Raid

"Some evils you cannot fight alone. Join with other brave Guardians to quest deep into the heart of Darkness and confront threats beyond imagination. Steel yourself. You will be tested to the very edge of your strength."

- Grimoire Description.

Raid is a game mode of Destiny. Raids are 6-player cooperative events that are of high challenge, and require communication between players to succeed. They involve specific quests for groups of fireteams. No waypoints or explicit objectives are provided.

Overview
Raids differ from Strikes in a few ways:


 * 6 player fireteams, as opposed to 3.
 * No matchmaking. A player must form a fireteam beforehand or search on an LFG (Looking For Group) site.
 * Raid enemies will have abilities not found elsewhere in the game (i.e. unique enemies, debuffs, etc).
 * Strikes last roughly half an hour, whereas raids can take up to several hours.
 * Raids have no objective markers. A player must find out where to go and what to do by themselves.
 * Raids can be dropped and picked up at a later time in the week. Players don't have to finish them in one sitting, but they do have to finish it before their checkpoint expires every Tuesday.
 * Players will have the opportunity to acquire gear and weapons specific to a raid once an encounter is complete. The gear that drops from the raids will often have perks specific to that raid and are intended to make the raids easier if a player chooses to equip a piece of armor or a weapon from that specific raid, although they are not bound to that activity.

Difficulty
Two difficulty levels exist for raids: normal, and hard. The normal mode must be completed before the harder ones can be attempted. This means that players who have completed the normal difficulty cannot take players through the hard mode even if they are not the fireteam leader. The normal mode is designed to teach players raid mechanics, and how to operate as a team. The hard mode provides tougher enemies, additional objectives and a harsher death penalty.


 * Normal Mode: Players need to wait 30 seconds before a teammate can revive them. Each encounter has easier objectives and enemies are easier to kill. Weapons and armor dropped from normal mode raids drop at a lower Light cap than hard mode raids.
 * Hard Mode: Players cannot be revived at all during an encounter (with the exception of self-reviving Sunsingers) but will automatically respawn if the fireteam progresses to the next checkpoint. Also, more difficult obstacles are included, such as additional objectives, harder-to-kill enemies, etc. The Light cap for items dropped in the hard mode is higher than the normal mode, and some weapons and armor pieces may drop that are exclusive to the hard mode, such as the 'Harrowed' armor and weapons from King's Fall and the Spliced armor from Wrath of the Machine.

Fireteams and Checkpoints
Players need to assemble their fireteam before entering the raid. The Fireteam leader is the one that the raid checkpoints is tied to, so whoever was the fireteam leader in the last session needs to initiate a new session in order to resume at that same checkpoint, otherwise the team may have to start fresh or at a checkpoint that differs from thee one they last left at.

There is a checkpoint for every boss killed, allowing players to return to the raid on other days, within a week (see lockout below). Players should agree upon how much progress they will make in each session if they don't plan on completing the raid in one session.

Lockout
Unlike all other activities, the Raid game mode employs a weekly lockout for earning loot. This means two things:


 * 1) Players have until the next Tuesday to complete the raid, otherwise their progress will be wiped and they have to start over.
 * 2) Players cannot earn new loot from the raid more than once a week per character. Separate characters on the same account can each play the raid and still get loot; this means an individual player can earn loot from a raid (including chests) for a maximum of three times (for three characters) per weekly lockout.

Rewards
Completing a raid rewards players with items not found elsewhere in the game. For example, Ascendant upgrade materials are common in chests, used to upgrade Legendary equipment. Some chests also have a chance to have an exotic weapon. Each boss fight also rewards a raid-specific legendary weapon or piece of armor. Completing the raid on hard mode will yield the best rewards, such as an exotic weapon not found elsewhere, such as the Vex Mythoclast from the Vault of Glass. Aesthetic items such as shaders, emblems, ships and Sparrows are also given.