Hi Destiny 2 team,
I'm not really sure where to raise this so I'll just raise it here and hope it gets some traction.
My raid team has not been the only one to notice this issue and share in the disappointment of missing out on the DP contest emblem, but it honestly feels like something in the encounter's final stand isn't functioning properly and causing erroneous wipes.
I wasn't originally going to dig any deeper until I saw other teams concerned about the same thing, so I watched some of our own recordings along with some vods of other people's clear and came to a few conclusions which leaves a few answered questions based on the observations from my own raid:
1. The final stand for Koregos appears to be 15 seconds (+/- 0.15), which I think might have to do with sync rate. I based this on measuring the time between the health bar flashing at the beginning of final stand, and the time at which the fireteam is wiped, on a clearly unsuccessful attempt.
2. It appears the encounter is designed such that when the wipe threshold is hit, the fireteam is immediately killed and remains on the boss platform.
3. The boss has around 900k HP, this can be seen on the boss kill from TStorm106 and bravos's vod, which has their total damage dealt on a successful kill at 887k.
This leaves me with a few observed inconsistencies that I can't find any explanation for:
1. I have seen variances of up to 15% on total damage dealt on the boss for a kill. I initially thought these were owing to the stun damage during the mechanics phase of the fight, but this would only account for a difference of around 10-15k, and this makes assumptions that another team are circumventing the beam stun mechanic (which is unlikely on contest).
The video linked shows a few damage totals from other successful runs from content creators, each of which having less damage dealt than our team's wipes.
In fact, we even had a wipe where our damage totaled over 1M, yet were still not credited with a kill.
2. The boss health bar for us flashed when empty, indicating that we had met the damage check needed to kill the boss, however instead of the boss entering the post death mechanic, it appeared to skip this and go straight to the explosion after the "Decoherence Imminent!" timer expires.
The main reason behind my thinking for this is that the harpy explodes and disintegrates after the post death timer expires, however on our multiple wipes, the boss floor simply despawns immediately, as if the harpy has already disintegrated.
This happened several times to our team, and the encounter did the 'correct' wipe mechanic when we clearly didn't meet the damage check, which is what initially led us to believe something strange was going on.
3. Every kill I saw had final stand times between 13 and 15 seconds. My team emptied the health bar in around 14.5 seconds, as did most other streams I saw. Even with desync and latency, I would assume the tick rate of the Destiny 2 servers would be able to register the kill correctly through fractions of a second.
We also experienced several bugs during the encounter that drastically affected the damage Lord of Wolves was dealing per shot (37 down from ~120 per crit), as well as other issues affecting the encounter (such as rings not registering when chronons are deposited).
Given the amount of similar issues we experienced during the raid and the amount of reinstancing we needed to do to get things to work for us, I feel that our team was deserving of the clear but were inhibited, in my opinion, by the bugs and issues throughout the raid, but more specifically the Koregos encounter.
I do think the raid is great, and feel the contest difficulty, whilst definitely on the harder side was achievable and enjoyed the challenge.
My whole team does not mind losing out on the contest emblem if it turns out we lost fair and square, but this particular one feels like we should have got it.
I would really appreciate if Bungie could look into this and let us know either way, as the integrity of the contest difficulty is something that I'm sure we all equally find important.
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