The Gorgons are pretty straight-forward, except finding the damn hole.

Yeah, that's what I was talking about. I mean, it's pretty obvious what their mechanics are. I feel like it only took getting spotted once to realize not to let that happen. It's just more the patience involved in finding the path out (and the chest), while trying to avoid all of them.

Now cleansing? Picture, for a second, your group simply not knowing about cleansing at all, since you thought failing an Oracle was an automatic failure back in the Templar's Well. Now think ahead of how the Gatekeepers in the timestreams would go with that lack of knowledge.

That's pretty much how I felt when Beorn "dragged" me into an Atheon checkpoint trying to cheese him off the cliff and I got teleported before we could.

Lol, see, that's what I'm talking about. I'm not sure that it would have happened often (if at all), but you could theoretically make it to the Gatekeepers without knowing the cleansing mechanic, right? I've only ran VoG twice (and never on hard), but if you don't step in the fanatic goop, you'd never have to worry about it right? And it's not like you'd have to be told not to step in that toxic looking puddle on the ground.

The Gorgons are pretty straight-forward, except finding the damn hole.

The idea of what to do is straightforward. Actually having 6 people execute it when they don't know the area, a workable route, or even where they're supposed to end up (seriously, how long did it take for someone to locate that tiny little exit?), that's a whole other thing.

You also missed the greatest part of the game. Having an experienced group take you through the raids for the first time does not hold a candle to doing them fresh when nobody in the world knows how to beat them. The sheer sense of fun, awe, and wonder that I had stepping into the Vault the second it opened up, not knowing what lies ahead or how to tackle it, can never be replicated.

And yes, we've managed flawless for both raids. It's not impossible :-p

Oh, I realize that, as well. It's the biggest reason I'm so excited for The Taken King. While I obviously want the rest of it to be good, experiencing a raid for the first time with everyone else is worth the price of admission for me. I've already talked to Kermit a bit about trying to form up a full fireteam of folks doing it for the first time.

Closer to TTK, I'm going to create a group committed to taking a vow of raid purity, meaning they won't watch any films and will make a good faith effort to not read Raid spoilers. I'm of the opinion that once you're in the know, then promising to not spoil things isn't good enough. Just knowing things reducing MY tolerance for experimentation and subtly affects my gameplay. With true raid virgins, a big part of the fun is suggesting strategies and then voting on them. Even my silence on what I know is a bad suggestion can come across as a vote, if you know what I mean.

My best raid experience was VoG the first time, and that lasted 14 hours over several days, and took place nearly a month after Destiny came out. I don't know if it will take a month to get ready for the TTK raid, but if you're interested, be thinking about going dark for a while when the expansion comes out. (A likely start date will probably be after the reset on 9/29. I'm planning this for the Xbox in part out of tradition but also because I expect most of the PS players I know to lose their raid cherries quickly :).)

And if any of you must-do-it-first-and-quickest raiders posts a spoiler in a subject line (or an unidentified spoiler otherwise), you'll be on my shit-list forever. Grrrr!

Kermit

I was only partially able to do this for TDB and it was a great experience. I would love to do this with you Kermit. I just need to convince the wife that it's a great experience as well...