Had a pretty productive weekend.
The wife and I played with 4 people who we know in the real world, who all recently got into Destiny around Black Friday/Xmas area.
On Saturday morning around 10:30 we all got together and walked them through vault of glass. They had been asking for a raid experience sometime, and it just happened to work out that we had 6 people. The lowest person was 280, so it wasn't really a problem.
It was so fun getting to experience some of that raid stuff again. Watching people who didn't know what was going on learn and adjust is actually very rewarding. I'm talking people who had never even seen a video about the raid to know what to expect. We got Aetheon on our 2nd try, which made me feel pretty happy with the group.
One of the new guys ask if we could take a crack at king's fall, maybe get some loot they could actually use. I didn't think we'd make it through the whole raid, but I figured we could at least take out the warpriest.
The Statues were fine, and fun. The jumping puzzle was... entertaining. We had one guy (the 280) who just cannot platform for shit, so it took probably 25 minutes alone getting through the Portico.
The totems took about 5 tries before people got their rotations figured out. We kept dying with about 15% left on the door, so we knew it was possible, just needed exposure to the encounter. Then we got through.
Loot - Only my wife got a ghost, shards for everyone else.
Explaining the warpriest was difficult. I could tell that people just weren't getting that if you had the debuff, you had to kill adds, but only closer to when the debuff has run out. So eventually i just said fuck it and we started the encounter. I figured I'll let them all feel the actual encounter once or twice, and maybe things will start to make sense. It worked. We got the Warpriest down on our 4th try. Note that not everyone in this group had snipers, so to DPS you saw ARs, Rockets, and Hammers being thrown all over the place. It was very interesting, but it worked.
Loot - Only my wife got the machine gun (which she already had the Harrowed version of), shards for everyone else.
Golgoroth took some more adjustments. We tried the 1 orb strategy but it just wasn't working. It also didn't help that I was holding the gaze mostly, but I probably had the best gear of the group. So after 2 attempts, I taught the whole gaze mechanics to two other people so they could bounce it around. This way would could DPS on the 1st, 3rd, and 5th gaze shift. Using R1, L1, and L2 orbs. 2 trys of this (had to do some small adjusting for cursed thralls) and we nailed it on the 1st orb of the 3rd cycle.
Loot - 3 of the new guys got the chest piece.
The pistons were god damn amazing. I've never seen a group laugh so much. It didn't matter that they were dying repeatedly, they were having a blast. I figured the sisters might be the end for us. I knew we couldn't kill each sister right off the bat, so that meant 4 runners, which meant a stronger chance that our 280 player would have to do some platforming. Somehow on our 4th attempts, we got super lucky with who got and we took them down.
Loot - 1 class item and 1 weapon for the new guys.
We were screwing around, I wasn't planning on trying oryx because i could tell things were going to be tight if we did. While screwing around in the room someone triggered the boss fight on accident though, so we just ran with it. People adjusted pretty well, and gave me a bit of optimism. Thus started our 120 minute Orxy encounter. It took about 6 tries before we could do 1 clean cycle. It took me a while to get used to the rules of normal again, because I'd see 3 people wipe while detonating orbs and feel like the encounter was all over. Forgetting that they could be rezzed. We had several attempts with Oryx at less than 15% health (2 bombs), and random shit kept going wrong. I shit you not, we needed 1 bomb left to kill him, and my controller decided it needed to resync itself when I was 1 platform away from the relic. It was torture. When we finally got that kill though, man did it feel good. Best feeling I've had for killing Oryx in a long time.
Loot - 3 Primaries for the new guys. I got a helmet.
It was super fun doing it all again like it was brand new. I do wish the other guys got enough loot that their light levels would have adjusted. The 280 was 283 by the end, and that felt like a pretty crappy jump.
All in all, it sums up my feelings about King's fall anyway. The experience is fun, but the rewards take the wind out of it.
