King’s Fall didn’t simply come with a facelift, however; several mechanics were changed and adapted to better suit the much more complex sandbox of Destiny 2. This held especially true for the first 24 hours since launch, which is when Contest Mode was active in order to provide teams a chance to face a more competitive challenge and also a hand at winning the World’s First race that typically accompanies Raids in Destiny 2. It’s precisely during this timeframe that players encountered a massive obstacle on their way to battling Oryx, the Taken King, and it came in the form of the Warpriest boss.
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Why Destiny 2’s Contest Mode Made the Warpriest in King’s Fall Problematic
While King’s Fall was overall a huge success in terms of how well it was ported to Destiny 2 thanks to its excellent graphics and nostalgic feeling, the Warpriest encounter in Contest Mode proves that some fights are designed with the idea that players will have a certain level of performance. If players can’t keep up with the required performance level, they inevitably fail the attempt. There are many popular strategies now about how to beat the Warpriest in King’s Fall, but this particular boss was extremely problematic during Contest Mode due to its humongous health pool and scarcity of ammo throughout the encounter.
Basically, out of four phases, Destiny 2 players were required to have almost perfect DPS to beat the Warpriest due to how much health the boss had, but that also meant that Destiny 2 Heavy Ammo was the single best thing one could have in the fight to keep going. Seeing how ammo economy works right now, some players had to sacrifice their Exotic slot to use the corresponding Aeon Exotic for their class, regardless of their builds, or else they would run out of ammo on the boss and not complete the encounter.
One player would also have to use the Divinity Exotic trace rifle to debuff the boss so that others were allowed to maximize their damage output and avoid wiping. Overall, the Warpriest encounter had an unnecessarily high level of artificial difficulty that proves how Destiny 2’s current meta depends on its Heavy Weapons and a handful of Exotics when it comes to any endgame activity, despite Bungie’s renewed interest in build-crafting. Building encounters in a way that forces players to use given items to keep playing is not inherently good design, and that’s because it’s contradicting the formula of playing as one truly wants.
Contest Mode made the Warpriest an incredibly tough opponent to beat, and that is also due to the fact that players were required to stick next to each other in order to be able to damage the boss, which in this specific encounter wasn’t always feasible. In fact, to keep the damage phase going, players need to defeat the Knights that spawn in fixed locations on the map, and if they spawn away from the group, one player needs to defeat the Knight solo and then go back to damage the boss. Overall, Destiny 2’s take on the Warpriest showed that Bungie’s approach to increasing the level of difficulty needs to be revised if challenges are meant to be fun and to afford a bare minimum of build diversity.
Destiny 2 is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
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