So after having completed HM WoTM twice this week, I'm curious how people feel about the changes to "up the difficulty". Do you like what Bungie did with it or do you feel it was poorly done. Personally I don't really care for a number of the changes starting with the first real boss fight. We discussed on the last podcast that we wondered how they'd make such an easy raid more difficult and my hope was they'd be creative. Instead they decided on the first loot boss to just drag out the time it takes to drop his shield so ridiculously long that the odds of small mistakes by players increases. It's really sad because the normal mode fight (though not super imaginative either - take down shield while never really feeling threatened by the actual boss and then unloading with impunity) was fun enough. The general consensus from my friends is this fight just sucks now. It's not really any more difficult, but it's 100% more obnoxious. The Zamboni is still the Zamboni. Had an interesting conversation with RWG about it and she pointed out how disjointed that fight is from the rest of the raid and I agree, but the end just doesn't get old. This fight had the only genuinely shocking and really awesome moment of hard mode when the Devil Walker drops. Unfortunately this fight was easy AF before and remains so. The Walker doesn't need to be killed, is not even 1/100th as deadly as the one in the Taniks strike and is cool to see drop in, but ultimately requires zero effort to pass. The Zamboni is an interesting fight. It's a really cool set piece, but Bungie decided that instead of building in more interesting challenge mechanics to just give it a time limit. Artificial difficulty at its worst (even more so than Bungie's beloved elemental shields) If anything this fight is easier on Hard Mode as there seemed to be less splicers in front of the Zamboni since the Walker was there. Then we have Aksis stage one. This to me is the worst of the raid. Okay the regular fight is a cakewalk, but I haven't liked Bungie's blocking off areas of play since RoI released with traps and turrets and the turrets here are just dumb. If you don't want players populating sections of maps, design better maps. Throwing in traps to force play away is cheap and again it didn't make the fight any more difficult in the end, it just made it less fun and kinda obnoxious. Finally Aksis phase two. This is the only one I thought worked. Granted they didn't do anything spectacular other than making us kill more servitors and throw more bombs, but I think it is actually a more challenging fight now and that difficulty is based on actual mechanics and not artificial shit like the endless bombs that needed thrown on boss one or the stupid turrets. Phase two requires communication, coordination and everyone pulling their weight and up until DPS phase, I think it shined in normal mode and hard mode is even better. Unfortunately there's the "until DPS phase" qualifier because unfortunately Destiny raid bosses themselves have been relegated to backdrops that do exactly jack and shit on their own and then just stand and take a beating for a brief time. Phase two sorta gives more immersion with the actual boss by making us do the empowered slams, but then it's the same "everyone DPS the boss" I would love to see Bungie design a raid boss that didn't involve just dealing with endless adds until we can kill the boss for a bit. I want to see a boss that actually -blam!-ing fights us (Taniks has called you out, guardian. Now watch him run away from you in the ways of old). I want to see boss fights where the boss attacks, defends, moves about and targets. Give them abilities and tactics and make us have to use our own to counter. We have weapons, grenades, supers... The chess matches could be epic, but instead it's kill adds, DPS boss ad nausea. I know it probably sounds like I don't like the raid and that's not true, I still think it's a fun place to run through and I like running it, but where normal mode was like the best strike in the game, hard mode is a nightfall with shit modifiers to make it difficult by just making it obnoxious. Ultimately I'm sure we'll still play it a lot, but where King's Fall could get past the kill adds, DPS boss rut with drastically unique encounters built around them, WoTM just doesn't have the same depth or range. The fights (minus the Zamboni) are all so similar and like I said, it's a really cool 6 player strike, but I was hoping hard mode would make it a bit more.