It's more fun when broken by high levels and gear. (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Friday, April 06, 2018, 09:57 (2211 days ago) @ Funkmon

The thing is, we're looking back at the stuff and playing the stuff beyond what was intended initially.

Hard mode Crota was INTENDED to be absurdly difficult because we were underleveled. Skolas was too, plus no swords to block the death.

You essentially had no freedom in these encounters when played as intended.

As soon as we hit 34 and 40, Crota and Skolas became fun and flexible. They were not at the time. They were awful to get through.

I somewhat agree, although more in the case of Crota than Skolas.

Hard mode Crota was, when it originally launched, brutal. Not just because of pure challenge, but because the damn encounter was so buggy. Crota's behavior was erratic, his sword lunges sometimes involved time travel, it was impossible to predict if/when he would turn his attention to the sword runner or completely ignore them, etc. But by House of Wolves, being just slightly over-leveled took just enough of an edge off the encounter to make it way more fun IMO.

With Skolas, I love how brutally difficult it was when it first launched. My problem was always the fact that you had to play all the way through the rest of Prison of Elders, which was a) not fun (IMO), and b) very time consuming and without checkpoints. I thought the fight itself was a brilliantly designed encounter. I love the level of communication and skilled execution that it took to complete it. It was thrilling, and felt like a real accomplishment to complete, and failure never felt like the result of random BS the way it could with Crota. I just hardly ever got to experience it without already feeling exhausted and worn out due to grinding through the rest of PoE on the way to Skolas. Checkpoints would have made all the difference.

Going back to Skolas over-leveled is still enjoyable, and it makes the rest of PoE far less painful (because you can just breeze through it now). But trivializing the Skolas fight does take a good chunk of the fun out of it for me. It's still cool though.