(BTW - Old-time HBOer here who missed out on D1 due to life stuff and hasn't been on bungie.org in ages, other than a couple of recent games with Claude - hi man!)

I keep meaning to look for you again for some raiding!

It seems like everyone on the Destiny subreddit far prefers the D1 raids, but as someone who played D2 first, I feel like Leviathan and EOW are both incredibly well-designed experiences. Between the gorgeous visual and sound design for both D2 raids, and the audacity of the encounter mechanics (plus my own personal affinity for co-op puzzle solving and platforming challenges), I put them both up there with the best video game levels I've ever played.

(BTW - Old-time HBOer here who missed out on D1 due to life stuff and hasn't been on bungie.org in ages, other than a couple of recent games with Claude - hi man!)

Anyway, Moment if Triumh was where I spent most of my time with Skolas. I did it once around when HoW launched and it was brutal. By the time MoT came around, it was still difficult, but it wasn’t “lose three hours a night for a week straight and still fail” difficult. I ran with quite a few groups pretty last minute to help folks get that last thing for MoT, and that’s where I really fell in love with that fight.

The thing is, we're looking back at the stuff and playing the stuff beyond what was intended initially.

Hard mode Crota was INTENDED to be absurdly difficult because we were underleveled. Skolas was too, plus no swords to block the death.

You essentially had no freedom in these encounters when played as intended.

As soon as we hit 34 and 40, Crota and Skolas became fun and flexible. They were not at the time. They were awful to get through.

I somewhat agree, although more in the case of Crota than Skolas.

Hard mode Crota was, when it originally launched, brutal. Not just because of pure challenge, but because the damn encounter was so buggy. Crota's behavior was erratic, his sword lunges sometimes involved time travel, it was impossible to predict if/when he would turn his attention to the sword runner or completely ignore them, etc. But by House of Wolves, being just slightly over-leveled took just enough of an edge off the encounter to make it way more fun IMO.

With Skolas, I love how brutally difficult it was when it first launched. My problem was always the fact that you had to play all the way through the rest of Prison of Elders, which was a) not fun (IMO), and b) very time consuming and without checkpoints. I thought the fight itself was a brilliantly designed encounter. I love the level of communication and skilled execution that it took to complete it. It was thrilling, and felt like a real accomplishment to complete, and failure never felt like the result of random BS the way it could with Crota. I just hardly ever got to experience it without already feeling exhausted and worn out due to grinding through the rest of PoE on the way to Skolas. Checkpoints would have made all the difference.

Going back to Skolas over-leveled is still enjoyable, and it makes the rest of PoE far less painful (because you can just breeze through it now). But trivializing the Skolas fight does take a good chunk of the fun out of it for me. It's still cool though.

Hard mode Crota was INTENDED to be absurdly difficult because we were underleveled. Skolas was too, plus no swords to block the death.

You essentially had no freedom in these encounters when played as intended.

As soon as we hit 34 and 40, Crota and Skolas became fun and flexible. They were not at the time. They were awful to get through.

Skolas is the one endgame activity I really disliked. Granted I don't think I ever went back to play it when I was over-leveled, so my only experience was hiding in the dang corner with Raga's bubble shield.

Yeah, mine, too. Except I think it was with Funkmon and Chewbaccawacca.

Flashbangs were always underrated in D1 PvE.

Truth!

Fun fact: Prior to the Day 1 patch, they could also blind Ultra/Boss-tier enemies.

I'd definitely do it again.

It's easy now. Too easy, actually.

I loved the Skolas fight but it did get a bit too easy. I remember burning him with a team of titans using the Weapons of Light bubble and Thunderlords before the mine the disease even started to spread.

IMHO Destiny is best when you're slightly underleveled and the challenges are hard. It's great when you can go stomp things later, but that's not quite as fun outside of the nostalgic value of "remember when this took us 20 tries?" That's one of the reasons I loved that Crota could be solo'd through to the end. It gave me a goal to strive for even after leveling made it easier.

It's easy now. Too easy, actually.

It took us an like hour, and we had to do a level 28 Prison of Elders first to unlock level 35 for me.

It's also fun because there's a ton of room to form your own (sometimes wildly less efficient) strategy. When we first did the Raid Lair we got some wrong ideas into our head but pushed forward with them anyway and sorta brute forced our way to victory.

I think that's my favorite thing about the Raid lair... the last 2 encounters, anyway. It's a very technically elaborate pair of encounters, but the more familiar a team becomes with it, the more the strategy tends to narrow down towards "just call it out as it happens, and we'll improvise". We kept finding situations where our strategy wouldn't cover a potential outcome, so we'd need to break from our plan to handle it. Turned out having almost no plan made things flow more easily. But your entire team needs to have a firm grasp on what is happening in order to pull that off.

Agreed! When we played last night during the Mines encounter I was just goofing around (in a helpful kind of way) killing things. We didn't call out positions at the start or anything. Just started it and ran with it.

It's also fun because there's a ton of room to form your own (sometimes wildly less efficient) strategy. When we first did the Raid Lair we got some wrong ideas into our head but pushed forward with them anyway and sorta brute forced our way to victory.

I think that's my favorite thing about the Raid lair... the last 2 encounters, anyway. It's a very technically elaborate pair of encounters, but the more familiar a team becomes with it, the more the strategy tends to narrow down towards "just call it out as it happens, and we'll improvise". We kept finding situations where our strategy wouldn't cover a potential outcome, so we'd need to break from our plan to handle it. Turned out having almost no plan made things flow more easily. But your entire team needs to have a firm grasp on what is happening in order to pull that off.