Salvation's Edge is fun though. 😭 I sherpa that raid pretty consistently, and most everyone states it's a lot easier than they were led to believe.

1st encounter is ok. Unique for sure. Second is kinda irritating because the UI does a poor job of letting you know your random responsibility. 3rd is probably my favorite, it’s only confusing if people try and rush. 4th is absolutely hellish if you don’t have an experienced person on the outside doing the shapes. Even worse if the people inside aren’t using the method where you get all rooms to the single shape of your room and then give it away. 5th to this day boggles my mind. Trying to memorize how 3 different shapes, colors, and hand attacks that don’t have any actual connection besides “Bungie said so” relate to one another is just an awful awful mechanic. I shouldn’t have needed to have made 5 pages of flow charts to join an LFG group for a raid. As an engineer in real life and a substantially above average Destiny player I can’t even fathom how a regular Joe would do that raid.

Raids are often considered harder than they actually are, here’s the reasons I see: - raid mechanics tend to be easier to learn while trying them and many players aren’t willing to do more than watch a YouTube video (if they can be bothered to do that) - players often get kicked from LFG raids if they join a “kwtd” post and don’t actually know what to do; just set aside a few hours for your first clear and subsequent ones become easy - many, MANY players have their own “pet builds” which they refuse to take off under any circumstance; I may be here telling people to use the queenbreaker, but if they refuse to take off the thunderlord and hit like -blam!- per phase, a boss like Atheon goes from an easy 1/2 phase to a slog with 3/4 phases. - (related to the last point) the perception of “meta = bad” has made the average casual simply hate the idea of swapping loadouts for an encounter, so even outside of dps, we get people -blam!- to take champions seriously in master raids & die constantly. - raids are supposed to take about an hour on average, so when people set aside 40 minutes for their first clear and then fail to even get halfway, they leave the raid thinking it’s impossible. I know I’m “blaming” new players a lot here, but they are their own biggest barrier to getting through a raid; I have 100s of sherpas and many 100s of runs more for teaching raids to those who have only been carried; challenge teaching runs, runs such as divinity or catalysts, etc, etc and these are the issues I constantly see. (Related) An LFG player (guardian rank 7, so not a complete noob or anything) recently joined a teaching run of GoS I was doing expecting to be carried or “ad clear”; he complained the whole way through until he point blank refused to engage with the mechanics, so he was booted. He said that learning mechanics was too hard and that I was an elitist for not just carrying him. I thought about it and decided to test it out and see if it truly was too hard for the average player (maybe my tendency to raid just puts me around other good raiders, so it tints. My perspective?) Well, I found a random blueberry in the tower; guardian rank 1 & then invited him to fireteam; he was so new that he had come to the tower to ascend to rank 2 & we had to run through the ruskrunner quest before he could even launch into a raid as part of my fireteam. I ran him through a VoG with less than 10 hours on his total playtime; he was engaged with the mechanics throughout, he had almost nothing gear-wise and just spammed Izzy (from rite of the nine chest); no issues. A completely new player can pick up the mechanics and be an active part of a raid clear in under 1 hour if they’re simply willing to engage with the content. Yes, VoG is arguably the easiest raid (alongside DSC and RoN), but the point is that getting into raids is easy if you’re willing and that moving from VoG to something like KF isn’t that big of a jump. Start with something easy, be willing to learn and to actually play & in no time at all, you’ll be 100s of raids in with godroll adept/harrowed/timelost gear, raid titles, raid exotics and maybe even some flawless runs, low mans or day 1s.