[quote]What some of us need to do (and that includes me, emphatically) is up our game and keep practicing until we're on that level.[/quote] On these forums where everyone constantly asks to have the bar lowered and the game to be dumbed down in order to cater to their own inabilities as players this is a very refreshing thing to read. 🫡

There's gotta be mountains worth climbing... there's 2-3(4) spaces in the game where min-maxing matters. GMs, Master Dungeons... Master Raids/Contest. PvE sweats need something.

I have over 1000 raid completions on two accounts. However, almost every raid encounter has a good setup, architecture, ad composition and flow. Unfortunately this is not true for most nightfalls (The Lightblade being a noble exception, I really dig that one). That's why I like to raid so much, and that's why activity design failures like the battlegrounds nightfalls turn me off so much. They replace creativity and play value with throwing tons of bullet sponge ads at you. That's not really a challenge; At least not for one's wits, only maybe for one's reflexes and patience.

I disagree entirely. I'm on the other side. I find raids... with a couple exceptions, SoS prestige, EoW prestige boss... simplistic... I think most encounters are derivative and often held back by 1st person 6 person tuning... which relates to the 2 examples I gave. When Bungie tries more complexity in their design... no one plays them. If raid encounters and raids are so well designed tell me why: 1. Respective other endgame (GMs, Dungeons, Master LSs) no one plays them 2. Why does no one play the encounters as intended ??? I'm not saying there aren't exploits in GMs, but the difference is... it lends itself to poor efficiency & efficacy. You can cheese BUT it's in your best interest to just learn the GM. Raids are the opposite... it IS almost Exclusively BETTER to use the exploit methods... It's better to farm the easiest encounters on normal for spoils and then cash them in after a boss checkpoint. How does any of that suggest good endgame design? It doesn't. That's why I don't raid... anymore. I believe Destiny raids... are and have always been fundamentally and obviously flawed. They're fantastic set pieces... but bad endgame. GMs aren't perfect... but they're much better. And I've played a lot of them. Dungeons too...

That's about as unrealistic a suggestion as telling somebody who is lacking bicycling skills to keep practising until he is on Lance Armstrong's level, or if he is lacking soccer skills, until he is on Neymar's level. Just because a few people can dance through such an activity neither means that in the end, with enough practice, it would be as accessible for everybody as for these kids, nor that it should be built specifically with that 0.01% of the player base in mind. The other thing is that I don't have the time or desire to make a science out of running a nightfall by creating the perfect build for it I then have to perfectly proc the perks of to rule a nightfall. I have seen these "easy solo GM with this build" videos, more than one. I can beat such a nightfall once I know what I'm up for, but it isn't worth the effort for me, because it is no fun at all for me. It is blunt, hard work. It is like having to cut down a huge tree using a handsaw instead of a chainsaw. Disclaimer: I had repeatedly gotten the conqueror title in the past. When it still felt like both fun and a challenge.

First of all, Lance Armstrong didn't wake up one day and was suddenly, well, Lance Armstrong; he practiced to get there. I have no idea who Neymar is, so I've got nothing for that. The point is, if you want it, you've got to work for it. Second, if you don't have the time or desire and it's not worth the effort to you, then what's the point of your post? Disclaimer: That was then, this is now. I found Mega Man both fun and challenging in the past but we're not living in the past, are we? So I guess what we've done "way back when" holds little relevance now.

You're completely avoiding the point. Very few people have the body to get where Lance Armstrong or Neymar were or are; regardless how hard they try and how much they practise. There will only be a few being able to reach the top, and that requires more than just hard training. However, I found a good team with a knowledgeable guide, and that made the battlegrounds (we did two) feasible and halfway entertaining. There was a quite some cheesing involved, though, and when you need to cheese a nightfall to cut down playtime and effort required to complete it, something has already gone wrong with the activity design! I did hold my own during these runs, it was by no means a carry where I didn't contribute to the experience. Yet, that required competent team mates, which I find hard to come by these days. We also did the Lightblade, and man, was that a refreshment in comparison! You actually had to use team organization and tactics, get the boss' aggro, deal with the lightbearers and champions quickly, keep moving and have good situational awareness. A perfect balance and mixture of minors, majors, champions and boss in an arena that provided some cover and room to maneuver, but never allowed you to go static. That was the only nightfall I truly enjoyed, and that's how every nightfall should be, and not a static bullet spam fest until everything was slain!

You're going to believe what you will regardless of anything I say, so I see no reason to continue this debate further. I hope you get what you want out of this game and wish you luck in your future endeavors.

That's a so called killer argument, which intrinsically always is a very bad way to argue (even worse than suggesting that with enough training and hard work everybody could become world class in anything he'd be practising hard enough). You didn't get my point about skill and practise, and you obviously also didn't get my point about activity design, despite my elaborating on it to make my angle clear. Don't blame me for your lack of understanding, or lack of will to understand what I wrote. Regarding (my) skill: I don't need a team to carry me through either battlegrounds or Lightblade nightfalls, I just needed a team that can hold its own so that I can hold my own, plus a few pointers here and there regarding cheeses and positioning (please don't start on cheeses: As good as everybody uses them to make nightfalls easier; Fun fact: You cannot cheese the Lightblade boss fight, which I enjoyed very much). Independent of that, the battlegrounds nightfalls design sucks; I explained why. To follow your line of argumentation, I could recommend to you to train your intelligence until you get it. Well, you can at least try and see how far you get.