My fireteam and I ran Vesper's Host for the first time just a few days ago, and I wanted to share our experience as a fireteam with what I think is a pretty average skill level. To put that into context, for us a regular strike would be dead easy, a nightfall pretty comfortable, and a GM nightfall quite challenging. Two of us started playing during Lightfall and one just a few months ago, so we don't quite have all the best weapons / armour available for every situation but we have enough to make some decent builds.
Shout out to anyone at Bungie who worked on the mechanics in this dungeon because our run started out overwhelmingly positive. It was pretty unanimous that this dungeon had some of the most fun mechanics we'd seen and we had a blast in the first encounter. The challenge level was very comfortable while learning what does what.
We started running in to roadblocks at Raneiks though. We got better as we went (Some loadout changes were in order thank you Dragon's Breath), but this ended up taking us 8 phases after a few wipes. I'm sure it could have been a lot quicker, but again this is how things worked out at our skill level. It wasn't clear at first if splitting Raneiks up during this phase would grant more damage, but we eventually figured this out. Little bit of a skill issue there I'll admit, but even after figuring things out, splitting him up, and trying to maximize out splash damage, this boss still took a looong time and we were exhausted by the end of it. The mechanics themselves we thought were really good, but the length of time we had to execute them for was beyond tedious.
As I'm sure you've guessed we had a similar experience with the final encounter. We actually ended up completing this one in four phases on our successful run, but there were a lot of wipes and a lot loadout/strategy optimizations before that. It was a great moment finally making it to the end, but the sentiment quickly shifted from "Yes we did it!" to "Thank god we never have to do this again", as the last encounter also ended up being very tedious, especially having to redo the whole basement bunker shenanigans between every phase.
In some ways this is my favourite dungeon, but I don't think I could ever convince my fireteam to run it with me again due to the sheer tedium of those last two encounters.
[b]TLDR, our biggest takeaways were:[/b]
- We had to do a lot of research about meta DPS strategies, and meta weapons to use for each boss. We would love if the "normal" difficulty for a dungeon rewarded this kind of commitment, but didn't require it to be completed comfortably.
- Having to do each in-between-DPS mechanic twice for each boss ended up being very tedious. It would have gone a really long way for us if you could do an abridged version subsequent times.
- The complexity of the mechanics in this dungeon felt just right. They felt challenging but not impossible.
Bracing for the obligatory "git gud" comments. At the end of the day I love Destiny and want to continue engaging with it in as many ways as I can, but I don't know if I will be able to convince my fireteam to do the next one with me if it ends up being a similar experience.
Thank you for listening :)
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Edited by BetweenMyself: 1/23/2025 8:02:52 PMGood on you for sticking with it and getting it done. One piece of advice in case your team does any future runs would be to use a heavy other than [b]Dragon’s Breath[/b] against the Servitor boss Raneiks as it has been intentionally coded to receive [b]greatly reduced damage[/b] from back to back Ignitions. Earlier in the Episode there was a bug that incorrectly applied this behavior to [u]all Bosses[/u] within the game, but this was fixed in [b]Update 8.1.5[/b] to ensure it only occurs with Raneiks: [quote]Fixed an issue where Ignitions were incorrectly scaling damage against all bosses instead of just Raneiks Unified, resulting in lower-than-expected damage.[/quote] (΄◉◞౪◟◉`)