With Moments of Triumph hitting Destiny 2 this month, and lots of people looking to complete activities they haven’t yet attempted, I’m considering doing more high-level activities to teach other players how to run specific things in the game. 

Part of what I’ll be doing is working on guide posts people can read to get an overview of the activities and hopefully learn them within their own groups. But with the release of the first Lair activity, I started considering what the important aspects are for teaching these things.

These precepts are certainly not the only way to teach endgame activities (thinking specifically about raids at the moment), but the way I try to approach them.

Have patience. These activities require practice and familiarity.

When you’re running a complex and sometimes punishing encounter with players who haven’t completed it before, it can be difficult to put yourself back in the shoes of an inexperienced player.

It can occasionally feel like the rookies won’t ever understand how to complete the activity—to you, it’s very simple! After all, you’ve completed the activity a couple dozen times or better, and you have the muscle memory and encounter familiarity to execute your role without serious danger of a wipe.

Just recall the first few times you ran through a raid, before you’d been in the spaces and executed the necessary steps. Use that to guide your words. Ask players what’s going on when they miss a step or take a death. Remind them to look at the section of the death HUD that shows them what killed them and to share that information with you so you can help them.

Don’t berate players if they are having trouble. Be a positive influence on the attitude of the group.

Be mindful of the activity when you split the fireteam between new and experienced members.

Leviathan has many sections where the team is split 3/3. Eater of Worlds often has you split 2/2/2. When you make these splits or consider roles, try to group new and experienced players together. This allows for a few things:

• Experienced players can make up for any lack of gun skill or encounter awareness.
• Experienced players can watch the new players as they execute and help them determine what’s going wrong if there are mistakes.
• Experienced players are better at knowing when it’s appropriate to go in for a revive if a death happens.
• Experienced players should be flexible enough to play multiple roles within an encounter, so if you need to switch, they can do so.

When you group experienced players with new ones, you’re primarily doing so to get more information on what’s happening in the encounter, so you can change things up if you need to—either by switching roles or sometimes switching to an alternate strategy.

Explain the victory conditions first, then go back and explain the mechanics that get you there.

When you are running through encounter explanations within the encounter space, it’s really easy to get bogged down in the details and start explaining things in order. The main problem with doing this is that new players can often fail to see the forest when surrounded by really tall trees and a handful of bears.

Start by telling players what needs to be done to complete the encounter. Give them the tangible goal of the victory condition, and then explain how to get there. Go one phase at a time if you have to. If there are checkpoints, don’t be afraid to wipe after a checkpoint or take a break before explaining the next part of the encounter.

Doing this often helps players establish the mental space necessary to track various phases and can reduce surprise, especially if there’s a wrinkle happening at the end.

A great example of this is the Gauntlet in Leviathan. The victory condition is dunking nine orbs in the center. Once you establish that, it’s slightly easier for a new player to see how the phases of the encounter relate to one another. (e.g., The consequences of missing an orb during the first three rounds are easier to grasp.)

Unitask new players when possible.

If you have a choice of roles in which to put new players, you should give them a single task if possible so it’s easier for them to establish the mental space necessary for surviving the encounter and executing well. Eventually, you want all players to be comfortable with various roles, but especially for a first clear, give those new players something to do that allows them to focus their attention on one or two things at a time. Cognitive load is a real thing that takes concentration away from execution.

Good examples of these roles are:

• Pretty much any role in Leviathan Gauntlet, though I advise steering them clear of the Psion-punching role.
• Following the ground leader in Leviathan Gardens and taking either of the close (L1/R1) dogs in damage phase.
• Perma-punching or throne room defense in Leviathan Calus.
• Plate defense in Eater of Worlds Argos Phase 1.
• Either of the inside plates in Spire of Stars boss room. (Less gun skill required to survive, and you will always be able to switch out a floater with at least one of the outside plate holders.)

If a unitasked role isn’t available, try to find positions that either start with extra help or give you a buffer. The main example I can think of on this one is the “top” plates in Leviathan Pools, as you can have the left/right float positions start there and help with taking out bathers before establishing the triangle rotation.

Teach methods that are easy to adapt for Prestige or Challenge modes later.

This one can be tough, but ideally, you want to set up players for success in later, harder, more mechanically-challenging activities. I don’t yet know what this is going to look like for the Raid Lairs in Prestige mode, as much of it will depend on the modifiers in use. (We don’t even know what two of the three of those are yet.)

Challenges in Leviathan will grant you additional loot, which is important for power leveling when the cap is increased. And Prestige modes are going to become more desirable once they have Exotic Masterwork Catalysts attached to them starting tomorrow. If you teach strategies that don’t apply easily to those more complex encounters, players will have to unlearn things before they can adapt to them. Shoot for methods that allow players to slide into Prestige by changing as few things as possible. Good examples of this include:

• Using rotation strat in Leviathan Gauntlet. (Runners, punchers, platers.)
• Practicing quick handoffs and quick bather kills in Leviathan Pools.
• Using perma-puncher role in Leviathan Calus. (This teaches the throne room defenders to solo left/right.)

I don’t want to speculate too much on Eater of Worlds or Spire of Stars until I see what tomorrow looks like, but my guess is that the current optimal strats that involve point-blank damage might not be the right ones to use.

Argos will probably revolve mostly around using primarily supers for damage phase? I don’t know, but it’ll be interesting to see what it is and how it changes how people play.

Teach for understanding, not carries.

When you are running folks through these encounters, I think it best to teach the encounters like you are preparing those players to teach other people. There are a handful of encounters where you can super-simplify the mechanics to the point where one or two players don’t have to do much to complete it.

(The main example of this right now is the “run backwards” strat for Leviathan Gauntlet. I strongly believe this strat should be avoided in teaching runs.)

I’m sure a decent number of people will disagree with me on this, but I think there is a fundamental difference between a teaching run and a carry. In teaching runs, you want players to learn the mechanics in a way that they theoretically could go out and teach others in the same way. In a carry, you just want to complete the encounter with the least amount of danger (or even effort) possible on the part of the inexperienced players.

Gimmick strats and cheeses are fun to mess with when you are playing with established groups and you all know what’s going on. My regular group usually does Rat King 2-plate for Calus on Normal, for example. But I would not teach that method to a player new to the raid or encounter, as it requires fairly advanced knowledge of the workings of the encounter and tight coordination in the group itself.

(This is also why I am bearish on point-blank strats for Spire boss phase 2.)

Focus on fun first, learning second. Stop the session if the group stops having fun.

Raiding and running other endgame activities in Destiny is both challenging and fun! Once you get the encounters down, it’s a good time to run through these things with a group that knows how to rock it.

For people new to the activity, it won’t always be a fun time. It can be frustrating, demoralizing, and negative—especially if you are made to feel like you are holding the group back.

Do your best to prevent the establishment of that kind of tone in your encounters. Be positive. Compliment players on their performances. Reassure them when they make a mistake that it can be corrected and that it happens to everyone.

If you sense the mood in the group flagging, stop running the activity. There are lots of way to do this: take a water/bathroom break, move the group into a different activity (much easier when 6v6 PvP becomes standard in Quickplay tomorrow), or just call it and consider scheduling a follow-up session.

Encounter fatigue is a real thing that can lead to repeated wipes when the group hits a mental—or even physical—wall. Try to manage this as best you can.