Removing surges from raids was the right move, as it'll help a lot more people get into raids without having to grind for dozens or even hundreds of hours to piece together meta for each surge. Kudos Bungie. However, that's half the battle. The next step is removing the -5 part too for the following reasons. 1. It weakens guardians while not improving the reward structure. Pantheon had guaranteed loot. Regular raids and dungeons do not. The "time spent" to "rewards earned" ratio is not optimal for enjoyment, especially considering that to get everything, you have to run the raid dozens of times, especially if you have bad exotic RNG. 2. Raids used to be more chill. People who wanted a challenge could do master, duo/trio, or flawless runs to get their challenge rush in. That was a very good system and changing it didn't make it any better. 3. Increasing the damage taken and reducing the damage dealt has not driven more people into raids. Last week was GoS, and according to Charlemagne, it was only run marginally more often than it would on any other rotation week, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of players actually need pinnacles right now. Link: https://warmind.io/analytics/raid/garden-of-salvation That means people are [b][i]not[/i][/b] running the raids more often, and I would posit that it probably would've been run even more if the changes hadn't taken affect because, again, a lot of people need pinnacles right now. Also taking into account that those numbers are compared to last season, which was one of the most dead seasons in D2 history. Doing marginally better than a dead season when way fewer people were logging on is not an achievement. The last time we needed pinnacles and GoS was in rotation, it was run 2 1/2 to 3 times more often than it was last week (as per the above link). So, no matter what the dillholes here or on Reddit say, the community has spoken. They don't want to do raids in this new system. It's fine that the raids needed to be the same across the board in terms of light level. A little housekeeping is perfectly okay. However, the -5 difficulty will only ever appeal to a small percentage of players and raid stats will continue to plummet, especially once everyone hits Pinnacle cap and doesn't care anymore and especially once the seasonal stuff has run its course and the fairweather players dip out again.