On Oct. 18, a month after “Destiny’s” release, Bungie released the Prestige mode of the raid. With this new mode you can get a cool golden shader for your armor and weapons, as well as a gold and purple reskin of the raid armor. However, the mere cosmetic loot is not worth enduring the stress that comes with the challenges of prestige mode.

The spike of the enemy’s power level from 270 to 300 makes even the beginning sequence, where players have to run three relics to the doors, into a frustrating grind. If you’re not starving for a new shader you should skip these encounters, and head straight for the underbelly of the Cabal ship, a labyrinth of underground corridors, traps, and treasure chests.

Be aware that the first three encounters change their order every week. This week’s order is: “Gauntlet, Pleasure Garden, and Baths.” The fourth and final step is the boss fight with Emperor Calus.

Gauntlet: The changes in difficulty here will have you working in two teams of three. One team will share both the Dog and the Sun platforms and the other team will share the Cup, as well as Axes platforms. What’s different in prestige mode is that every person has to be the runner, so take turns swapping with your teammates. For the people who are not runners, you need to help your partner outside by shooting an enemy Psion that spawns above them. Overall, this is challenging section can  take an hour or two to get everyone on your squad used to this difficulty.

Pleasure Garden: This part is surprisingly easy. Instead of six dogs there are now eight. It will certainly take a few attempts to learn the new pattern of the beasts that run in the Pleasure Garden, however once you learn this configuration it becomes super easy. To beat this encounter you should get an x36 stack on your spores and damage your assigned beast as much as possible without killing it, then quickly run into the safe room. Repeat the first step, but this time kill your beast. The players on the left and right side then gang up on their respective beasts, in order to kill it quickly and move on to the next encounter.

Baths: This part plays just like the normal version of the raid except for one difference in the mechanics. After the first damage phase on the lanterns, three of the fireteam members will have been marked by the Emperor. The players who are marked need go to the middle of the stage and memorize the symbol that appears to them. The symbols are as follows: Dog (bottom left), Axes (top left), Guards (bottom right) and Cup (top right). Sounds easy to do, but remember, all the enemies are at power level 300 and they will melt your life bar away.

Final Boss: Normally, three people stay in the Throne room and three stay in the Void room. Here the person who punches a Psion in Throne switches places with a randomly selected person in the Void. Communication is vital as one mistake can and will cause your fireteam to wipe over and over. Although we used a glitch, this part still took about two hours to complete.

After this raid you’re rewarded with either a piece of armor or a weapon at 300 power, an emblem, and an aura. The aura goes away on the following Tuesday when the game’s weekly activities reset.

These rewards don’t offer much more than bragging rights and aren’t worthy of your time as a student to put in the hours that will be taken away from studying. Trust me, your final will not even be this stressful.