Destiny's raid challenges are lame so far, but at least they guarantee loot

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Starting with the Warpriest

This week, Destiny‘s raid challenges debuted for both normal and hard mode variants. The gist is that each week, a new boss will have an active modifier that’s designed to test player’s skill, and reward them with specific bonuses if they meet said requirements. In this case, the challenge involves the Warpriest, the third encounter and first major boss of the King’s Fall raid.

Except so far, this isn’t really quite a “challenge.” In essence, players will find that enemies will spawn faster, and the boss has a slightly faster firerate. Other than that, you only need to complete the fight with no one player holding the aura (that allows you to damage him) twice. That’s it. Most groups will down him in two sequences (mine does it close to one at this point), so there’s very little effort needed to actually accomplish this if you’re already doing the fight on hard.

So what’s your reward? 310 gear on normal, and 320 gear on hard (weapon, artifact), thank goodness. But in the end, this only slightly delays the grind, because the rest of the raid each week is still gated behind multiple counts of RNG. Instead, I wish there was a token system like many MMOs out there, where running the raid will net you a piece of currency — after accumulating a certain amount, players can then turn them in for a missing piece, most notably the mysterious hard mode helmet that’s nigh impossible to get.

Raid challenges and guaranteed 320 gear is a step in the right direction, but it’s a half-measure. Hopefully Bungie can go further to help retain players going forward, as I don’t see this lasting more than a month or so as each challenge cycles through to Oryx.