Pre-emptive Checklist/Ideas for Dark Below

[Dumien]

I'm a big fan of pre-emptive strategizing. The week before the VoG came out I was constantly talking strategies with my buddies: weapon loadouts, possible challenges, everything I could possibly think of that they would throw at us. About 70% of those things were incorrect. Bungie did a terrific job (imo VoG is their crowning achievement EVEN WITH all those bugs) at throwing constant curve balls. The things I/we/my friends were right about were the insta-death triggers, parkour, and infinite spawning... Up until that point we were asking the question: "How could they possibly challenge us? Even Nightfall is easy-ish to us." Things we didn't account for were stealth, the relic, and interdimensional travel.

So... I want this thread to function as not only a hype train for The Dark Below, but a planning ground. What sort of mechanics are you hoping for?

I'm instantly thinking there is going to be some sort of "darkness" mechanic (SkorpionMode) that must be countered by lighting areas. Rumor on the street is that there is going to be an ogre chase sequence on sparrows. I'm also thinking infinite thralls with lightswitch (rumored modifier) might be a thing. Also definite Wizard battles.

So... my personal checklist is this...

I want to max out my mythoclast and secondly make sure all my vision of confluences/Praetorian Foils/Hezen's Vengeances are near maxed out. The Hive only have two types of shields...arc (knights) and fire (wizards). Gjallarhorn is certainly going to retain its OP-ness. If there are going to be tons of thralls I'm pretty sure I want to have my invective maxxed out (ammo regen) and my praedyth's revenge maxed/get more fatebringers...since their firefly ability lets you take down a group of thralls in one shot.

[hebbnh]

A sparrow chase sequence would be cool -- that could be the Gorgon's Maze of Crota's End. I agree that something darkness/brightness related is a likely mechanic. Horde mode wave defense vs thralls would be cool. Seems feasible since there are already a couple missions where thralls just kind of appear out of some muck pools on the floor. Imagine being surrounded by a big pool of that crap in an almost pitch-black room, with thralls and acolytes spawning in constantly, with your team's ghosts being the only light source. Sounds like fun to me! Plus it would require a lot of teamwork and communication to make sure each sector is illuminated, reloads might have to be coordinated so that nothing is able to get in behind you and into the middle of your fireteam, stuff like that.

My checklist is in pretty good shape weapon-wise. Vision of Confluence is maxed, Fatebringer is halfway there and will probably be done this week since there's arc burn on the Nightfall. For special weapons I already have a maxed arc sniper, Found Verdict is maxed, Invective is close, working on Pocket Infinity also. Could probably use a Solar sniper still (Xur why you no sell Icebreaker again!?!) and maybe an arc fusion rifle. I have heavies covered too, but unfortunately no Gjallarhorn or Hezen Vengeance yet.

Now, if I can just get the VoG to drop me some raid gear to get me to 30, I'd be good to go!

[psychlon]

Any kind of labyrinth using only your ghost as light source, throwing loud sounds (footsteps) against echoing walls while having to fulfill some kind of puzzle seems likely. Let's say 4 gates (so you can take new guys), each "group" has to find a lever which will open a door on the other side, letting one of the other groups pass to the next zone. Wrong way = say hello to thrall spawns with nightswitch.

[wittyscorpion]

My preparation for Expansion Pack can be summarized in one word: "raid"

I need everything from Raid: raid gears obviously, raid weapons, shards, and energy (well, almost everything. I don't need the 1 millionth copy of chatterwhite and class items ).

Weapon wise I have decent coverage on arc and solar (tier 1 in gold color, assuming exotic buffs can make real difference):

arc: Patience & Time x2, Epitaph 2261, Plan-C, Light/Beware, The Culling, Thunderlord. Can use a Rocket Launcher.
solar: Ice Breaker, Prudence II, Pocket Infinity, The Culling, Super Good Advice, Hezen Vengeance, Steel Oracle Z-11, Invective, The Comedian;

Primary wise it would be nice if I can get some Raid weapons, although I do have a decent arsenal: The Devil You Know, Proxima Centauri II, Grim Citizen III, Suros Regime, Bad Juju.

I also have a set of void weapons: Preydyth's Vengeance x2, Light/Beware, Deviant Giant-A, Unfriendly Giant, Truth.

Subclass wise: on track to master all (already done 4, 1 is inches away from done, and the last one has just half row to go).

[Pharq as guest]

1. get to level 30. upgrade preferable weapons.

2. stack materials. (metal, filaments, bloom, iron, shards, and energy) for upgrades

3. stack sellable consumables (house banners, silken codex, axiomatic beads, network keys) for above glimmer cap

4. max out marks and get to at least rank 3 on both (new armour will most likely cost vanguard marks according destiny db)

5. gold 1 daily event per day and save packages (packs give 2500xp, so quick way to upgrade new gear)

[iw5000]

'SkorpionMODE'

LOL. That will go down in the legends of gaming!!!


I do agree though, I think they will do more with it. The VoG dabbled with the blindness idea, doing the relic thing on the gatekeeper phase. More experimentation with it seems likely.

There are also only so many elements you can add to make a Raid more difficult than a typical Nightfall attempt. The biggest is eliminating cheese spots, but these can happen even in raids. But the one element that seems to be used the most is 'time'. Force players to play under pressure with some form of timer forcing their hand.

What I see coming:

- A jumping puzzle that requires the lead person to land, and then take out snipers shooting at that platform, allowing teammates to leapfrog to the next platform (where the process needs repeated)

- A chase sequence where the rear players need to coordinate to hold off enemies, while the front team has to unlock the doors to help further the escape. Rinse and repeat over and over.

- A scorpion mode, where rather than shooting oracles to help stop you from going blind......you will need to hit a sequence of difficult sniper shots to keep the lights ON. All the while, some of the teammates are taking down swarms of enemies coming at you.

- Possible an open air type of platform sequence, while six players have to bounce around jumping to avoid hundreds of enemies shooting at them from distant ledges (while sniping them back). Doing this for say 3 to 4 minutes, while waiting say for a pickup? Forcing six players to jump next to each other, on one a small place.

[Dumien]

Here we are guys. 6 days away. Are you pumped or what? I have the Hearthstone expansion coming out on the 8th and Destiny expansion on the 9th! This is like Christmas in December! I haven't watched any youtube videos on this stuff... I'm pretty much in the Dark for the actual raid...and I enjoy it that way. Being on the cutting edge of Raiding is a special kind of fun. THIS is where the true joy of raiding hits...and why I recommend attempting it the very first day even if you feel you have no hope of accomplishing it. It simply isn't as fun when you already know what to do. When you know what to do you do your job. When a Raid first comes out you get to INVENT the jobs. Pretty sick right? My only claim to Raid fame is the single gate strategy for the gatekeeper.

Okokok So I wanted to ramble a bit about "best possible loadouts" going in to TDB. We all know that the best weapons will eventually be TDB weapons themselves with the anti-hive buffs. First I want to talk about those buffs (hive disruptor) themselves and what we can discern from them on the Raid design. Well first, look at the buff the VoG weapons gave us: "Oracle disruptor" Bungie saw fit to give us a buff in the VoG not to kill Vex, but to kill the insta-kill clocks. Oracles are generally seen as one of the major "gear-checks" of the VoG. If you don't have a weapon that can take down the Atheon oracles...you are done (Hi Witty). The other is the Praetoreans, but you could always just teamwork them. Bungie saw fit to give us a way to make this gearcheck passable simply by raiding more often. Oh, but wait...TDB disruptor is not for some new enemy, but for Hive in general. This probably means that the gearcheck is the enemies themselves this time. So... we can expect more and tougher enemies than we normally would... However, we are going in without these buffs. This is a major reason we should be extra focused on getting the best possible gear for TDB.

Deej stated in one of his Weekly updates that the Mythoclast is supposed to be the best weapon for TDB. It makes sense. You want your bestest raid reward to perform well in future content...otherwise what is the incentive to obtaining it? We can attribute this to the increased damage, but I think the slightly more important bit is the solar damage. We are facing Hive. Hive generally have two types of shields on Nightfall. Arc for knights and solar for wizards. There will definitely be solar shields on the wizards, but you should also prepare for potential arc shields from the knights even though there is no "epic" modifier.

So the focus should be on solar. That means hunters and warlocks will be having a better go at using grenades for kills. Defender titans might need to throw down the suppressor grenades in order to prevent wizards from poisoning and knights from shielding. Golden gun will be the best non-fireborn super in the Raid for sheer killing potential. The aclophage helmet will probably be recommended by most.

Now let's talk weapons.

Here is my recommended list in rough order of importance:

Vex Mythoclast -highest attack
Ghallarhorn -greatest burst dmg (I don't have this one)
Vision of Confluence -highest sustainted solar damage
Praetorian Foil -greatest secondary non-exotic burst
Icebreaker -best sustained sniper
Pocket infinity -greatest secondary burst dmg
Hezen Vengeance -best non-exotic solar rocket
fatebringer -best mass thrall clearer
Found Verdict - reliable panic button
Thorn - New glow-in-the-dark highlight buff

Fatebringer and found verdict move up substantially if knight arc shield is a thing.

Here are some of the classes I am thinking about... Here's four if the knights don't have arc shield

Mythoclast
Praetorean Foil
Hezen's Vengeance
-----------------
Vision of Confluence
Praetorean Foil
Ghallarhorn
-----------------
Vision of Confluence
Icebreaker
Hezen's Vengeance
-----------------
Vision of Confluence
Pocket Infinity
Hezen's Vengeance

If the knights have arc shield, you can easily shift of of the secondary or primary slots for fatebringer or found verdict.

I'm expecting tons of thralls so the fatebringer might end up being a superior choice to a solar primary in some cases. Combined with something like the Warlock's Voidfang Vestments, one would potentially have more sustained fire with a handcannon than the Mythoclast.

It is important to note that some TDB raid weapons have knight shield piercing. Having a good shotgun might end up being better than a fusion rifle if we have to deal with knights spamming shield. Flanking them while they immobile is possibly good strategy.

Also it will be really dark. One of TDB raid weapons has an ability that marks targets for a short period upon hits.TWe can infer that is gonna be really really dark (Dark Below Heyo). The thorn's recent buff really makes sense since it ALSO highlights targets. This could end up being a very strong weapon in the raid. It pieces through targets so it is also good against thralls!

So, what are you guys going in with? What class are you starting with? How many of these recommended weapons do you have?

[wittyscorpion]

Oh, great. It is going to be really really dark? Will I be able to see anything with brightness = 2?

[wittyscorpion]

Weapon wise I would like to present this table for discussion (only solar and arc weapons are listed and color coded, power weapons in bold):

Slot	Exotic	VoG legendary
Primary	Vex Mythoclast (solar) Suros Regime	Vision of Confluence (Solar) Fatebringer (arc)
Special	Ice Breaker (Solar) Pocket Infinity (Solar) Invective (Solar) Patience & Time (Arc) Plan-C (Arc)	Praetorian Foil (Solar) Found Verdict (Arc)
Heavy	Gjarllarhorn (Solar) Super Good Advice (Solar) Thunderlord (Arc)	Hazen Vengeance (Solar)

The reason why I found this useful personally is because any of the weapons in the same cell can be put on the same loadout.

[mannon]

Super Scorpion Hard Mode!

[wittyscorpion]

I am still missing VoC and Fatebringer, 2 weapons I really hope to get from this week's raids, and of course Gjallarhorn, which I have all my hopes on Xur . Without them, below are the 3 loadouts I am going in with:

1) Primary exotic

Vex Mythoclast / Suros Regime / MiDA Multitool
Praetorian Foil / Found Verdict / arc legendary Sniper Rifle / solar legendary Sniper Rifle
Hazen Vengeance

2) Special exotic

Grim Citizen III / The Devil You Know
Ice Breaker / Pocket Infinity / Invective / Patience & Time / Plan-C
Hazen Vengeance

3) Heavy exotic (not a good option, most likely won't go with it)

Grim Citizen III / The Devil You Know
Praetorian Foil / Found Verdict / arc legendary Sniper Rifle / solar legendary Sniper Rifle
Super Good Advice / Thunderlord / Truth / solar Unfriendly Giant

Of course, the switching among the 3 can happen on the fly as needed.

[tooros]

Away from my console in the US from 9th - 12th.
I'll be relying on you Men to post LOT'S of info.

[wittyscorpion]

Dec 3, 2014 14:32:33 GMT -5 tooros said:

Away from my console in the US from 9th - 12th.
I'll be relying on you Men to post LOT'S of info.

Don't worry, we got you covered

[malgato]

I am feeling pretty good on my prep. I have VoC, Icebreaker, Hezen's, Pocket Infinity, Plan C, Fatebringer, Found Verdict, Patience and Time, Super Good Advice.

Just need the Mythoclast, Gjallahorn, and the Praetorian Foil.

[thebb22]

Depending on whether or not there are arc shields, I'm looking at either:

Fatebringer, Praetorian Foil, Gjallarhorn or
VoC, Found Verdict, Gjallarhorn (or possibly Super Good Advice if massive thrall mobs need clearing)

All of which are currently fully leveled up (or at least they will be).