A Garden World- Next to last on my personal list of strikes. You're doing essentially nothing until you finish your Infinite Forest trek, but at least you get to exit into the prettiest area in the game. The mechanic for this one is floating cubes that cast a shield bubble, and place an unbreakable shield on some large Vex enemies. They're extremely easy to pop even before the Minotaurs are functioning, but can still be annoying if a large group of smaller enemies is waiting for you in the shield. The boss is annoying simply because of his insane accuracy with his powerful gun while he rotates around your cover. On top of this, he'll put up an unbreakable shield at intervals, forcing you to kill the huge cube Minotaurs before you can damage him again. When Curse of Osiris was still relevant, this is one I'd almost always skip, as it feels like just a long haul where you keep being stopped to bust cubes. Tree of Probabilities- Another overall bust. I don't exactly hate this one, but it's still usually a skip. You start out killing some enemies just to be able to enter the Forest and run through. Once you get out, you have another wave of pretty simple enemies, but at the end of this fight, your sparrow unlocks. This is something we almost never see in the middle part of strikes, and I'm grateful for any chance to cover some ground quickly and skip unimportant enemies. It lines you up on what feels essentially like a very short SRL track, including obstacles. Sadly, this is short-lived, and dumps you right at another stretch of pointless ads, which lead directly to the boss. This boss suffers from damage-phase-itis, jumping in only to get melted, jump out, and force you to fight enemies to progress to his next section. On the bright side, you only have to kill the minotaur to lower the shields blocking you, there are some fancy laser grids serving as obstacles, and there's a bit of jumping to change up the pace in between. After burning through the big guy twice, you can literally instantly murder him with a super in the last phase, making this strike fairly easy and quick at the very least. Strange Terrain- It's alright, but man am I tired of queueing into it. Since Warmind dropped, I've gotten this strike to appear out of the playlist almost every time. Aside from that, it uses a half new, half old mechanic of throwing orbs that you pick up from defeated Knights, but this time at floating crystals that lock doors or put shields over important enemies (do I smell more recycled mechanics?). The strike basically just consists of wandering through a cave and gunning down ads, with one quick wizard fight, one large chamber where you have to stay in cover to avoid in ogre while you kill ads and break his shield crystals, and then Nokris. This isn't made any better by the fact that throwing the orbs feels incredibly different from anything we've had before. They're lighter, travel faster and arc less, bounce awkwardly and roll, snap onto the crystals pretty harshly but also inconsistently, and glitch out wildly sometimes. All of this makes for a pretty bad situation once you're thrown into the boss fight. There is only a few real cover spots around the room, and they're small awkward, and largely usless. Nokris spawns some ads and then just sits around while you burn him, until transitioning into- you guessed it, a damage lockout phase. He sits up top in an unbreakable shield, calls down a neverending wave of thrall (we'll come back to this later), and leaves you to kill ads and break two of his crystals, rinse and repeat. It staggers your progress, and makes this fight take longer and be far more annoying than it needs to be, especially with him lobbing huge blasts at you the entire time. It gets even worse once he starts to move around the room, even chasing you behind cover, while still invincible, while still blasting away. A pretty big flop right at the end. Will of the Thousands- I only just today managed to queue into this one for the first time. That being said, I don't hate it, but I'm speaking largely from experience with the mission. This one feels the most like still being a story mission, as they lumped both the forging of the upgraded Valkyrie and killing Xol into this one, so you still have to go through the motions of popping vents to open doors, interacting with the scannable conduit to grab the first valkyrie, and throwing it into the forge, for seemingly no reason now. None of the enemies seemed to be too challenging, or even interesting, aside from one ogre that spawns just in front of the door to the forge. Once you get to Xol, it's just an exact replica fight from the story mission, and my group managed to kill him before we even got a Valkyrie, leading to a bland, stationary, but quick boss fight. My grievances here come mostly from Xol being able to insta-kill you by snapping you up while trying to grab a Valkyrie, or crushing you when he randomly decides to slither across the platform while you're killing ads or simply don't have time to move; and the Valkyrie being basically nonexistent in this fight.