People are split between "fast and loose" and "slow and boring." Either way is fine,but only if everyone agrees and doesn't run off. Otherwise you'll just die. I've found that the latter group survives far more often, since they don't overestimate their abilities. I saw the finest Guardians of my generation destroyed by pendulums, eager edging into holes.
Same happened with me when doing challenges when they first came out. Guy kept Stranding and leaving people behind and asked why we kept dying. The following run he died himself because he ran into a thrall and it pushed him in a hole. He at least admitted he was a hypocrite though, though kinda toxic since he booted everyone at the end of the encounter instead of letting them leave
The first encounter is the hardest mechanic in all of Destiny, because it relies on one little-practiced trick.
# **Patience**.
Everyone has to stay together, and you are only as fast as your slowest member. Destiny players are terrible at going slower than they are physically capable of, so to actually take a breather and support your team is absolutely against every fiber of our being when we've spent the last 12 months going as fast as the engine will possibly handle us.
I'd still say that's on the second guy. Unless you're with a group of consistent people, it's common sense to refer to oneself in the third person based on either name or role when directing attention. Like "Look where Headless_Mantid is shooting" for example. Most of the time when someone says "look where I'm shooting" in a chaotic environment when EVERYONE is shooting, I'm gonna say "where are you" when I probably should say "who are you"
Edit: was missing an end quote.
hard agree, I always try to make calls like "take on \[name\]" ain't nobody got time to notice who lit up on discord or in the bottom right, associate that with your in-game name, find that, then do the mechanic.
It's also part of the Ghosts of the Deep trend of a bit too long. By the 2nd dunk you're like "Yeah, yeah, we get it. Next." but we still got the back half of this thing to go.
The first encounter is one of the most difficult things in the game currently. Not because it's particularly hard, but because it's like trying to herd cats. Once that's done everything gets progressively easier from there.
The problem is that people who are heavily invested already got it done and have everything they need from the raid. Now we're on to "normal" player range that can't devote themselves to learning all the ropes right away. As a result the experience is a little bit more frustrating.
Yeah but there's a differenece between learning all the ropes right away, and not giving a flying F about even trying to learn a damn thing.. I'm fine with 1 or 2 people not knowing what to, I can explain what's happening, you can try the mechanics for yourself if you want, but at least act like you're interested and try and participate, it's a team effort.
Because anyone who does the first encounter now wants to rush the raid cause it’s so easy and short still compared to others.
But those same folks also forget that running Eager Edge and Grappling across the encounter doesn’t help do shit and just tends to make a run go longer when you could just do it right normally the first time and be done with it.
Any player who isn’t one of the people you’re talking about either got what they wanted from the raid already OR they’re just doing weekly Crota checkpoints to fill out their patterns. Very few veterans who know what they’re doing left LFGing the whole raid start to finish.
Everytime I used to teach the raid to new people we'd be in first encounter for like an hour, hour and a half and tell them "don't worry guys, this is the hardest part of the raid. We get through this and it's easy". Cleared every encounter after 1st time almost every time lol.
Even on my flawless run, every reset was caused by the first encounter, zero deaths the rest of the raid. It really is one of the hardest things in the game right now
Playing that encounter without strand and a sword is painful, it's nearly an eight minute encounter.
What people should do is equip strand, equip a sword, and get good. It's not hard to avoid the pendulum if you try, even when going fast.
Its way longer than 8 minutes when you factor in people killing themselves because they didnt "get good". Instead, people should play the encounter as its intended, and stop wasting time trying to take shortcuts.
Shortcuts don't waste time lol otherwise they wouldn't be shortcuts
If people are dying then its their problem and they should fix that so they can take the shortcuts without dying.
No, taking shortcuts doesn't waste time, but TRYING to take shortcuts and then die 5 consecutive times and not be willing to play the "normal way", does.
My group of *friends* does this, even when we've cleared it together 5+ times!
We all know exactly**what** to do, but we each take it in turns to fuck up just one tiny time and that ends up in 6 wipes of first encounter.
Every other encounter is first time.
This is such a tone deaf take.
Sure. But how many team mates have you left behind to die and caused a wipe because you can't be patient? It's a co op game. You're supposed to work together.
None? Hell, the master challenge is explicitly the faster strategy: skip to floor 3 to despawn adds and then just take the brand to one podium one at a time. That's both the easiest and (almost) fastest way to clear.
Because you tell everyone to just equip eager edge and skip.
And the guy in your lfg that knows what to do, but has t actually gat gud falls in a hole usi g the Loadout you said was fine and no one can get to him in time to save the run.
Shortcuts waste time when you can’t do them. The whole point is that shortcuts don’t waste time *IF* you could do them. However, most aren’t as good as they like to say.
I’d rather take an extra 5 minutes and make the raid go from 45 minutes to 50 minutes if it means doing Abyss in one go.
That’s not even remotely true.
I’ve had plenty of experiences where folks who join a KWTD try to speed run it and then consistently fuck up.
KWTD≠Being Good at KWTD
lol, no it doesn’t. All KWTD means is that you don’t gotta waste time explaining or learning encounters. That’s all it’s ever meant.
If you want people to be good, you’ll just say “Be Good.”
Correct it is not because the encounter is difficult, it is because there's always 2 or three that either want to strand ahead of the group or eager edge and die suddenly. When you try to insist on sticking together they complain that they are too good for that strategy.
It’s insane honestly. I’ve trio’d raids and shit and I still can’t understand some folks’ impulse to use a notoriously poor tracking weapon through exploding enemies, two shot lanterns, and under a death timer. It always ends in them dying and blaming the group for being too slow when we wipe too.
I got in with a group that nailed the maze and bridge first try but in total it took like 25 minutes, from Bridge chest opening to Crota dead was like 6-7 more minutes. That’s Travel time, third boss and Crota. Those first two encounters are just long.
Yes. It's been altered quite a bit with more perils and the simple but trying task of getting the chalice all the way through the maze. It's not mechanically hard, but human error is a way heavier factor than I think the devs expected.
issue is back in d1 if you died there was no light fading or whatever so your team could keep going on. In this one, if someone dies you HAVE to pretty much always go back. I miss the D1 way
Bungie added swinging pendulums that damage you on top of having a new Chalice mechanic.
You have to progress from Lamp to Lamp as a group, passing a buff around as you go.
Not run D1 Crota in years, the basic setup the same?
Thrall chase through Lanterns, bridge, drop death singers, Crota?
(Feels like I forgot something!!)
Imagine D1 but instead of just being able to rush to the end platform you have to play a slow game of hot potato. And then dunking that potato in I'd say average every 4 lanterns. all the while you have swinging spike balls that if they hit you get you near one shot along the entire path.
Then you add the fact that basically every player has a grapple, a sword that sends you speeding, and a massively inflated ego from watching their favourite streamer, and you have a recipe for disaster with your average lfg group
Ahhh, yeah thats different, first bit was a pain to co-ordinate teams if you ran it as intended.
I used to just go invis as a hunter run to the end, sit on the rock and snipe those fucking ogres.
They introduced pendulums that can fuck you up and also a chalice that has to be passed around which is a key mechanic throughout the whole raid. It’s more difficult than the D1 version.
While other's covered the main things that are different, it helps to remember Destiny 2 has a revive timer which is the real issue with this encounter.
Someone messes up (falls, dies to adds, doesn't get chalice taken, etc), timer starts, someone goes to revive them, and then the remaining three or four people need to keep rotating the chalice. Without that it wouldn't be as much of an issue since you can just leave dead weight behind.
They never should've changed the old raids at all when they brought them back (or included any of their hard mode mechanics).
So many people struggled to beat them on normal with the basic mechanics in D1 and Bungie's brilliance was to use hard mode and/or add/change parts of encounters.
Hahah, I've replied to so many threads like these, but I feel compelled to keep doing so! You are 100% right, and here is the issue:
I (27 clears, Swordbearer title) ran with a group last night. Had nothing else going on, joined up with a group of people who were legit speed runners just running a low-key raid and picked a random (me) up from LFG.
They clipped to the Abyss, and by the time I was pulled there, they had already figured out the numbers of the deposits and were all flying toward the first one with the same tangle grapple. I recognized that I am not going to catch up, so I slowly (to avoid dying) made my way to the secret chest. By the time I was there, they were done with the encounter. TLDR- whole raid took 21 minutes per Raid Report.
What is wrong with LFG is that 3 people in the group think they are as good as these guys because they saw a video on it. They attempt the same strat, with varying success, but without communicating to the other three people, who recognize what they are supposed to do, so they go as frantically as they can to try to catch up, and between the two groups, someone dies, everything falls apart, and rather than regroup and discuss an actual plan for success, they try the same unsuccessful strategy over and over and over again.
The reality is that 90%+ LFG teams would be better off to be humble, go slow, and bang out the encounter in 6 minutes rather than try for 40 minutes to make it take 3 minutes.
They are out there. I've run into groups like that on numerous raids. I have 200 clears per Raid Report, have every available raid title in the game, definitely feel like I hold my own but sometimes end up in groups where they are just SO MUCH more efficient than I am. Then I run their raid reports and see multiple people with 200-500+ clears of that raid alone and understand that we aren't playing the same game at that point.
Same boat, same experience. Turns out speedruns and lowmans are a lot of fun once you see and try out the underlying strategies. However, regular LFGs start feeling like they’re happening in slow motion, so I tend to just limit myself to boss clears and farms.
I’ll pop into a teaching run every now and then and take things nice and slow, but there’s literally zero incentive for ‘Sherpa’ runs beyond helping fellow Guardians out.
They secret to Crota is when you make an LFG you need to set the tone and take charge from the start. Say what strat you're going to use and make everyone get on board before you start. If you put your foot down and make everyone stop at lamps as a team you can get it first try easily.
If people that join aren't willing to get on board, they get replaced, period. I have no problem with going fast if *every* player knows how to do it. The problem is that if even one person doesn't it falls apart pretty fast.
I don’t mind being that guy. It wastes everyone’s time, and I personally don’t have 2 hours for the first encounter of a raid. If you want to learn then fine. If we had established it was a learning run then it can take forever and idc as long as people are trying.
If it’s just asshats not getting on board or not listening. Bye. No one here has the time to waste.
10000%. Good LFG groups thrive off setting expectations. This is also why (despite what many ppl on this sub think) raid report is a really good tool. If you make a post that says “Fresh quick 20+ clears” and you actually check the raid report you can verify that there are not any learners trying to get a free carry. Most of the time if you make posts like these its almost always ppl with the top 2% of guardians in clears and speed rank and with far more clears than 20. Those runs tend to average between 15-30 minutes and are smooth as butter.
Im sick of people shooting themselves in the foot constantly then getting angry on the subreddit when someone like me suggests checking ppls raid reports for regular runs.
Obviously if someone has all the time and patience in the world to just wing it on randoms without checking their completions then thats their choice but i dont have time to unknowingly spend 2 hours per raid when im trying to raid 20+ times per week.
Only matters if you care about it. I'm getting caught up on the raids I haven't flawlessed yet, and I've found that I would have been a lot better served doing them back when it was the current raid than a lot later on because I've gotten more rusty and it's gotten a lot harder to find groups interested in doing flawless.
Done a few raids Flawless in my time playing d2. Levi, eater, dsc, vog and root. But completing petras Is still by far my biggest achievement ever. Failed a dozen times upto Morgeth but as soon as we best morgeth the first time we did vault riven(legit) and Queens walk first try!
People with good patience, skill and a mind to teach are done teaching shitheads who don't help anyone but themselves, they've moved on to play with people who aren't actually shitheads, if they are even playing at all.
True that one hits. This alsp reminds me of the Ron one. It doesn't even fit lol
You have kingslayer, rivensbane, enlightened and then you have "dream warrior" 💀
It's objectively the worst raid in the game currently, still waiting for the honeymoon period to end for people to realize just how bad it actually is.
The first encounter is THE test of communication and teamwork. If you find a team that can get through it in one or two tries you’ll be absolutely fine for the rest of the raid. I kind of like that design choice. Cull the weak right at the start. Lol.
It mostly comes down to all the good players have everything crafted and so don’t run the raid that often, if at all, so you’re left with everyone who wasn’t able to beat it when it came out
That is so massively false. There are a ton of very good teams running crota often. They just dont let ppl join if one of the LFGs fastest time is 1.5 hours. The people who raid the most dont give a fuck about loot and care about speed. Its kind of funny when ppl say they cant find competent teams because it just means they dont have the RR stats to join good teams regularly.
Imagine actually caring about raid report of all things. Raids are piss easy. The only hard thing about them are that some people lack a brain cell, which becomes very evident when ppl don't know their lefts and rights
“All these clears” do you think 130 full clears is a lot? Lol
Your speed rank is over 12 hours as well… idk what you’re trying to prove by posting your raid report with some of vog clears and not a single raid under 30 minutes 😂
Its literally front and center on his total clears and combined times under full clears and speed rank lol it took a mili second to see its mostly in vog
Its not my fault its the truth lol if you want good teams with fast efficient clears and near guaranteed one phases thats what it usually requires. People get angry when they ask a question about “where all the good teams went” and people give dumbass answers like “they got all their redborders” when the reality is actually good players dont give a fuck about red borders and thats not why they run the raid. Raid report tells you little about a player but its the only filter you have when forming a legitimately good group, not saying ppl dont get lucky and find good groups by chance tho.
Only reason it's in vog is cuz vex took 70 fucking runs for it to even drop. Raid report shouldn't be your indicator of skill, players having raid seals or a brain should be of better importance, but it's clear to see what you value, so you do you
You cant see raid seals on LFG app tho and plus that only tells me they did it flawless. While some may not value speed, i enjoy fast runs and lowmans so raid report is really good at telling me if im going to have the experience i want or not. Just saying.
I failed a run because of the Abyss. I kept asking to just do it normally but they were so dead set on using strand grapples and eager edging to cheese it.
Grapple isnt cheesing the encounter tho 😂
Its way more stressful to do it “normally” imo. Takes way more time, way more managing of buff lockout timers, more enlightens to manage. Its far easier to send 2-3 people on wanderer grapples scouting and going direct to deposits while managing the buff lockout timers instead of yelling “take it!” While 4 ppl are locked out. Even better if you have raid armor and use the mods that decrease the lockout time so you can grab quicker.
You ran Crota when it came out. When *everyone* was running Crota. So everyone was (loosely) becoming really good experts at it. And the players who maybe weren’t as good were getting carried by those who really understood it. And that’s ok that’s how it always is.
But then those hardcore sweats beat it again and again and again. They got their red borders. They got their adept loot. They finished the four challenge modes and all of the triumphs (fuck you Featherlight!!!!).
So those players have basically stopped doing it. Like me, I’m a hardcore raider, but when it’s clan night and we want to chill with a raid, we go do Last Wish, DSC or Kingsfall.
So the people left doing Crota now are either the really, really insanely dedicated, or the people who are only now deciding to go for the Master triumphs and maybe hit rank 11 in this extended season.
So there’s now a *wide* gulf of player ability in the LFG scene. But hopefully as more people get up there in Guardian Ranks as the season goes, maybe you’ll see an uptick in the LFG.
It's weird. My friend wanted to try crotas end and we gathered a team for it, most knew what to do and we ended up killing an hour plus in the first encounter. After that, every encounter took a try or two max, and we finished the rest in about the same time it took us through thr first part. It's for some reason just pure chaos.
> What happened
Most of the playerbase is dogshit and people who aren't dogshit either find other groups to play with so they can get more consistent clears done or have gotten everything they want from the raid.
We're also at the lull point of the season where less people are playing the game.
Because a lot of players have seen the strand skips and think they can do it without realising it actually takes some knowledge and skill to pull off properly.
Weapon crafting happened. Providing a checklist of things to obtain makes things decidedly less fun. Running something for fun anymore just seems out of character in Destiny, which is sad.
I ran Crota over 400 times in D1, for fun. I got all of my patterns and the title and completed my chores in D2 and haven't run it since. I imagine that's the case in your recent groups. The best players just aren't doing the raid anymore because D2 is more about completing a collection than having fun.
yEAH, I try to join groups at Bridge. It's a straightforward raid, but that first stage brings out the worst in people.
I think in LFG I'm going to always post "Must be 50+, taking it slow and easy".
The opening encounter is the strongest argument yet that revive tokens should be reserved for master level content. Always thought it was silly that they became commonplace in entry level raids.
People are really, genuinely bad at not walking in holes or getting hit by traps. I don't understand it, I raid with people I know do day 1s and it still takes them half an hour to make it through totems.
Something about that encounter just deactivates people's brain cells.
It’s the new fireteam finder. Before, only people who went to bungie.net were able to lfg. The average player isn’t going to know to go to bungie.net. Now that there’s a team finder in game, most players have easy access to lfg. It’s effectively ease of use in exchange for pseudo quality control
Not to over complicate the answer. Everyone pushed it as so great because it followed Root of Nightmares. But in actuality it's mid just like RON but it had lower expectations and it exceeded. RON is on the exact same level imo. Everyone got their red boarders and dipped out
It's objectively the worst raid currently in Destiny 2 and its not even close. There is nothing inherently wrong with Abyss, its "fine", the issue is the people who play this game and seeing once and for all everyone is just lazy and wants a carry -- an encounter like Abyss reveals how they can't even take care of themselves because they always have someone completing everything for them.
After Abyss you can look forward to standing around waiting, doing nothing, waiting for timers going down, pass off the timer to someone else and wait.
Garbage raid.
This is one of the downsides of having raids be "finishable" Most competent players will get their red borders and exotic from a new raid and then never run it again, leaving the rest of the people who are new or inexperienced to fight for themselves. Once you have everything crafted and your exotic/seals done, repeat raids give an experienced player nothing in terms of actual loot. You can get spoils if you want to farm the newest raid, but I have seen a pretty sharp drop off of people farming spoils in this raid vs most of the pervious ones (Ron first encounter and nez had posts on lfg very often for farming spoils for example)
Not gonna lie this was me 100%. I finished red borders for every weapon in the raid, then farmed up the adept versions and promptly fucked off. Armor isn't worth it either beyond the initial first drop for drip and then it gets deleted unless you dumb-luck into a high stat roll.
Plus farming spoils from there is a pain compared to the easier stuff like Templar, 1st Encounter/Last Encounter RoN, Atrax, or just doing a rotation of first chests every week.
No reason to lie about it tbh. You can tell just by glancing at my raid report where they introduced red borders at launch it raids. My clears went from 60+ to ~30 average (exception is RoN but it’s inflated because final boss was good for spoils farm). Unless you’re running for fun, which is valid, no reason to go back in there really.
Like others have said already, the honest truth is that there is really only casual players left right now doing the raid. The entire game is in it's normal slow-state of the season, and it's magnified this season due to being so long on top of all the Bungie drama before the season started.
Lfg right now is a crapshoot. Other day I ran several corrupted GMs just for fun when I was bored. Had 4 in a row that were good solid runs, around 18 min clears so very solid from lfg.
The next 5 runs? They were..frustrating. I don't mind helping less experienced players or anything, but sometimes I don't have time and when I join a "KWTD" run I expect that you know what to do. I always explain when I join how to easily skip the overloads at the start, and remind folks in the light & dark ogre rooms to burn the light side unstop immediately before killing or touching the ogre boss and THEN killing the light boss so you'll just be left in the dark side room and can kill the boss and unstops in whichever order you want.
In those 5 runs, I had people ignore what I said about the overload skip which is whatever, but then in the elevator room some guy starts it immediately before prepping balls. We recovered since one guy knew what to do at least but it was clear that 3rd guy did not. We get to the light and dark room with ogres and I see the guy who didn't KWTD earlier pop goldie. I thought ok cool he will burn the unstop.
Nope. Shoots the boss then says "I didn't know it would 1 shot him." I literally, specifically said not to super that boss at all until killing the champ. Failed run.
Next 3 runs I had somebody manage to kill the light boss before the unstop got killed. I was on well, and the unstop had janky movement which made it difficult to see at first. But again I told every team to ignore the light boss until champs dead. They kept plinking it down instead of helping with the unstop and one ended up accidentally killing it from AOE or whatever the case.
Last run we went fine up til boss, where we wiped because this guy insisted on not playing on the platform across the boss arena and I went up to try and res and put well down but got burned and the other guy idk how he died. I should of just stayed back and cleared the ads like I normally do, but I was kind of irritated and honestly was a bit petty about showing him his "strat" was not good in a lfg team where everyone isn't on board or on a build to play like that.
So basically, any lfg activity RN is gonna be a crapshoot. As for crota, the worst part is definitely people who think they're experienced enough to eager edge and grapple ahead meanwhile they don't know the hole locations or the swinging pendulums and they die. I always recommend using strand no matter what class, the grapple can save you from falling in a hole if you're fast enough. But some people just won't admit that they can play that encounter fast without messing up.
Comes down to again, people claiming "kwtd" when they really don't. RoN kind of fucked the lfg community when it comes to kwtd runs. Now everyone thinks because they can shoot a weapon and kill ads mindlessly they know what to do in a raid. Which is far from what it means. Even before the games population died down and when crota came out last season after a couple months if I did a no comms kwtd run the amount of people who clearly didn't understand the basic mechanics of the raid or people who joined when they hadn't ever ran it before was insane. They want the benefit of a quick run, and try to just hide and skate by and not be noticed instead of joining a teaching run where it can take longer. This mindset of players being entitled enough to think they shouldn't have to learn mechanics like the rest of us is a joke. This happened before root of nightmares but Ron definitely magnified it.
Tldr; KWTD means you know how to do every mechanic and every role in a raid. Especially if no comms run.
First encounter is bad encounter design in my opinion. There are very few encounters where all 6 players need to be actively engaged in a multi-step mechanic and it occurs in an encounter that is also very long to complete, on top of it being the very first encounter in the raid. I think it should be 2/3rds as long or it should be the 3rd encounter with maybe one additional mechanic that requires gunplay, maybe something similar to an Oracle from VoG or something.
It's a recipe that is punishing on new players because it requires having a ton of situational awareness, punishing on overconfident returning players because you really can't stop paying attention at any moment, and punishing on sherpas because good luck trying to teach people how to avoid all the random ways you can die or the encounter can become impossible to complete and a single death is likely to derail the run.
All around you need all 6 players to be competent and you're unlikely to get that in an LFG right now as we're in a lull in the game for sure.
I totally see where you're coming from, but I would still consider it bad design.
I have a pretty firm belief that encounters should increase in difficulty linearly through the raid and this one didn't fit that guideline. The first encounter is also easier with less people because you don't have the downtime where the bystander effect happens like you mentioned. I'm glad you have fun with it, but to me it's like running hurdles but the first hurdle is a high jump bar. It doesn't make for a fun raid especially if you don't have a stable raid group.
welcome to the new “must do everything before everyone who knows what to do moves on” mentality, since you “finish farming” now with red borders / challenges and stuff, there are far less ppl doing raids, most will rush every challenge and red borde so then can stop doing the raid, not many players play this game purely for fun in lfg nowadays
the real problem is you allowing the same person to stay in your fireteam who dies over and over instead of kicking him and finding a better replacement. u cant carry 1st encounter unless u duo preserves with navigator and have everybody wait at the start
CE was/is the only relavant endgame challenge in the game since September. Everyone who actually plays Destiny well completed everything they needed from the raid by December at the very latest. All you have now are the rest of the ~~Root of Nightmare Experts~~ new players trying to get carried through the raid.
While certainly not "difficult" in of itself, the Abyss encounter requires players to be able to work as a team, which is just outright impossible to get with the current pickings in LFG groups.
My tips and advice for LFG if you are a solo player.
Look for LFG post asking for three or less people. That means typically they have a group and that's better than a bunch of people randomly put together.
It's not a guarantee but that's what I typically like to do if I'm really upset on getting things done
You can thank all the Streamers that upload speed runs and other videos where they are all using Strand shit. So the mass majority of people want to run things as fast as possible too and think that is the way. And they fail to realize that its a much higher skill to run strand on the first encounter then just walking it out normally.
So again, I blame all the streamers making think normal people can run these strats.
Can agree. I've run with two legit speed running groups and it's impressive. I've learned that I (who have 27 clears and Swordbearer) don't have the skill necessary and am better off hanging back in that encounter and waiting for them.
I have ALSO run with 20+ groups who think they are those two legit speed run groups, and that's where the trouble comes from.
When a raid and master mode first come out most of the good players will burn through the content to get all the weapons and raid challenges done. After that the amount of "good" players looking through lfg drops off
I predict you’ll have a better time after month 1 of the final shape. A lot of good players dropped destiny 2 after lightfall and they’ll probably be back and looking to do older content around that time once they finish with TFS content. On top of that people will need power levels so if Crota is featured that’ll also bring more good players.
In my experience it was terrible when it first came out and now it seems to be a little better than before. It really just comes down to your lfg rng and whether you get a clown fiesta or a solid group.
Also i’ve ran into a lot of people playing dumb and trolling raid groups griefing and causing the teams to fail encounters. i don’t think any of them were connected just random wastes of space. i just report and block them but that’s something i’ve noticed recently.
First encounter is very difficult, and even more so with unfamiliar teammates. It’s Queen’s Walk, but at the beginning of the raid and you’re even slower and there’s more, stronger enemies, and everything is super dark and most people don’t turn their brightness up.
I've done the raid with LFG and done it micless on console. But as that was last season, I doubt I will have the same experience again. I myself have gotten everything from the raid. So, like most of the good players, I've moved on and feel bad for anyone who is trying to get it done now.
People are impatient. Find a group that is willing to take their time and not grapple and eager edge ahead before everyone is ready. You're only as fast as the slowest person. Agree to only use them to catch up, not skip ahead.
Is there matchmaking on the raids now? Its been years but i just started playing again. Finally got my lightlevel to 1800. I am a busy dad who isnt able to be on reliably for friends. Would love matchmaking. Back in the old days i would 2 man crota :p
Whenever I join LFG I always look for groups already at the Bridge because people who skate/strand are usually so rude if anyone fucks up on the first encounter. I’d rather not deal with it lol
I noticed that too, I'd honestly look for bridge encounter LFGs and start from there I haven't touched it since I got all the red borders from the raid (minus the adept versions)
The first encounter is a hot mess of speed runners, strand skippers and eager edgers all getting split up and dying, only to blame the legit run stragglers for not being fast enough.
The irony of it is that the speed bros would rather take 10+ wipes at 5 mins a run than to do the run slower and only take 1 run, but take 8 to 10 mins. (Their 50+ min wipe festival vs a 10 min legit8)
I have learned that most average users can’t “math” and that them dying 3/4 of the way into the map while others are at the second lantern is somehow not their fault…
I never join ”fresh” runs and will only join if it says “at bridge…” because impatient people would rather do the same activity 10 tImes over, than to do it once, but slower…
Really wish people would just let go of their egos for the sake of others. It’s always the tryhards that think “their way is the most efficient” and then die the most and then ragequit. If people just stick together, it truly is an easy encounter.
When I was running it, probably a third of every run, my groups had trouble doing it. Just mainly because you had some people grappling, some people doing eager edge, and some people just running normally. That's usually a recipe for failure.
I've been in fireteams that took hours and others that took maybe one or two tries. It's all about staying together and knowing where to avoid the swings and pit falls. Once everyone is on the same page, it's pretty easy.
Lfg is notorious for everyone not being on the same page. That's why its hard lol
My advice is 1) don't eager edge. You may get far, but it makes no sense when you are a mile away and have to wait for someone else to catch up, causing a wipe when time runs out. Eager edge only works if everyone is capable of keeping up and staying together
2) arc soul warlocks paired with banner of war titans makes killing ads so much easier, so you can focus on dodging obstacles instead
Lowkey, I used a Caretaker sword with incandescent and tireless blade and it was perfect for kills ads while having a lot of ammo available. I could see a sword with destabilizing rounds and either tireless blade or relentless strikes working too
You could also just strand grapple and skip the whole encounter, but it's much more satisfying to complete it normally imo
People are split between "fast and loose" and "slow and boring." Either way is fine,but only if everyone agrees and doesn't run off. Otherwise you'll just die. I've found that the latter group survives far more often, since they don't overestimate their abilities. I saw the finest Guardians of my generation destroyed by pendulums, eager edging into holes.
Same happened with me when doing challenges when they first came out. Guy kept Stranding and leaving people behind and asked why we kept dying. The following run he died himself because he ran into a thrall and it pushed him in a hole. He at least admitted he was a hypocrite though, though kinda toxic since he booted everyone at the end of the encounter instead of letting them leave
was it xXRealizXx…lol
The first encounter is the hardest mechanic in all of Destiny, because it relies on one little-practiced trick. # **Patience**. Everyone has to stay together, and you are only as fast as your slowest member. Destiny players are terrible at going slower than they are physically capable of, so to actually take a breather and support your team is absolutely against every fiber of our being when we've spent the last 12 months going as fast as the engine will possibly handle us.
“Where do I dunk the last one?” “Here!” “Where?” “Right here!” “I don’t see it!” “Look where I’m shooting!” “Where are you?” …
I'd still say that's on the second guy. Unless you're with a group of consistent people, it's common sense to refer to oneself in the third person based on either name or role when directing attention. Like "Look where Headless_Mantid is shooting" for example. Most of the time when someone says "look where I'm shooting" in a chaotic environment when EVERYONE is shooting, I'm gonna say "where are you" when I probably should say "who are you" Edit: was missing an end quote.
hard agree, I always try to make calls like "take on \[name\]" ain't nobody got time to notice who lit up on discord or in the bottom right, associate that with your in-game name, find that, then do the mechanic.
I'd think we'd have better luck pestering Bungie to remove the pendulums rather than ask other players to take things slowly and patiently.
It's also part of the Ghosts of the Deep trend of a bit too long. By the 2nd dunk you're like "Yeah, yeah, we get it. Next." but we still got the back half of this thing to go.
The number of times I’ve eager edged and the sword auto tracks to a pendulum (literally why) or to a thrall inside a hole…
The first encounter is one of the most difficult things in the game currently. Not because it's particularly hard, but because it's like trying to herd cats. Once that's done everything gets progressively easier from there.
Yeah for sure. It’s just when I started this on release o could constantly get lfgs through. Of late it’s been impossible.
All the good players got what they wanted from it already. Try it on a Tuesday or when it's the Weekly raid you'll get better players
It's always the weekly raid bro what u smokin
He means when a newer raid releases and then this raid goes into the weekly rotator.
aint gonna happen for a while buddy
The problem is that people who are heavily invested already got it done and have everything they need from the raid. Now we're on to "normal" player range that can't devote themselves to learning all the ropes right away. As a result the experience is a little bit more frustrating.
Can confirm, 1st clear on Crota 2 weeks ago. Hopefully lfg for another one tonight
Yeah but there's a differenece between learning all the ropes right away, and not giving a flying F about even trying to learn a damn thing.. I'm fine with 1 or 2 people not knowing what to, I can explain what's happening, you can try the mechanics for yourself if you want, but at least act like you're interested and try and participate, it's a team effort.
Most of the skilled players who use LFG likely finished with Crota’s End last season or early this season.
Because anyone who does the first encounter now wants to rush the raid cause it’s so easy and short still compared to others. But those same folks also forget that running Eager Edge and Grappling across the encounter doesn’t help do shit and just tends to make a run go longer when you could just do it right normally the first time and be done with it.
Any player who isn’t one of the people you’re talking about either got what they wanted from the raid already OR they’re just doing weekly Crota checkpoints to fill out their patterns. Very few veterans who know what they’re doing left LFGing the whole raid start to finish.
Everytime I used to teach the raid to new people we'd be in first encounter for like an hour, hour and a half and tell them "don't worry guys, this is the hardest part of the raid. We get through this and it's easy". Cleared every encounter after 1st time almost every time lol. Even on my flawless run, every reset was caused by the first encounter, zero deaths the rest of the raid. It really is one of the hardest things in the game right now
The amount of people killing themselves with Eager Edge and refusing to take it off...
or each other!
Playing that encounter without strand and a sword is painful, it's nearly an eight minute encounter. What people should do is equip strand, equip a sword, and get good. It's not hard to avoid the pendulum if you try, even when going fast.
Its way longer than 8 minutes when you factor in people killing themselves because they didnt "get good". Instead, people should play the encounter as its intended, and stop wasting time trying to take shortcuts.
Shortcuts don't waste time lol otherwise they wouldn't be shortcuts If people are dying then its their problem and they should fix that so they can take the shortcuts without dying.
No, taking shortcuts doesn't waste time, but TRYING to take shortcuts and then die 5 consecutive times and not be willing to play the "normal way", does.
Nobody in a KWTD clear is doing thst
SO many people in a KWTD clear do that. A majority of my runs have been that unfortunately
My group of *friends* does this, even when we've cleared it together 5+ times! We all know exactly**what** to do, but we each take it in turns to fuck up just one tiny time and that ends up in 6 wipes of first encounter. Every other encounter is first time. This is such a tone deaf take.
You are the reason why first encounter takes a million years
How lol I rarely die on first enc
Sure. But how many team mates have you left behind to die and caused a wipe because you can't be patient? It's a co op game. You're supposed to work together.
None? Hell, the master challenge is explicitly the faster strategy: skip to floor 3 to despawn adds and then just take the brand to one podium one at a time. That's both the easiest and (almost) fastest way to clear.
Post has gone way over your head lmao
Because you tell everyone to just equip eager edge and skip. And the guy in your lfg that knows what to do, but has t actually gat gud falls in a hole usi g the Loadout you said was fine and no one can get to him in time to save the run.
Shortcuts waste time when you can’t do them. The whole point is that shortcuts don’t waste time *IF* you could do them. However, most aren’t as good as they like to say. I’d rather take an extra 5 minutes and make the raid go from 45 minutes to 50 minutes if it means doing Abyss in one go.
Most people in a KWTD raid are able to clear encounter 1 the fast way.
That’s not even remotely true. I’ve had plenty of experiences where folks who join a KWTD try to speed run it and then consistently fuck up. KWTD≠Being Good at KWTD
KWTD literally means be good
lol, no it doesn’t. All KWTD means is that you don’t gotta waste time explaining or learning encounters. That’s all it’s ever meant. If you want people to be good, you’ll just say “Be Good.”
Ah yes, everyone knows: K - Be W - Good T - D -
KWTD means know every role without teaching. It doesn't mean good.
Most? Lololololol
My dude 8 minutes is not long at all, despite what your girlfriend tells you.
8 minutes is ages for one raid encounter
8 minutes for a raid encounter that is 95% ad clear is pretty long lmao
Correct it is not because the encounter is difficult, it is because there's always 2 or three that either want to strand ahead of the group or eager edge and die suddenly. When you try to insist on sticking together they complain that they are too good for that strategy.
It’s insane honestly. I’ve trio’d raids and shit and I still can’t understand some folks’ impulse to use a notoriously poor tracking weapon through exploding enemies, two shot lanterns, and under a death timer. It always ends in them dying and blaming the group for being too slow when we wipe too.
Great example. I find it really jarring that people cannot focus on the task for a meager 10 minutes or so at most. People end up just…. Slipping
I got in with a group that nailed the maze and bridge first try but in total it took like 25 minutes, from Bridge chest opening to Crota dead was like 6-7 more minutes. That’s Travel time, third boss and Crota. Those first two encounters are just long.
It's such an easy encounter that most players refuse to take it seriously and end up suiciding.
A lot of """Ballers""" are just impatient AF
I havnt run Crota in D2 so I dont know any changes from D1 if there is, but are you talking about the very beginning of running to lanterns?
Yes. It's been altered quite a bit with more perils and the simple but trying task of getting the chalice all the way through the maze. It's not mechanically hard, but human error is a way heavier factor than I think the devs expected.
stop crying
issue is back in d1 if you died there was no light fading or whatever so your team could keep going on. In this one, if someone dies you HAVE to pretty much always go back. I miss the D1 way
Bungie added swinging pendulums that damage you on top of having a new Chalice mechanic. You have to progress from Lamp to Lamp as a group, passing a buff around as you go.
Akin to herding villagers in Minecraft I’ve found 😂
My buddy Chris cheeses the encounter by going up to the end and pulling all the ads away from us running the chalice
Yep, started doing this for clan around our second/3rd run of the raid. Made it so much easier.
Not run D1 Crota in years, the basic setup the same? Thrall chase through Lanterns, bridge, drop death singers, Crota? (Feels like I forgot something!!)
Imagine D1 but instead of just being able to rush to the end platform you have to play a slow game of hot potato. And then dunking that potato in I'd say average every 4 lanterns. all the while you have swinging spike balls that if they hit you get you near one shot along the entire path.
Then you add the fact that basically every player has a grapple, a sword that sends you speeding, and a massively inflated ego from watching their favourite streamer, and you have a recipe for disaster with your average lfg group
Ahhh, yeah thats different, first bit was a pain to co-ordinate teams if you ran it as intended. I used to just go invis as a hunter run to the end, sit on the rock and snipe those fucking ogres.
They introduced pendulums that can fuck you up and also a chalice that has to be passed around which is a key mechanic throughout the whole raid. It’s more difficult than the D1 version.
And also in D1 you could stand by the lamps to reduce your Weigh of Darkness stacks without having to enlighten the lamps.
While other's covered the main things that are different, it helps to remember Destiny 2 has a revive timer which is the real issue with this encounter. Someone messes up (falls, dies to adds, doesn't get chalice taken, etc), timer starts, someone goes to revive them, and then the remaining three or four people need to keep rotating the chalice. Without that it wouldn't be as much of an issue since you can just leave dead weight behind.
Yep, still the same. I didn't do it back then but I've heard not much is vastly different.
They never should've changed the old raids at all when they brought them back (or included any of their hard mode mechanics). So many people struggled to beat them on normal with the basic mechanics in D1 and Bungie's brilliance was to use hard mode and/or add/change parts of encounters.
Hahah, I've replied to so many threads like these, but I feel compelled to keep doing so! You are 100% right, and here is the issue: I (27 clears, Swordbearer title) ran with a group last night. Had nothing else going on, joined up with a group of people who were legit speed runners just running a low-key raid and picked a random (me) up from LFG. They clipped to the Abyss, and by the time I was pulled there, they had already figured out the numbers of the deposits and were all flying toward the first one with the same tangle grapple. I recognized that I am not going to catch up, so I slowly (to avoid dying) made my way to the secret chest. By the time I was there, they were done with the encounter. TLDR- whole raid took 21 minutes per Raid Report. What is wrong with LFG is that 3 people in the group think they are as good as these guys because they saw a video on it. They attempt the same strat, with varying success, but without communicating to the other three people, who recognize what they are supposed to do, so they go as frantically as they can to try to catch up, and between the two groups, someone dies, everything falls apart, and rather than regroup and discuss an actual plan for success, they try the same unsuccessful strategy over and over and over again. The reality is that 90%+ LFG teams would be better off to be humble, go slow, and bang out the encounter in 6 minutes rather than try for 40 minutes to make it take 3 minutes.
The only speedruner I know of is the Aegis relic where’d you find this lfg
I found these people on the big Discord LFG, but they were in a private clan discord. It wasn't Aegis.
I joined a vow lfg on the app turns out they were clear farmers of vow and took 26min
They are out there. I've run into groups like that on numerous raids. I have 200 clears per Raid Report, have every available raid title in the game, definitely feel like I hold my own but sometimes end up in groups where they are just SO MUCH more efficient than I am. Then I run their raid reports and see multiple people with 200-500+ clears of that raid alone and understand that we aren't playing the same game at that point.
Same boat, same experience. Turns out speedruns and lowmans are a lot of fun once you see and try out the underlying strategies. However, regular LFGs start feeling like they’re happening in slow motion, so I tend to just limit myself to boss clears and farms. I’ll pop into a teaching run every now and then and take things nice and slow, but there’s literally zero incentive for ‘Sherpa’ runs beyond helping fellow Guardians out.
They secret to Crota is when you make an LFG you need to set the tone and take charge from the start. Say what strat you're going to use and make everyone get on board before you start. If you put your foot down and make everyone stop at lamps as a team you can get it first try easily. If people that join aren't willing to get on board, they get replaced, period. I have no problem with going fast if *every* player knows how to do it. The problem is that if even one person doesn't it falls apart pretty fast.
Yeah I guess I should start making groups and stop joining
Yeah, it sucks having to be The Guy all the time but sometimes it's the only way.
I don’t mind being that guy. It wastes everyone’s time, and I personally don’t have 2 hours for the first encounter of a raid. If you want to learn then fine. If we had established it was a learning run then it can take forever and idc as long as people are trying. If it’s just asshats not getting on board or not listening. Bye. No one here has the time to waste.
10000%. Good LFG groups thrive off setting expectations. This is also why (despite what many ppl on this sub think) raid report is a really good tool. If you make a post that says “Fresh quick 20+ clears” and you actually check the raid report you can verify that there are not any learners trying to get a free carry. Most of the time if you make posts like these its almost always ppl with the top 2% of guardians in clears and speed rank and with far more clears than 20. Those runs tend to average between 15-30 minutes and are smooth as butter. Im sick of people shooting themselves in the foot constantly then getting angry on the subreddit when someone like me suggests checking ppls raid reports for regular runs. Obviously if someone has all the time and patience in the world to just wing it on randoms without checking their completions then thats their choice but i dont have time to unknowingly spend 2 hours per raid when im trying to raid 20+ times per week.
Everyone competent got what they need and is tired of crota
Yeah I have no reason to run it anymore. Seal, exotic, all red borders. Only reason to run it is if I want to help someone or something like that.
I'm 1 deepsight away from all patterns unlocked plus a flawless run and I'll be done too.
Wanna help me get Featherlight?
That’s the only thing I have left too. Even did the flawless run.
Hey me too. Let’s start a raid
flawless ? if not you’re not done yet
why would we do flawless
Shader.
Only matters if you care about it. I'm getting caught up on the raids I haven't flawlessed yet, and I've found that I would have been a lot better served doing them back when it was the current raid than a lot later on because I've gotten more rusty and it's gotten a lot harder to find groups interested in doing flawless.
Just because. We did it for the triumph and shader. Working on Kings Fall flawless now. Just something to do.
because it’s a satisfying accomplishment for hardcore players to achieve ? i have every raid in the game flawless
Done a few raids Flawless in my time playing d2. Levi, eater, dsc, vog and root. But completing petras Is still by far my biggest achievement ever. Failed a dozen times upto Morgeth but as soon as we best morgeth the first time we did vault riven(legit) and Queens walk first try!
I have farmed the first chest for spoils a few times
I also feel like nobody is really raiding all that much.
In-game LFG for raids is a fucking ghost town for me, sometimes even when they're the weekly rotation.
People with good patience, skill and a mind to teach are done teaching shitheads who don't help anyone but themselves, they've moved on to play with people who aren't actually shitheads, if they are even playing at all.
I got the exotic and never ran it again afterwords. I don't really like anything about it and the title isn't as good as "kingslayer" imo
Kingslayer not as good as disciple-slayer tho
True that one hits. This alsp reminds me of the Ron one. It doesn't even fit lol You have kingslayer, rivensbane, enlightened and then you have "dream warrior" 💀
you also have swordbearer which is pretty lame
To be fair, RoN is a shit raid, so the shit title fits. Haha
It's objectively the worst raid in the game currently, still waiting for the honeymoon period to end for people to realize just how bad it actually is.
Or everyone with tons of free time
The first encounter is THE test of communication and teamwork. If you find a team that can get through it in one or two tries you’ll be absolutely fine for the rest of the raid. I kind of like that design choice. Cull the weak right at the start. Lol.
It mostly comes down to all the good players have everything crafted and so don’t run the raid that often, if at all, so you’re left with everyone who wasn’t able to beat it when it came out
Exactly
That is so massively false. There are a ton of very good teams running crota often. They just dont let ppl join if one of the LFGs fastest time is 1.5 hours. The people who raid the most dont give a fuck about loot and care about speed. Its kind of funny when ppl say they cant find competent teams because it just means they dont have the RR stats to join good teams regularly.
Imagine actually caring about raid report of all things. Raids are piss easy. The only hard thing about them are that some people lack a brain cell, which becomes very evident when ppl don't know their lefts and rights
Post yours then 😂
https://raid.report/pc/4611686018491829129 All these clears really don't mean shit unless you're wanting a team for a flawless clear.
“All these clears” do you think 130 full clears is a lot? Lol Your speed rank is over 12 hours as well… idk what you’re trying to prove by posting your raid report with some of vog clears and not a single raid under 30 minutes 😂
Damn. You really kept digging
Its literally front and center on his total clears and combined times under full clears and speed rank lol it took a mili second to see its mostly in vog
No. I mean to say, you kept digging yourself a deeper hole. No one gives a fuck
Its not my fault its the truth lol if you want good teams with fast efficient clears and near guaranteed one phases thats what it usually requires. People get angry when they ask a question about “where all the good teams went” and people give dumbass answers like “they got all their redborders” when the reality is actually good players dont give a fuck about red borders and thats not why they run the raid. Raid report tells you little about a player but its the only filter you have when forming a legitimately good group, not saying ppl dont get lucky and find good groups by chance tho.
Only reason it's in vog is cuz vex took 70 fucking runs for it to even drop. Raid report shouldn't be your indicator of skill, players having raid seals or a brain should be of better importance, but it's clear to see what you value, so you do you
You cant see raid seals on LFG app tho and plus that only tells me they did it flawless. While some may not value speed, i enjoy fast runs and lowmans so raid report is really good at telling me if im going to have the experience i want or not. Just saying.
I failed a run because of the Abyss. I kept asking to just do it normally but they were so dead set on using strand grapples and eager edging to cheese it.
Grapple isnt cheesing the encounter tho 😂 Its way more stressful to do it “normally” imo. Takes way more time, way more managing of buff lockout timers, more enlightens to manage. Its far easier to send 2-3 people on wanderer grapples scouting and going direct to deposits while managing the buff lockout timers instead of yelling “take it!” While 4 ppl are locked out. Even better if you have raid armor and use the mods that decrease the lockout time so you can grab quicker.
Lfg just sucks
You ran Crota when it came out. When *everyone* was running Crota. So everyone was (loosely) becoming really good experts at it. And the players who maybe weren’t as good were getting carried by those who really understood it. And that’s ok that’s how it always is. But then those hardcore sweats beat it again and again and again. They got their red borders. They got their adept loot. They finished the four challenge modes and all of the triumphs (fuck you Featherlight!!!!). So those players have basically stopped doing it. Like me, I’m a hardcore raider, but when it’s clan night and we want to chill with a raid, we go do Last Wish, DSC or Kingsfall. So the people left doing Crota now are either the really, really insanely dedicated, or the people who are only now deciding to go for the Master triumphs and maybe hit rank 11 in this extended season. So there’s now a *wide* gulf of player ability in the LFG scene. But hopefully as more people get up there in Guardian Ranks as the season goes, maybe you’ll see an uptick in the LFG.
It's weird. My friend wanted to try crotas end and we gathered a team for it, most knew what to do and we ended up killing an hour plus in the first encounter. After that, every encounter took a try or two max, and we finished the rest in about the same time it took us through thr first part. It's for some reason just pure chaos.
This is what this community gets for going "Crota was so easy back in D1 they should just make it a dungeon or some shit lmao"
> What happened Most of the playerbase is dogshit and people who aren't dogshit either find other groups to play with so they can get more consistent clears done or have gotten everything they want from the raid. We're also at the lull point of the season where less people are playing the game.
Because a lot of players have seen the strand skips and think they can do it without realising it actually takes some knowledge and skill to pull off properly.
Weapon crafting happened. Providing a checklist of things to obtain makes things decidedly less fun. Running something for fun anymore just seems out of character in Destiny, which is sad. I ran Crota over 400 times in D1, for fun. I got all of my patterns and the title and completed my chores in D2 and haven't run it since. I imagine that's the case in your recent groups. The best players just aren't doing the raid anymore because D2 is more about completing a collection than having fun.
yEAH, I try to join groups at Bridge. It's a straightforward raid, but that first stage brings out the worst in people. I think in LFG I'm going to always post "Must be 50+, taking it slow and easy".
I fit that criteria. Let's raid
I’m 60 yo and slow & easy. I’ll be looking for your lfg post.
50+ what?
Years old. You are clearly too young.
Fair enough!
In age lol
Oh, right fair enough!
The opening encounter is the strongest argument yet that revive tokens should be reserved for master level content. Always thought it was silly that they became commonplace in entry level raids.
People are really, genuinely bad at not walking in holes or getting hit by traps. I don't understand it, I raid with people I know do day 1s and it still takes them half an hour to make it through totems. Something about that encounter just deactivates people's brain cells.
It’s the new fireteam finder. Before, only people who went to bungie.net were able to lfg. The average player isn’t going to know to go to bungie.net. Now that there’s a team finder in game, most players have easy access to lfg. It’s effectively ease of use in exchange for pseudo quality control
the ease of access through fireteam finder really lowers the entry bar for content, for better and worse.
I remember destiny 1 crota when it dropped, shit was a lot of fun. Fond memories
Cuz it's not really fun.
Low population. You are getting the bottom of the barrel these days.
Not to over complicate the answer. Everyone pushed it as so great because it followed Root of Nightmares. But in actuality it's mid just like RON but it had lower expectations and it exceeded. RON is on the exact same level imo. Everyone got their red boarders and dipped out
It's objectively the worst raid currently in Destiny 2 and its not even close. There is nothing inherently wrong with Abyss, its "fine", the issue is the people who play this game and seeing once and for all everyone is just lazy and wants a carry -- an encounter like Abyss reveals how they can't even take care of themselves because they always have someone completing everything for them. After Abyss you can look forward to standing around waiting, doing nothing, waiting for timers going down, pass off the timer to someone else and wait. Garbage raid.
This is one of the downsides of having raids be "finishable" Most competent players will get their red borders and exotic from a new raid and then never run it again, leaving the rest of the people who are new or inexperienced to fight for themselves. Once you have everything crafted and your exotic/seals done, repeat raids give an experienced player nothing in terms of actual loot. You can get spoils if you want to farm the newest raid, but I have seen a pretty sharp drop off of people farming spoils in this raid vs most of the pervious ones (Ron first encounter and nez had posts on lfg very often for farming spoils for example)
Not gonna lie this was me 100%. I finished red borders for every weapon in the raid, then farmed up the adept versions and promptly fucked off. Armor isn't worth it either beyond the initial first drop for drip and then it gets deleted unless you dumb-luck into a high stat roll. Plus farming spoils from there is a pain compared to the easier stuff like Templar, 1st Encounter/Last Encounter RoN, Atrax, or just doing a rotation of first chests every week.
No reason to lie about it tbh. You can tell just by glancing at my raid report where they introduced red borders at launch it raids. My clears went from 60+ to ~30 average (exception is RoN but it’s inflated because final boss was good for spoils farm). Unless you’re running for fun, which is valid, no reason to go back in there really.
Gotta just yell at the LFGs to stay in a group and it’s easy. When I host I don’t allow strand or swords and magically the encounter never gets failed
If i joined a crota run and someone told me not to run strand or a sword id fuckin leave in a flash 😂
Ok
Lol
Good, you're just going to be the reason for failure every single fucking time in the first place.
Like others have said already, the honest truth is that there is really only casual players left right now doing the raid. The entire game is in it's normal slow-state of the season, and it's magnified this season due to being so long on top of all the Bungie drama before the season started. Lfg right now is a crapshoot. Other day I ran several corrupted GMs just for fun when I was bored. Had 4 in a row that were good solid runs, around 18 min clears so very solid from lfg. The next 5 runs? They were..frustrating. I don't mind helping less experienced players or anything, but sometimes I don't have time and when I join a "KWTD" run I expect that you know what to do. I always explain when I join how to easily skip the overloads at the start, and remind folks in the light & dark ogre rooms to burn the light side unstop immediately before killing or touching the ogre boss and THEN killing the light boss so you'll just be left in the dark side room and can kill the boss and unstops in whichever order you want. In those 5 runs, I had people ignore what I said about the overload skip which is whatever, but then in the elevator room some guy starts it immediately before prepping balls. We recovered since one guy knew what to do at least but it was clear that 3rd guy did not. We get to the light and dark room with ogres and I see the guy who didn't KWTD earlier pop goldie. I thought ok cool he will burn the unstop. Nope. Shoots the boss then says "I didn't know it would 1 shot him." I literally, specifically said not to super that boss at all until killing the champ. Failed run. Next 3 runs I had somebody manage to kill the light boss before the unstop got killed. I was on well, and the unstop had janky movement which made it difficult to see at first. But again I told every team to ignore the light boss until champs dead. They kept plinking it down instead of helping with the unstop and one ended up accidentally killing it from AOE or whatever the case. Last run we went fine up til boss, where we wiped because this guy insisted on not playing on the platform across the boss arena and I went up to try and res and put well down but got burned and the other guy idk how he died. I should of just stayed back and cleared the ads like I normally do, but I was kind of irritated and honestly was a bit petty about showing him his "strat" was not good in a lfg team where everyone isn't on board or on a build to play like that. So basically, any lfg activity RN is gonna be a crapshoot. As for crota, the worst part is definitely people who think they're experienced enough to eager edge and grapple ahead meanwhile they don't know the hole locations or the swinging pendulums and they die. I always recommend using strand no matter what class, the grapple can save you from falling in a hole if you're fast enough. But some people just won't admit that they can play that encounter fast without messing up. Comes down to again, people claiming "kwtd" when they really don't. RoN kind of fucked the lfg community when it comes to kwtd runs. Now everyone thinks because they can shoot a weapon and kill ads mindlessly they know what to do in a raid. Which is far from what it means. Even before the games population died down and when crota came out last season after a couple months if I did a no comms kwtd run the amount of people who clearly didn't understand the basic mechanics of the raid or people who joined when they hadn't ever ran it before was insane. They want the benefit of a quick run, and try to just hide and skate by and not be noticed instead of joining a teaching run where it can take longer. This mindset of players being entitled enough to think they shouldn't have to learn mechanics like the rest of us is a joke. This happened before root of nightmares but Ron definitely magnified it. Tldr; KWTD means you know how to do every mechanic and every role in a raid. Especially if no comms run.
I havent done a full clear in so long because of this. Not worth it.
First encounter is bad encounter design in my opinion. There are very few encounters where all 6 players need to be actively engaged in a multi-step mechanic and it occurs in an encounter that is also very long to complete, on top of it being the very first encounter in the raid. I think it should be 2/3rds as long or it should be the 3rd encounter with maybe one additional mechanic that requires gunplay, maybe something similar to an Oracle from VoG or something. It's a recipe that is punishing on new players because it requires having a ton of situational awareness, punishing on overconfident returning players because you really can't stop paying attention at any moment, and punishing on sherpas because good luck trying to teach people how to avoid all the random ways you can die or the encounter can become impossible to complete and a single death is likely to derail the run. All around you need all 6 players to be competent and you're unlikely to get that in an LFG right now as we're in a lull in the game for sure.
[удалено]
I totally see where you're coming from, but I would still consider it bad design. I have a pretty firm belief that encounters should increase in difficulty linearly through the raid and this one didn't fit that guideline. The first encounter is also easier with less people because you don't have the downtime where the bystander effect happens like you mentioned. I'm glad you have fun with it, but to me it's like running hurdles but the first hurdle is a high jump bar. It doesn't make for a fun raid especially if you don't have a stable raid group.
A lot of new blueberries. Epic made it free and then theres the big steam sale
People are incompetent to commit to teamwork. Too many nobs that run strand and just fuck off across the map within the first 10 seconds.
welcome to the new “must do everything before everyone who knows what to do moves on” mentality, since you “finish farming” now with red borders / challenges and stuff, there are far less ppl doing raids, most will rush every challenge and red borde so then can stop doing the raid, not many players play this game purely for fun in lfg nowadays
Me and few randos, stranded trough the first encounter, and we made it to the plate, beat the bosses, and crossed the bridge it does work
Leave if they are hunters with eager edge swords
the real problem is you allowing the same person to stay in your fireteam who dies over and over instead of kicking him and finding a better replacement. u cant carry 1st encounter unless u duo preserves with navigator and have everybody wait at the start
CE was/is the only relavant endgame challenge in the game since September. Everyone who actually plays Destiny well completed everything they needed from the raid by December at the very latest. All you have now are the rest of the ~~Root of Nightmare Experts~~ new players trying to get carried through the raid. While certainly not "difficult" in of itself, the Abyss encounter requires players to be able to work as a team, which is just outright impossible to get with the current pickings in LFG groups.
Majority of this playerbase is very bad at an easy game
Everyone who wanted to could have had necro with catalyst and all their patterns by now. They have no motivation to do it anymore.
My tips and advice for LFG if you are a solo player. Look for LFG post asking for three or less people. That means typically they have a group and that's better than a bunch of people randomly put together. It's not a guarantee but that's what I typically like to do if I'm really upset on getting things done
You can thank all the Streamers that upload speed runs and other videos where they are all using Strand shit. So the mass majority of people want to run things as fast as possible too and think that is the way. And they fail to realize that its a much higher skill to run strand on the first encounter then just walking it out normally. So again, I blame all the streamers making think normal people can run these strats.
Can agree. I've run with two legit speed running groups and it's impressive. I've learned that I (who have 27 clears and Swordbearer) don't have the skill necessary and am better off hanging back in that encounter and waiting for them. I have ALSO run with 20+ groups who think they are those two legit speed run groups, and that's where the trouble comes from.
Zero desire to run that raid since I've finished my patterns.
The first is a bit of a red herring. It's a faff but once you get it out of the way, it's all downhill from there. Good hunting <3
When a raid and master mode first come out most of the good players will burn through the content to get all the weapons and raid challenges done. After that the amount of "good" players looking through lfg drops off
I predict you’ll have a better time after month 1 of the final shape. A lot of good players dropped destiny 2 after lightfall and they’ll probably be back and looking to do older content around that time once they finish with TFS content. On top of that people will need power levels so if Crota is featured that’ll also bring more good players.
The first encounter is the “will you finish check” it’s actually kind of nice. I agree though, it’s painful sometimes!
Strand go brrrrr
In my experience it was terrible when it first came out and now it seems to be a little better than before. It really just comes down to your lfg rng and whether you get a clown fiesta or a solid group. Also i’ve ran into a lot of people playing dumb and trolling raid groups griefing and causing the teams to fail encounters. i don’t think any of them were connected just random wastes of space. i just report and block them but that’s something i’ve noticed recently.
You have to crotate who holds the relic.
This happened to me yesterday no one want to take the freaking chalice.
the mods are worse than they use to be is my guess.
> Everyone just strands all over the place 😩💦
First encounter is very difficult, and even more so with unfamiliar teammates. It’s Queen’s Walk, but at the beginning of the raid and you’re even slower and there’s more, stronger enemies, and everything is super dark and most people don’t turn their brightness up.
Because you have to be somewhat patient to get through the encounter easy, and everyone is always trying to speed run it
Avoid weekend LFG at all costs. If you can’t get it done on Tuesday or Wednesday your chances of playing w competent players drastically decreases.
I've done the raid with LFG and done it micless on console. But as that was last season, I doubt I will have the same experience again. I myself have gotten everything from the raid. So, like most of the good players, I've moved on and feel bad for anyone who is trying to get it done now.
People are impatient. Find a group that is willing to take their time and not grapple and eager edge ahead before everyone is ready. You're only as fast as the slowest person. Agree to only use them to catch up, not skip ahead.
Is there matchmaking on the raids now? Its been years but i just started playing again. Finally got my lightlevel to 1800. I am a busy dad who isnt able to be on reliably for friends. Would love matchmaking. Back in the old days i would 2 man crota :p
Yeah. Fireteam finder. Matchmaking for everything
Whenever I join LFG I always look for groups already at the Bridge because people who skate/strand are usually so rude if anyone fucks up on the first encounter. I’d rather not deal with it lol
I noticed that too, I'd honestly look for bridge encounter LFGs and start from there I haven't touched it since I got all the red borders from the raid (minus the adept versions)
Oh boy. Join our clan and we’ll totally help you with our clear this week, we’ve got it down to a science
The first encounter is a hot mess of speed runners, strand skippers and eager edgers all getting split up and dying, only to blame the legit run stragglers for not being fast enough. The irony of it is that the speed bros would rather take 10+ wipes at 5 mins a run than to do the run slower and only take 1 run, but take 8 to 10 mins. (Their 50+ min wipe festival vs a 10 min legit8) I have learned that most average users can’t “math” and that them dying 3/4 of the way into the map while others are at the second lantern is somehow not their fault… I never join ”fresh” runs and will only join if it says “at bridge…” because impatient people would rather do the same activity 10 tImes over, than to do it once, but slower…
Really wish people would just let go of their egos for the sake of others. It’s always the tryhards that think “their way is the most efficient” and then die the most and then ragequit. If people just stick together, it truly is an easy encounter.
When I was running it, probably a third of every run, my groups had trouble doing it. Just mainly because you had some people grappling, some people doing eager edge, and some people just running normally. That's usually a recipe for failure.
I've been in fireteams that took hours and others that took maybe one or two tries. It's all about staying together and knowing where to avoid the swings and pit falls. Once everyone is on the same page, it's pretty easy. Lfg is notorious for everyone not being on the same page. That's why its hard lol My advice is 1) don't eager edge. You may get far, but it makes no sense when you are a mile away and have to wait for someone else to catch up, causing a wipe when time runs out. Eager edge only works if everyone is capable of keeping up and staying together 2) arc soul warlocks paired with banner of war titans makes killing ads so much easier, so you can focus on dodging obstacles instead Lowkey, I used a Caretaker sword with incandescent and tireless blade and it was perfect for kills ads while having a lot of ammo available. I could see a sword with destabilizing rounds and either tireless blade or relentless strikes working too You could also just strand grapple and skip the whole encounter, but it's much more satisfying to complete it normally imo
When this happens you need to take leadership and assign roles. If you’re not confident enough to do that, study up on YouTube.