In Bungie’s latest weekly update, they outlined a few changes coming to Destiny.
Most of the weapon changes they mentioned have been well received, especially the PvE buff for the Vex Mythoclast, since many people were disappointed when it got such a significant PvE nerf. Bungie stated that the Mythoclast will be “a weapon [people] can continue to rely on in the next Raid, Crota’s End.”
What hasn’t been well received is the change to the Atheon encounter in the Vault of Glass.[divider]
According to the update:
Next week’s Hotfix is going to contain some fixes to the Atheon encounter.
- We’ve added “baby bumpers” to areas where players could knock Atheon out of the environment.
- Knocking a boss off a ledge is a bug. We will seek to address bugs like these as quickly as possible.
The encounter goal for Atheon is to act as a climax and the culmination of learning for a given Raid group. Part of that is making sure that each player in your group can perform every job as required. A change will take effect next week which fixes a bug with Atheon’s target selection. When using its Timestream ability, Atheon will select 3 players at random, instead of choosing the three players furthest from it.
[divider]Random?
The decision to change the way the Timestream ability works is causing people to question Bungie’s motives about the entire encounter.
If you haven’t attempted or completed the Vault of Glass raid yet, Timestream is an ability Atheon uses in the fight where 3 people will get teleported, and as of now it’s your team who chooses which people he teleports. This change causes players to know “every job as required.” Will this cause more frustration? Probably. Will the change cause the encounter to be even harder? For a lot of people, definitely. But is this “bug” fix really necessary?
It seems people are missing the keyword: bug. Atheon randomly teleporting people is how the encounter was originally supposed to be.
Though it’s unfortunate that the encounter does not currently (pre-hotfix) work correctly, it’s doubtful that people would be in an uproar about the random Timestream ability if they had fought Atheon using it since the beginning.
DattoDoesDestiny weighs in on the subject by saying,
This change makes it more random, yes, but it breaks up the monotony and I’m looking forward to it. It will make you better at the raid. It’s good practice for dealing with chaos.
[divider]Will this improve the encounter?
The fact that people were able to defeat Atheon in unintended ways and with unintended mechanics is disappointing, and of course Bungie is at fault for this.
Is this change really needed now that so many people have gotten used to the unintended strategy? There’s probably a better way that Bungie could complicate this encounter, or have people “preform every job as required.”
There were hundreds of people who supported the thoughts of Reddit user JarredMack
This is a horrible design decision for the game. The purpose of organizing a team to do content is that you can assign people to particular roles and make sure you cover everyone’s strengths appropriately. Not only does this “fix” make the encounter much more frustrating for groups to complete, but it creates situations where you simply can’t afford to raid with people that can’t do 100% of the encounter – this is incredibly alienating for new raiders and pickup groups alike.
Perhaps it would be better to only have people who play on Hard mode randomly teleported via Timestream? Or is it going to tarnish the experience regardless?
Are you happy with this significant change, disappointed, or indifferent? Let us know what you think about these upcoming the upcoming hotfix in the comments below.
