In spite of a lot of criticism, Destiny ultimately went on to be successful, and become a fixture in millions of players’ now playing lists- a lot of this owed itself to the endgame in Destiny, which introduced real loot based stats, grinding, and exclusive content, such as the raids, which led to a self fulfilling, self perpetuated grind, which kept players playing. The best part of Destiny was considered to be its end game raid, the Vault of Glass. And when its first expansion, The Dark Below, was widely panned, the raid, Crota’s End, kept people playing.

Given, then, that Destiny’s success so far has owed itself entirely to the end game raids, you would think Bungie would be doubling down on those, right?

You would think wrong. The upcoming expansion, House of Wolves, will have no raid.

‘House of Wolves will not have a Raid activity,’ Bungie said. ‘We didn’t make this decision lightly. Our team has been humbled by the reception of Raids in Destiny and we are creating a new Raid for a release later this year. House of Wolves will have a new cooperative end game activity focused on variety, replayability, and skill – a new battle Arena called The Prison of Elders.’

What I don’t understand is… why? Bungie, after Destiny and The Dark Below were criticized, specifically delayed House of Wolves, because they wanted to incorporate player and community feedback. They specifically promised that the new expansion would reflect community sentiments about the game, and double down on what was good about it, leading to a fresh new direction for the game. Then why is this expansion the exact opposite of what was promised? What has Bungie been doing all this while? Why exactly was House of Wolves even delayed?

House of Wolves will launch for Destiny later this year, on Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS3, and PS4.

Work smart, not hard. An adage that rings true throughout the world. A single player, acting alone and without outside assistance, has managed to defeat Atheon from the Vault of Glass on their own. The raid is one of the games best examples of how to make teamwork essential, but that’s no longer the case.

This was accomplished by way of a simple trick that takes advantage of the games Radiance ability and how the battle works. The player, who goes by the name of “whoismendle” on PSN, Reddit and Bungie’s forums, spawned into Atheon’s chamber playing as a warlock equipped with Radiance.

From there, he opened up on Atheon with a rocket launcher, but this is where the plan gets clever. This fight takes a team of players to pass through time streams, in which they must defeat the enemies and collect a relic. Players that didn’t pass through the stream must defend themselves from multiple opponents while setting up an exit portal for the other portion of the team.

This means that if “whoismendle” crosses the time stream, then there’s no coming back because nobody is there to open the exit portal. But when Atheon tries to open the stream, “whoismendle” launches himself down a pit and uses Radiance to respawn back on top with Atheon now locked in space, assuming that the player is now in the time stream.

From there on, “whoismendle” is free to whittle away at the now frozen Atheon with barrage upon barrage of grenades before repeating the process over and over until victory is achieved. A genius strategy that takes advantage of both the games mechanics and how it all works.

The Destiny fanbase have proven themselves to be an inquisitive bunch, scouring every corner of the game for new loot exploits and they dig even deeper trying to find information about the upcoming House of Wolves DLC. But it would appear that they aren’t as attentive as we may have thought.

Members of the Dads of Destiny clan, simply known as DOD, recently took part in a stream alongside Lead World Artist Rob Adams and Senior Raid Designer Gavin Irby, to stream Crota’s End. One member of DOD asked if there were any more chests left in the Vault of Glass, following a short silence the answer they got was, “Yes, the answer is yes”.

This is kind of cool when you consider that the Vault of Glass has been open to players since the middle of September last year. Typically players find all of the basic content extremely fast in games like this as they break up into teams to search.

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