I think Bungie dropped the ball... (Destiny)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Wednesday, May 27, 2015, 18:57 (3467 days ago) @ CruelLEGACEY

I should clarify: my 1 hour of ToO resulted in a Flawless Victory. From what I can gather, 2-3 pieces of Etheric Light is about par for the course for a flawless victory.

A flawless victory is something most of use will never ever see. Comparing that reward level of ToO to anything else in the entirety of Destiny is just not right. I'm a decent Crucible player. I've played three serious ToO sessions along side decent Crucible players and I have never gotten above 3 wins. I'm thinking you need to do a reality check and should consider that what most of us will ever get out of ToO (other than intense frustration) is nowhere near what you got out of it.

From my response to Xenos' post here:

you are 100% correct that my ToO results were ideal. But let's look at the ideal PoE results: the best you can hope for from a 34 or 35 run is 1 etheric light (unless they also drop from the large chest... Do they?). So that's 1 every 1-2 hours vs 3 every hour-1.5 hours. On top of that, there are plenty of ways to spend a couple hours in PoE and walk away with NOTHING. At least with ToO you can get the other reward packages, buy weapons and armor, and get drops along the way.

Three every hour? I played three multi-hour sessions of ToO and got exactly zero Etheric Light. That's vs a small pile of Strange Coins, Motes of Light, and Legendary Weapons from PoE with much much less frustration. You are vastly inflating what is possible with ToO and vastly deflating what PoE rewards... It certainly didn't take us two hours to beat last week's 34 PoE either. Certainly not our second play through where we knew what was up. Probably didn't even take an hour.

On the bigger picture of PoE, I just find it silly how you talk about trying pieces of a raid from the left side, then the right side... when a lot of the advice for section of PoE is "we had luck trying it from the left side" or "Cluster on the right side."

Those are descriptions of 2 very different scenarios. When I talk about switching positions in a raid, it is the equivalent of changing the position you play on a sports team. I don't know if you are into sports at all, but I'll run with the analogy: Changing from the left side to the right side in a given section of a raid can be a lot like changing from a power forward to a shooting guard in basketball. You have a different set of responsibilities, and it requires a different skill set.

With Prison of Elders, it is quite literally "should we stand over here or over there". There isn't much more to it than that.

I played a great, almost essential position as a Bubble Titan vs the flame boss. My two Hunter companions played great rolls as Orb generators and add killers with their Golden Guns. In the Arc Hive section cloaky Hunters were a huge help. Against the Cabal I could see a Solar Warlock being very good at breaking those flame shields. Are the Raid mechanics a little more complex? Sure. But again, there are quite litereally far more role possibilities in PoE than you acknowledge!

I'm not saying PoE is equal to a raid... to me raids have more thematic continuity and that counts for something... but the harder challenges of PoE are roughly as replayable as any section of either Raid.

I respectfully disagree, for the very reasons I mentioned above. Different positions in raids can require a very different skill set. You sometimes need to completely relearn an encounter because your roll within it is so different. So far, we haven't seen anything on that level in PoE, and I doubt we ever will. That requires a level of coordination and teamwork that bungie seems unwilling to demand from a matchmade event.

I can't blame them. I will not run a raid with a random team of nobodies because of the awful idiots I've picked up in my few attempts of LFG.

Furthermore, you seem to be judging the first couple of weeks of PoE vs months of people having figured out the Raids. Even week to week we breezed through the same PoE room that we were stuck on just one week earlier. As players level up the 34 level PoE will become much easier than trying to run it as a 32 or 33. Same as the seemingly impossible sections of the Raids were quickly broken down and figured out and get easier as players leveled from 28 to 32 or 30 to 32. Also, PoE isn't finished revealing all of its content. By the time the we see all the content it may turn out that PoE has more unique segments than either VoG or Crota's End. Maybe the Raid segments are a bit more challenging or a bit more team dependent or whatever but in the grand scheme of things I don't think the Raids and a high level PoE run won't be all that dissimilar in the way they challenge players.

I'm judging PoE by the fact that it was already getting old during my 2nd playthrough, while the raids consistently open up with more challenges and possibilities the more I play them. And that's fine... PoE doesn't need to match the raids in that way. But PoE has been worked into the end game in a way that demands we replay it over and over (if we want to progress/upgrade our stuff), and I don't think the activity itself can handle that level of repetition.

PoE is still adding new content week to week. It is still opening up. You seem to be ignoring that. As I and others have said, the bosses and encounters that seem too hard right now will be figured out and become as trivial as the Raids are now. You also shouldn't look at PoE as the only PvE way to get Etheric Light. Supposedly Nightfalls will also sometimes grant Etheric Light. And I know for a fact that I have a much better chance at completing a Nightfall than I do getting 4 wins in ToO. I've beat three nightfalls since HoW came out. Beyond random drops I have gotten absolutely no rewards from ToO!