Thoughts on Deep Stone Crypt *Spoilers* (Destiny)

by CyberKN , Oh no, Destiny 2 is bad, Monday, November 22, 2021, 11:10 (1100 days ago) @ squidnh3
edited by CyberKN, Monday, November 22, 2021, 11:21

You strike me as a guy who likes to figure things out for yourself, and as such it's not a huge surprise that your run through DSC didn't elicit similar reactions to ours when it was new.

You're half-right. A good chunk of my all-time favourite memories in Destiny were running through CE, KF, and WotM blind and figuring stuff out as we went. It's a blast, and I have yet to experience anything else like it. However...

Personally, I never got to do VoG blind, and as such it's not really one of my favorites. Actually it's probably in my bottom 2 of all Destiny raids.

I didn’t run VoG blind at all either. I probably watched people play that raid a minimum of 3 times before I tried it myself, since I was still super under-leveled when it dropped. Yet, I still think VoG is the best raid in terms of length, difficulty, variety of encounters, and general atmosphere, and is therefore my favourite, by a large margin.

Probably a big part of the spacewalk being such a "moment" (besides the music) is that it follows probably the most difficult encounter in the raid. In our blind run we spent hours and hours on that 2nd encounter, failing repeatedly on the final stand. None of us had Lament so damaging the bosses was really difficult, and we had to go through a lot more cycles, putting a tremendous amount of pressure on not screwing up at the end. When we finally did it, the spacewalk was such a moment of bliss and catharsis.

I can appreciate that. Pacing between encounters is pretty important, and I don't want to undersell how much I respect everyone who manages to finish a particularly hard section of a raid blind.

I still think it's a weak-sauce platforming section, though. Theoretically, you could play around with the game physics so much in that setting, compared to what we've seen before in terms of platforming sections. To see Bungie not even try was maddening.

You were also shortchanged on the final boss. The 4-bomb+Divinity+Fusions(or slug shotguns) strategy is very effective, but it's super boring and is mostly a "roll the dice" strategy, where you just do it over and over again until things work out right. In the blind run, we did it 2 bombs at a time, which requires a Scanner, and we did a lot of iteration on the best way to do DPS (I think Kermit did figure out Divinity for us to beat it).

To be clear, I don't have any issues with a final boss feeling "easy", especially given that this raid has been out for a year and people have been able to pick it apart with fine-tuned loadouts and strategies.

It just feels like whoever designed the setting and flow for the final encounters dropped the ball. During Taniks Part 1, I didn’t even realize the station was de-orbiting since the fight itself was so chaotic.

And like I said in my original post, the last fight feels like an afterthought; you’re just fighting this floating boss in the middle of some snowy wreckage, and the stakes and excitement don’t feel high at all compared to what you’ve done in the prior couple of encounters.

In my fantasy version of this raid, the station’s de-orbiting would be the final encounter. Have a giant window, like in the upper room in the Atraks fight, with the planet looming ever larger as a visual enrage timer. Then, during the last-stand phase, make it so that all 6 players have to eject themselves out of the airlocks. The raid ends by watching the station burn up and crash and explode, as you collect your loot from a floating chest in zero-G.