"ready for the easiest day 1 of our lives?" I regretted that one about 8 hours into bridge.

i think crota was meant to be killed with swords, it just fits perfectly for him. kinda the same way how you could run 6 touch of malice's on oryx

Crota hit puberty

I would love the [REDACTED] Final Shape race to be like Last Wish and just obliterate even the most experienced teams. I'll never forget waking up the morning after the LW started and realizing that everyone was STILL stuck on Riven and Queenswalk.

Surprisingly, I used Xbox LFG to get 1 more person at Crota for my first run, and got one the most GOATed raiders I’ve ever seen on LFG. We ended up beating Crota, and then beating challenge mode in a bit over 5 hours

I do think Bungie 100% intended Crota to be killed w/ swords. Not sure if they tested other options or if successful teams did something other than swords on day one but it matches the theme and spirit of D1 so well. The title is called “Swordbearer” & they did a sort of sword rework this season.

Its crazy that they were able to turn a Strike mission into an actual raid!

Crota DPS without well stack was one of the biggest challenges for my team on day 1 and I love how much theorizing we needed to do to solve the problem. We only had 2 wells and normally Crota easily destroyed both very early into damage phase. However, we realized the Burning Maul could keep Crota staggered for its duration which made our first well last MUCH longer. With that, our 2nd well was generally enough to keep us alive for the final parts of damage. HOWEVER when we realized that you literally can’t stagger Crota on final stand, things seemed completely screwed. We tried Phoenix Cradle to spread restoration around when our wells ran out but it wasn’t enough to survive. Tried Boots of the Assembler but too sporadic and not strong enough heals. Then we realized that Sunspots with Phoenix Cradle, while they only give Restoration x1, can actually REFRESH Restoration x2 if you have it. And Resto x2 was enough to survive Crota’s repeated slams. So adding a warlock’s enhanced healing Grenade and then keeping resto x2 up via sunspots throughout final stand ended up being the last piece of the puzzle that we needed to take down Crota. The sheer volume of strategy we needed all throughout the encounter was great but the puzzle that was DPS without well stacking was absolutely the most satisfying to solve. Took us 25 hours & 41 minutes to clear Crota’s End. It took me some serious effort to convince my teammates not to look up additional info, but we maintained our individual experience. That’s what matters to me, running the raid blind and solving it yourself. 48 hours allows for some people to go and just follow guides, which is unfortunate, but I’m glad it at least allowed my team to continue the blind run experience of Day 1.

I can kind of understand where uncoordinated LFGs struggle in the maze. If people aren't used to raiding, they get overlapping or confusing comms. I've seen more than 5 times at this point, "I thought someone said take!"

This was my first Day 1 Raid. I am only mediocre at the game, so relegated myself to watching from the sidelines, but I was able to coach my friends through the new encounters in Twitch chat. After Gatekeepers encounter though, they invited me to join them in the actual raid call as a coach, and then when we were getting into wee hours of the night, I was actually invited to cover a tap-out and actually got to play! We weren’t ever able to clear Contest Crota and progress to Challenge Mode, but it was one of my favorite D2 experiences and I am looking forward to attempting Final Shape’s raid experience in whatever way I can.

Regarding the 24-48hour debate. I feel like 48h is the sweetspot. It allows people on different timezones or with other responsibilities to still get a shot at completing the raid in contest mode, People in the UK are getting the raid start at 6pm, which is pretty late, and would mean for them to stay up through the night and into the next day, even worse for people farther east. My team took about 18 hours to get both of our clears. 8 during friday, and 10 during Saturday and was comprised of people from various different timezones. Didn't look at any guides or streams through most of it, our only peek was at bridge encounter, to figure out how to get our 6th person across. For me, 1st day one clear, outside of the joke that was RoN, so I am very glad I got to experience this with my friends

What I enjoyed the most about this contest raid experience was that my team figured out (on our own, without looking anything up) that Renewal Grasps were a Godsend for the Crota encounter. We kept running into the issue of Crota breaking Wells and killing us in final stand, but one of our teammates, a hunter main, said why don’t we try to forgo using tether and instead use Renewal Grasp duskfield grenades for the super long and large AOE 75% DR, especially since we already had Tractor Cannon for debuffing. Turns out, that DR also applied to the wells. We got our Crota kill only a few wipes after making the switch to it and when we got back to Crota in challenge mode, we only had one wipe before getting the clear since we already used a challenge strategy to break Crota’s shield.

I 100% agree with the whole shift that this has made especially after the difference between this and Root of Nightmares. As my team had half HALF of the team thinking it was gonna be easy and I was there going "Guys, it's contest mode. This is GOING to kick our asses whether you wanted it or not.". Half the team rage quitted from the first encounter, we got a new 3 and it took us 2 tries because of the buff timer and getting accustomed to the chaos of the pendulums taking people by surprised. And for those 5 it was their first contest mode try at a contest mode. It was a lot of fun and hilarious getting hit by the pendulums and people falling into the pits. All in all, great fun and looking forward to the contest mode and giving it a try and trying for a contest mode completion.

I really liked being the "scout" for Ir Yût on my team. I wish it didn't require Wish Ender to actually SEE what is in the rooms, but I enjoyed the almost peaceful non-combative role of checking rooms and making the callouts.

Crota takes +35% damage to swords, so yes Bungie 100% tailored Crota’s optimal dps strategy to swords intentionally!

One thing to consider with 24/48 hour splits - is time zones. For me we start at 6pm not 10am like in US and that has a huge difference. I know our team had things going on the Saturday so we did our first clear on Friday night, then regrouped for Challenge on Saturday night. We could have done it

Watching this raid race live with your team was so fun because I was expecting it to be a competitive Speedrun, and it ended up being a massive slog fest and was very fun

People will forever joke about you getting 2nd multiple times, or stomp on you for being 100+th in raid races, but you being the amazing content creator that you are, a great player and someone so understanding of people's struggles, I do not care if you are second, third or nowhere near the podium: You're Datto, one of the few reasons I kept on playing this game early on, and just this gives you the right to stand proud, cuz I know I ain't the only one thinking that.

“People are struggling moving down a path”. Moves on to next encounter lol love it.

And all it took was adding hot potato

I think 48 Hours of contest mode evens the playing field between America and the other timezones a bit. I am living in Germany and 24 hours was always a struggle, as the daily reset is at 7pm here. We did loose a few day one raids due to just being sleep deprived. But with 48 hours my team and I can play until 1 am, then go to sleep for a bit and then come back and finish the raid the next day. Love the commentary and thoughts by the way

I think that the issue teams were having with abyss simply came down to impatience. It was so easy to get frustrated after failing a 10 minute encounter and it was so punishing if a player died. Half the time they’re rez would be way behind us and we would have to stop and send someone back to go rez them. Many time this led to even more deaths as people were rushing to juggle the chalice and catch back up to the group. On top of this because the final plate to so long to finish it was IMPOSSIBLE to clear the encounter unless everyone was up when you got there.

Just wanted to dump my thoughts here on contest crota's end because why not. I have never played destiny 1, I went into contest Crota's End with a few friends and a few LFGs, and for day 2, I went in with a friend's group. The first team, we got to Ir Yut before disbanding, the second team got to Crota and hit enrage many many times before disbanding. Abyss: A fun puzzle to figure out. I think this encounter can prove challenging post-contest because the difficulty is not combat or mechanics, but traversal. It reminds me of the tension of a flawless raid's parkour sections. If someone dies far behind the team, it's a big danger, and forces your team on alert as they get away from the lamp and start setting up a rescue. The fact that Bungie put boss-level enemies spawning in the holes to punish people that eager edge is really funny to me. Bridge: A complicated puzzle that we had to look up, mostly to learn that there was a chalice preserve on the far side of the bridge, and that you could cross with the chalice. I enjoy how sandbox-y this encounter is, allowing for multiple strategies. My team did some insane stuff where the first sword person would cross and drop the sword off the edge, so we'd have someone across to support future sword people with tractor. Even with everyone across and only 4/5 swords dunked, it doesn't softlock you, spawning a swordbearer right there for you to use. It also supports hero moments, with everyone forcibly split up across plates, totems, and the bridge. The last person to cross the bridge died, losing enlightened, so I did some quick thinking, picked up the chalice, crossed back to res, gave him the chalice and crossed later with a sword. Felt really good. Post contest, this encounter is kind of boring. Charging up 8 enlightens(3 for the plate, 5 for swords) is a bit tedious, and so is waiting for swordbearers to spawn. Being the last one to cross is a nailbiter though, and there is tension in that everyone is enlightened so if they die we need to do some gymnastics. Ir Yut: The opening part where you bust in to kill everything gets a bit repetitive. I'm not entirely sure how bungie intended for us to exist on this map, do they just expect us to well/tether/warbanner spam our way through an insane holdout at the chalice? That way is fun but feels a bit unintentional imo. The mechanics do feel like you're meant to just look inside and know which rooms have shriekers/wizards. Maybe if the wizards ran in circles around the room? Wishender feels really bigbrain though, which feels good. Love the dynamic of carefully creating enlightens, and killing all 3/4/5 wizards at the same time, a third damage phase is truly crazy. Also wizards might be some of the most frustrating normal enemies to fight. They are sometimes annoyingly evasive, or their oppressive smoke cloud makes me feel like I'm playing pvp. Something I want to shoutout is the way the encounter encourages planning ahead. During the first DPS phase, you should be charging enlightens for the next phase of wizards, since starting fresh will take too long probably. The chalice preserve spot is in an extremely awkward spot though, making our team just sacrifice a person if their chalice was full. Crota: This encounter was made extremely difficult not based on mechanics, but mostly thanks to the encounter design with the enemy placement. Most enemies are orangebars. Too many redbars results in exotic primaries and abilities shredding everything. Too many ultras results in infinite heavy ammo, like in Ir Yut. The boomer knights, ogres, and wizards all being orangebars feels like the right balance. Crota is a bastard, but he feels too punishing if you don't have a sword tank on contest. So many random snipe deaths. We also were frustrated by how random the sword damage felt, sometimes two swords, sometimes three. Also sometimes Crota would just hump the swap point, which feels almost impossible to overcome unless you quickly send someone to swordtank. Despite all these issues, I think Crota is really fun. If there was one thing I'd change, it'd be to make the Oversoul more interesting during damage. He's even pretty good post-contest, the boomers can still kill sword people, and he still just murders wells. Like Datto, I wonder what Bungie's intention was. Did they intend for us to use rockets? Lament? Divinity? I have no clue. If they were to make legendary swords more competitive, I wish they re-released falling guillotine, or powercrept it more directly lol. Lament just might not be accessible enough for most people. Crota's end was very difficult, as most people know. I think it will age "poorly" in terms of difficulty, because it leaned heavily into combat difficulty compared to mechanical difficulty(no symbols, not that many plates, just pass the buff around at the right time, and kill stuff). I do think Necrochasm's quest is too annoying, and if this is gonna be the way they dish it out, maybe RNG would've actually been better. Getting 20 essences with RNG drops(people say 10% per encounter) with a constant quest bar taunting you is frustrating. The raid's loot does not seem very good on the surface. 180 HC, rapidfire scout, rapidfire pulse, high impact auto, lightweight shotgun, and adaptive machine gun. The origin trait makes me so badly wish for an SMG or waveframe or sword from this raid(none of these archetypes existed in D1 year 1 though, I know).

honestly the people complaining about this raid's difficulty are the same people that eager edged into the pendulums in Abyss. This was a breath of fresh air for Destiny. Hope this is kept up in final shape.

For the 48hr/24hr stuff, I really don't care for how many people get the emblem. For those that actually care about the differentiation, raid report already does that. I'd rather take the 48 hours and have more people experience contest mode raiding than 24hrs just to feel more special

Glad to hear Cyth and their family is doing okay!

My group made it to Crota and we just couldn't get past him. The RNG part of the fight of whether he destroys a well or not, and sometimes his invulnerable shield wouldn't break, even with 3 swords and a tractor cannon. It was rough and it left a bitter taste in my mouth, but I can objectively say it is a good raid

That sponsor transition had me in tears.

My favorite part of Ir Yut's encounter day one, was when i realized that stylish executioner let me wallhack the rooms for wizards and shriekers and I was running scout w gyrfalcons until i found the rooms. Very satisfying surprise.

I enjoyed contest mode, until I realized my challenge mode kill bugged out. If I don’t get that emblem, I’m sharding everything I’ve ever collected

Our opinion has arrived

This was my first contest mode clear ever. I had participated in all of them since Deep Stone and never got a clear. I did not do Root of Nightmares because I was sick of not getting it done and it looked so easy I decided to do Crota. First clear took 21 hours and the challenge mode clear took another 6 hours. The first crota kill took my team 10 hours and the second took just ten minutes because we got him down first try. Could not be happier to have finally done a day 1 raid.

Great video, glad Sith's situation has improved :)

I really enjoy these videos and watching Datto and his team clear great video💪

Interesting that you say that you thought the "Englighten everybody first" strategy was only viable on Bridge AFTER contest ended. Because during contest it was after our team tried this strategy for the first time after 5 hours of doing relay race that we actually beat it!

I get the wanting it to be 24 hours it makes the whole experience more face paced more frantic as you just have to adapt with little information but it's brought up here too you have to still execute it properly still all the information be damned you still have to be good to actually complete which is why I don't believe 48 is that big of a deal compared to most

My team kinda had the opposite problem when it came to team members and roles: we had a couple members who do well in mechanics, but are our weakest fighters overall. A good number of our wipes on deathsinger could be attributed to them dying to enemies leading up to damage and us wiping because they couldn't do enough damage individually in dps.

Not sure what you're talking about in the Damage Check section. Ir Yut and Crota were both 2 phase-able, and Crota Final Stand wasn't a damage check at all, really just a survivability check. We spent hours on Crota 5+ Final Stand wipes, came back with 1 more Well and beat it in 3 runs, 1st try on Final.

"People are just struggling moving down a path" So, goddamn, true.

@FalloutPlays Really wanted this video

i was very happy with the difficulty. with how much stronger our survivability has gotten, it felt good to be kept on your toes. what i wasn’t very happy with was that what ultimately kept my team from beating Crota, was super inconsistent damage to his shields when breaking them with the swords. it was seemingly a ping/server issue, which made everyone really frustrated considering our damage was pretty good when we did manage to quickly get to dps. Still enjoyed it overall, also very happy with the weapons and armor

3:20 Datto I thought the same exact thing. Pendulums only go one direction and people are dying the to thralls and gravity. makes me go insane

Our group gave up, ran into so many bugs, swords disappearing when we pick them up, rally banner not granting super or ammo, couldn’t bank the chalice in podiums, probably our worst day 1 experience. Enjoyed the mob density and bosses though!

finally my opinion has arrived

Been waiting for this video 😤

Hey Datto, I think you making a video about what your ideal raid would be like if you've given that any thought would be pretty cool to hear. It doesn't have to be anything specific like designing mechanics, but if you could describe how involved you'd want an encounter for a team of 6 to be, what exactly challenge is, difficulty, enemy type (rank), enemy density, stuff like that. I know you've talked about Golgoroth as your favorite encounter and talked about that. Just a potential video idea

Another note on 48 hours being the new norm for contest, I think Bungie also wants to encourage people to not destroy their body by going for an insane amount of consecutive hours. I'm not gonna argue with anyone on whether or not the "prestige" of a sub-24 hour clear is more or less valuable than one's physical/mental health. I just think Bungie wants to let people experience contest mode without torturing themselves and going an entire day without eating or sleeping.

Thankyou for saying it! Crota being this hard was needed. Glad we got it done

people complaining about chalice mechanics because they finally have to do something in a Day 1 experience was so funny. My team didn't even get to attempt Challenge because we took 13 hours to get to Deathsinger and then took a 11 hour break before coming back and finishing her pretty quickly, but then taking another 10+ hours to beat Crota(I had a full team of friends until we took a break then had 3 LFG randoms that actually pulled their weight)... I personally LOVED the difficulty and I really hope that The Final Shape raid is EVEN HARDER

Hope your friend and his family are doing better. Great recap as always.

Sorry to hear about the emergency during your run but I'm glad your friend and cohort is okay. And as a filthy casual who has never attempted Day 1, I am glad to hear it has returned to form. Just because it's not my thing doesn't mean I'm not happy the hardcore community wasn't slighted on their big holiday this year. Going to try normal mode Friday with my group, my first time playing the game this season. I'm sure to get my ass kicked haha

I only watched the stream through the normal run and I'm glad that Cyth's emergency has lightened up, it's very understandable that it would add some stress to your Challenge run

2:14 AYYYYY! Love these puns! Keep them coming!

i did the raid after contest was over, mainly due to health reasons (herniated disc in my back last week and I couldn't sit down for longer than 20 minutes before being in agony and having to constantly keep things moving to prevent seizing up), and if I ignore the whole damage output being higher than contest, or damage taken etc, from a mechanics perspective, I found it extremely easy, I did it as part of a LFG group where there were only 2 people in the group with any real raid experience (myself and the group leader) the rest of the people there were either pvp mains (forever guardian rank 6 bro), a new player who had never set foot in a raid before and a couple of guys who were there after coming back to the game last season and wanting to get that nostalgia boner tugged on by bungie, overall it took a decently long time for a normal mode clear but not too long as to be problematic, and everyone was able to execute things properly, also, on the wizard boss encounter, I was the one tasked with the callouts for the wizard locations and honestly, having to interact with the radar was fun, not overly problematic and for the most part 100% accurate. as a side note, i wish 'contest mode' for raids was done on a global scale, and not based exclusively on the moronic west coast USA model, because as it stands the only place i was able to get a day 1 clear finished in time was Root of Nightmares, i have come close on about 6 different occasions in the past (crown of sorrow i missed out on because of the moronic timezone change over so by the time i killed galrahn it was technically outside of the contest timer so it didn't count as a kill for the emblem), and you have no idea how frustrating it is to come home from work, deal with family stuff and life stuff in general, get some sleep after a hard day, and wake up the next day to find you only have 16 hours for your contest mode and not actually 24 hours because of the moronic timezone shit.

Imagine if the Darkblade was down in the Abyss and chased the Chalice holder and could smash enlightened Lamps

Crazy how different but similar it felt. This is the best reprisal in my opinion.

thanks for mentioning the challenge emblerm bug. This happened to me and it was very very frustrating after playing for 26 hrs straight then 16 hrs right after

I think Abyss remains the hardest encounter because it is a parkour encounter. You can't move fast or double jump, but it's about timing your movement, sticking together as a team, and recovering from mistakes can be quite difficult. Going back to res someone and slowly making your way back, or fetch the despawned chalice, or trying to fill up the chalice because you took it too early.

This raid really got the help it needed, many people (including myself) thought it would be a joke and either underprepared or didn't give themselves enough time. I ended up helping a buddy as a 7th man, thinking I could get a clear done after they breezed past the raid and regretted it. First time I missed the 24 hour window since garden and I had to settle for 48 hour, so big disappointment on my end. Makes me really excited for the raid race of the final shape if bungie keeps this level of challenge up.

cool fact unsure if you are aware of this, but the shield singer wizards in Ir Yut actually sing when you are near the door which is another way to figure out where they are

"It's Crota, how hard could it be?" is the exact sentence I uttered the night before contest... boy was I wrong and I'm happy I was wrong

Now if only the titan thrown hammer was ever brought up in the nerf debate

It was probably the hardest 48 hour raid thus far, if VoG and KF were extended they'd have higher completion rates

23:53 "We are so formidable, so strong... so hard to kill, that anyt-" "Semi died"(Guardian Down)

So glad they brought challenge back to this raid. Was the most fun I've had running a reprised raid, and I Iove how hard it was.

Crota in D1: It's so over Crota in D2: We're so back Crota in D2 after contest mode ended: It's so over

Say, why was the warpriest damage check so bad, thinking back to it? We had 4 aeons targets per phase with the wizards, along with a potential for 2 more if you finished the taken knights. I wonder if people just weren't adapting fast enough to create ammo back then? I was there for contest, and I remember it being tough, just wondering.

I hope we get wrath back tho i wonder how they would change it up. Wrath is my favorite raid to date with reprised kings falls and scourge being up there. However, based on how bungies changes were massively different and better than my expectations following a great remaster with challenges in the 2017 version of crota, safe to say they would find a way to do a good job on a raid that I still feel is up to par in 2023/24, which was released back in 2016.

Who would've guessed...the main thing to increase the difficulty of a raid is to add some swinging pendulums for LFGs to struggle. The Architects geometry will always be our arch nemesis

3rd day 1 raid now where I repeat the following sentiment : "toggle able contest mode please" Contest mode is a much better "hard endgame experience" than master mode, would much rather have toggle able contest than have master mode.

this was my first ever challenge/contest mode emblem 🙏 beat most of normal with friends and LFG'd for normal crota and challenge mode, definately harder than other raids i've tried but i got some good lfg teammates and we did challenge mode in 3 hours. feels good

After seeing Ghosts of the Deep, I was really hoping for that density in a raid especially. Suffice to say, five or so thrall every several seconds in the Abyss is not comparable to Ecthar. I mean, i get why, otherwise it's a gurling slog back to where you wiped, but i would've prefered a shorter endurance encounter with *a lot* more ads

Honestly what gave our team the most trouble with Crota is that we were using the Burning Maul stunlock strategy to safely deal damage, but for whatever reason this stopped working in final stand making it incredibly difficult to stay alive and deal DPS at the same time in that last stretch when we got through the previous damage phases with no issue, so I (The Titan that was slamming) had to switch to Bubble after 2nd DPS and just do my best to contribute some kind of DPS during final stand instead of keeping him standing still. (And even then we only barely got the kill, I think I finished him off with an Expunge.) Because of this we were stuck on Crota for almost 20 hours and finished with only 3 hours left on contest which gave us no time to do the challenge run when we knew we could get through the challenges without too much issue, we were even already doing the Challenge method for Crota which was hitting him with 3 Swords at the same time so we knew it was just a matter of getting back to Crota and just repeating what got us success last time. (Even in the time we had we still cleared 1st Challenge and then cleared 2nd challenge like 10 mins after the time was up.) Needless to say I'm rather butthurt over missing out on the emblem because it was right within reach for us, and it was only that combination of having to change things up for final stand as well as just general "Skill Issues TBH" that had us fall short. (Though I would attribute some of that to just being at it so long that we were wearing out.) Looking forward to getting my revenge on Master Difficulty at least when going for the seal.

I was away bc job and got back Sunday morning. Watched the vids on my way home and joined a random lfg and got to Crota in 11h. Managed to get final stands a few times but no kill, so never even got to challenges.

Happy to hear about the good news about cyth 🙏🏽

Watched the world’s 1st guys, then used there strats with clanmates & beat it in 3.5 hours, so thank you for showing us how to make it happen so we could get the emblem & the exotic

This raid’s difficulty was perfect for contest mode except for one room. I really feel like crota’s encounter was just slightly overtuned. Everything else was the right flavor of difficulty that took my team having good coordination, survivability, ad clear, and DPS. But where it took us about 6 hours to make it to his room, we couldn’t clear it after 10 additional hours in the room. I think a small combination of changes would have made it challenging but a little more in line with the rest of the raids difficulty. Maybe not having the “must swap chalice in the glowing spot” as it was very much rng if you got a decent spot or if you got a spot up top where crota was just camping it waiting to curb stomp. Or how the swords disappeared after like 2 seconds of trying to break crotas overshield for seemingly no good reason. Just those two changes alone would keep a chunk of the difficulty without taking it over the top.

d2 crota feels like it's in a very comfy spot for me, personally. if you know what you're doing and are paying attention, you can breeze right through (though it's not a shooting the shit kind of experience like RoN), and if you totally zone out, you can still fuck things up like getting absolutely blasted to hell by crota if you leave yourself in his line of sight. i think the new mechanics add a lot to it, and i like that basically everyone has to have some degree of responsibility at *some* point, but there's also variability in the amount of responsibility - so if say you have someone who's new, and isn't comfortable taking on a lot of new information and responsibility, there are roles you can give them where their level of responsibility in mechanics is lower. most of all i'm happy to see crota return, and i'm happy to see him get to throw hands this time around - both in the sense of having a fun, engaging experience, and also a little bit to spite people who thought it couldn't be brought up to par with today.

Lfg groups be like “hitting all the lamps is so tedious we should just use the chalice deposits to extend our time and keep moving” then wipe 7 times in a row when we could’ve been done if we just did it normally.

Crota was a problem for my team, we did run into ammo priblems even running the aeon and cenitaph strat. It showed that people really needed the top dmg loadout on lock

48 hour contest mode is actually the only reason I really can partake since I'm technically the sub for my raid group, and I have to run it on a run back after they finish. And I work on Fridays so I can only really even start the raid late Friday or Saturday morning.

I thought I almost wouldn't have an opinion on this Raid. Thanks for coming through for me once adain Datto

23:59 I love that someone died right as he said that.

My team couldn’t complete contest on normal within the 48 hours, we got to Crota in decent time but got stuck there. Came back on the second day and continued to slam our heads into Crota without success after nearly 22 hours. We lost in a final stand due to Crota teleporting away in the middle of the last bit of his health bar, so that was wildly frustrating. We had a few runs go sour due to some of the inconsistencies with damage to Crota’s shield or whatever. Overall, we were split in our opinions. While we liked that Crota’s End was difficult, some of us really didn’t enjoy the Chalice mechanic. “Playing Hot Potato” is a good comparison as it really is just keeping track of timers and buffs. Having it kill you if you held onto it too long was really the thorn that was in everyone’s side though, many an encounter was lost because one of us were busy helping with Sword Bearers or Ogres or Boomers and then forgot they had the chalice and then died because of it. Crota out of contest mode is a joke still though, after coming back to him outside of contest we 2 phased him with no difficulty so take that as you will.

I’m with regular Datto this time, I think overtime the contest mode has become an experience over an “elite club”. I like the idea of the community coming together for two days to just enjoy the chaos of a new raid

Oh that was close, I was worried someone would ask my opinion on this before Datto's video came out

It is one of the best raids difficulty-wise, contest mode was a nice challenege and it was very fun to do on normal mode, but also at least for me, because I didn't have a team for conteat mode, it showed the more toxic side of lfg because I didn't know one mechanic, or I was not 1810

I want oryx ornaments back, or just all the raid armors of triumph from D1 brought back like they did with Crotas Armor set.

Sad to say our team couldn’t get through The Abyss (Lamps), mainly due to lack of clear communication about the Chalice and who needed to do what, and when. We tried it for about 3 or 4 hours before I needed to go off (as it was near 2am UK time). We were going to give it another try later in the weekend but couldn’t get everyone back on at the same time again.

Crota after contest mode is basically a dungeon. On par with Ghosts of the Deep. Contest mode, completely the opposite Also, there are mega threads on Reddit basically relaying the strats of the top teams LIVE. My teams have always gone in blind, whether it be day 1 or 2. That's the fun of it. I don't think Root made people soft. But the Abyss is ruining a certain kind of player. I also think some of the chalice deposit spots are poorly designed, as they can't be seen if it's on or not but only from a specific angle. When they all have the little lights around the rim and then 2 of them those lights are buried under the map or smashed against a rock face, you end up going "wtf where did we miss it?!" And then next time "stumbling" on it feels bad. That's poor design to me when the first 3 were all relatively clear once you found it. 2 of them can spawn in places where you memorize it, or just happen to walk over it. That's not good.

My only issue with the Crota boss fight, was the inconsistency of 3 sword on contest mode, it just felt like over and over again my team would get Crotas shield to a sliver left and then all of the swords would run out, other than that I feel like it was plenty difficult and I quite enjoyed the experience of going in blind, as I have only played Destiny 2

I got stuck at ir yut on contest, we consistently got through 2 phases, but we either couldn't get to 3rd because of struggles with wizards or just got to it too late to do enough damage.

this was my first contest mode attempt and even though we didnt have enough time to get past crota it was still a super fun time

I didn't get to finish it on Contest, had things to do the second day, but I did it on normal that Sunday and it was really fun still.

Doing the Abyss on day one was so chaotic and fun. We did it again after contest mode and unless you’re skipping pillars to get to the end faster, it is a miserable boring trek to the ogres.

End of bridge on contest was super intense when you only have 3 people left frantically calling out ogres. Lol.

Can confirm, the lack of contest mode and having to focus and be on top of everything with the chalice mechanic, really screws this raid a bunch. I ran with my day 1 team and my god we failed hard in normal mode. It was all over the place

As a professional Ad Clear Player I am happy they still gave me a small role. I was angry that so many people were appropriating my role in Root and putting disrespect on the good name of us Add Clearers.

You can hear the wizards singing by the doors in 3rd encounter to actually tell what rooms they are in, if you don’t want to use radar

Fallout is creaming over this vid rn.