My high-skill friends and I have been enjoying Pantheon so far. We're at 6/10 on the Godslayer title and are nervous but otherwise excited to see how the next two weeks pan out with the additional bosses and increased power handicaps. [b]Difficulty feedback:[/b] The difficulty makes sense for a dedicated end game activity, like one where you assume everyone hitting the Launch button is already experienced and isn't going to need to spend 2 hours learning every encounter before the group has a chance at clearing. Unfortunately, this is not the case for most people in LFG. There are a lot of players who are hopping in for no reason beyond "it's new and I want to see the content" and are quickly finding themselves in over their heads with +5 Golgoroth alone, because they've never run King's Fall before and are missing a whole pile of mechanical knowledge (how to take gaze and orient the boss, what order the bubbles drop in, what to do with Unstable Light) and practical knowledge (which gun should I use to take gaze / do DPS / drop bubbles / clear trash, how do I handle poison orbs efficiently while holding gaze, when on the gaze timer do I start shooting if I'm using a scout rifle to take gaze for some reason). Unless you're hosting a dedicated teaching group and have a LOT of spare time, you simply will not be able to transfer all this knowledge into a new player in a manner that they can understand and apply it before someone else gets bored and quits. Yes, guides exist, but at this stage, the players who care about their performance just look them up without being told. The players who NEEEEEEEEED the guides are deliberately avoiding them, even when explicitly directed to them, which doesn't help matters any. As a result, my friends and I have been requiring raid reports and other evidence of skill (titles, day 1 emblems, etc.) to be presented when deciding whether or not to group with someone. We do not have time to teach 4+ raid encounters in one session, and by filtering our invites in this manner, we've been able to full clear both currently-available difficulties in a couple hours each, with high score triumph completion and everything. On the other hand, my clan admin asked me how the first week went and if she'd enjoy it. I pointed out the +5 power difference, compared it to standard playlist strikes, and asked her what, if anything, she remembered of the Golgoroth, Caretaker, Planets, and Atraks encounters. She's completed all of the source raids at least once, but it was so long ago for all of them that I don't blame her for replying to me with "I remember NOTHING." So my recommendation to her was to not participate in Pantheon, and she accepted that. We still run Onslaught together every now and then and spend most of our together time in WoW anyway, so it's not like it was a HUGE loss for her specifically. (and to be fair, if there was ANYTHING AT ALL FROM VAULT OF GLASS in there, she'd be on top of it easily) My high-skill friends are happy with the content. Casuals, on the other hand, don't stand a chance. My humble opinion is that if Pantheon were to return in the future, it may prove beneficial to feature a +0 power handicap difficulty instead of starting at +5. It may prove beneficial to feature some simpler encounters early on in the lineup, before adding the complex encounters to the end of the lineup on higher difficulties. It may prove beneficial to add some sort of tooltip or other in-game explanation to the Pantheon node, specifying that this content is for experienced raiders and that the player may wish to complete one or more of the source raids prior to attempting Pantheon. [b]Encounter tweaks:[/b] I've been seeing a lot of positive feedback on these and I agree with it. Simple changes like "2 unstable lights in Golgoroth" and "fire tornadoes on the plates during Explicator" are exactly what I think you should be prioritizing when looking to "freshen up" old content, whether for Pantheon or otherwise. They're small, they're meaningful, and they legitimately make the encounter more interesting than it used to be. Please do more changes like these. The other side of the coin: please avoid simply dropping a Tormentor in the room and calling it good (like what you did with Atraks in Pantheon), or giving us the Master Raid Special by replacing random large enemies with Champions, making no further changes whatsoever beyond the power handicap and maybe a modifier or two, and calling it good. Champions in general have been widely disliked for their entire existence and do not contribute to my personal enjoyment of Destiny 2 in any way, shape, or form. Tormentors are cool, but they by themselves aren't exactly an interesting change to a raid encounter. [b]Regarding the scoring and time bonus:[/b] I just wish it was more clear what the score requirement was to complete the "high score" triumph for the Godslayer title. I'm sure you heard about the slew of mistaken bug reports coming in regarding Atraks this past week, when all that happened was that all those groups optimized themselves out of a platinum score. They willingly chose to only kill as many enemies as they absolutely had to in order to complete the encounter, which left them with not enough points for the triumph, even after adding the massive time bonus granted by pushing final stand in only 1 or 2 clone kills. My initial group on Tuesday did this as well. When we ran it back on Wednesday, I specifically instructed the group that "it's not bugged, just kill the servitors and Tormentor and we'll be fine" and lo and behold, we were fine. The triumph was completed as expected. In the future, please just tell us up front how many points we need to complete the "high score" triumphs. Preferably in the description of said triumphs. Otherwise, I think the premise of "you get a huge chunk of bonus points if your group can 1-cycle Golg / 2-cycle Caretaker / 1-clone Atrax / etc." is good on paper. It falls apart with bosses like Caretaker, where failing the 2-cycle all but guarantees you fail the high score triumph due to not getting a time bonus, and it can be hard to intentionally push DPS with how awkwardly gated his health bar is. Actually, Caretaker in general is just a bad encounter to feature a time bonus for. If your stunners and runners are on point, the boss won't have even rounded the corner on his path prior to the ritual being completed. Fast is good, right? Except in this case it isn't, because your team has to stand there awkwardly, sometimes for almost a full minute, doing nothing aside from shooting those darkness spindle things, because the boss has to get most of the way to the obelisk before becoming vulnerable. Even if you finish it so early that the first damage plate activates while he's still walking (which was a necessary strat during contest mode, and probably will be for the +20 Pantheon as well), you STILL have to throttle damage when you get close to his health gate. If you don't, and you pass the health gate without using all 3 plates in a phase, he just leaves early and you miss out on potential damage, which you need in order to ensure the 2-cycle that the time bonus in its current state requires. Atraks wants to have a similar issue but unlike Caretaker, the part where "overflow damage" (meaning damage dealt to the boss above and beyond the amount needed to reach a given health gate) doesn't cause damage phase to end immediately means that it... just doesn't have that issue. You can just blow the boss up and that's always optimal, and that plays very nicely with a time bonus mechanic. And I think that about wraps it up. Allow me to add myself to the pile of voices you've probably seen requesting a Pantheon for dungeon bosses, and have a great rest of your day.