Could not disagree more. (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Tuesday, April 16, 2019, 13:04 (2066 days ago) @ Claude Errera

It was easy to imagine entering in, failing, losing the synth thingies I bid to get in.

The "wagering" thing is weird. If you bet a synth and win, you get a piece of armor. If you bet a synth and lose, you get your synth back. The only thing you lose is your time.

Unless you get distracted and forget to recover your synth before the bank opens again. Once it's open, your synth is gone. (Forever.)

I'd scoff at that qualification... if I hadn't lost a couple of dozen synths this way over the last few weeks. :(

It is intriguing to me that people are comparing it to the raid because Tier 1 is super boring and has no interesting mechanic whatsoever. As far as I could tell it is literally "shoot the taken before the timer counts down."

This isn't quite right. You can shoot the Taken all day and not actually complete the level, if you don't notice that it's really only multikills that are advancing the counter. Team-shooting is critical, and supers are critical. A well-organized team can finish the round in less than 2 minutes. A poorly-organized group of whatever size can hit the 6-minute mark with 10% (or less) on the counter.

I wouldn't call it 'raid-like'... but it's not as simple as 'shoot stuff before the timer runs out'.

I can't see how anyone could compare The Reckoning to anything raid-like. I've definitely had better luck than it sounds like you've had, and I've managed to knock out a handful of Tier 2 and Tier 3 runs, but nothing ever really gets much more complex than "kill things and try not to die." In fact, they basically split those two objectives up so that the bridge section is "if more than two of you die, you fail" and the third part is either "kill this big thing in three minutes" or "kill this thing first so you can kill that thing faster" depending on the week.

Eh. The Knights on Tier III need to be dealt with separately; knock both of their helmets off simultaneously, and you have to be REALLY good (or really lucky) to finish. Work on them serially and they're not bad - but that takes skill, and awareness. (As in, don't tether them on the first encounter, because then all damage is shared. And so on.)

Likewise, Oryx has some mechanics that keep teams on their toes, even when they know about 'em.

I'm not saying it's a super-fun mode; I'd agree that things like the Shattered Throne (and Raids) are far more repeatable without getting boring. I'm saying it's not quite as simplistic as it's being painted in this thread. (That said, it's not super-fun, imo. There are too many 'crap, this is an auto-wipe' circumstances for that. Stomp mechanics on a narrow bridge? Fuck that noise.)

Agree on pretty much all points.

For me, Reckoning has virtually no replay value. It’s a solved equation. Success is more or less decided by your team’s subclasses. If you have at least 1 WellLock, you’ll probably be fine. Add a tether, and it’s basically a sure bet, baring any unfortunate stomps or something like that. Of course, players at the extreme high end will be able to push those boundaries, but for the average group there isn’t much chance of success without those subclasses. So it ends up playing out the same, run after run.

The encounters are also designed in a way that favor using abilities to tank damage, rather than using skillful movements to avoid damage. Particularly the bridge. You’re literally just standing there, getting shot at from all sides, with no cover. It’s all the hazards of a bullet-hell shooter, without the abilities or mechanics to evade fire that make BH shooters work. It reminds me a lot of the early days of Prison of Elders. If I could run and jump and evade the way I can in a game like Titanfall or High Moon’s Transformers games, then dealing with the constant barrage of enemy fire would be a fun, challenging, and rewarding activity. But Destiny just doesn’t allow that kind of movement. So you’re mostly forced to use win buttons (ie supers) to utterly negate the incoming fire.

More than anything else, my issue with Reckoning is that engaging with the activity in a way that is at all productive from a loot/levelling up perspective requires LOTS of repetition, and I just don’t think the activity itself holds up. As a fun little diversion that you run once every few weeks with friends, it’s fine. Nothing special, but fine. But if I want that Gambit Prime armor, I’ve gotta do a boatload if Reckoning to get it. Which I don’t find fun, so I don’t chase the armor. And then I go into Gambit Prime (which I find quite enjoyable), and I go up against top-tier 4 stacks who are all running max-Level sets of Prime armor, which puts me at enough of a disadvantage that the fun is starting to drain out of that activity for me as well.