And TheFourth wants to come, too. He's a lock.
If we just jumped off and died and let you solo him, that would work too, right?
yeah but i already did it on my lock so i can't re-enter just the atheon save anymore, it makes me start from the beginning. it also usually takes a few tries to solo it, first time it took me about an hour second time about 15 minutes (~45 secs per try).
thefourth should be able to solo it though and yeah you can just jump off, the video link last paged is exactly the way I did it in both normal and hard, he just 2 shots you in hard so gotta be really careful. just remember, when you fail and if you used both grenades go to orbit so you can reset grenade c/d. also pick agility options on weapons so you can get to the spot faster, in hard every second counts since his purple balls hit so damn hard
re: loot, as i understand it you can only get loot from the chests in vog once per week, normal or hard. you can get loot from the bosses twice, once for normal each boss and once for hard. you definitely get loot for both, i got confluence and ship both times. you won't get any more loot for further clears though until tue reset. this applies per character, you can do alts and get more.
you are also saved to someone elses checkpoint the second you zone in when they are leader, but you can reset the checkpoint from the raid launch menu. you can't start a hard mode raid if you haven't cleared normal, but you can join someone elses hard.
if you are gonna cheese hard atheon i'd do it tonight, bungie would be dumb not to roll out a hotfix tomorrow before the weekend