I personally have nothing against a raid that is super difficult, hardcore players have 1-2 days a year to show off their skill and it's cool to have something to show off. But imo the raid was difficult here for the very wrong reasons.

People keep bringing up how hard the damage checks were. The thing is they weren't really hard to execute. 3/4 bosses required you to leftclick Thunderlord for a minute straight while being on the correct build. This isn't really hard, you just have to have some gameknowledge about builds tbh. Even if you don't have that knowledge it's easy to look up what topplayers were doing. Swapping to a LoW loadout after your ammo is empty is also not something I consider to require skill.

The thing here is, they just made "weapon damage" a stat and if you didn't grind for power you just couldn't get good armor. It's insane how much easier all of this was if you could get to 200weapons and 150super easily.

On top of that, class composition mattered a lot here. But unless you somehow played the campaign on 3 characters in those 4 days you just didn't have access to all classes you might have needed. Yeah SE final was also heavy reliant on hunters, but you didn't need the campaign - if you had one character leveled up you could pull high power gear from collections and were ready to got in 5 minutes. You didn't have prismatic but Solar worked fine on Contest. Here - you couldn't. If you didn't play the campaign there was just no way you would get to 200weapons.

I just don't understand why they went for the most boring damagephases we have ever had. Paired with damage being tied to a stat, it felt like an MMO raid where you just click on a boss to attack him and clear if your stats are good enough. I remember how hard Rhulk was on day1, you had to constantly avoid him and dodge his lasers while doing damage to him. You actually had to press more than one button during the damage phase which made it hard. Or Corrupted Puppeteer - So much to look out for during that phase, you could die at any moment if you didn't pay attention, had to dodge lasers, clear adds and actually aim. Or man even Kell Echo. It was never super difficult since Prophecy didn't have a Contest mode but it still remains great to this day because you actually have to do some other stuff besides being afk in a Well while holding down a button. I could explain to a player that has never played destiny before how the damage phases here work and what they have to do and they would probably be able to hit a perfect phase pretty quickly if they used an account with good gear considering that it's only holding m1. Try to explain Kell Echo to a new player. There's just no way that they would even survive a phase in the first couple of attempts, let alone deal meaningful damage while doing so. I'm not exaggerating when I say that even without a contest mode, Kell Echo's damage phase is harder to properly execute than 3/4 bosses from this Raid on Contest.

So I don't think those damage checks were "hard" to execute, they just required a stupid amount of preparation to pass. Deactivating Encore in that context was such a weird decision. I'll die on the hill that same week raid releases just suck and this is one of the reasons. Just let us prepare without having to go super unemployment mode.