At work, I have taken it upon myself to try and spearhead various initiatives within our Customer Success team that act to push forward how we work and what we work on, as iteratively as possible, taking into account various feedback channels and measurements, and involving anyone who is interested either in reporting something that could use optimization or helping to optimize something that needs help.
We use a threaded discussion system called P2 to do most of our asynchronous communication at work, as we are a globally-distributed company. I have teammates around the world, and we need to collaborate and work with each other “overnight” (which is a relative term, as is, say “summer,” or even “Thursday”).
For each P2, we have a small sidebar image, tagline, and site icon that’s generally chosen by the person who starts that P2. Here’s what I chose for the Quality project P2:
I felt like sharing why I went with these things, because I don’t ever choose anything for no reason, though I am known for occasionally doing so out of whimsy.
The sidebar header is a moment from Tron: Legacy, as the film heads into its climactic scene, and the main characters are on the run. Flynn explicitly takes a moment to stop, head to the deck of the solar sailer, close his eyes, and find calm.
As he leaves to do so, he says:
“The old man’s gonna knock on the sky; listen to the sound.”
“Knock on the sky; listen to the sound” is apparently a somewhat old Zen saying. Sometimes, calming your mind and opening it to what is around you is the way to find inspiration, insight, or guidance that might be in front of you. It’s challenging to do this when you are running from thing to thing, or very frustrated, or distractedâbut that’s maybe when you need to do it the most.
The site icon is the logo of Garlond Ironworks, a group of scientists who study various ways to use machines in the world of Final Fantasy XIV. The motto of Garlond Ironworks is:
“Freedom through technology.”
They intentionally do not study or manufacture anything that can be used for tyranny’s gain. It is a gathering of intelligent people who wish to utilize and study technology for purposes of lifting up all people.
Now, I don’t remotely pretend to view the work I do on supporting customers or improving internal things as being relevant to that ethical quandary specifically, but it does serve to remind me of two things: that ingenuity can come from a variety of sources and from all sorts of people, and that we have a choice regarding whether to further technology to good or evil ends. (The former is definitely why I chose to use it in this specific context.)
This is a nice short set of interviews with Yoshitaka Amano and Kazuko Shibuya, the two people most responsible for the look and feel of the characters in Final Fantasy IâVI.
It’s been a while since I changed the look of this site, and I had a desire to get away from the wasted screen space of my previous theme on a desktop browser, so today, I flipped my theme over to the understated and clean Velox.
There’s a lot to like, and it adds a few things that I really appreciate, such as a time-to-read and a progress bar for people reading single articles. It’s also block-editor-friendly.
At the same time, I’m also going to try something (yet again) that I have attempted previously for my writing: I’m going to split my content a bit between two of my sites and see how that goes in terms of focusing audience.
This site will continue to host my writing on life things, events work, general technology topics, work and remote work, and customer support and success.
My guides, resources, and other writing on games and video games will start to be published over on my streaming homepage, located at backlogathon.tv. I’m not going to move anything from this site over there to start, but instead will begin writing there, with a possible focus on Final Fantasy XIV and Destiny 2.
I will probably write about various games here on this site when they are significant enough that they have entered my general attention, or have been super-significant. I owe this site a post regarding FFXIV at some point, for example.
Planning to work towards earning the title “Savior” in Destiny 2? Here’s your guide to the triumphs necessary to claim the Seal and equip the title before it expires at the end of the Season of Dawn.
14 total Triumphs are necessary to complete the Seal. I’ve reordered them slightly below to group them by theme/location.
Obtaining the Triumphs
The Season of Dawn Collections Badge
You’ll need the following to complete this one:
The Global Resonance triumph, which is also included in this Seal. It drops the Timeswept Shell Ghost shell.
The Crucible Quests “Stronger Together” and “Fire Breather.”
The Gambit Quests “Tear It Up” and “Spitting Distance.”
The Vanguard Quests “Duty Driven” and “Shoot Fast, Tread Lightly.”
Collecting a full set of the seasonal armor. You receive this automatically if you have the premium track on the Season Pass.
Obtaining all three seasonal exotic weapons: Symmetry, Devil’s Ruin, and Bastion.
Acquiring one of each weapon available as a reward from the Sundial activity.
The most time-consuming bits of this will be the seasonal ritual quests, which require engaging with all three major playlist activities, and in half of them, using specific weapons to earn the ritual weapons for the season.
As long as you are engaging with the seasonal exotic quests as they appear during the season, you should receive the rest of this more or less naturally. You’ll need to make sure you pull at least one of each weapon from the Sundial activity.
EDZ Resonance: Increase the Resonance Rank of the EDZ Obelisk to 10.
Tangled Shore Resonance: Increase the Resonance Rank of the Tangled Shore Obelisk to 10.
Mars Resonance: Increase the Resonance Rank of the Mars Obelisk to 10.
Nessus Resonance: Increase the Resonance Rank of the Nessus Obelisk to 10.
Global Resonance: Increase the total Resonance Rank of all Obelisks to 40.
These will require engaging with the seasonal activity nodes on each of the four selected planets. To increase the Resonance Rank of the Obelisks, you’ll need to run weekly bounties that can be found at each Obelisk, or receive drops from running playlist activities, the Sundial, or the Menagerie.
The Tangled Shore and Mars Obelisks are available in the game now. EDZ and Nessus receive their Obelisks on 17 December.
Race Through Time: Complete the Sundial within a set amount of time. (Checkbox indicates this is for Niruul specifically.)
Inotam’s Ruin: Defeat Inotam, Oblivion’s Triune, within the Sundial.
Flayer Slayer: Defeat each of the Psion Flayers found within the Sundial (3).
I received the time trial triumph after my first run of the Sundial, so I have no idea how quickly you need to complete the activity. It’s possible this just requires not failing at any given section of the activity. If you are cycling it often enough, these should happen for you automatically.
Over time, Flayers are being added to the Sundial. It’s not obvious at this point whether they are being added to a rotation, or replacing each other. To be safe, I’d recommend running the Sundial as soon as you can when one is added, to ensure you receive the completions.
Ozletc is being added on 17 December, and Tazaroc on 24 December. Inotam is being added on 4 February.
Legendary Psion: Defeat Inotam, Oblivion’s Triune, on Legend difficulty or higher.
Legend Sundial is not available until 7 January, and Inotam is not being added until 4 February. It’s somewhat likely that running Sundial on Legend will require a pre-made fireteam, meaning this may not be possible to do solo.
Undefeatable: Complete a run of the Sundial without dying.
The hardest part of doing this at the time of this post is surviving the “cages” Niruul places on you during the boss fight. They require other players to shoot them to prevent you from dying. This would be significantly easier with a pre-made fireteam.
Saintly Savior: Save Saint-14 from the Infinite Forest.
The seasonal schedule indicates this will likely be completable starting on 17 December. This is a story progression quest found within Season 9.
Link Repair: Repair each of the fractured links found on the Tower Obelisk.
It’s unclear when this will be added to the game.
Torch-Bearer: Complete the Empyrean Restoration effort and light the beacon.
Empyrean Restoration is an event or quest on the seasonal calendar, and it’s scheduled to be released on 4 February. You won’t be able to complete this until then.
Devil’s Ruin: Travel to Twilight Gap and collect the materials required to repair Devil’s Ruin.
The Devil’s Ruin quest is scheduled to open on 7 January.
Bastion: Acquire the Exotic fusion rifle Bastion.
The Bastion quest is scheduled to open on 28 January.
A Chronological List
Here’s what you can do when, if you want to start getting ahead.
Immediately
Begin increasing the Resonance Rank of the Tangled Shore and Mars Obelisks.
Finish the first steps in the Saint-14 Quest, which are available from Osiris.
Begin work on the Crucible, Vanguard, and Gambit seasonal quests and ritual weapon quests.
Run Sundial and collect each of the four weapons available. Defeat Niruul. Attempt to do so quickly to receive the time trial Triumph.
17 December
Complete the Saint-14 rescue quest.
Begin increasing the Resonance Rank of the EDZ and Nessus Obelisks.
Defeat Ozletc in the Sundial activity.
Run the Sundial and collect the four remaining weapons now available.
24 December
Run the Sundial and defeat Tazaroc.
7 January
Complete the quest to obtain Devil’s Ruin.
28 January
Complete the quest to obtain Bastion.
4 February
Complete a run of the Sundial at Legend or higher, defeating Inotam.
Begin the Empyrean Restoration event/quest.
Unknown
Perform quest steps necessary to complete/fix the Tower Obelisk.
The earliest possible date to complete the title is likely 4 February, and the Season of Dawn concludes on 9 March. You must complete all necessary Triumphs before the weekly reset on 9 March.
Tomorrow, Destiny 2’s Season 8 concludes, and Season 9 begins. 8 served as the opening season of Year Three, and marked a transition for the game from a “traditional” update method of small DLC packs spaced out within the year to one large DLC pack and small-purchase seasons to fill in content droughts.
I thought I’d jot down some thoughts on it from the last ten weeks, divided into some of the major aspects of the season. I’ll try to keep this about things particular to this season and not to things that were big sea changes from Shadowkeep.
What I’ll touch on:
Vex Offensive
Iron Banner
Eriana’s Vow
Eververse and the Season Pass
Ritual Weapons
Undying
Vex Offensive
The big “seasonal activity” going away tomorrow is Vex Offensive, and it’s an amazingly mixed bag. For the most part, the activity itself isn’t bad. It’s a progressive arena shooting bit, with a timer that doesn’t impact a whole bunch other than whether you get good drops or not? (I’m not really even sure about this because it’s very not obvious what it does. It’s not a fail state.)
Things warp in, shoot shoot, bang bang, run bounties, get a weekly challenge out of it or two, get a bunch of weapon drops, rinse, repeat.
Normally, a fairly inoffensive horde-style mode, which at this point is generally what we are getting out of seasonal stuff (cf. Menagerie, Forges, probably Sundial). It gives a rather generous number of random roll drops, which is good and gives you a chance to find a roll you like from grinding out the weeklies for drops. The mechanics of the encounters are fairly easy to grasp.
I think Vex Offensive is a very good start for the type of seasonal activities we’ll be seeing that come and then go after each block of time.
There are some problems here, and they are more issues with the current design philosophy of Destiny rather than the activity itself:
Almost every bounty and triumph connected to the mode requires you to be an active jerk to your teammates.
This is now a rather frequent problem Destiny as a whole. It forces you into matchmade team activities, and then gives you objectives to complete that push you into doing things that take away from your teammates’ ability to accomplish exactly those same things. Bounties and triumphs requiring “final blows” instead of participating in defeats of enemies with assists mean you’re competing with others in what’s ostensibly a cooperative mode.
The only real way to progress on these goals is to go Peak Titan and charge ahead of all of your teammates, grabbing the glory for yourself. It’s enormously frustrating, and for more friendly players who might otherwise enjoy the game and the cooperative nature of these activities, is a huge drain on enjoyment.
Because of Champions, a team can drop into Vex Offensive that doesn’t have a realistic chance of completing it well.
The Champion mechanic is a new one introduced with Shadowkeep. In Vex Offensive, the two enemy types requiring specific weapons or mods to defeat efficiently are Barrier and Overload “Champions.” You can outdamage or stagger these enemies and circumvent the weapon mechanic, but for a team of random players to have a reasonable chance at a good run, the team should have a distribution of both anti-Barrier and anti-Overload weapons equipped.
The simple problem is that many players just don’t pay attention to this. Whether it’s because they are trying to complete triumphs that require specific weapons, some classes of which can’t even equip the necessary mods, or because they are ignorant or unbothered by the mechanic itself, I know of many runs where only one or two of us were doing all of the work against the champions, which then slows down the activity entirely. The game doesn’t prevent you from loading in without equipping the tools necessary to have the best chance at a good completion.
The annoying thing here is that I believe Champions are an overall positive addition to the game, especially in things like the raid and the Nightfall strikes. They add a layer of tactical complication that makes previously rote sections of content more interesting in terms of the weapons you choose and how you construct a team, but they appear to be mystifying matchmade teammates in many activities.
Destiny 2 needs more prescriptive instructions to players that teach them how to play the game “properly.” Especially with the entrance fee to Destiny now being free-to-play, I believe there are many players in the game today that don’t understand many of its basic mechanics. More tutorial contentâor better yet, less inscrutable information in-gameâwould go a long way to making activities less annoying to run.
Iron Banner
I mostly had fun in Iron Banner this season, but then again, I usually have fun in Iron Banner. Power Level matters, but it’s not insurmountable, grouping is advantageous so I enjoy running it with my friends and clanmates, and it provides an excuse to run around with dumb weapons in PvP and escape the PvE grinds for a while.
If I’m going to PvP, I generally prefer that PvP to be Iron Banner.
The armor was a new set that rolled pretty high stat packages most of the time, and reputation packages from Saladin had a decent chance at dropping Enhanced versions of armor mods, which gives a greater number of players access to these without having to play competitive PvP or high-level non-matchmade activities. This was good.
The weapons were the same ones we’ve been using for over a year, so not super-exciting. They could definitely use a refresh.
Even the bounties for pinnacle gear were halfway decent. One required final blows, one required assists, one required zone captures, and one required ability kills (more on this one in a second). Most players are capable of completing two of these given a decent amount of time in the mode, and a decent number of others probably capable of nabbing three each Iron Banner. Two to four pieces of 950-960 gear three times in 10 weeks is pretty great.
The ability kills bounty should have been rotated out early in the season.
This was even a known problem! It was admitted that they were aware the bounty was causing trouble because the number of kills was very high (200), and the bounty was quite difficult to complete, especially for some classes that have poor supers, poor neutral game, or both.
The API indicates there are three more bounties available to be rotated in, none of which made an appearance in any of the Iron Banner weeks of Season 8. It would have been a great solution to rotate those bounties in once the problem was known and admitted. (Perhaps this is actually quite difficult to change without a risk of breaking things, in which case, OK.)
The “kickoff quest” for Iron Banner was too much.
For the first time, there was a quest that had steps necessary both to earn the Iron Banner armor for the first time for the season, and even to unlock the ability to turn in tokens for reputation drops. If you hadn’t completed the quest, you could do nothing with the Iron Banner Tokens you’d had drop from either wins or losses.
This was unfortunate, and I think a mistake. Here were the steps:
10 zones capped, 30 opponents defeated, 3 Super final blows
6 matches completed, 20 zones captured, 25 pulse rifle final blows
20 fusion rifle final blows, 30 zones captured, 100 opponents defeated
15 SMG final blows, 15 Super final blows, 40 zones captured
50 zones captured, 15 matches completed, 10 grenade launcher final blows
(The fifth step was altered after the first Iron Banner of the season to remove the grenade launcher step due to a bug.)
Here again, we see the ugly monster of “final blows” rearing its head. Bungie, I love you, and I love Iron Banner, but please stop with this. There are many players who will gladly hop into Iron Banner for a chance at some drops and to chip away at some progress in things like assists bounties or capping points, but if they weren’t able to nab final blows, and in some cases with fairly technical weapons like fusion rifles, they were unable to claim even a single drop from the vendor.
If you want players to be in PvP and be cannon fodder for other players, orâbetter yet!âto learn how to PvP over time and maybe begin enjoying the mode, you have to give them something for their time. Making this multi-step quest the barrier to entry, and making it character-bound on top of it, is too much to ask of infrequent PvP players.
It will not move them to improve. It will instead drive them away from the mode and potentially the game.
Eriana’s Vow
This gun is amazing. It steps outside the weapon class and archetype, has one of the new anti-Champion aspects baked in, and hits like a truck. Has a great risk/reward profile for bringing it with you. More like this, please.
The quest for the catalyst was not amazing. It required ludicrous numbers of “ritual” event completions to complete the quest to even get the catalyst to drop, and then required you to get a bunch of kills with it to finally slot the catalyst.
I played hundreds of hours of Destiny over the last ten weeks, and I still don’t have this done.
Eververse and the Season Pass
I could write several thousand words on how Eververse is missing the boat, but I’ll save that for another time. I’m sure many of you are aware of its problems.
The season pass track was actually mostly well-done.
This is also very much a part of Shadowkeep and not the individual season, but I think they hit this one at about 80%. The ranks felt like they moved along quite a bit, it rewarded me for engaging with various kinds of content and especially bounties, and it was very doable to get it to 100 within the season. (I hit 150-ish.)
There are some things I’d definitely change about it:
Season pass engrams were rarely rewarding. They should have a very high chance or maybe even a guarantee of rolling with high stats or even specific high stats, to make them aspirational. Exotic engrams should never drop as a weapon, due to the new important of armor random rolls.
The mid-levels felt like they didn’t give me anything of note. There was a stretch from the mid-50s through around level 70 where the rewards were pretty much a wasteland. I wouldn’t take anything away from other levels, but if I’ve paid for the $10 season, I’d like to feel there are significant rewards along the way.
The seasonal armor drops were pointless. I was receiving drop after drop of these in the wild, usually with much better stats. Other than being a guarantee that I could check them off in my collections badge, dropping them from the season pass was not interesting.
The amount of Bright Dust given on the track was a complete joke, as were the BOYO 2 bright engrams. C’mon, Bungie. If you are going to reward me with in-game currency, the value should be at least what I have paid you for the season, to encourage me to grind at it and get my value back out of it. A few hundred Bright Dust is insulting. The Best of Year 2 engrams every five levels were probably much better for players new to the game, but I already owned everything in them, so there were very wasted on my account. I’m interested to see what next season’s bright engram is.
A bunch of this gets down to core problems with Eververse as it stands right now. Some brief thoughts on that for now:
The amount of design work going into Eververse while in-game sources of gear go untouched or “reprised” is a really bad look. I get that Bungie needs microtransaction income to pay their employees and grow at this point, and I don’t really have a problem with some cosmetic things being pay-only, but the disparity and the level of detail going into one versus the other is really bad.
The Bright Dust economy is now pathetic. In previous seasons, if we worked fairly hard, we could nab just about anything from the in-game store we wanted, whether with Bright Dust or with bright engrams. Now, you’d never be able to earn even a quarter of what’s available cosmetically in a given season, even if you did nothing but grind out bounties that provide the currency. Weekly bounties provide 200 each, and repeatable mini-bounties provide 10. Even bumping this to 500 and 50, or raising the chances of receiving Bright Dust in a bright engram, would go a long way.
Bungie touched on this in this past week’s blog update, and now more of the Eververse inventory will be making it out as Bright Dust purchases: 80% or so rather than 50%.
What if they took that extra 30% and channeled it into in-game accomplishments, rewarding you for doing grindy or challenging things with a cosmetic thing? I’d much rather see that.
Ritual Weapons
Bungie got tired of Pinnacle Weapons ruling pretty much every mode, which was absolutely happening due to the unique traits of those weapons, so now, we have Ritual Weapons instead. Each is still a unique weapon you can only get from a specific quest, but they’re no longer creating special perks that can only roll on those guns.
What I didn’t expect is that these weapons wereâin at least one caseâeven harder to acquire than the Pinnacle Weapons they replaced.
I think it’s still kind of amazing that even with ditching the overpowered Pinnacle weapon system, the Crucible gun and quest were still the most ridiculous of them all, though this time, I don’t think the Crucible one was the best PvE weapon for a change, as that honor probably goes to Exit Strategy from Gambit.
All three weapons are pretty decent. Edgewise is another high ROF machine gun in an element we didn’t have for add clear, and Exit Strategy has a pretty great perk selection for any SMG not named “The Recluse.”
Holy cow, though, y’all – Randy’s Throwing Knife had a steep quest. And it’s one of the best weapons in its class. Again.
Randy’s Throwing Knifeâif you can hit your critical hits with itâis a beast of a weapon that has no peer in its archetype. It also has one of the better flavor text selections of the past year.
BUT the Randy’s quest was just beyond what it needed to be or should have been. 450 final blows with a scout is something that we essentially needed Momentum Control as a game mode to complete in a lot of cases, and the medals/kills requirement was yet another “percentage-based” one where medals counted, but not all medals, and not all medals that did counted for the same amountâŠ
Exit Strategy had a lot of the same problems. I ground that one out this past week, and some post-match medals didn’t count at all. I had more than once match where I was certain I was done, but yet another match waited for me to complete it.
In the future, when quests have “percentage” completion bars, it’d be really nice to have a guide somewhere that tells us what counts for how much progress.
The guesswork necessary to complete these things efficiently is a huge part of the frustration with them.
Undying
Look: I ground out Undying this season, but I would not recommend it for most people. On the surface, the first time I looked at it early in the season, my reaction was “this isn’t that bad, and I think most people should be able to complete it.”
I am less than happy to admit that I was very wrong concerning this point.
The Vex Offensive portions of it weren’t horrible. I thought they’d be the worst, but other than what I mentioned above regarding having to step in front of teammates (and that’s a big “other than”), those bits were very doable with enough time spent in the mode.
The same thing applies to the Moon-related ones for just doing stuff using specific element-based classes. Grenade kills? Melee kills? Super kills? Can do.
In the end, the unreasonable bits for Undying came down to a single triumph:
The Collections badge.
To complete the Collections badge for the season, you needed:
the ship that drops from completing a 980-difficulty Ordeal Nightfall,
all three steps from all three ritual activity seasonal quests (Strikes, Crucible, and Gambit),
the exotic quest for the season,
all three ritual weapon quests completed (see above), and
every weapon and armor piece that can drop from Vex Offensive.
This was a lot of work, and worse yet, not completable as a solo player. (The 980 Nightfall and some aspects of the Strikes seasonal quest spoil it.)
I just looked up the badge on BrayTech, and was astounded to find that the lowest completion rate in their records is actually for the Strikes seasonal quest, which I can agree was a horrible slog. You can only receive strike scoring for Nightfalls, and the only way to get those done without having to get a group togetherâfor most playersâis to run the Ordeal version of the Nightfall, so this past week, my son and I ran Savathun’s Song something like seven or eight times in a row.
It was mind-numbing and the second worst part of getting the title. (The worst was getting the medals in Gambit for Exit Strategy, which took about double the time I wanted.)
This was the first “seasonal” title that required players to engage with all three “ritual” activities in large amounts.
I’m not sure what I think about this, especially given that each of those grinds required a certain amount of proficiency to complete. Personally, I prefer seals and accomplishments that are grinds proficient people can complete somewhat quickly, but determined or dedicated people can complete with a lot of effort.
In this case, Undying was only really completable by proficient people who also had a lot of time to grind at things, and that strikes me as the wrong way to go about it.
I’d like to see future seasonal seals focus more on that season’s unique activity, rather than forcing us into ritual activities that we may not wish to engage with.
That way, if the seasonal thing isn’t my bag, I can just nope out of it early and not bother with the seal. If I really enjoy it, or it’s significant to me, it gives me something long-tail to strive for before the season is over.
As it stands, this season, I spent more time in ritual activities grinding away at the same strikes, the same Crucible maps, and the same Gambit matches I’ve been running for over a year, instead of engaging with anything new or unique to the season.
This doesn’t feel like an effective use of the concept.
Closing Thoughts
I’m mostly looking forward to seeing what Season 9 has in store for us starting tomorrow. Season 8 was a decent first attempt: some solid core ideas, with portions of execution I found wanting.
I didn’t think it was a home run of a content slice, but I also didn’t think it was a complete disaster. It’s weird to have an activity in-game that’s completely ending forever, and not taking up space in the Director for the rest of the life of the game. There’s a lot of potential here if Bungie can change course rapidly enough to respond to feedback.
It’s notable that Season 9 is scheduled to be three weeks longer than Season 8. It’s my hope that spacing things out a bit more will give the activities room to breathe, and not that we’ll be looking at even steeper grinds for the next quarter.
I’m hoping to get back into the practice of writing some guides for Season 9, and I’ll likely focus first on some suggestions for grinding the seasonal title. I’ll know more tomorrow when I get a look, and plan on publishing a guide to the patch notes sometime tomorrow afternoon as well.
At the end of Destiny 2’s first year, my regular raid group had the idea to run all three of the Leviathan raids in one evening, as a challenge to ourselves for fun.
It was a pretty good time.
We didn’t get around to this last year, but in the last couple of weeks, what’s now grown to become Ethos (our Destiny 2 clan) started discussions around doing something similar once we’d completed Garden of Salvation. Schedules have magically aligned, and this Saturday, we run Raidapalooza 2019.
Raidapalooza 2019 will start this Saturday, November 30, at noon Central time, and will run for 12 hours maximum. Each raid will be limited to a two-hour hard cap.
Since this will be a fairly long event, we’ll be streaming it on my Twitch channel, and hopefully raising some funds for Extra Life. I didn’t get to participate in Game Day this year, so instead, I’m running some longer streams between now and the end of the calendar year to raise those funds.
I’m hoping to raise $1,000 this year. Right now, we’re sitting at $50, and we could use your help.
All of the proceeds from this fundraiser are forwarded to children’s hospitals in the St. Louis metropolitan area.
What are the Raids?
The first Destiny introduced the MMO concept of “raids” into the first-person shooter genre. Simply put, a Raid in Destiny is a six-player cooperative activity with higher challenge than much of the rest of the game.
Players are expected to master complex mechanics and tougher combatants than they’d experience in playing alone. They have cohesive themes and narrative importance to the Destiny experience.
As a whole, they are sharply-crafted and rewarding experiencesâthat many players of Destiny simply never get to see due to the six-player requirement and time necessary to learn the encounters.
As our team runs the raids, you’ll see clear and concise communication, or “calls,” throughout the experience, and witness the result of teamwork that’s been built over many attempts.
There are seven raids currently available in Destiny 2. We’ll be playing through them in release order, and limiting each raid to a maximum of two hours to ensure we can showcase as many of the raids as possible. We’re guaranteed to run at least the first six raids on Saturday, with a rotating cast of players.
Here’s what you can expect out of each raid.
Leviathan
Grow fat from strength.
Called by a mysterious invitation from the Cabal Emperor, Calus, the Guardians board his pleasure barge, Leviathan. Calus wishes to test the Guardians and their Light to see whether they are fit to serve as his Shadows: trusted operatives and elite forces.
As a raid, Leviathan relies more on mechanics than on enemy difficulty. The first three encounters are selected in a weekly random order. Players will face poisoned water in the Royal Baths, be hunted by Calus’s personal war hounds in the Pleasure Gardens, and run the Gauntlet’s obstacle course before confronting the Cabal Emperor himself in the Throne Room.
Leviathan is a good showcase of clockwork raid mechanics, where each player in the group has a specific job that must be completed to prevent the entire team from losing and having to start over. The raid layout itself is non-linear, and you’ll see us taking secret passages to navigate from encounter to encounter.
The version we’ll run is the “Prestige” version, which adds mechanics to some encounters and raises enemy difficulty.
Called back to Leviathan, the Guardians answer a pest control call from Emperor Calus. As the ship slowly consumes the centaur Nessus to create royal wine for Calus’s hedonistic lifestyle, it’s encountered some trouble: a Vex Mind was nestled inside the core of Nessus, it’s been eaten by the ship, and now it’s angry.
Leviathan didn’t have more than a single real “boss fight” throughout the encounter, but Eater of Worlds is essentially a jumping puzzle followed by nothing but a boss fight.
This is a shorter raid; the initial step is a jumping puzzle that requires coordination between all team members, followed by a brief onslaught. Once this is complete, the raid team is confronted by a boss with two phases: a puzzle phase to unlock the boss itself, and then the boss fight itself.
In Eater of Worlds, you’ll see fluid teamwork to deliver matched weapons to various parts of the arena, followed by a final encounter that requires quick field general work to ensure maximum damage to the boss.
Spire of Stars
On the wings of Icarus.
For the third time, the Guardians are called to Leviathan to assist Emperor Calus. The Cabal Red Legion, responsible for invading Earth and assaulting the Traveler at the beginning of the events of Destiny 2, are mounting a final assault to challenge the Cabal Emperor and threaten his position.
Spire of Stars is one of the fewer-run raids in Destiny 2, owing mostly to its combination of heavy mechanics and overwhelming enemy forces. The initial encounter is a challenge of timing and efficient enemy clearing, and it’s then followed by a jumping puzzle that requires teamwork to relay an object from tower to tower.
The final encounter is again in two phases, at the top of the eponymous Spire of Stars. Val Ca’uor is assaulting Leviathan itself, and both he and his warships must be dealt with. The boss encounter is a challenge that requires constant and tight communication, as well as precision when attempting to do damage to the boss himself.
Of all the raids we are running this Saturday, this is the most likely one to run into the two-hour time limit, owing mostly to a lack of recent practice at the encounters. Many of our clan members do not yet have a single completion of this raid.
Last Wish
O murderer mine.
At the heart of the Dreaming City, the home of the Awoken people, sits its greatest secret: Riven, the last known Ahamkara. Ahamkara grant wishes to those who entertain them, but at a price. And this particular Ahamkara has been Taken.
Charged by the Mara Sov, the Awoken Queen, to destroy the Heart of Riven, and thus rid the Dreaming City of a Taken curse, the Guardians enter the Keep of Voices.
Last Wish is the largest and most boss-heavy of all raids across both Destiny and Destiny 2. It ranges from a simple and unlimited-time arena boss fight, to a tightly-timed chase of another boss, to a high-damage fight and then a mechanics-based puzzle, to a complicated boss fight (that we’ll attempt to just out-damage), and then a relay race to cap the entire experience.
Its encounters are both curiously-designed and varied, and remains exciting throughout. If you want to see the greatest mix of Destiny encounter types and strategies, this is definitely the raid to watch.
Scourge of the Past
A vault, filled with the finest wares.
Siviks, Lost to None, a Fallen Captain, seeks to plunder the vast wealth of the Forges of the Black Armory and steal their secrets as his own. Ada-1, the Curator of the Black Armory, has reluctantly sought the help of the Vanguard in repelling this assault on her family’s legacy.
Scourge of the Past is our raid group’s absolute favorite to run when we have six people hanging around and a bit of time within which to complete an activity. It’s largely fun, it moves relatively quickly, and it’s generally easy to complete with a minimum of fuss.
(We’re also still trying to get the space motorcycle from the raid to drop for my son. 30 clears and counting!)
It’s also a very good example of the “introduce one mechanic first, then a different mechanic, then at the end, mash them together!” approach that makes some Destiny raids a joy to teach. It’s again some quick encounters, followed by a two-phase boss fight.
Most of the mechanics are fairly light and rely on good communication and efficient enemy clearing. Some enemies are more dangerous than others in these encounters. If you want to see a raid that becomes super-tight with repetition, this is a good one to check out.
Crown of Sorrow
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.
Emperor Calus’s appetite for power has ensnared one of his lieutenants in a trap. Gahlran the Sorrow-Bearer has been entrusted with an artifact of great strength: a crown that links him to the evil Hive race and grants him use of their magics. But SavathĂ»n, Witch-Queen of the Hive, has used it as a cunning trap, and a Hive infestation now threatens Leviathan. The Guardians, Calus’s Shadows, are tasked with eradicating the Hive within the ship.
Crown of Sorrow is a return to the innards of Leviathan, and provides a timing-based initial encounter, followed by another jumping puzzle (Leviathan has a lot of bottomless pits, OK?), and then a two-phase boss fight: first with Gahlran’s Deception, and then later with Gahlran himself.
The initial encounters depend more on timing and rapid enemy clearing, while the final boss fight requires sub-teams of two players to control space in tight cooperation, while rotating one-minute timers threaten to kill players throughout.
I rather enjoy this encounter; I get to form a squad with my son to complete the boss fight, which is quite enjoyable. Our timing is almost wordless in most situations at this point, and it’s amusing to find that we are coordinating with fewer and fewer words spoken each time.
If you want to see boss fights utilizing clockwork precision and heavy multitasking to accomplish the correct outcomes, you should watch.
Garden of Salvation
The heart of darkness.
The Darkness is manifest in our solar system with the discovery of a Pyramid on the Moon. Hive there are worshipping the Pyramid, and Nightmares of enemies past roam the system, threatening all. Eris Morn, Bane of the Swarm, has traced the signal from a mysterious artifact to the Black Garden, which is tended by the Vex.
This raid may or may not happen this Saturday; with the 12-hour total time limit, if other raids run longer, we won’t have the time to get into this one. For what it’s worth, our group only cleared this raid for the first time last week, after a bunch of struggling with the boss checkpoint.
If we do get into it, you’ll see some of the most amazing environmental art in the game. Garden of Salvation encounters rely on causing boss damage during specific windows of opportunity. For the first half of the raid, the team chases down the Consecrated Mind, attempting to confront it.
For the second half of the raid, we then battle the Consecrated Mind and later the Sanctified Mind, using a combination of mechanics borrowed from the Gambit game type, and positioning-based puzzles. The puzzles demand careful planning, as when you are helping with that aspect, you are unable to defend yourself from waves of enemies.
By this point, I expect we’ll be mentally tired in any case, so if you are watching, I would not necessarily expect to see a clear on Garden and instead watch us hit either the single-raid 2-hour time limit or the full activity 12-hour time limit.
And then what?
Should we actually manage to complete this marathon within the 12-hour time limit, I’m totally switching from Destiny and just hitting a few shots in Everybody’s Golf.
I have a feeling I’ll deserve it. đ
In any case, especially if you have read all the way to the bottom of this post, I hope you’ll stop by this weekend and watch us run some of the most entertaining content that exists in Destiny 2. We’d love to have you along for the ride, and we’d love even more if you are able to donate to Extra Life on our behalf.
See you there. Saturday, November 30, at noon Central time, on my Twitch channel.
This will be my fourth year attending Combo Breaker, and my third year helping staff the event. Combo Breaker is an event like no other, staffed with amazing people who go the extra mile and ensure the experience is top-tier for everyone involved.
I’m not even sure yet what I’ll be doing this year staff-wise, but I’m excited to find out. I’ve run brackets, helped with security, manned the TO desk, done A/V setup and lighting, and generally been available to help with anything needed.
Is this the year I submit a commentary reel and get behind the mic? Stream run? Run emcee for an Auction Tournament? Camera op? My quest to do literally everything I can behind the scenes at a fighting game major continues.
Think about attending and find out with me. Over 700 people have already registered, and it’s only been a few hours. Come celebrate the best of the fighting game community in the Midwest for one weekend to start the summer. I promise you’ll have a great time.
Plan to be in the west suburbs of Chicago on Memorial Day weekend. Don’t miss out.
Steam looks vulnerable, so it’s only fitting that others are jumping at the chance to steal some marketshare. First Epic and now Discord:
So, starting in 2019, we are going to extend access to the Discord store and our extremely efficient game patcher by releasing a self-serve game publishing platform. No matter what size, from AAA to single person teams, developers will be able to self publish on the Discord store with 90% revenue share going to the developer. The remaining 10% covers our operating costs, and weâll explore lowering it by optimizing our tech and making things more efficient.
90/10 split is ambitious. And I hope this kind of competition combines across more than one storefront to give both developers and players more options. I just wish they hadn’t followed that paragraph with this one:
We will also empower developers to communicate with their players by improving Verified Servers, extending their ability to add great content to the Activity Feed, and more. We believe if we iterate and work with developers, we can reverse platform fragmentation in the game industry while connecting developers and players closer together.
The last thing we need (on PC) is a different monopoly to take the place of Steam. The best possible outcome for consumers is competing storefronts that don’t rely on onerous DRM, so we can purchase and download from the store of our choice but not be limited to running eighteen launchersâand take advantage of sales that might compete with each other over time.
Consoles are, of course, a different story altogether.
Well, this one didn’t exactly go as planned, we’ll say.
A few hours into my stream to raise money for Extra Life, there was a rather loud noise in my home. Some brief investigation from my children didn’t turn up anything, but a few hours later, it was revealed to me what had happened.
My wife had rolled her ankle on the stairs and it was clearly injuredâit’d swollen up to about the size of an orange.
My good friend Ken was kind enough to take her to the hospital, as she’d told me she didn’t want us to end the stream. I went on to stream with four of my children, as she waited six hours or so for attention in the emergency department.
(You should understand that my wife does all of the social media work when I do charity streaming. She really enjoys it and she loves supporting the charity. For her to stop doing so meant she was most definitely hurt.)
Turns out she broke her ankle, and she’ll need to get a cast a bit later this week. So instead of staying up all night playing video games, I’m staying up most of the night making sure she can keep weight off the injured foot. Life took precedence.
Sure, it’s not what we expected, but that’s perfectly OK. I’m happy to help my wifeâshe’s not normally one to sit still or not do much, and it turns out that’s exactly what she needs to do right now. And at the hospital, they did give her this pretty rad award:
She got a gold star. :)
To everyone who either watched, donated, or both: thank you so much for supporting my stream for Extra Life this year. This won’t be the last one; I’ll be announcing further streams to benefit the charity, and you can make sure you know about them by following me on Twitch or Twitter.
Because the schedule was shortened, not all raffle prizes will end up being claimed. I’ll message the winners after this weekend is over when I get a minute to sit down and figure out who donated when. (There were only a handful of donations by the time we had to stop the stream.)
It may no longer make you eligible for a prize, but if you would still like to support my Extra Life fundraising efforts, please consider dropping by my donation page and giving what you can. All of the money goes to help children’s hospitals in the St. Louis metro area, and I know they will appreciate every dollar.
I look forward to streaming more often in coming days. I sincerely hope you’ll tune in.
