Hive Wizard.

Health Regeneration is disabled in the fight, by any form. That means orb pickup, Apotheosis Veil, etc.

There's a shrine on one end of the arena that heals you. There is a protective bubble around it and it acts like a bubble shield, meaning you can walk in but can't shoot out. It would be maybe 3x as large as a bubble though.

The Wizard is in a similar bubble on the other side of the arena.

Each bullet that hits the boss will deal 180 damage to you. That means you hit it once and you will be inches from death. Shoot her twice and you die.

You have to enter the Wizard's bubble, fire a bullet, make your way back across the arena to recharge your health, and then go back to shoot. Obviously there will be tons of enemies around. You'll need people who deal damage to the boss, and people who clear the way for their run back to and from the shrine. Someone might have to pull agro off the wizard in the bubble so the shooter isn't instantly killed after the shot.

If you take damage on your way to the wizard, you won't survive the shot. If you take damage on the way back, you'll die. Protect your shooters!

Nothing special, just shoot him in the head. Normal health.

100% guaranteed exotic drop.

I'm so tuckered out by things being hard I just want a nice simple raid encounter. It should be like this from Borderlands 2, but easier, and with better loot.

One of the things that most bugs me about the Oryx raid is the randomness of the final encounters. The warpriest and ogre are ok, but Oryx is just odd. After the story missions I expected to face a Taken Oryx, and instead I got something like Donkey Kong crossed with Rtype.

I think the best encounters have some sort of story behind the mechanics, not just random mechanics for difficluty sake. Crota and his sword for example dove tail with the Hive fluff. I imagined that because the sword bridges the bearer and the target, the swordbearer wasn't just injuring Crota but sapping his divinity into themselves.

Likewise Atheon's teleports are part of his time control purpose. It served some inscrutable plan of the Vex and Time's Vengeance mechanism is the bonus Guardians get for defying the Oracle's plan and riding the backlash of time.

I would propose a hive encounter where two wizards are in the back, summoning shards of the traveler. They would then consume and convert the shard to energy to feed to a hive knight, further empowering him and causing him to grow.

Players could destroy the shard, and stun the wizards temporarily so they could damage them, but at the same time another team has to control the knight, knock down his shield and get a sword on him. It would kind of be like the Fanatic of Crota plus the three wizards. Killing one wizard or the knight would just cause another to spawn along with some adds, so the team would have to get them all within a short span. This would be the longest route to victory but the safest.

Alternatively, the players could activate some hidden steps that allow access to the platform where the shard is use the sword on the piece of the traveler they would instead gain it's power and gain a mega version of their class power, that could do significant DPS.

Lastly, the players could go the hard route, and sacrifice super energy to overcharge the fragment, causing it to erupt with light and teleport out. This would cause the bosses to go nuts for a moment shooting and running about, but then they would tire and become vulnerable, allowing the team to do damage before the rotation resets.

It was pretty late when I posted this thread, which is why I didn't respond sooner. Wanted to hear everyone's takes on it before I posted my own.

The encounter I imagine is that the Hive have pushed the Guardians into a corner in which they cannot escape. In order to move on, Guardians have to use a Cursed Thrall explosion in order to help break a seal on the ground and open the way to the next area. The play space is fairly large and multi-tiered, but with no normal way out. The seal will be fairly large so that players know that it's important, but they won't initially know how to break it.

Guardians can either have a Cursed Breacher (yellow bar Cursed Thrall) explode near them three times, granting them a buff which will break the seal when they move near it, or bring any Cursed Thrall to the seal and have them explode. Meanwhile, all sorts of Hive are positioned to attack the Guardians. I imagine Boomers raining death from on high while Knights and Acolytes protect the Cursed Breacher. Random packs of Thrall, both cursed and otherwise rush the Guardians (this is how I imagine they'll initially figure out how to break the seal).

After five explosions, the seal will break, a hole will open in the floor and the Guardians can move on to the next encounter. The Hive will push harder once the seal has been broken, forcing the Guardians to go in instead of holding out (though I imagine that the hold after breaking the seal might be a fun challenge to earn some extra rewards).

What do you guys think?

There's a story mission where you stumble across 3 hive wizards who are corrupting a shard of the Traveler and stealing its light. I like this idea, and I want to turn it into a raid fight.

Setup: You're in a large, round room. The whole room slopes from the outside wall downwards to the middle. Above that low point is a floating shard of the Traveler, covered in corruption.

There are three Hive wizards channelling light out of the traveler. While doing so, they are immune to damage, but cannot attack.

There are also four doors on the outside of the room. One through which the players' team enters and three through which adds enter. The adds follow a standard wave system of 8 thralls per door, then 4 boomer acolytes per door, then 2 sword knights per door, and finally 1 ogre per door. The waves cycle about 3 seconds after the last member of the previous wave dies. Initially, only one door spawns adds. When 1 wizard dies, a second door also begins spawning adds, and when the second wizard dies, all three doors will be spawning adds. The add phases are linked, so all thralls spawn when the last ogre dies, etc..

Any orbs that drop during the fight will naturally roll down the slope of the room towards the low point. If they reach the shard of the traveler, they will be absorbed into it and any wizards channelling at that time will grow more powerful.

Here's how the wizards work: They each have a flame shield. They start with 1 health. Their health increases steadily as they channel, and will max out at 5 minutes, just like a super bar. Each orb absorbed by the corrupted shard will increase the health of all channelling wizards just as much as it would increase a player's super bar. When a wizard's super bar completely fills, they will wipe the raid. As the wizards take damage, they lose their grip on the light and drop orbs (which can totally roll down to the shard and be absorbed by the other channelling wizards).

One more thing: When a sword knight dies, it drops its sword. These swords can be picked up and used to sever the connections of the hive wizards, at which point they can be DPSed normally for 10 seconds. Swords left on the ground for 10 seconds disappear. When a connection is severed, the sword disappears and all nearby players gain full super as the channeled light bursts free. All nearby players and enemies are completely healed as well.

Here's how I imagine the fight would go:

- Initially, everyone is just on adds. Kill the thralls, then the acolytes, then 1 knight, leaving a single sword knight running around. Someone picks up the sword, and the other 5 players form a defensive wall to catch orbs that will drop as the wizard takes damage.
- The sword bearer breaks the channel, making the wizard vulnerable but filling everyone's supers. You then blow all of your supers at once to DPS the wizard and then pick up the fountain of orbs that drop before any reach the shard. The wizard should have enough health that it takes about 15 seconds of max DPS to kill the first one, requiring using both swords back to back (which means an ogre comes out in the middle of the second DPS phase).
- As the wizard goes back to channel from the shard, you have to immediately kill the 2nd knight to get the second sword, break the chain, and super DPS the wizard again, always mindful of the orbs. In all phases there should be 1 person who saves super (or is able to collect enough orbs to refill fully) who can quickly nuke down the 2nd sword knight and then the ogre.

The players now need to repeat this for the 2nd and third wizard, but you need 3 swords' worth of DPS to kill the 2nd wizard (4 if the wizard got a few orbs) and 4 to kill the third one (as many as 6, depending on how many orbs they got), requiring a lot of careful super use to kill knights and ogres, and lots of wasting supers on purpose so a player can pick up more orbs before they charge the remaining wizard.

This will be a crazy and fast fight with lots and lots of supers going off. Only about 2 minutes of the fight is spend DPSing the wizards (total) while the other 3 are spent dealing with adds and setting up the knight phase for sword action.

In a nutshell, I picture a scenario something like this:

You are in the Tower, talking to the Vanguard Mentors, when the room quakes. You get word somehow that the Fallen are digging on Earth and that is the cause of the quake. Your fire team is sent to put a stop to it. As you land on Earth, and begin racing to the site of the dig on your sparrow, the ground around you continues to shake and collapse. Sort of like the final run in Halo 3 where everything is crashing around you. As you near the end, you have to take out a massive Fallen Devil Walker that IS the drill.

Upon stopping the drill you chase a Fallen captain down into a hole made by the drill and it takes you deep underground into an old Forgotten bunker. And I mean really old, pre golden age. Somehow the Fallen had found out about this place and they wanted inside it badly. As you fight your way through the bunker, you discover its actually an old Nuclear Missile Stockpile from a long forgotten war and the fallen intend to set it off even deeper underground to make the Earths core collapse.

You end up chasing the Fallen down into the earth and have to fight a Fallen captain on a lava flow. Proximity to the Lava causes your health to slowly diminish unless you have some of the TTK armor that makes you resistant to Solar Damage. The longer you stand on any one platform in the lava flow, it makes that platform diminish into the lava, so you have to constantly keep moving. Right as you finish off the Fallen, he gets one quick hit on the nuclear missile he has been dragging and throws it into a wall where it explodes and knocks you unconscious.

Your ghost then helpfully revives you, but you discover that the Fallen never intended to destabilize the entire Earth. They altered the bomb to make it a more controlled explosion and knocked out a hole in the cave wall. That's when all heck breaks loose as a Fallen Queen Mother that had been trapped underground is finally freed. You then have to chase the Queen back out the way you came and try to take her down before she reaches the surface.

I imagine that during the raid, we discover that the Fallen prefer to follow a Queen, which is why they were so willing to serve the Awoken Queen.

So, I haven't had a chance to get through King's Fall yet. But I do enjoy me some encounter theory.

One I've had floating around for awhile would be about as follows:

You enter a large, irregular elliptical room. Think egg shaped, and you're at the skinny end. There are sections of pillars and holes (that lead to some catacomb-like paths) sort of like an evil Stone Henge. Though the space between the larger pillars and pits are enough for an Ogre to comfortably move around. In this space there are three Altars which work as focal points. One at the back, and two up front.

Wandering around the arena is the boss, an Ogre of an unusually bubbling nature. It has a Mechanic shield. It isn't terribly aggressive at chasing Guardian's, either. It has it's eye blast and ground smash as usual.

Now, the real danger is the army of Thralls roaming the rather large play space. Most of them are regular Thralls. About 1/10 are Cursed Thralls of random damage times for their explosions, and of the overall spread, about 1/15 are Majors (some cursed, some regular) and they are all aggressively spawning and chasing the players. With the initial spawn there is also a Husk Bearer Cursed Thrall. This Thrall will have a random shield of the three regular selections that will recharge on a very active basis. When they explode the explosion is about twice the size of a regular Cursed Thrall. This repeats for the remaining 2 shield types through the rest of the fight, and will cycle to other random shields if necessary.

Now, once that Thrall explodes he leaves a Tomb Husk-style relic. Thralls are repulsed by it, so it will have a safety ring around it for pick up, but the Ogre is drawn to it when it is available and will very aggressively pursue it. If the Ogre picks it up it will eat it, it regenerates a portion of health at that time. But when a Guardian picks up the relic one of the Altars will become active, and they will have to run it to deposit it.

You get a damage Buff that allows for you to break the Ogre's shield at this point, and that Altar becomes a safe haven from the Thralls. When the Ogre's shield breaks, it "pops" and he turns into a Giant, Running Thrall and worms are spread around the arena. Killing the worms damages the Boss, who will also take direct damage while the initial shield-breaker buff is still active. The Giant Thrall will flee you and attempt to recover and re-consume as many worms as possible. Once it has consumed about 10, it regains the shield and bubbles back up to being an Ogre.

After this the Altar is still safe, but the number of Thralls in the Arena is now focused around the other two Altars. Repeat this process with a more substantial damage buff for the second, and an unlimited duration Buff with the third and the Mechanic shield doesn't return.

An encounter where the boss won't ground stomp you to death and you're actually rewarded for getting in close as opposed to stomped into the dirt.

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ok, there would be more to the encounter than that. The boss only deals damage to those outside of shotgun range and instead of ground stomping you it will attempt to knock you away. If you (personally) deal enough close range damage (melee/shotgun) you get teleported. Once you are teleported you lose your shields but are given a buff/debuff that will deal notable damage if you shoulder-charge (any class, not just titans) into the boss, but the buff/debuff will kill you if you take too long to reach the boss. There could be adds trying to kill you or possibly an (easy?) obstacle course that must be navigated in order to return to the boss.