Destiny 2’s Newest Raid Is Not Everything Guardians Hoped

As with all Destiny 2 DLC, Edge of Fate debuted a new raid a week after its release. Desert Perpetual is a sprawling, Prophecy-themed raid that offers Guardians a new challenge to tackle once they complete EoF‘s main story, but day one raiders found themselves struggling under the weight of the raid’s challenge. Not only did the new damage scaling seem heavier than anticipated, but Light level changes left some Guardians scratching their heads at the truly baffling DPS checks they faced each encounter. All this was wrapped together in a bow of game-breaking bugs that saw players truly fed up with Bungie.

Desert Perpetual’s Numerous and Devastating Bugs

In a post by Bungie during the raid race, the devs acknowledged that there was an issue with the power scaling in Contest Mode, which is supposed to be set at [POWER], seemed to be much higher. Devs reported that they’d received reports of “enemies being at a higher delta than what the activity advertises – ex: enemies have a skull icon next to them instead of a sword,” following up with a promise to investigate the issue. However, nothing was actually changed during the race itself.

This meant that any players experiencing bugs that required a reset forced the entire Fireteam to restart the activity, forgoing any earned checkpoints and progress. Thanks to raid race rules, a run during which a player left the activity, including crashes and resets, was not valid for the race competition. If a player’s PC crashed or the game crashed thanks to poor activity optimization or some other bug, the team had to start the activity over from the beginning.

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Additionally, players reported rally banners not working–occasionally not all the way and other times not at all. It’s integral to a raid encounter to begin with as many resources as possible, and raid banners being dysfunctional saw many raid teams stopped in their tracks. In some cases, players reported that the banners didn’t give ammo, abilities, or even supers to their Fireteam, leaving them without the resources needed to tackle the massive challenge that each encounter posed. Not only were the bugs frustrating, but three DPS-check bosses make the raid a slog, despite the interesting, non-linear design.

Leviathan-Inspired, Non-Linear Encounters

Like some of the missions and side quests in Edge of Fate, the encounters in Desert Perpetual can be completed in any order. There are three total, not including the final encounter, and it’s completely up to the Fireteams which they want to complete first. Similar to the original Leviathan raid that released in 2017, this means that Guardians can play a new way each time they load into the activity.

Unfortunately, there’s really no point in switching up the order. While the option to choose is novel, there’s no difference between doing one encounter first over the other, leaving the choice cosmetic at best. The encounters themselves are interesting enough, but leave something to be desired in comparison to the high-quality encounters of Salvation’s Edge. When combined with the frustration of the Contest Mode challenge, this interesting option to choose is rendered lackluster.

Raid Race Encounter and Mechanic Design Was Less Than Inspired

Coming off the highly rated Salvation’s Edge raid, Desert Perpetual had a lot to live up to design-wise, and by most accounts, it failed. The encounters themselves aren’t too clunky, but what really frustrates most players is the high DPS checks that were the boss health pools. This isn’t the first raid where this has been an issue, but the problem is even more stark with Armor 3.0 and the power rework coming into play.

In previous raids and dungeons, bosses touted health bars in the multimillions, while the Desert Perpetual bosses’ are in the hundreds of thousands. With this huge scale-down in health, it only makes sense that player damage numbers are lower as well, but with the Contest Mode power delta also potentially being overtuned, it was next to impossible for players to clear DPS checks without a lengthy ammo farming phase before each DPS phase.

DPS checks are a long-hated trend in Destiny raids, and it’s disappointing to see Bungie devs falling back on them as a way to make a Contest Mode raid difficult. Players would prefer difficulty to come from the complexity of the mechanic rather than making a number bigger, and in this case, Bungie failed completely. Between bugs inherent to the Edge of Fate DLC and the bugs specific to the raid itself, Desert Perpetual is a shining example of Bungie’s many recent failures with Destiny 2.