Grind is in the eye of the beholder (Destiny)

by Claude Errera , Tuesday, June 25, 2019, 10:08 (1996 days ago) @ Cody Miller

I think I’m just sad nobody would ever do Riven the ‘real’ way with me should I ever try it :-p

Oh, there's some of us that want to do it, and once cross-saves get here...

I kind of resigned myself to the fact that I'll never finish it nor any future raids. I already looked up the fights to see the 'real' way, and so now I don't really have any reason to do them.

So you care more about the exploration than the challenge and playing with DBO? I'm not judging just curious :D

Well I wouldn’t want to play it with anyone other than DBO.

Doing Spire and the first few encounters of Riven with only some people in the group blind really diminishes the experience. First impressions are important. So even after you know the raid and are just playing to get better, your first experience lingers on.

I mean, if you watch the sixth sense being spoiled the first time, your second viewing is not going to be even close to the experience of someone who was not spoiled and is watching a second time. Both people ‘know’ everything watching it their second time, but the experience is gonna be really different based on that first viewing.

That's an interesting viewpoint. I don't think it fits with my experience, though.

I did King's Fall blind; it was my first blind raid, and I really enjoyed the experience. (Well, except for maybe Golgoroth; I think I'd have liked that encounter better if I'd known the mechanics ahead of time. ;) )

However, at some point (pretty early on, I think), that stops being even remotely relevant. (I have 35 KF clears, and raid.report says I have a 26% completion on it... which means I've run it over 100 times.) I don't think the good experience I had trying it blind (or the bad experience I had doing Leviathan blind) really changed how I think of either of those raids - I enjoy them (or don't) for the encounters, and the groups I do them with, not for any nostalgia (or maybe it's something more ineffable, I don't really know what you're feeling) about how it went the very first time. My favorite raid is Vault of Glass, and my first completion - my first ATTEMPT - was well over a year after the raid dropped, and the people who sherpa'd me through were machines. Every encounter was explained its tiniest detail before I stepped into it, and my inexperience was completely waved away by their competence.

In short: the experience of doing a raid blind is a cool one, and I can look back on it and enjoy the feeling... but that feeling doesn't carry through to change how I experience the raid in future runs. I completely understand how you can feel differently about it, of course.

(A good example of what I mean: Warpriest on KF was one of the places where I had an insight that helped my blind group get past a part that was confounding us - the feeling of the 'aha!' moment is probably my best memory of that blind run. By now, though, Warpriest is one of the dullest points of the raid - the last few times I ran KF, we weren't even paying attention in that section. In contrast, I hated Baths, in Leviathan, when we were running blind; it was relatively complicated, it was unforgiving, we got super-close so many times but couldn't complete. I think, in fact, we had to cheat to finish it (I can't remember the details, but we were doing something wrong that was keeping us from doing enough damage at some point, and couldn't figure out why). I enjoy Baths, now, though - it's an encounter that requires concentration, but good playing by a single person can save a run where someone died at an inopportune time. I don't play it and think at all about the pain I experienced in the blind run... I don't even use the techniques we developed in the blind run, because they were all pretty inefficient. I think my life would be better if I hadn't actually RUN Baths blind in the first place.)