Destiny 2 Raid Ideation - Part 2

Hi, and welcome to a post that hopes to improve upon my last post, or at least expand it and provide clarity. I have also updated that post to include some explanation as to my 'raid-type groups' included in the preface, for context.

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Navigate the Labyrinth

Entry Encounter Design Iteration

Defining the Design Goals

The original goals for this encounter were for it to be involved and fun. I'll define those terms as to their relation to this design.

• Involved: All players must have an active role in the raid, beyond killing enemies. If a player does not have an active role (not utilizing raid mechanics), then they should be able to easily explain the encounter at a high level after playing through it once or twice. That is to say, a player should gain an understanding of the raid and its mechanics through either interacting with them or experiencing them. A player should be mentally engaged during the raid.

• Fun: This is somewhat subjective. Players should enjoy the encounter and playing through it from start to finish. At no point should a player feel annoyed at the encounter or its mechanics. Furthermore, players should not feel driven to skips or exploits to avoid engaging with the encounter in a given raid run, be it the first or the 20th time running the encounter. The encounter should be played through naturally because the encounter is enjoyable — playing for the sake of playing.

The first is pretty measurable and easy to achieve. The second, well, not so much. These two ideals are linked as well, as an encounter can be *too involved* to the point at which running the encounter feels tedious to players, and thus looses its fun factor. Because the second is a pretty nebulous goal, though it's still important, I'll add another goal to this list.

• Replayable: Players should not be fatigued by engaging with this encounter within reason (between 1-3 times a week). Players should be able to engage with the encounter in different ways on subsequent runs, and obtain mastery of multiple raid mechanics over the course of those runs.

This addresses the fun aspect of my goal. An experience can be fun once, or a few times, but there usually comes a point where players are fatigued with an encounter or a raid in general. If a player is fatigued with an encounter, the encounter becomes less fun to play; thus, replayability preserves the fun factor of an encounter.

Refining the Player Roles

Coming back to this design after a while left me with a few questions that needed addressing.

• How do players know what their role requires?

• How do players know what their buff does?

• What actually differentiates the game feel of roles on a moment-to-moment basis?

I decided here that there needed to be a distinct, visual indication of what each role did. So I came up with the following, which aims to replace the 3-bullet lists in the prior post.

Endurance:

Incoming and outgoing damage is reduced by 25%.

Players are surrounded by a glowing white ring on the ground.

Combatants inside the ring are blinded and become Vulnerable.

Agility:

Vulnerable combatants are outlined in red and take increased damage.

Wisdom:

Players can shoot Tinctures placed around the labyrinth to heal the fireteam.

Tinctures glow blue-white when unused, and slowly refill after use.

* Players lose these buffs on death

I mentioned two new terms above: Vulnerable and Tinctures:

Vulnerable is a state combatants enter when near an Endurance player. This interacts with the Agility players' vision and indicates that the combatant is ready to be damaged. Certain enemies cannot take damage unless they are Vulnerable.

Tinctures are lantern-like structures, roughly Guardian height, filled with a blue-white liquid that glows when the Tincture is full and ready to be shot. When a Tincture takes enough damage, it emits some particles and provides a 5 second period of enhanced regeneration to everyone in the fireteam. Then the Tincture slowly refills, taking around 30 seconds to become active again.

This system provides visual cues to players as to what their roles do, similar to the Scanner/Suppressor/Operator roles in Deep Stone Crypt.

Mechanics and the Labyrinth Wardens

The mechanics of the main portion of this encounter are simple. You navigate a labyrinth, find a Warden node, and continue from there, looping that process until you reach the fourth and final Warden. However, this raises an interesting question: if the average runtime of an encounter is somewhere between 5 and 10minutes, does this encounter derive its length from the sheer scale of the labyrinth and running through the correct path? Or is traversal only five-or-so minutes and the remainder of the time goes to Warden mechanics?

To answer this question I referenced Esoterickk's First Clear of Shuro Chi. Their team is undeniably faster than average, but since this is their first clear I think it's fair game for general-purpose analysis.

The first real run to Shuro Chi begins after her first damage gate is cleared. Players have to travel along an arc, killing minors and majors until they reach Shuro Chi again. Here they have to interact with her immunity mechanic and then pass a DPS check. Afterwards, a puzzle and platforming challenge bar entry to the next run-and-gun segment. To get from the 1st damage gate to the 3rd, it takes Esoterickk's team roughly three minutes. To get from 3rd to 5th, around another three minutes. Since I want the feel of this encounter to closely mimic other traversal encounters like Gorgon's Maze or Desolation, I'm opting for more time focused on running and gunning.

That being said, the Labyrinth Wardens shouldn't just be big beefy ultras — that would be boring! But since the encounter isn't designed to focus on boss-combat mechanics, and instead the roles given to the players and the puzzle of navigating the labyrinth, Wardens shouldn't have complex mechanics either. So in order to damage a Warden, fireteams need only send their two Endurance players into close quarters to make the boss Vulnerable. Then, the Agility players DPS while the Wisdom players crack Tinctures around the room and handle adds.

The Labyrinth Warden rooms would look something like this:

Each circle surrounding the Labyrinth Warden's platform corresponds to a statue, represented by the colored rectangles. The top, gray pair have Endurance statues overlooking them; the bottom, blue pair have Wisdom statues; the middle, red pair have Agility statues. After defeating a Warden, players stand under any statue that does not already have a player. When all players are standing under a unique statue, three doors will open in a similar fashion to the encounter's entrance. Only one of those doors leads to the correct pathway. The players will also have their roles refreshed, gaining whichever role their statue represents. A typical Warden room should only take appropriately geared teams one minute, while traveling between nodes should take an experienced team between one to two minutes.

Since I want the focus to be more on exploration and one of the encounter's primary design principles is fun, I've decided to do away with a wipe timer. Players are unable to regenerate health in the labyrinth, and since Tinctures take time to refill, fights can become dicey if players aren't careful and take too much damage while the Wisdom player is proverbially 'out of mana'. While I think there is room for a wipe mechanic in dead ends, I prefer Scourge of the Past's 1st-encounter-to-2nd-encounter transition approach, where the only thing you lose by going the wrong way is time. I think this method makes learning the proper route much more rewarding and provides a greater sense of player growth and raid mastery.

Ending Note

To close this out, I think the above addresses most of the concerns I had with this encounter's original concept. I will continue to post more of this raid and its encounters in the coming days, starting soon. The next one I'll sort through is planned to be a midway boss encounter, and after I think I've delved into that encounter sufficiently I'll move on to the final boss.

* Edit: There is one thing I forgot to mention that's somewhat crucial to this encounter and the raid as a whole. While you have any of these buffs, health regeneration is greatly decreased. I included this point in the post 1, but forgot to re-include it when I updated the buffs in this post. Since I didn't include that here, the next post I'll be making will talk about how lowered regeneration and combat-type roles (as opposed to mechanic-type roles) work within Destiny 2's build and class systems.

As always, thanks for reading.