As the title states this is going to be a criticism of the Shield Brothers strike, all of what I will mention is my own personal opinion based on what I saw, and what I'd possibly like to see be improved upon.
I'll start off first by saying that I thought the strike was pretty good in my opinion but there was A LOT left to be desired overall.
There were just so many things Bungie could have done to make this strike a bit more engaging and I suppose I'll start with picking off my first point.
[b]Strike Length[/b]: I'm in the group of players that felt this Strike was a bit too short, although for me I've always felt strikes should at the very least have a "Devil's Lair" type length mainly consisting of 3 bosses(Mini - Major - Final) more bosses adds more to do in the strike and more chances for unique encounters which is something I feel Bungie needs to improve on a lot in terms of boss fights in Strikes. Pretty much the addition of one little mini boss with some kind of personal mechanic specific to it would have been a nice addition and added a little more length to the strike. Speaking of bosses this kind of ties over into my next point. A small little side note, I kind of felt the Strike could have used a little sense of urgency such as a time limit on the final boss fight since you know there was a bomb that needed defusing and Destiny seems to have this weird "Time Freeze's during a fight", If a time limit was a bit too much the could have even had Nolandroid have the ability to temporarily stop the countdown timer for about 10 - 15 seconds or so with a 20 second cooldown(Idk I'm just brain storming here)
[b]Boss Encounters[/b]: This right here is my biggest thing with all Strikes, one thing almost all of them lack is a unique boss encounter. Shield Brothers imo was the first Strike to actually step into this, you actually have two different Cabal with new attacks and they aren't just Val'us Tauric 2.0(which is basically just an upgraded Centurion) Needless to say it was good that Bungie tried to at least make these bosses interesting I felt their abilities were a bit limited in the fact that the Brothers really only had what looked to be maybe 2 or 3 variants of their attacks(Maybe less) none of which were terribly difficult to avoid or even watch for. I kinda felt that just by adding a little more attack variation to the fight would have made it better overall, like say for instance the Charizard Bro could have had 3 different variants of his melee like a Brief Charge attack that resulted in him cleaving everything in a straight line, or a massive ground slam that could encompass the whole room that would require you to jump in order to avoid the heavy damage it could deal, or even better possibly a combined attack with his Blastoise Bro where they become temporarily invulnerable and just unleash a hellstorm of death(Flaming mortars) that have to be avoided for a short duration and have a much faster impact time than the standard mortars and leave a burning patch on the ground. Same thing could go for Blastoise Bro, he's primarily ranged/defensive with his bubble so he could have his standard mortars, possibly toss out some land mines every now and then, or just do like a focused beam attack for a short duration, hell he could even drop a little healing station or something that Shields and/or Heals himself and his bro and you have to destroy it. Maybe I'm thinking raid style mechanics here, idk these are just some things I thought would have made this boss fight overall a bit more epic to play and wouldn't have made the bosses seem so transparent.
By god I didn't realize how long I had made that, sorry guys that's a crap load to read, but that's just my idea of what could make a fight more unique giving bosses variations to their attacks and not the standard "I just use one or two attacks the whole damn fight" thing that Bungie has going on currently and personally I think this needs to follow all bosses in Destiny, From Mini to Raid bosses along with giving them their own unique models/animations. No one wants to have a pallet swapped Tank as a boss or the same Fallen Captain, but just bigger we want variation and things that actually make bosses feel like bosses and fights that are memorable and engaging even if its just a Strike, hell even if it's just a story mission boss. I want an encounter where I can be like "Hey remember that time we beat (Insert random boss name here)?!" "Yeah that fight was something else man can't wait to see whats next!"
This is pretty much it for what I have to say, how do you guys feel about it all and what would you have wanted to be added to this strike to make it better? As a community we really need to get more constructive with these criticisms if we want to see this game improve just constantly shouting it was bad will never really lead to a decent change. Speak up and say what was wrong with it and how it could be improved. Otherwise they'll just keep trying to change things based on assumptions of what we want.(Just something to keep in mind for those of you who will be posting your own criticisms in the future)
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The strike may be short, but the boss fight in a nightfall will be annoying