Our group managed to get to the second of three bosses in about 3 hours. If anybody reading this hasn't tried the raid, it's a lot of fun. It's more complex mechanically than Vault of Glass, without the bullet sponges of Crota's End. It's really really good. Try to do it blind. But if you don't want to…

Spoilers:

1. You have to activate six statues to open the portal. There are two halves of an artifact, that two people will have to carry and deposit them at the same time to activate a statue. The artifacts are on opposite ends, and each subsequent one get farther and farther away. One person runs the artifact, and the other two take out enemies and take down the shields blocking the way. This part is just a warmup.

2. Once inside, you have a bit of a jumping puzzle, by riding Hive ships across a void. Afterwards, you do something similar to the Crota bridge, although there are no enemies.

3. In this part, you open the door to the first boss. There is a plate in the middle, and totems on the far ends of the room. The rooms housing the totems will slowly drain your life and kill you. There's ball that gives you a buff, which lets you survive, and it effects nearby allies. When it wears off, it is passed on to whoever is inside your circle of influence. It works similarly to skolas, in that when you get it, you can't get it for a while. When you pass it on, you get a stack of ten Deathsinger's energies. You need to deposit these on the plate in the middle of the room. What you need to do, is send two people to each side, and put two people in the middle. Then you rotate in and out of the middle when you have the energy to deposit. If you have ABC, C stays in the middle, and A and B go to the side. A grabs the buff, and when he passes it to B, A swaps with C and deposits the energy. When B passes it to C, B swaps with A. Repeat. The biggest headache is the boomer knights on the ledges. Bring a scout Rifle!

4. Warpriest. Super cool boss. He is immune to damage. There are three circles, and three pillars in front of each. Waves of enemies will spawn, and at some point three yellow Knights will spawn. After killing them, you can activate the circles. You have to do it in sequence. There will be a flame in front of the one you need to activate, however if the corresponding pillar is up it will block the flame so you can't see which. Your first one you have to guess, and you get three tries. We did process of elimination. The person who activates the last circle gets a buff that allows them, and anyone standing in their circle of influence to damage the Warpiest. It is stacked 5x, with a ten second timer. When the timer runs out, you die. If you get a kill with the buff, it resets the timer and removes a stack. Essentially, you need to wait till it gets to 1 second, then kill something to keep the buff as long as you can. At this point everybody needs to lay into the boss hard. When the buff finally expires, the Warpiest will summon some taken ball thing which instantly kills everybody, unless you are hiding in the shadow of a pillar. The pillar you are hiding behind will then crumble. You essentially get four rounds to kill him, since there are three pillars. Rounds 3 and 4 spawn Taken enemies instead of hive.

5. Maze. There's a maze to get through, with a calcified fragment in it.

6. Golgorath. This is where we stopped for the night. What we know is that he can only be damaged by firing at his back, or at a point on his front. Shooting him in the back seems to cause him to focus on that person, giving him his gaze. We figure that someone needs to keep the gaze so that others can damage him, but we haven't worked out how. When someone dies, a rune appears on a pillar. 6 runes = instant kill, so stay alive.

Go try it immediately. We did fine with 2 Light 280s. So far… We are reconvening Sunday night.

I think we discovered something extra about the second boss you didn't, but it's a complete mystery to me.

Also, it turns out I'm not a fan of figuring stuff out on my own. We must have spent an hour on a dumb puzzle thing and just didn't notice two plates that opened a door like a bunch of doofuses. And the war priest mechanic was torture. Maybe I'm weird.

I

#4: On the backside of each pillar is a light that will light up when you need to activate that plate. You just need a spotter to hide under the platform and call out which ones light up.

Crew B got to the first boss. We just felt like we couldn't do enough damage, so we decided to go try to level up more.

I thought I saw that on the left, but then when I went back there they seemed blank. Must have been a timing thing. Good to know that they are lit up when they need to be used!

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Crew B got to the first boss. We just felt like we couldn't do enough damage, so we decided to go try to level up more.

Combine Nightstalker supers with Weapons of light. Use Snipers. Make sure you keep the buff as long as you can by killing something with 1 or 2 seconds left.

We were doing that too, but I think fatigue was setting in too.

My team got to the end (we think) after 8 hours. Then we needed sleep. The Raid is kind of amazing, but somehow despite being a "blind" Raid my impatient friends ended up cheating and looking up the second boss. It still took 2 more hours.

Did not know that. Hot damn that would have been useful. We thought it was a straight-up DpS race. Had no idea you could extend the timer

Did not know that. Hot damn that would have been useful. We thought it was a straight-up DpS race. Had no idea you could extend the timer

The person with the buff will notice 2 new things on their HUD:

* A countdown timer that starts at 10 seconds
* A ticker that is set to "5"

The countdown is telling you how long you have until your buff runs out. But the person with the buff can reset the timer by killing an add. You can only do this a limited number of times. That's what the ticker is for: it tells you how many more times you can reset the timer before the buff goes away.

So the person with the buff wants to let their timer get as low as possible, then kill an add to reset the timer. Their ticker will go from 5 to 4. Do this again. Ticker goes from 4 to 3. Repeat, etc.

The other mechanic in play is that if the person with the buff dies, the buff gets passed to another player. They start with a fresh 10 second timer, but moving the buff does seem to remove from your ticker count. So keeping everyone alive is ideal, but if someone dies it's not a total write off.

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It felt like we only got them through sheer force of will. It was a big question of "what's the order?" for an hour, then I said "ALL right. Next time, let's stare at these things. They MUST give an indication." Zero hid at the back and they lit up. We had already kind of discounted them.

God the whole raid had me feeling like a tool. Even the tombships confused me.

So we still had the full amount of time then. We just had someone dying every ten seconds, reducing our DpS

We figured that was the mechanic, until I think Old Fire Thief said "no, this has a hard mode, too. It can't be."

We figured it out pretty quickly because the score screen tracked kills under the buff.

Or patient enough, also apparently unable to remain connected to the internet long enough.

First of all, sorry about my abrupt departure last night. My daughter woke up upset (must've had a bad dream or something), so she wasn't going back to sleep quickly. Just as well, though. It was 3am and I was starting to feel myself slip. Probably only had a few more minutes left in me.

That stuff aside... wow. WOW. What an amazing night! This was my first time going into a raid totally blind, with an equally blind group. I'm so glad I got to experience it with you guys. I had so much fun!

LOVE the new raid so far. Perfectly captures the feeling of going on a journey or adventure together. Each set piece so far is just great. Love the flow of it, too. Plenty of action, but lots of quiet stretches. Loved every single moment.

Is it Sunday yet?

Video contains King's Fall spoilers

I'm going to talk about the raid now. If you don't want to hear it, reader, why the hell are you in this thread? Anyway...

Because we didn't notice the sync plates, we explored all over the side of the room for what must have been a half an hour at least. We left Old Fire Thief up there in the door to see what would happen. Half of us left, completed the jumping puzzle again to get back to the tombship, then while I was spectating Zero, I noticed the sync plates. Facepalm. We activated, the door activated, Thief walked though.

"There's a chest here."

Then we spent about 2 minutes figuring out how we would all get it, which was absurdly simple as well, and we got moldering whatevers, except for Battymatt who was so tired of that raid already by then he quit caring and skipped the chest.

I figured we missed something like that because:

So there's two things before the Warpriest…

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Lol. So close, but I doubt we would have figured out how to get up there as I questioned the existence of that ledge after everyone was already across.