The Corrupted Shard of the Traveler (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Tuesday, September 29, 2015, 20:22 (3439 days ago) @ Claude Errera

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.

Couple of things with this...

First, why kill everything except the knight - why not leave something else running around, to keep the next wave from spawning after you KILL that knight?

Second, orbs are a bit weird; when you drop them, everyone but you on your fireteam can see them. Does that mean that EVERYONE has to grab all the orbs (which is probably impossible, since you can't fire off your super fast enough to stop them all from rolling, especially if people are on opposite sides of the room)? Or that just ONE person has to grab an orb I drop for that orb to be out of the 'rolling to the center' running?

This seems really confusing. :(

Since enemies only spawn in like groups, if you've got 1 knight up, then you've only got knights up.

For orbs, yes, the way I wrote this, everyone is playing goalie the whole time. The orbs dropped by the wizards, however, will be 1 orb for all players, so only one person has to pick those up. Orbs dropped by a player need to be picked up by all 5 other players.

It would make more sense for all orbs dropped during this encounter to be available for all players to see (and pick up), so let's amend it to work that way.