(Before people start questioning my experience, yes, I have cleared CoS 30 times and cleared it flawless) So I want to talk about why CoS is just so bad of a raid and I am going to go over the enocunters one at a time. Encounter 1: Establishes the main theme mechanic of the raid. You need to swap the buff around to keep it going for half of your team for 1 minute before swapping. Depending on if you have buff or not you can hurt certain adds and you need to shoot crystals that will wipe the group if not shot by one of each buff and non-buffed player. Stand in center crystal to refresh and swap buffs. Problem: Immediately out of the gate its a buff management raid. Let me say this as bluntly as possible. ... This is dogcrap to build an entire raid around. This mechanic has been done ad nauseum in raiding. Its not a strong enough mechanic to build an entire raid around, its a mechanic you build a phase around, not an entire raid. We already have done this before with Skolas and its only been 'raidified' in a bland way. Now for the encounter itself... its boring. Its a standard kill adds quickly and then kill crystals before swapping. Its far too long for what little is provided in the encounter. Bad start to the raid. Encounter 2: (I am skipping the platfrom section because although its an encounter its one with no time limit or wipe mechanic so keep throwing yourselves at it till you succeed.) Boss fight! Well first off you split into 3 pairs around the arena. One pair will get the buff and each side needs to kill adds until the ogre spawns and then move to large crystal to share/swap buffs to unlock more of the arena till all 3 locations are unlocked. The boss is an annoying melee lord for one team. When you clear all 3 locations one buff and one non buff damage the boss inside its shield to bring it down then unload on him. Repeat breaking his shield till he dies or he resets the whole phase. This encounter is disappointing. Its just another add kill encounter with the timer being the buff basically to keep it going. It does a really terrible job and feels like a tacted on encounter than a full fleshed out encounter. Even the arena isn't fit for this encounter because you can just stand on debris and the boss does jack to you. A joke of an encounter and clearly an unfinished encounter that was rushed out the door. It needed more to it. Encounter 3! Final Boss. This encounter is just as bad as the previous one. Its basically the same encounter with some changes but you are doing almost the same thing at its core. Start with 3 people with buff. Split up back to your pairs. Kill all adds. Refresh buff when needed. Crystals from encounter 1 spawn that must be killed on each side in a rotating clockwise pattern. When orges spawn one team will have the previous boss spawn. Stun him on the platform, shoot big glowing hand and go get new buff from another side. Rinse repeat till all 3 do it. After that each team shoots both hands on their side, find out which one is real, refresh buffs, then obliterate boss. This is one of if not the worst "Final Boss" in Destiny history. Yes, even worse than Crota's glitching out face. Its [b]ANOTHER [/b] add management fight with just the two bland encounters smooshed togetether with a dumb idiot occasionally shooting at you. This boss is absolutely 0 threat to the raid. Instead the threat is simply remembering to prioritize the crystals. [b]THAT'S IT. [/b] This is not a raid Bungie, this might qualify as a 6 player dungeon if I am being generous. You are never in any danger in this raid unless contest is activated, you are only under pressure by a clock you set. This is entirely one singlular puzzle mechanic. This is not a raid, you did not make an adequate raid boss. Raid bosses are supposed to be the main [b]THREAT[/b] to the raid. The bosses here are no threats. The worst part is you [b]REGRESSED[/b] in raid design with Crown of Sorrows. Last Wish even with all of its issues is a better raiding(ish) experience. Riven when not dumpstered has an interesting mechanic of the players needing to pay attention to the boss and adjust to what the boss is doing to interrupt the boss. It has [b]ATTACKS THE GROUP REACTS TO![/b] You know like a boss is [b]SUPPOSED TO DO![/b] In Scourge of the Past you improved up that concept with Inserection Prime. It had threatening attacks the team needed to keep an eye on and try to interrupt and it actually moved around. Granted, not well but it moved and was something we had to keep tabs on. It should have been improved up on further, instead you threw it out the window for a regressed boss fight that is one of the worst in the series. Come on. I know you likely were deep into development on CoS when SoP was released, but seriously, why did it feel like you guys threw it away? Time constraints? It feels like CoS was rushed, and you know what? That is why you guys seriously need to give the raids more time to be developed. Give them at least 6 months to be released or more. Wait for player's reactions to settle on the raids a month afterwards or more to get a proper feel of what to learn from. Don't even listen to day 1 or week 1 clears, everyone is jacked up racing onto twitter to praise you just because they cleared it. They are basically on a raid high. Wait for players to clear the raids a few times and let a LFG meta settle so you can learn from it. CoS was a dumpsterfire in my eyes. One of the worst raid experiences so far. When I have 4 instances where someone on LFG falls asleep in the middle of an encounter... something is wrong.