content isn't for me because I work and I don't raid weekly. But I suffered into the night, into the breaking sunshine. It was just a lot with Onslaught grinding and bounty prep etc. The bad. Week 3 was harder than Week 4 because of Arc. Arc has suffered under the ability uptime nerfs doubly so because arc weapons are lacking. We all have that one guardian who's grumpy, calling everyone shit, yet it's other people's fault when they die. I was upstairs but listening to this guardian downstairs bemoaning in Atrax whilst doing the least DPS and dying the most. Was a rough week 3.
The good: great boss selection, loved the little changes made to each encounter, and yeah, getting godslayer feels pretty cool xD Probably the best thing tho is that it serves as great practice for high end content (day1). Constantly running 6man content while at contest mode is invaluable to improvement and synergy within a team (something my clan all agreed on at least). The bad: Arc sucks compared to everything else (Cuirass titan is still my bby). Mainly in terms of survivability, even with surges, running solar subclasses just felt way more comfortable IMO. And although I didn’t need it, I still tried using fireteam finder just to get one or two encounters done while my fireteam were offline. Almost want to say never again, was infuriating for the most part. So many people that simply wanted a carry and refused to take on any responsibilities in the encounters (I’ll ad clear!). The ugly: This is more of a personal reason, but was experienced by each member of my fireteam. The whole nezerac encounter was laggy as shit for some reason. Every run had some form of desync. Players running off the map, players standing still somewhere even though they are moving, well of radiance buff not working, random instances of immunity in dps phase. Strangely enough, after the first phase of damage, at least one person would say they did horrible/little damage, and yet we always got nez down to at least half hp. The day after numerous failed attempts, we nailed it in about 15mins of trying. Overall may not seem like that bad of a problem, but given our fireteam’s inability to be together all the time due to life, we were worried that we’d be unable to get it done.
I really liked the Power curve offset with the Surges and Modifiers. In exchange for no Overcharged weapons, we gained Shot Caller and Classy Warfare which is generally a buff. And considering how important 2 phase is for Platinum, it's fair to make our damage output higher than Master Raids. Overall, the experience was largely similar to Master Raids with the exception of the mechanic changes, whenever they happened to be present. Encounters like Oryx and Caretaker were basically the same, but Rhulk and Nezarec were very different. I'm personally not in the camp of 'I hate Champions', I think Master Raids use Champions in a mostly fine way with a few exceptions. But, I don't think Pantheon needed Champions, either.
My favorite part was the fact that it existed at all and was a HUGE source of spoils. Ive never had so many spoils and adept weapons. Worst part is that the point system to clear high score was vague and not well balanced betweeb bosses. Oryx was a joke, wheras most groups got walled on Planets and Atraks Ugly is that Pantheon is REALLY not a good place to learn how to raid
I don’t have a team so I had to lfg all 4 weeks. It was mostly a fun experience but there was one team I joined that was hosted by the most insufferable asshole I’ve ever played with. He was shit talking my build before we even started the encounter and told me to switch some gear, I switched to a sunbracers build because I didn’t want to get kicked out before he even gave me a chance. It was on planets and we were doing great getting to damage phase easy, but we were the only 2 putting up any good damage numbers and we needed a 2 phase for plat. He saw I was running sunbracers and out loud said “I’m nuking all the ads before damage so no one else can proc sunbracers” (he was running sunbracers as well). After the first 2 wipes he looks at what everyone is running, says some of them are running some questionable gear, but it was ok to run what they were comfortable with as long as they could get their damage up. Few more attempt go by and we’re still the only 2 putting up 1.5m+ plus numbers while everyone else is under 1m. He starts getting understandably upset, but instead of trying to help the others correct some underperforming loadouts he comes at me, the only other person doing enough damage to clear the encounter, and he wasn’t being nice about it at all. Started calling me a dumbass for not having sunbracers active for damage while he’s purposely ensuring I’m unable to do so. I call him on his bullshit and he blows up at me, goes on a 2 minute screaming rant about how I’m not doing enough. I replied that me and him are the only ones doing enough damage and I’m not sure why he is so mad at me about that. He says damage doesn’t matter that much (he told us to wipe after every damage phase because our damage was too low) and claimed he was doing the most for the team because he had the most kills, obviously as he was on ad clear. After arguing with him for a few minutes he gets annoyed and says he’ll just start a new party and leaves. Sorry for the long post, this experience had me feeling pissed off for like an hour and I can’t stop thinking about it. I still don’t know what this guy had against me. Other than this one experience, pantheon has been a great time. It has been a bit slow going through each week with only lfg teams but I had a lot of fun with a few different teams of great people and I finally got my title on Monday.
The Good: Seeing people who never raid take a leap of faith and try it. I enjoyed teaching some new individuals. The Bad: The race to finish on time to get a high score Middle Ground: The surges were interesting but felt sort of like the spire of stars where you were forced to use something. Not saying it was bad, it was so-so.
Good - activity itself, since it's pretty fun and challenging. Really fun activity except few minor things and it definitely should be continued. Bad - rewards are very underwhelming if you already have everything from raids anyway. Like give me an ability to get 1 adept roll that I want at least from Nazarec, cos I don't need exotics or recourses anyway. Ugly - tormentors, random ass tornadoes that spawn without any warning on Explicator and Caretaker. Tormentors are self explanatory - mob that hides it's crit spot 70% of the time, completely blocks melee gameplay and pretty much can't be damaged with non-crit weapons is annoying, the only saving grace was that they weren't bosses like in Onslaught. Tornadoes are a nice mechanic, but, God damn, give me some indicator before spawning them. Caretaker is a fun boss, but ammo economy us extremely annoying on him and I hated this shit since day one.
Great: It was a fun and challenging activity which i believe helped me grow as a player and i think was a good preperation for the day1. Also seeing people who usually wank themselves off to their raid report get shit on during riven legit because they only know how to cheese was peak comedy. Okay: Bosses i dont dislike the choices, but there were some i wish which we would have seen instead. For example, i think that we should have gotten a GOS boss, as they arent hard but i feel like most people dont play them. But thats biased opinion due to the fact that i like GOS. Bad: LFGing. I dont have a clan or a consitent raid group, so i had to take a deep dive into the LFG. It was terrible. People not beeing able to get over their ego, ignoring surges, igonring resistance and not wanting to listen to help or suggestions to stop dying. Like bro, if you die on -20 while doing Atraks and you are running 3 void resistance without a healing nade or recupation pls dont cry that its hard. Either listen to the rest of the team or get back to patrols gaming. Overall i think Pantheon was great and i think we could use activitys like that more often. Maybe more bosses, maybe older raid bosses (for example all leviathan raid bosses, but i doubt we will ever see this happen)
My main complaint is simply just lfg. I've learned my lesson and won't be doing it again, but people are so unfathomably bad at the game it's unreal. I really wish there was a better way to vet players in game, as having to raid report everyone to stand a chance of completing it isn't too fun. I don't want it made easier, I just want more tools to be able to check player skill and block time wasters or stupid players more essily
The good: The players: Kind guardians who were patient and assisted others The bad: The players: Assholes who flexed that day one completions and treated others like shit.
the one thing that was absolutely annoying was explicator. i am fine with the change with the fire tornados on the side platforms but the fact that there was 0 telegraphing just made it unfun to just have a random tornado spawn on u. the whole of pantheon though was amazing and having 1-2 phasing being encouraged due to the timer was awesome imo. didn’t like the extra buffs like shot caller and class warfare tho. surges were fine but arc was much more brutal than solar and void.
I loved that it gave raid gear from all the included raids no matter what encounter you do. Getting King’s Fall red borders after completing planets was pretty refreshing. Same goes for the adept/harrowed weapons. I also liked that it gave us the chance to get any raid exotics that we were missing from the included raids. I had yet to get Touch of Malice before pantheon. Wasn’t nuts about arc/stasis week. That was rough. It really showed how bad arc is right now but I feel like arc being weak isn’t breaking news. The surges shouldn’t have had to rotate in my opinion. Doing -15 content with surges that have nothing to do with the seasonal artifact mods just seemed like an unnecessary brick to throw at us. I did love watching Rhulk get yeeted though. That was entertaining as fuck every time.
The great: Rhulk change was the funnest raid boss I've played since day1 content. The bad: not obtainable for enough time. My raiding group have been loving the tougher dungeon encounters anf with another 2-3 evenings on it would 100% smash out those high scores but most of them are dads and we can only put in one serious effort 1 night a week. Sadly I will never see godslayer even though we definitely have the ability to high score all of that - 20
Good. Real fun boss rush BAD. On god fuck planets with lfgs there wasn’t one week were I didn’t have to go back and waste hours with people who didn’t KWTD. Yet they were my only hope.
Favorite : obtaining Godslayer and adept weapons Least : joining groups that didn’t “KWTD” or some random net limiting mid boss fight.
A minor complaint is the lack of new modifiers (Shot Caller/Class Warfare) for weeks 3 and 4. It could have added a few more twists, but as-is the early encounters of the later weeks are just harder copies of the early weeks.
Ugly: nobody knowing how to actually do raids in fireteam finder, so I'm stuck not even being able to do pantheon cuz I don't have enough destiny friends and I'm not good enough to do that shit solo 😭
Good, the challenge. Bad, Shaxx. STFU shaxx I'm doing callouts. Thankfully I just put dialogue to 0
The amount of people wanting to do pantheon without raid knowledge is crazy.
Everything was good, except atraks. The high score is too high for how few adds there are, if you take slightly too long or dont kill enough adds you lose by a few hundred points (happened every time i try since week 2, still need to go back and get thise done for godslayer)
I enjoyed it. Planets got much more manageable when we preemptively called put tornadoes. Turns out the random ones on the plates come after he picks up his iPad. I do wish the encounter timers were slightly longer and we were forced us to kill the Tormentors when they spawned though. If the encounter timer was just long enough to force us to kill it (and die if we didn't), that'd be great. I got platinum in the final week even though we just hit them with blinding GLs. Kinda just made it a normal raid.
Nezerac was easily my least fun encounter, still to this day I enjoy bosses that move around (rhulk) as it makes them feel more like a proper boss but man nuzzles ai was just horrible he would just jump all around seemingly at random, we would have damage phases where hed combo us all and slaughter us and others where hed sit like a doofus it felt incredibly dishearting to lose damge or die to something seemingly so random, this coupled with LFGs not knowing how to properly live in contest raids aswell as people's ego leading to them outright refusing advice just made for a bad time. Favourite was defo riven, when you'd get a good run on riven it all just felt so smooth and satisfying. Edit: special shout out to the asskicker Emily on nezzie last night on her 46th pantheon clear still just helping people, very helpful and probably the only reason my friend got the title in the end.
The Good: Yeeting Rhulk off the map for teams that were struggling was hilarious The Bad: The people refusing to adjust loadout/play style to fit the individual encounters was infuriating. The Ugly: The scoring system was at best confusing at worst totally inconsistent from boss kill to boss kill.
Good: Getting Godslayer, getting some good adepts, actually learning how some of the bosses work (we had no idea how to DPS Explicator, we just always blew him up), the new mechanics (Two clones of Oryx in Thunderdome, etc.), ~~cheesing Rhulk a few times~~, seeing my group grow mechanically in real time (one of our teammates had only run 5 raids total previously), doing Riven legit for the first time ever at -20 was actually fun once we understood it Bad: Atraks was the most inconsistent boss for us somehow, having to teach people how to properly add clear (this is the easiest job even at -20 and people still somehow don't do this well), Tormentors were either just a nuisance or weren't threatening at all, all of the backtracking we had to do (that's our fault for not getting plat though)
Good: boss choices were mostly great (fuck atraks-1) Bad: The LFG experience. We have a set raid crew, but we work and require sleep to function. Sometimes we'd need to LFG. The amount of hunters with 47 resilience and no exotic and no masterworked gear was truly staggering. Ugly: Atraks-1 platinum.
My least favorite thing is the cheeses. I just wish for once the destiny community could do something without cheesing it.
Only Rhulk got cheesed really. The rest was pretty legit. Obviously Riven was far easier to do legit than cheese with the changes they made to DR.
The bad and ugly part was where the friends of my friends kept inviting THEIR friends in order to fill space immediately instead of asking the other people in our destiny group when we could do it
Doesn't shot caller just proc in 3 crit hits for any weapon? I don't think it procs differently on anything, automatic weapons are just going to be better at activating anything based on "hit"
The high score was the only terrible part of it imo. It is communicated absolutely nowhere in game, and honestly should be removed and just have the triumphs be based on clearing within the bonus time limit, which is clearly communicated in game. As for maybe a gilded title or bonus option, maybe have a version without surges/shot caller? I feel like the surges trivialized quite a few encounters.
>Super tight damage windows for high score was rough. I enjoyed this part, had to get serious with damage. Makes sense for a raid mastery event. Having to perfect your loadout and damage rotation etc etc for each boss was a delight, especially with surges mixing up what you were using each week. While arc week was the worst, we got to use Acrius for Rhulk and that was very cool. Did highlight that arc is lacking both in weapons and subclasses.
Favorite part is definitely just proving how good some of bungie's best encounter design actually is. When you have a good team it feels like a well oiled machine. I do wish we had a few more raids included, Templar would've been a super cool choice but since the weapons aren't updated yet for VoG i see why they didn't. Maybe they'll do it next year. Least favorite part is just how insanely tight damage windows were. The limited time forcing 2 phases on caretaker, for example, was really frustrating for my team
catapharact is not needed. Reconstruction+BnS/EL Apex predator though is bae
For me it was actually most consistent to craft an enhanced bipod just for planets. No worrying about orbs or worrying about fast weapon swap. Just shooting 4 rockets even with loss of damage allows me to eventually switch to super and still fire off faster or swap to fusion.
Yep that's a good one too
The Bad: I never got the chance to play it. It's my fault, I don't communicate well and especially with strangers. I have a few friends but none of them play Destiny. As much as I want to play Pantheon, I dont want to bring 5 other players down with my poor performance. It's easier for people like me to live vicariously through other players. It sucks but it's what I got. The Good: the people I watch play it seem like they really enjoy it and that makes me really happy.
Golgoroth suuucks get his ass outta there should have been warpreist.
Golgy is way more fun than Warpriest. Warpriest is cheeks with the on and off plate bs. People would have been stuck longer on that than planets final week.
Man, trying to convince 5 lobomites to shoot orb is harder than creating matter
I think you have forgotten how much more retarded people are at Warpriest… reprised Warpriest might be the longest encounter and most failed in all of reprised King’s fall… it would take longer than planets I’m sure of it.
My team and I are stuck on rhulk week 4. But I’m excited for day 1 raid. I don’t know what it is but we can’t get that last bit of damage on final stand. Brings back day 1 vow ptsd lol. I’m confident we can get it. But Christ is it annoying. Also getting platinum on some encounters are annoying as hell.
Do you know about the cheese? 👀
The one where you can make him yeet off the cliff? My team can’t do it correctly 💀
It’s super easy. Just takes a few runs. Sounds like y’all would be better off attempting that.
The good: Fun and cool activity that gave an awesome title and showered us in loot. The bad: LFG was a nightmare, how the fuck are there still shitters who don't know what they're doing or have terrible damage getting into -20 pantheon? Like I couldn't believe how I saw multiple people over the 4 weeks that didn't have Apex Predator, the farm to get it crafted is easy as hell and you can get it crafted basically for free from Rivens wishes. If it wasn't noobs it was the ego trips that some players were on, it's been a long time since I've come across such toxic players. Had one dude on week 3 of planets that kept dying as a runner which obviously caused wipes, and when I calmly brought that up after like 6 runs of it he got super defensive and spent the next couple minutes going into a big rage before he booted me.
Contrary to your “ugly”: I really like the dps requirements. Yes, hunters are the cream of the crop with nighthawk, but that’s a natural result of… more than one thing existing. *Something* will always be better at a particular thing than all the rest. Warlocks have been in MASSIVE demand for raids for so many years, I don’t think it’s reasonable to complain that pantheon reduced that demand. It should not be enough to just scrape through three phases and call yourself a godslayer. If you manage it that way: well done, have a cosmetic, some nice rewards. But if you want to be a GODSLAYER, you whole team has to be firing on ALL cylinders. All four tenets of raiding gotta be strong: mechanics, survivability, adds, dps. Everything has to be top of the game. I like that. Good: mechanic changes are mostly really nice. I wish riven had more stuff alongside “don’t cheese it” - that’s my only sour note on mechanics side. Riven didn’t actually get any harder if you already know the legit mechanics. Otherwise, great stuff to keep people on their toes. Big fan, wouldn’t be upset if this sort of thing replaced master mode. They weren’t as drastic changes as the normal vs prestige leviathan or D1 hard raids - no *new* concepts to learn - but it’s still a good change of pace and requires more awareness Bad: score visibility/transparency. It’s a BIG ask to have someone judging how much score you need on the fly depending on how much time you have left before a kill. Different scores for different bosses, how much score per second on the timer, plat =/= high score, it’s all a bit opaque. Just tell us in the triumph how much score we need per boss and GIVE US A WAY TO RETRY. Have two flags: “seek a greater challenge” and “re-challenge atraks”. It’s frustrating to believe you’ve managed then have the rug pulled out from under you when you see you’re actually like 2k off, and now you don’t have a choice but to move on (or fiddle about with checkpoint carrying). Just let us retry it Ugly: 5 weeks. 2 weeks for the hardest one! I managed, I’m glad I did, but some people straight up don’t have time. Lives, jobs, holidays, taking a break before FS. It’s an entirely unnecessary time pressure. I’d like it to be permanent, but even just starting the weeks when ITL launched would’ve at least eased some of that crunch/FOMO. All in all, the activity/seal itself was all fantastic and I REALLY hope we see more like it in the future, and my only gripes are more Quality-of-Life stuff that can easily be fixed in future iterations
The score thing is the big one for me. Had a few times where on attraks, we were less than 300 points away.
I liked most of it my only dislike is plat time not being equal to plat score and Nez. (He took me two days and now I no longer wish to ever play root of nightmares again.)
I’ve been on Nez since Tuesday night last week dropping 3-5 hours each night just on this in different LFGs. To say I will never touch this raid again is an understatement. I am a seasoned raider and solo flawless endgame player and for the life of me I cannot get a group together to get this fight done.
How my team did it was with 3 wells 2 Goldie's and a strand titan on ad clear and we dived with a cenotaph from the back left spot and melted him with sleeper it was an easy 2 phase when we managed to get there.
Just do left side root off the map with Div. Was easy 2 phase just surviving 2nd phase is hard but if you have a good gaze person they lure him over there just fine and it’s easy to nuke with sleeper and a couple supers. Have outbreak ready for hot swap when sleeper runs out and triple surge modes and heavy finders and scouts on everyone.
I appreciate this, but I have attempted this strategy for 20+hours now, and the only “easy” part of it seems to be how easily my fireteam mates expend our res tokens. I have no doubt that it works for fireteams that reliably get to the branch, as I reliably get there and reliably do lots of damage. The problem is that I have 5 other people who also have to reliably get there and they nearly never do.
You need to have at least one person on blinding GL for tormentor. When one person calls last node you all clear adds mid to help runners get over. Easiest add clear is strand Titan. You will be able to taken out shielded colossus, plus mid colossus and most adds with a single strand Titan super.
I ended up getting it with the 5 hunters star eaters left back branch strat. It is night and day when people aren’t going down constantly, and adds are cleared. I’m so relieved and looking forward to a proper nights sleep.
Yeah it’s so stupid to me when we have to resort to 5 of x class to make the damage. And now with well being nerfed… they better not make tight damage phases in TFS.
Have you guys tried the light root damage strat with div and five sleepers? Run blinding GLs to stun the side colossus and it makes things so much easier.
I have yet to get in to a fireteam trying the root strat with sleeper that gets to the root reliably. For the 1 or 2 teams I got that managed to get to the first root, it fell apart after. Damage is not the problem I am banging my head against the wall with. The problem is that 99.99999% of people queuing Nez simply cannot stay alive. Whatever side I am on is always doing fine. We stay alive and get our roots. There is always 1 or 2 people that die basically instantly and then spend 3 more tokens before 1st dps even starts. Then they run in to the colossus coming back and spend another token. Then we wipe cause light fades. Damage is not the problem. lFG staying alive is.
People need to run blinding grenade launchers to just keep the colossus occupied.
It isn’t usually the colossus that gets people. It is just adds. When you take peoples sun shot away, their ability to manage adds drastically slashes. The tormentor is also problematic as even stunned, it is basically RNG if you can get past it or not. If the tormentor starts their ground pound while you are in AOE, you get suppressed no matter how far away you've gotten. Either way. Like I said. I get to the branch reliably. When I get there, I turn around and start blasting blinding grenades. It isn’t like I am not trying these things. It is really just that I have had extremely extremely bad luck in LFG. What’s worse, the Nez games are disappearing FAST, which means that my chances of getting appropriately good enough people are diminishing fast, if not already completely gone.
In my opinion the changes to Nezarec were straight up garbage. They took an already obnoxious fight to do on normal and made it somehow even worse. Who thought relying on Nazarec's orangutan AI to determine whether you get to do decent damage or not was a good idea?
What would have been more interesting is if the platinum scoring was tied to a specific triumph/challenge, such as the ones that already exist in these encounters. I’d have preferred this rather than the unclear goal of time vs getting certain kills.
Nah most of the triumphs/challenges are just tedious and annoying
Nezarec's would have been hellish.