Argos - Giant Vex Hydra boss
Same arena as the previous encounter and many of the same mechanics. There are three parts to this fight, the shield phase, the DPS phase, and the wipe phase.
The shield phase is most similar to the previous encounter. Argos will randomly face one of the plates. If you're on that plate, you'll see three orbs of the three elements situated like an upside-down T (one on top, one to the left, one to the right). They can all be the same element, they can all be different, it's random. Like before, you need to charge the Vex skulls and use them to shoot the orbs of the same element. When you shoot them continuously, they move towards the center where they explode. Shoot all three at the center at the same time and his shield will drop. The strategy we used was to have the skull users charge three skulls at the appropriate plate and have the other three people converge on the DPS platform to kill adds. We also filled up any open charge slots on the DPS platform so we'd have extra skulls for the DPS phase (so for instance, if there were two void orbs and the void plate was the DPS plate, we'd fill the third slot so we could use the skull during the next part).
When you drop his shield, you enter the DPS phase. During this part, you want to use supers (Golden Gun w/ Nighthawk is great, hammers, etc), rockets, extra skulls, etc, to damage the boss' face. He has a bunch of attacks, but two are really dangerous. The first is when he shoots out a glowing triangle net. Anyone caught in the next will be lifted into the sky to their death. The person in the net can't do anything so the people outside will need to shoot it to free them. It's best to just dodge this attack. Second, he'll spawn six(?) suicidal Vex enemies -- think of the squids from the Matrix. These travel in a pack and will kill you if all of them hit you, so be aware and dodge/kill them. You also want one person (preferably a Stormcaller) always killing adds during this part as they continue to spawn.
After a while he'll put his shield back up which gives you time to prepare for the wipe phase. During this part, he'll start collecting void energy which he'll release and cause a wipe if you don't stagger him. You have to stagger him by hitting two targets during each phase. He has six total, so you can prevent him from doing this three times for four total DPS phases (he'll also do this if you take too long getting to the DPS phase). The targets you have to hit glow white and turn red when you do damage. You'll know you've done enough if they explode and no longer glow. The spots are on his arms, his back, and on top of his head. You can destroy them in any order, but you have to destroy both of a single type to stagger him (both arms for instance). He always faces the arc plate, so use the time before he starts collecting energy to get in position. If you're doing the arms or the head, you want to approach from the arc plate. If you're doing the back, approach from the solar plate. After you stagger him, you can do some damage, but it's safer to kill adds once he's staggered and get in position to rinse and repeat. Sweet Business and Ghost Primus are really good for this phase, so I recommend they take up one of your weapon slots.
There's a typical damage check at the end, but nothing too major at this point.
Someone in my group got the grenade launcher, I got boots, don't remember what anyone else got..
Can be around all weekend if anyone needs help with any of this -- fresh or a specific encounter.