After finishing vog challenge mode last night at around midnight I came on the forum and was blown away by the amount of hate vog was getting, Ive been replying a lot today but figured it just make my own post to round up my thoughts. First and foremost, it's not like I don't see where the complaints are coming from. I get it, this version of vog is significantly more complicated mechanics-wise than the original and I can see how these changes that make the iconic raid borderline unrecognizable would blindside people. People loved it in d1 and of course they wouldn't want it to change, and while I think it is ridiculous to expect them to bring it back unchanged, I can see why people would want this. But I just want everyone to think for a second about what vog would be like if it was copy pasted from d1 to d2. No mechanics changed at all, a carbon copy in every possible way. What about it would be challenging, even to the casual player? Vault of glass was a very simple raid even for D1 standards, and in D2 we have gotten significantly stronger; [b]if the original vog was brought back, it would be completely trivialized by things that the original mechanics were not designed for[/b]. Well of radiance, banner shields with ursa furiosas, top tree dawn skating, charged with light mods, warmind cells, witherhoard, blinding grenade launchers, anarchy, healing rifts, titan walls, it would be a complete joke because D1 didn't have any of this stuff. Just think about confluxes if there were no Wyverns, you could literally just shoot witherhoard at the darkness gates from start to finish with no issue. They had to add something to keep people in check. The D2 sandbox allows us to be much stronger; we can clear adds extremely effectively, have limitless options for outrageous DPS, have a slew of abilities to make it nearly impossible to die. Because of this, the only difficulty that bungie can impose on us in raids anymore is mechanical difficulty, hence why D2 raids tend to be a lot more mechanically demanding and complex than before. This is why they needed to toughen up and in some cases completely rescript the vog mechanics: to compensate for how strong we have become in D2. Aside from why I feel like they need to change the mechanics because of the sandbox, I think there is a clear argument in favour of this vog being objectively better designed than the original since it is coming after 7 years of experience designing raids and other pve content: >At confluxes it makes no sense to just spam minor enemies and a couple yellow bars, they realized that they needed something to keep people in check and make the encounter more engaging, hence the wyverns. hoards of goblins walking at you posing no threat for 10 minutes is not engaging for a raid encounter. >At templar, the point of blocking the teleport was unclear but now it is evident that it is a risk-reward mechanic: if you block the teleport you can stay in one spot to do damage, but more adds will spawn and eventually you will have to do another round of oracles so you have to stay on top of it if you choose to extend dps. An optional way to make the encounter more high risk and tight in exchange for a faster kill and arguably more simplicity is good design. >I'll skip gatekeeper for the sake of my wall of text but I feel like at atheon there needed to be something for people in the throne room to do, which is why they added the mechanic of the people in throne having to call out the order of oracles. In the original, if you didnt get TPed you didnt get to do anything but sit on a plate and shoot supplicants which is objectively bad design. The way I see it, these mechanics should have always existed, plus the changes to oracles and gatekeeper which I didn't talk about but I could if I wanted to. This feels to me like the vision for vog that was always intended. Overall I think VoG would have been incredibly boring if it was unchanged. I know people love their nostalgia, and I liked vog in d1 as much as the next guy, but I would prefer a new experience which is exactly what this was: the mechanics were fresh and fun to learn our way around, yet fundamentally familiar and still faithful to the original. I criticize this game a lot but, credit where credit is due, they knocked this one out of the park. I don't know how they could have done it better, except maybe allow people to shoot while detained, and lets be honest 2 rounds of oracles at atheon instead of 3 would have sufficed. Also, side note, please please please stop judging raids based on the contest day experience. Day 1 is a uniquely difficult event catered specifically towards people who want to push themselves to the absolute limits of their teamwork and PvE skill since there are so many opportunities to do this in this game. It is supposed to be unnecessarily difficult and it is not for everyone. If you struggled on day 1, try it again when you can play the activity at the intended difficulty and once guides and metas have come out, then give your critiques. Obviously the mechanics are going to feel overwhelming when youre 20 levels below and when no one knows what the optimal strategies are, and this is not the experience to judge a raid by.