A while ago, Bungie sort of dismissed the idea of bringing Crota’s End back as a reprised raid, given that it was a smaller one than the others they’d hadn’t done yet. And yet here it is, back before Wrath of the Machine, and let’s just say Destiny 2 has uh, compensated for the claims that it was just an oversized dungeon.
Yesterday brought the raid race for the launch of Crota’s End, and amazingly, Clan Elysium won for the fourth time in a nailbiting finish. But outside of the race, everyone quickly realized that the contest mode Bungie had crafted here, plus the actual mechanic changes to the raid itself, had created the kind of brutally hard offering that many challenge-wanters had hoped to see.
Want an example of just how much harder this was than Root of Nightmares contest mode, Lightfall’s raid?
That’s wild. We are not all the way back to 24 hour completion times in the Last Wish, the everyone-is-insanely-underleveled era, but we are certainly in new territory for the last few raids we’ve gotten back. Even the folks that always complain that everything in Destiny is too easy, even its hardest raids, seem satisfied that this was done well (looking at you, 4x champion Salt).
Of course, this won’t last long. I’ve already seen someone posting about how they two-manned Crota himself on contest, so strategies will evolve. And once the raid goes into “normal” mode, it will not be anywhere close to this level of difficult, as playing during these race periods is less like swinging with a weighted bat and more like trying to swing a tree trunk, especially in this case.
Another change was that everyone who beat the raid on challenge mode during the race got the new exotic Necrochasm, as a guarantee, and people are already farming the catalyst as well. It remains to be seen just how strong that weapon is compared to say, Conditional Finality, what may be Destiny 2’s best raid weapon ever from RoN, but hopefully it will be better than the underpowered version that initially launched in Destiny 1.
As for future reprised raids, we just don’t know where Bungie goes from here. They have confirmed that post-Final Shape, there will still be two new dungeons. They have not confirmed one way or the other whether they will keep doing reprised raids. There’s only one left, Wrath of the Machine, but that requires rebuilding an entirely new enemy type to D2, Splicer Fallen, plus all the other elaborate changes they make to ensure the Destiny 2 sandbox and the old raid fit together well, and it still poses a challenge. Actual D1 raids with no changes would currently be jokes without Bungie’s mechanic upgrades.
So, get out there are beat yourself against that wall. Otherwise, the normal raid will be here soon enough.
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