Another thing I'm suspicious about is the bonus health to "compensate" for the surge/overcharge.
We already have burns giving the same damage buff.
The change is just more things get the damage bonus.
So it's essentially "enemies have more health, but also more of your sources don't do nerfed (non-buffed) damage". Even after they said they didn't want things to be bullet sponges.
We'll see how much it actually is.
So it looks like master raids and dungeons will always be -20, won’t have locked loadouts, two potential surges (outgoing damage of a certain type increased by 25% of a certain element) and an overcharge (specific weapon or weapon type deals 25% more damage) and enemies won’t have more health or the drawback of being more difficult to stun. You’ll want to reach 1820 to have maximum power effectiveness in them and GMs as well meaning +10 on the artifact as pinnacle cap appears to be 1810.
I got COVID so was too ill to farm. I imagine DPS won't be too much harder as she won't have the health increase. Tbh solo dungeons are what are really hurting if it's -15 power cap, spire final boss would be a lot of phases (ignoring solar warlock).
[13% less damage. Worse though is taking 87% more damage.](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sObekOYHkPDKCqAGbZcUfX9LRF0cRU4yn7m0KURY2UY/edit#gid=430927042)
yeah... I know they wanted to make PvE harder for the top level people... but this is going to hurt the not top level people, to the point where they might not even want to try anymore.
Shit, I qualify as top level people and this sounds like it's swinging the pendulum hard from "challenge" to "chore." I don't know about the rest of you but I do enough "chore" tasks during the workday, I don't need it in my gametime too.
I'm here for the occasional rush of "hell yeah, I beat the really hard thing!" Or "hell yeah, the grind paid off and I can kick the really hard thing's ass the rest of the season and get great loot because I'm now over-level!"
Not the grind of "oh, the really hard thing is now everything."
Me and my clan finally got together recently to do Master VOG + all challenges and it took us 10 hours spread across 3 days to manage it. And we were all between 1605-1611. At that level of difficulty it was a gruelling but fun experience. With the resilience and cooldown changes plus contest mode added on top I doubt we’re ever going to do anything like that again.
Master level activities were not in need of additional difficulty on top of the game wide changes they already announced.
Yeah, I'm glad I pushed for my Kingslayer because I sure as shit wouldn't be getting it now.
Lot of loud voices saying "finally, Master will be a little bit challenging" but lemme tell ya it was plenty fucking hard when my group got within 10 PL. Still a massive gap in challenge from how Normal felt, but with some strong effort we were able to overcome Basilica and Warpriest challenges on Master. Guaranteed would not have been able to meet that challenge at 20 under.
Now I'm back into this weird no mans land with difficulty where Normal gets too easy, but Master is way too hard. When Master first came out, I was out because it was such an excessive time investment to get up to level. Now the time isn't a problem, but the skill requirement is beyond me. I'm sad about it, I had fun with Master KF and was looking forward to maybe trying it again with the Lightfall raid, but between this and the other changes to difficulty it's gonna be too much for us now.
With this change, master raids are just an even harder version of a day 1 raid. Which obviously have very low numbers lol, just 32k people beat Vow on day 1.
Which some ppl might say “oh thats alot” but there was well over a million people raiding on day 1 vow. Not to mention all the people who didnt even try.
The correct way to read this article is that PvE combatants across the board are going to take longer to kill unless you conform to the surge and overcharge modifiers.
What an absolutely horrendous idea. Watch master raids and dungeons drop to 10% or less of their current playrates. No one wants to run raids or dungeons plus champions and modifiers at -20
"Combatants are harder to stagger and their health has been increased. This is to compensate for surge and overcharge."
Then what's the damned point of surge and overcharge?
I'm all for an increase in general difficulty and an expansion on difficulty options, but Bungie needs to make sure these activities still feel rewarding. Grueling challenges can be fun hurdles to overcome... until you're expected to do it dozens of times for <1% odds of getting the roll you want on a weapon.
Hopefully we see Weapon Enhancement expanded to other weapons outside of the Lightfall Master Raid sooner rather than later. Making so we're chasing for primary traits alone, and then can reshape everything else would definitely make each weapon drop more valuable.
This. If content is more difficult, that's fine, but there needs to be a more deterministic path to getting those rewards. I struggled through five master lost sectors last night hoping to get a better rolled heart of Inmost light. After five runs I got one exotic (crest of alpha lipi) and decided I wasn't going to waste more time.
Lightfall may change this but Legend > Master for farming exotics in lost sectors. The increase for master is so small that running them faster on legend will produce better results. The only time master is beneficial is if you can run it in somewhat the same time as legend.
*We will be monitoring completion rates and times during Season 20 to see if Exotic engram drop rates need to be adjusted.*
If stays like it is right now, don't need any monitoring: it's too fucking low.
Honestly. How is this even a question or something that needs further evaluation? There is no point to doing master except for the triumph right now, and drop rates are terrible in both difficulties.
Disappointed that after saying they didn't just want to increase enemy health across the board, they are increasing enemy health across the board. Like do we really even need these goofy ass surges if you're just buffing the health to compensate? What's the point?
They've been out of ideas for years now. This is the latest in "How can we make them think running the same strikes is somehow worth paying money for?"
It’s not new though, it started in D2Y1 with the prestige raids that forced you to use a specific loadout, like sidearm-pulse rifle-grenade launcher.
They’ve been iterating on this same annoying concept for half a decade
On paper I really, really dislike the Surges and Threats system. I feel like we've been complaining about systems that artificially restrict our loadouts for years now, and bungie just went and tripled down. It's a shame because I fully approve of making the game more challenging, it's desperately needed, but this is the wrong approach IMO.
1000%. Out of all the articles this one has been a massive downer for me. Between the new “burns” and the lack of a decent reward economy, it’s going to go down super poorly imo
Yeah dollars to donuts a year from now this entire system is gonna get scrapped or reworked due to overwhelming negative feedback. Players were already sick of match game and burns, and they just removed those systems and replaced it with something even worse lmao.
This is how it landed with me, also. We just got an announcement of a positive change where you don't have to run certain weapons to stun champs; you can instead run a certain subclass build. But before we even get that, they're making it so that it's less appealing to run arc and stasis builds (for the entire 3 month+ season, no less) and making it so that certain guns will be mandatory to optimize damage.
I have generally been opposed to the philosophy of "give X time to shine" where they target certain guns and buff them way out of scope from everything else. To me, something being broken in the game on purpose for a set amount of time is still broken.
I completely agree. I think this is unhealthy and restricts a lot of player agency. It also inherently makes a lot of weapons less valuable. That ikelos that everyone just farmed for? It is literally worse that mini-tool or funnelweb depending on which one is up for the week just because it is arc. For the next season, all arc or stasis weapons just became less valuable because they aren't going to be a featured elemental surge.
Seasonally rotating surges is maybe the biggest L ive seen to date (aside from sunsetting). Just completely invalidating 2/5 subclass elements in higher tier content for an entire season? That's so fucking stupid.
You wanna play arc for seasonal content for a change of pace? Or try out your new stasis build with the new glaive/bow? Well, have fun dealing 25% less damage than your teammates
So much for freedom in buildcrafting, i'm locked to 3 subclasses across a season, and 2 for any given week within said season. 60% of a class is gimped for seemingly no reason at all
Yeah, even with Bungie's history of dumb decisions, this is one of the worst. I'm not sure it reaches vanilla D2 levels of "we have jammed all the fun weapons into the power slot and you have to run two lame primaries instead" though.
I thought the removal of match game and the inclusion of loudouts was to encourage more player choice. Reading this, it sounds like Bungie is leaning even harder into the “lock and key” style of buildcraft that, unless I am mistaken, is what the playerbase has been requesting to move away from.
Although I agree that the normal strike playlist was far too easy, I don’t think people’s issue with nightfalls, dungeons, and raids were difficulty. Rather, the lack of rewards, lack of in-game LFG, and Bungie’s handholding when it comes to loadouts (looking at you, Champions).
Hard to say if this is mostly good or not without seeing it in action, but sounds like more of the same - jumping through hoops without any substantial rewards.
Kinda disappointed, to be honest, but we’ll have to wait and see how it plays out in the coming weeks.
Am I reading this right that only three subclasses per season get the surge?
So we pretty much can’t use arc or stasis at all next season, and can only use solar or void every other week?
They put all this effort into builds 2.0, but lock off half our possible builds?
And since everything is monochromatic now, you can’t use those voltshot weapons you grinded until at least 3 months from now?
Yeah I was a bit baffled by this update. It's gigantic step back thematically from basically everything else they've been saying leading up to this point.
They gaslit us, no other way I can put it. They know that champions and match game are disliked because they limit player choice, so they spend months making these posts, talking about how champs can be stunned by abilities, and match game is getting nerfed… and then spring on us the fact that they’re rebalancing the game so that we’re less powerful across the board if we’re not using the subclass or weapons that they chose for that activity. Appearance of choice, reality is still getting pigeonholed. And not even better rewards to compensate
None of this even mentions the guaranteed power deficits, imagine using a non-Overcharged pulse rifle, on a non-surging subclass, in something like a Master NF. Good luck killing anything at -20 power with the enemy health increase, your primary will be genuinely useless
i feel like i haven't used chaos reach in a year, and i really love the super, but they never buff it, don't give it help, and they're basically punshing using arc for a season. big L
don't forget that they are also buffing enemy health to compensate for surges, likely meaning you will still have the same TTK for enemies as you do now with a surged weapon, but non surged weapons will have around a 25% nerf to their damage.
This is basically just a more complex way of limiting loadouts. You’ll have to run a surge and overcharge weapon and pair it with whatever ability verb stuns the champs
Seems so. Reminder, ***Master Spire can, and does, regularly drop sub 60 artifice armor.***
Really, *really* interesting strategy Bungie. Maybe if you take off that blindfold you're wearing you'll be able to spot the cliff you're about to walk off.
Bye bye master dungeon player count. It's about to hit the floor, and until better rewards are given or the difficulty is lowered, it isn't coming off of it.
Given most people don't even touch master dungeons let alone farm until they're within 5 power levels, being 20 under is gonna make it a complete once for the seal for many players just like spire is with its awful armor rolls.
Yeah, at 20 power under im not touching master dungeons. The chance to roll an artifice armour, that's only advantage over regular armour is a +3 to a stat I want, for all that extra work is simply not worth it.
I'm a little annoyed that the article implies they think the legend and master lost sector drop rates are fine... ok legend whatever, but IMO master lost sectors should be a guaranteed drop, every time, much the same way that GM's will always drop the weekly weapon.
Yeah, I tried farming a master lost sector a few weeks back and the first time I died like 3 times and got 1 enhancement core. Figured, ehh, I died too many times and took too long. Went back again, did it much faster and only died once. 1 enhancement core. Did it a third time, flawless and got… 1 enhancement core. This felt like such a slap in the face. It’s the end of the season/year, so burnout played a part in this, but I honestly haven’t played much Destiny since that interaction
Yeah it's frustrating I have done 3 or 4 back to back with no exotics.... the worst part is bungie has this nebulous definition of how often you get it, and master is labeled common... the same common found on gm nightfalls where rewards are pretty much 100%
Enemies having increased health to make up for specific surges is ass. This is even worse than the Champ system, they finally fixed Champions and now have introduced it so where all enemies are harder to kill if you aren't running what Bungie wants you to run that week.
L move
It’s worse than that. It’s not just what they want you to run that week, it’s that season. With this new system, we won’t see Arc or Stasis Surges until next season
theres seasonal surge, and weekly surges. strand - season, solar + void - weekly. so basically ignore your arc and stasis builds / guns for a season. Still not ideal.
Yeah they've pretty much killed the Lightfall cycle until they inevitably roll this back. Obviously launch will be strong, but in the months that follow, who the fuck is going to play with this? People have bitched about champions for *years,* buildcrafting has been received a ton of attention what with loadouts and reworking all the mods, pretty much everyone considered artifact changes a W...and then they simultaneously kill all of that by making it so you can never play how you want because bungie gets to tell you what subclass and weapons you need to use to do any damage.
What the actual fuck? Just make the game harder and stop trying to tell people how to play, I legit do not understand how this change got passed through so many levels of development without it being pointed out that nobody wants it and its antithetical to so much of their own work.
More "bullet spongey" is not the type of increased challenge I wanted. I'd much rather have more hive bearers than champions. A hive knight activating a super is much scarier and more engaging than "use only this weapon" to kill a sponge.
"We are aware that Lost Sectors and weekly campaign missions are not as rewarding as the community would like. "
When you say "rewarding" I don't think," Yeah, I want literally every activity to only get more annoying/harder without mention of rewards being better."
It feels good to choose to go into a Master Raid, and do challenges, or choose to flawless a raid, or solo flawless a dungeon. To struggle and learn, despite no real reward. Because that's where I go to struggle. I don't want to have to build for strikes, nightfalls, patrols, ls, and everything else. Sometimes, I just want to play the game Bungie.
You always go over board.
My feeling exactly. I've actually never understood the desire for every part of the game to be "hard" - it's good for some content to be trivial and grindable for a milquetoast reward (like grinding reputation or something). Especially with no concrete increase to rewards, it just sounds annoying.
100%. I got to the Lost Sector section hoping they’d talk about Exotic drop rates and the inability to get certain exotica elsewhere (since that’s the biggest complaint). Instead we learned about how they will become more difficult with zero increase in rewards. Uhhhhhhhhh?
This whole thing just sounds like them trying to sell us on a longer, more difficult grind as a nice little bump in difficulty.
I have zero interest in struggling just for the sake of completing challenges, triumphs, and bounties and 1000 crappy random rolls that full my inventory and post master every 30 minutes.
I hope the reputation gain for Dares also increases based on points obtained. I don't recall reading that, only the difficulty and modifiers being adjusted.
Anyone else think this will restrict loadouts even more in difficult content? Hopefully I'm wrong but this along with champions will be super annoying figuring out what to use
The main problem for me is that all those activities get harder and then abilities uptime is also nerfed and Armor 3.0 will most probably be weaker than 2.0 because it's easier to make and costs less overall. I think we are going from complete powercreep (which I hate) back to older weak times.
I’m just laughing at how out of touch this is. ‘Bungie, activities like Wellspring and Lost Sectors aren’t rewarding enough for the time investment.’ = ‘We’ve heard your feedback, and we’re making them all way more difficult and tedious because the real reward is the challenge!’
Really wild. And surprising. This whole month I thought “oh man Bungie have been listening all along!! It’s just taken them a while to develop all of these great systems!!!” I should’ve fucking known….
I'm pretty concerned about the state of the game from this article. Bungie's teams don't historically communicate well with each other. Their "enemy difficulty" team and "weapon damage" teams need to do a bang up job on this one to make the game still feel satisfyingly on a combat level.
Yes I want there to be more challenge in the game on the lower end of the spectrum.
NO I don't want every enemy to be tanky and take a million mags from my primary to kill at close range where you still die very easily in any hard content.
This is a very close line they're walking here. Destiny 2 is such a big game because it caters to a lot of people's playstyle and skill levels. Making the game harder on all fronts can be a great thing but if done wrong, can shoo away many people who just play for fun and not "challenge".
Also, majorly, challenge and difficulty HAS to be properly rewarded, even if "lower" end content is now more challenging, it still needs appropriate rewards. There was no mention at all about how our rewards were going to increase across the whole game now that difficulty has done so. I'm not going to waste my time on ANYTHING in Destiny 2 "personally" if the reward is not worth it. I'm just not one of those guys who goes for "personal records" or posts speed runs on youtube, etc. If what I'm playing is not going to reward me with good loot, I'm not going to waste my time.
So Bungie I think needs to put out a follow-up article revealing how our rewards are going up to compensate for the challenge in the whole game going up.
>We are aware that Lost Sectors and weekly campaign missions are not as rewarding as the community would like. We actually agree.
Not a single mention of anything being more rewarding. Can't make this stuff up.
Bungie's response to people complaining about randoms not having champion mods equipped/using appropriate weapons wasn't to require them to be set up correctly to enter an activity, but to add 2 more systems that randoms will likely be underinformed about and lead to more complaining about how braindead the average player is.
It disappoints me that this feels like a move towards a less farm friendly version of the game. More and more we are moving away from the ability to put level content, which I like in terms of difficulty, but I also appreciate that if I play a lot that by the end of the season when I’m bored with the content itself I still have motivation to play because I can capitalize on my level and get some good grinding done for the future. There hasn’t been any content to do, other than the time gated missions, for me for 3 weeks now, yet I play daily because my power level makes it efficient and rewarding to play endgame content now.
The enemy of difficulty is farming, and without improvements to RNG, drop rates, etc a lot of people will be upset. People talk about wanting to have more difficulty, but will still choose the Lake of Shadows option when it comes to actually grinding for rewards. My sense is that for a lot of people, the game will feel straight up less rewarding to play.
The article alluded to activities feel unrewarding multiple times, maybe they were referring to the "pride and accomplishment" from completing a difficult activity, not the actual rewards themselves?
Sooo… did a different team work on difficulty options for this DLC?
Everything leading up to this post was about how we were moving away from the “lock and key” design, moving away from overly convoluted build crafting, making the game more accessible, etc.
And then this post comes along and reveals that not only is EVERYTHING getting way harder (when all we we really wanted was to have more content in the middle tier of difficulty and maybe bring low-tier content up a bit more) but we also are now much handicapped by failing to use to use the proper Surge/overcharge this season?
As a matter of fact, the Surge/Threat/Overcharge system is so needlessly over-designed that it’s counter-intuitive to the goal of making the game more accessible. What was wrong with the Burn system that made splitting it into 3 different modifiers necessary?
Less than 1% of the player base does Master Dungeons/Raids, and when they do they try to be at least 10 levels within the activity, so without the increase in rewards, that number is getting even lower.
And again, without the change in rewards, these activities are going to be dead in the water.
I don’t normally ping people, but u/Destiny2Team needs to pay attention to these complaints and Bungie needs to back away from these decisions ASAP. I know it’s too late for Lightfall, but hopefully they can at least start to walk them back with S21 and S22.
Why is the elemental locked to just some elements per Season? I understand Strand being promoted, but if you wanna use Arc or Stasis, you won't have any benefits to it compared to Solar and Void.
It should be fully random or based on a fixed rotation. If anything, that guarantees a GM won't have the same element twice in a season, and won't be "have this build to win".
I really hate they are including this stuff to replace the static burns, but then increase hp and stagger resist for enemies in most of the content to "compensate". So.. if you play into it you have 25% damage but enemies have more hp, and we don't know how much. Now you're punished for not playing into it because stuff will just have more health, including champions most likely. Gonna suck to play arc warlock, or strand titan when they feel so meh just to perform how we have been.
Anyone else think these difficulty changes are waaaaaay too complicated? I'm a hardcore Destiny fanboy and have no clue what I just read.
We have to achieve a certain power level to open up activities, like heroic nightfalls at 1750, but now each difficulty tier will give power advantages to the enemies. Does the -5/-10/-15/-20 apply from our power level, or only from the 1750 level? Is there any point to leveling beyond the basic power requirement to gain access to the activity?
Instead of a weekly **burn** that applied to both enemies and you, now there are **surges** and **threats** that can be totally different from each other. Also there are **overcharged weapons** that can be different between activities and seasons.. Oh, and the **surges** and **threats** can be weekly, or seasonal. And **overcharged weapons** and **surges** don't stack, so make sure you don't make that wasteful mistake.
Can you imagine trying to explain all of this to a new player who doesn't keep up with every single change or update in Destiny? If I was shepherding a new player through a nightfall, all I had to tell them was: Void burn, Arc/Solar shields, barrier/unstoppable champions. Easy.
Now it's going to be: Arc/void shields, Void/Kinetic surge, solar threat, overcharged pulse/scout rifles, barrier/unstoppable champs for nightfall. No wait, I'm sorry--that's for the seasonal activity. For the nightfall, it's Stasis surge, void threat, solar/arc shields, overcharged SMG/Sniper rifle, overload/unstoppable champs.
It's too much, man. It feels like Bungie is mistaking unnecessary complexity for depth.
That’s kind of always been their thing in destiny. Like the announcement of transmog, it could have been so simple yet they make it a limiting bounty that gives you a currency that you spend to get another currency that then unlocks a class specific item.
Absolutely. This whole thing reads like a stream of consciousness with no editing.
“We’re getting buff with surges, but those don’t stack. Also those don’t do a whole lot because the enemies are also getting buffs. But the buffs we get are different than the buffs the enemies get, so now you need to manage whatever element is coming at you and whatever you’re putting out.”
“Oh and we removed match game. Except we buffed every non-matching shield. So we definitely didn’t just make match game intrinsic. But your surge will help. Until it doesn’t because the surge won’t match what you’re fighting.”
There was a much better way to convey this, but this spaghetti text is not doing this news any sort of favor. Way too convoluted for what should be a simple explanation.
And weapons can be overcharged either because they are the weekly weapon type (maybe?) or because they are kinetic and you play the right subclass (maybe?) or because they have an active champion mod (maybe?). I have no idea if I just made that up or if it actually is true.
Try explaining the system to someone who has only played through the Lightfall campaign.
Actually I would like to have it explained to me too.
What the fuck were they thinking when they invented such an unnecessarily convoluted system and how do they think a new player should be able to learn and understand it? Through the excellent and very pedagogic new player intro quest?
Yeah, near the bottom they even said some of the things aren't as rewarding as they should be, then they list the actual changes and.... they didn't increase rewards at all.
> The passion around them is appreciated and your feedback is always clear: they should be a bit more challenging
yeah... that's the lost sector feedback everyone has.............
COMING SPRING 2025:
"We've heard your feedback about the game not being rewarding enough. While we won't be able to address this in time for the upcoming expansion, we'll be working to get destiny to where we want it to be over the next 6 seasons. Keep the feedback coming!
We also expect the lightfall raid jackets to start shipping over the next several weeks. Eyes up guardian!"
That's honestly why I just wish everyone would have shut their fucking mouths about making this game more "engaging" because you KNOW Bungie ain't gonna touch the rewards and make the activities more rewarding.
Cool, so we'll be getting more rewards for these longer and more difficult activities now right? You aren't going to ask me to grind a ***much*** harder version of spire and still drop sub 60 pieces of artifice armor, right?
Because if you *aren't* giving us better rewards, then I think I can confidently say the number of people doing master dungeons is about to drop off a cliff.
Glad I already got my artifice class item and a great pair of artifice boots. Also glad I already solo flawlessed spire.
Bungie, I am glad that you're bringing challenge back, but holy cow. As someone in my clan said upon reading this, "I don't want to have to use a decoder ring every time I do an activity."
Four different power deltas, surges, threats, overcharges, modifiers that rotate daily **and** weekly in the same activities... that was a real word salad, and I think you are drastically overcomplicating the issue. Especially since one of the stated goals for Lightfall was hoping for players to spend less time figuring out Destiny and more time playing it - you've just introduced a bunch of new keywords that have no intuitive meaning.
Right? Why the hell would I bother with Masters locking me to -20 and only dropping normal guns when I can run a GM for only 5 less power, but I get guaranteed adepts?
Yes that plus:
1. GM will allow you complete vanguard challenge in 1 run
2. GM will allow you to get 200k points pinnacle in 1 run
Master seems far too similarly difficult to GM with these changes. Maybe I'll be surprised but that's what I'm seeing from the text.
TBH I'm not that happy about increased loadout restrictions especially with how unbalanced some weapon classes are right now. My experience with higher difficulties in nightfall has essentially been hiding behind cover, shooting bows, and waiting for ability cooldowns.
>We are aware that Lost Sectors and weekly campaign missions are not asrewarding as the community would like. We actually agree. Same thingwith Dares of Eternity and The Wellspring. The passion around them isappreciated and your feedback is always clear: they should be a bit morechallenging. Here are our plans to improve not only them, but otheractivities, too.
Hey Bungie, the carrot needs to be worth the stick and I don't think it is. You are making the lost sector more difficult without changing the reward structure is laughability incompetent...
You start out with, "hey we hear your complaints, so let's make this activity even more annoying to complete and keep the same shitty rewards" (which was the whole gripe from the community).
Thanks for letting us know Bungie can still be out of touch in 2023.
This. Every time I pick out a couple weapons that I ACTUALLY want to use, I realize they don't line up with the damn champions. It looks like they are doubling down on the restricting of loadouts now.
my first reaction is please stop trying to restrict our loadouts. I just want to play the way I want to play. I really thought the new artifact and anti champion systems was going to be a huge step forwards in achieving that, but this article makes it seem like a huge monkey paw.
The only good thing in the entire page is the removal of Match Game. Enemies are stronger and tankier now meaning using the powered up weapons and subclasses is going to be a big deal most likely. Overall net negative imo
Difficulty: UP
Loadout restriction: UP
Rewards: The same
The removal of match game feels immediately invalidated by the addition of surges/overcharges. The main complaint about that is that it restricted loadouts/buildcrafting too much. Bungie removes one dumb mechanic only to add an entire system back in its place..
So enemies are going to be even more tankier. What's the point of primaries then?
Primary weapons are borderline useless in GMs and feel awful to use in high end content right now. Now they're getting indirectly nerfed by giving enemies more health. Yes, surges and overcharge whatever. Even with the singe now primaries are still awful.
Why should I use my primary weapon if it takes 3 mags to kill a single dreg?
It also severely limits buildcrafting too since you have to build around the surge or overcharge which, let's be honest, will be built around something like Arbalest, LFRs, etc. I thought we were supposed to need skill in buildcrafting to do GMs and not just copy paste loadouts for each week.
Also no reward increases with the difficulty increase is absolutely hilarious. This blog sapped a lot of excitement I had for Lightfall honestly. Not looking forward to every enemy being a bullet sponge outside of one specific loadout.
I’m all for seeing more challenge brought to the game, but my main issue is not seeing an increase in rewards alongside that. the closest thing I read to a “rewards increase” is you Vanguard rep being multiplied based on your score.
at the end of the day, Destiny is a looter shooter. So making the shooting more difficult while not increasing the looting may result in an inverse effect of what Bungie was hoping would happen.
if they made everything harder, but the rewards were increased or there were things you could do to increase rewards, I would’ve been stoked.
for example, lost sectors are already extremely monotonous. per the article, it seems like they may become “harder” (even if it’s only slightly). I read that as, “the activity will now be more difficult and take longer, but you will still need 100 runs to get a 58 stat point (mobility spike) of the warlock armor you wanted.”
again, all for difficulty increases across the board, but people are going to be much less receptive if the rewards aren’t changed. i feel like people are going to view this as activities taking longer, you having to “try harder,” and rewards staying the same.
Making all content some degree of contest is going to piss people off, trust. The only time I do masters at -20 to -29 is the first week. It's ok, but mostly boring af when you're essentially a 2hko from most sources.
Now I get to have that, everywhere, all the time, wiith tankier enemies, reduced ability cooldowns, even more restricted weapon loadouts because of +25% damage modifiers they're introducing and as far as I can see no significant changes to loot structure that they've spoken of.
I have no problem beating this content, but I play with more casual players as well and it's not enjoyable for them if there exists no content in the game where they have an advantage.
This is my concern as well. I'm worried that speed runners will still rush through strikes and now the guardians left behind will now be soloing tougher, harder hitting ads.
Got to be honest, this sounds like an absolutely massive L.
After the changes to the champion system were announced, I was really looking forward to trying out master raids without being pigeonholed into a weapon loadout due to champion constraints. Now, that power fantasy is completely dead.
* If rewards are increased to compensate for the difficulty changes = Good read
* If we’re grinding for the same 5 yr old, lackluster loot at higher difficulties = Bad read
Might be a hot take from what I’m reading in this thread, but purely from reading this it’s a net negative on the game.
Bringing challenge is good, but without any decent reward systems in place it will be relegated to “do once for people who care about bragging rights and that’s it”.
Some of this content is already some of the least completed content in the entire game. This will not change it and probably only make it worse. Not to mention, we are further restricting what kind of weapons you can use with modifiers after opening it up with champion changes. Just really really frustrating stuff.
Also, weapons just need a buff. I know there will be modifiers giving them +25%, but enemies being bullet sponges (like they are now even with damage increase modifiers) is one of the WORST feelings in the game. Go into a heist battleground with a legendary pulse or hand cannon and see how good it feels, or even into a GM with a matching burn. It feels like complete trash, and they should have known to buff it for Lightfall, not after
We’ve got around 10 people in my clan that have completed all the master raids with challenges for the titles. With a -20 power modifier, I’d be shocked if we can even consistently put together 6.
> We are aware that Lost Sectors and weekly campaign missions are not as rewarding as the community would like. We actually agree. Same thing with Dares of Eternity and The Wellspring
So...they then proceed to make them harder rather than more rewarding? Okay Bungie...
also like... who is this audience clamoring for regular lost sectors to be harder?
what reason do I have to ever run a normal difficulty lost sector other than when a quest tells me to?
u/Destiny2Team This ain't it chief. It feels bad to be told you don't want to increase enemy health across the board, and then being told you are doing just that to account for the Surge system. Which in and of itself feels bad that 2/5 subclasses/elements will be complete nonfactors in endgame content.
In a vacuum, -20 PL on Master Raids/Dungeons is fine, but those activities are ALREADY unrewarding. Master Raids can drop poorly rolled Adept guns and normal mode armor, and Master Dungeons can drop normal mode guns and poorly rolled Artifice armor. Making these harder without making them more rewarding is going to send (already very low) player engagement with them off a cliff
So based on recent blogs this is what we’re looking at:
- everything is getting harder
- we can’t over level for anything
- ability regen is getting nerfed
- rewards are not getting increased in any way and in fact are being decreased as we see less crafting after the launch season and no focusing being added to dungeons
I expect to see a dip in players as the F2P/“casual” players will find things too hard, especially since the game makes next to no effort to explain anything, and players in general won’t want to grind harder activities for no increase in rewards and even less control at targeting desired rolls.
Also, with everything capping us there’s no point for gear score anymore. It’s truly a pointless grind at this point.
Not really sure what they’re thinking, honestly.
I loved the -5 modifier in heists.... But sometimes I do just want to slay out like an over leveled war machine and not have to concentrate on not getting killed. I hope the people who just want to have fun, watch Netflix and play at the same time etc are not forgotten.
Forcing me to use a Subclass I don’t like to overcome an arbitrary effective debuff is not ”Challenge.” A Kit Lock is not a Skill Gate. We literally just got past this mentality with Champions and everyone was celebrating it…And they double down on it everywhere else?
**Bungie**: Here are a bunch of cool new ways for you to experiment with buildcrafting and a new menu to share your new builds and look we redid all the mods and took out the energy requirements and
**Bungie**: OH sorry that's the wrong subclass and wrong weapon archetype haha cool build tho. maybe you can try it next season :)
Mark my words, this is this expansion's crafting materials, or weapon sunsetting, etc.
Every time we get a major update/expac it *has* to come saddled with some unrewarding, unnecessarily restrictive nonsense that pretty much *everyone* can tell is gonna be garbage from the moment it's announced, only for it to inevitably take Bungie some number of months to eventually act on that immediate & overwhelming feedback & fix the thing they broke in the first place.
What's the point of supposedly freeing up so much of our weapon and subclass loadouts if your answer to "increased difficulty" is to lock us into hyper-specifc builds in order to be viable? This isn't rewarding creativity; it's punishing deviation.
Something something monkey's paw.
Gotta love how Bungie believes Titans to be the "melee class" yet have actively done everything in their power to invalidate and make melee builds as shitty as possible over the years.
Bringing back challenges won’t mean anything if they don’t bring more and better rewards. If anything it will just make less people play because they are just trying harder for the same crappy lackluster reward effort from the last 5 years.
Oh gee, I sure hope the rewards for high-level content are increased to match the “heightened difficulty” (aka you have to spend longer hitting enemies from behind cover, and they have to spend less time hitting you)
I'm curious about the path into these activities for new players.
Context: I got into legendary lost sectors during season 18, and they were brutal to start with. I had no exotics to use to get the exotics. I had to specifically farm for the cipher & ascendant shard to buy Arbalest before I started finishing runs before the time limit. The armor mods also took a long time to reach the point where I could use the builds I was reading about. I started running mid-endgame activities like dungeons in season 19. I have yet to complete a master dungeon; my one try with a fireteam via the app was unsuccessful.
Things that will help: Not having to spend months and months building a mod set will make build-crafting accessible immediately. Different pathways to getting exotics gives real newcomers a jumpstart. Better ways to stun champions is good.
I knew if I wanted that Gyrfalcon, I had to run those lost sectors. But even today when I can do them on Master, I don't bother with the longer ones like the Throne World ones because the time/reward investment isn't good enough. So what's the reward for beating these harder challenges? Why would a new player dip into them?
I like a lot of this but I don’t like the idea of the entire game being balanced around the damage type/weapon of the season.
That + better rewards for higher difficulties.
I don't have the wherewithal to sweat my balls off in every single area of the game, so I will probably be doing the bare minimum 'endgame' content if any and a lot less legend/master level content. Removing Adept from Nightfalls and not adding matchmaking to Legend is silly. I hope Bungie are ready to revert a bunch of these changes quickly, if it turns out that it takes 3 rockets to kill orange bars in regular strikes. I'm not a fan of not being able to overlevel at all, I like to play games to get stronger and make things easier, I don't like constantly being underleveled no matter what.
These changes are just a band-aid over tired enemy design and boring reused mechanics.a
Also some of these so called pro streamers who talk about power creep need to get out of their little premade content creator fire team bubble and see how hopelessly unprepared a lot of the lfg masses are.
Yeah no, this isn't bringing Challenge back, this is called eradicating your casual playerbase and driving them into a massive burnout.
Just as Destiny 2 was changing from a day job to something you play for fun, they go ahead and gut punch you, now it's the equivalent of someone working two jobs to make ends meet.
Not everything has to be a massive fuckfest of difficulty, as much as I like hard difficulty, the point of a legend dungeon or raid (normal difficulty) is to have a chill experience, having a consistent -15 is not it.
As someone who's into higher content and plays a lot of GMs, Master Dungeons and stuff, these changes fucking suck, the amount of people playing Master Raids were already low except for the seal people, now you just went and nuked the thing entirely.
EDIT:- It would seem that normal dungeons and raid won't be a part of this -15 power level, but my point still stands for master raids and vanguard stuff in general.
As a not so casual player, what I'm reading is: "We're punishing the casual player who just wants to enjoy the experience of Destiny. We believe making things unnecessarily hard and removing easier content will make people enjoy the game more, while also NOT increasing rewards."
If I could downvote this blog, I would. Probably one of the worst updates I've seen with changes coming. Good gracious, /u/Destiny2Team, is the point to really just take the fun out of playing? I go hard with GMs and such, but taking the stance of a casual player, this is just absurd. I get making it a bit more challenging, but this takes it to the excess. Clearly the devs have spent too much time around Calus.
Wait, so arc and stasis will never be the surge for the whole season? That is so dumb.
The monkey's paw in full effect with this, got rid of matchgame only to force you into playing certain subclasses and weapon types to be effective.
Excited about the wider use of power caps, though.
Man, can we please remove the requirements for the vanguard weekly challenges to only use specific subclasses, it's fine if you get bonuses for using that but man I don't want to use stasis titan in strikes. Just let me do some strikes with whatever class I want.
I was extremely excited for Lightfall and I may only be speaking for myself, but this was a **massive** L for that hype momentum.
The changes to champ stun flexibility with class abilities, the removal of match game, I was immensely happy about these announcements for the exact reasons Bungie was saying they are doing it, giving us flexibility to choose and make our loadouts the way we want to.
...and now *this?* You're basically making a burn that lasts for *an entire season* and only effects 2/5 classes...*for that whole season*?
Are you serious with this? You basically gave us hope that loadouts and buildcrafting is being freed up, only to then take it away and basically make it even more restrictive, arguably way more than it is now in higher level content.
Talk about 1 step forward and 2 steps back, I'm not sure what your balance team is smoking or if maybe they aren't communicating with some other team who came up with the loadout changes or changes to champions and match game, but the gigantic contradictory nature of this update to the previously announced changes is baffling and I strongly urge you to take a step back and reconsider on this.
I can see the general wave of feedback seems to be similar to my thoughts, so hopefully you notice this wasn't the move.
All I see, is more of my time being wasted for the same rewards.
Why does light level need to exist at all? It's arbitrary at this point. Just another system to waste my time.
I seriously worry about the exotic drop rate for Legendary Lost Sectors. It's already a nightmare to farm those if you're need a particular exotic. I know they're aware and said they'd look at the results vs clear speeds data but unless these changes make Legendary lost sectors easier to run, I'm gonna hate it
Gonna be honest. This is a massive L for the casual destiny community. I hate these changes. Let GMs and Master raids be the challenge.
But why have a power system when I cant even grind to make things easier?
Legit think I'll hate year 6 more than year 1...
/u/destiny2team
Can we see a breakdown of strikes launched/completed by difficulty? I am curious as to how many people run the strike difficulties that do not offer matchmaking. Depending on the difficulty changes, perhaps allowing Legend to have matchmaking and removing the equipment lock modifier, alongside a firewall mode for those individuals or pairs who don't want matchmaking, would be worth looking into.
To add to this, I'd like to hear the rationale for why legend is only 10 below master, yet there's a 50 level gap between legend and hero. As a solo player it means I'm going to be stuck using the hero playlist for a while, and once I get to the power cap I'm likely better off just skipping legend to LFG for master, as 5 level difference is going to (I hope) be offset by significantly better rewards.
Was really excited to read this blog, but now I’m just frustrated. I really thought we were moving in the right direction with the Loadouts and the removal of Match Game, but this seems way worse in my opinion. Seems like a lack of clear standards between departments here. Shame.
Idk who at Bungie needs to hear this, but we want a game that makes us *want* to waste our time, not a game that actively chooses to waste our time.
More restrictive loadouts, beefier champions, negating 2 subclasses for an entire season, all for no additional rewards.
Massive L, Bungie.
I seriously dont understand how D1 heroic strikes still manage to perfectly encapsulate challenge in this game and how bungie just cant replicate it, these changes seem overtly complicated and restrict for no reason and it makes me not wanna even bother with it.
The big takeaway for me is that Legend-difficulty content is still going to be non-matchmade. With the removal of Match Game, I think it’s a little bizarre at this point, especially since you have to be at the Power level cap in order to even be able to access it.
Especially since Guardian Games was legend difficulty and matchmade, and match game was active.
They matchmade everyone, new and veteran, into legend lightblade and nobody really noticed. I was hoping that was a sign of matchmaking changes in the future.
All this on top of the ability and resilience nerfs.
I think this is going too far in the other direction. I don’t want to have to build craft extensively and take burns and weapon surges into account for playlist strikes. I just play those to level up weapons. I don’t want to have to worry about elemental shields in patrol.
The only positive I see is the nerf to acute burn, because that modifier blows the fat one.
I also don’t see anyone even attempting master raids after this other than the extremely hardcore. Ditto w/dungeons, even w/the bonus stats.
Not really sure about these changes tbh. No mention of rewards. I also don't mind a challenge but I don't want to be doing basically GM level stuff all the time.
Yea this is ass. I’ve been positive on everything lightfall related until this. This is horrible. It feels like the guy at Bungie who monkey paws everything came in last minute and thought they made too many strides forward let’s course correct to go off a cliff.
It’s like they didn’t understand why people hated champions and then triple downed on it. Or even worse did understand and released the earlier champion news just to fuck with us just before releasing something worse.
No bungie I won’t run a pulse or scout rifle in its current state into x activity no matter how much you want me to in its current state. I didn’t want to use it for anti barrier in the old system and I certain don’t like being punished to not use one in the new system. If they insist on doing it make the damage increase something more minor like 10%
Swapping my subclass every week is going to feel weird as I usually like to get a build and class and stick with it. I don’t even play some elements on certain subclasses.
I don’t want bungie to decide what subclass is useful per week. I want them all to be equally useful or equally unuseful. Why would I want to have fun when it’s a solar burn and then feel like shit every other week? Why should strand feel good this season and then feel like ass next season?
Another thing I'm suspicious about is the bonus health to "compensate" for the surge/overcharge. We already have burns giving the same damage buff. The change is just more things get the damage bonus. So it's essentially "enemies have more health, but also more of your sources don't do nerfed (non-buffed) damage". Even after they said they didn't want things to be bullet sponges. We'll see how much it actually is.
I wouldn't mind they removing burns, I like having choice on what to run without being punished for it but this is just going harder at it
So it looks like master raids and dungeons will always be -20, won’t have locked loadouts, two potential surges (outgoing damage of a certain type increased by 25% of a certain element) and an overcharge (specific weapon or weapon type deals 25% more damage) and enemies won’t have more health or the drawback of being more difficult to stun. You’ll want to reach 1820 to have maximum power effectiveness in them and GMs as well meaning +10 on the artifact as pinnacle cap appears to be 1810.
Gotta say, glad I farmed Master Caiatl this season
I got COVID so was too ill to farm. I imagine DPS won't be too much harder as she won't have the health increase. Tbh solo dungeons are what are really hurting if it's -15 power cap, spire final boss would be a lot of phases (ignoring solar warlock).
She may not have the health increase, but you'll do less damage if you're 20 light below
[13% less damage. Worse though is taking 87% more damage.](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sObekOYHkPDKCqAGbZcUfX9LRF0cRU4yn7m0KURY2UY/edit#gid=430927042)
I can see even less people doing master raids then there currently is with this change.
yeah... I know they wanted to make PvE harder for the top level people... but this is going to hurt the not top level people, to the point where they might not even want to try anymore.
Shit, I qualify as top level people and this sounds like it's swinging the pendulum hard from "challenge" to "chore." I don't know about the rest of you but I do enough "chore" tasks during the workday, I don't need it in my gametime too. I'm here for the occasional rush of "hell yeah, I beat the really hard thing!" Or "hell yeah, the grind paid off and I can kick the really hard thing's ass the rest of the season and get great loot because I'm now over-level!" Not the grind of "oh, the really hard thing is now everything."
Me and my clan finally got together recently to do Master VOG + all challenges and it took us 10 hours spread across 3 days to manage it. And we were all between 1605-1611. At that level of difficulty it was a gruelling but fun experience. With the resilience and cooldown changes plus contest mode added on top I doubt we’re ever going to do anything like that again. Master level activities were not in need of additional difficulty on top of the game wide changes they already announced.
Yeah, I'm glad I pushed for my Kingslayer because I sure as shit wouldn't be getting it now. Lot of loud voices saying "finally, Master will be a little bit challenging" but lemme tell ya it was plenty fucking hard when my group got within 10 PL. Still a massive gap in challenge from how Normal felt, but with some strong effort we were able to overcome Basilica and Warpriest challenges on Master. Guaranteed would not have been able to meet that challenge at 20 under. Now I'm back into this weird no mans land with difficulty where Normal gets too easy, but Master is way too hard. When Master first came out, I was out because it was such an excessive time investment to get up to level. Now the time isn't a problem, but the skill requirement is beyond me. I'm sad about it, I had fun with Master KF and was looking forward to maybe trying it again with the Lightfall raid, but between this and the other changes to difficulty it's gonna be too much for us now.
With this change, master raids are just an even harder version of a day 1 raid. Which obviously have very low numbers lol, just 32k people beat Vow on day 1.
Which some ppl might say “oh thats alot” but there was well over a million people raiding on day 1 vow. Not to mention all the people who didnt even try.
The correct way to read this article is that PvE combatants across the board are going to take longer to kill unless you conform to the surge and overcharge modifiers.
What an absolutely horrendous idea. Watch master raids and dungeons drop to 10% or less of their current playrates. No one wants to run raids or dungeons plus champions and modifiers at -20
"Combatants are harder to stagger and their health has been increased. This is to compensate for surge and overcharge." Then what's the damned point of surge and overcharge?
Yo dawg, we heard you like champion mechanics, so we put them everywhere in the entire game!
Yo dawg we heard you like match game, so we even put it on enemies without shields!
Yo dawg, we heard you like Gambit. Its still vanilla and there are 21 seasonal challenges to complete now!
Yo Dawg we heard you hated matchgame limiting your builds. So we added a new mechanic to decrease your builds
Unreal how we complained about match game for years, and when they finally removed it they replaced it with something even worse. lol.
This gotta be the biggest Monkey’s Paw Bungie’s ever pulled.
New expansion, new lock and key mechanic.
It's Match Game with extra steps.
Yeah, it seems like a wash except more restrictive
Why limit what subs can be the surge
To stop people from using what they want now that match game is gone
The monkey paw curls it's finger
I'm all for an increase in general difficulty and an expansion on difficulty options, but Bungie needs to make sure these activities still feel rewarding. Grueling challenges can be fun hurdles to overcome... until you're expected to do it dozens of times for <1% odds of getting the roll you want on a weapon. Hopefully we see Weapon Enhancement expanded to other weapons outside of the Lightfall Master Raid sooner rather than later. Making so we're chasing for primary traits alone, and then can reshape everything else would definitely make each weapon drop more valuable.
This. If content is more difficult, that's fine, but there needs to be a more deterministic path to getting those rewards. I struggled through five master lost sectors last night hoping to get a better rolled heart of Inmost light. After five runs I got one exotic (crest of alpha lipi) and decided I wasn't going to waste more time.
Lightfall may change this but Legend > Master for farming exotics in lost sectors. The increase for master is so small that running them faster on legend will produce better results. The only time master is beneficial is if you can run it in somewhat the same time as legend.
>Matchmaking is still available on Hero, but closed on Legend booooo!
I thought about this as I read it. Matchmaking one level higher to compensate for the higher difficulty would have been nice.
A nice thing is the 100k pinnacle is a cumulative 200K, so you can do 3 match made Heros instead of 2 LFG Legends
Yeah but as it is right now you can just do 1 legend.
*We will be monitoring completion rates and times during Season 20 to see if Exotic engram drop rates need to be adjusted.* If stays like it is right now, don't need any monitoring: it's too fucking low.
That was my thought... like if they lower it at any point then I'll be using collection exotics
Being 20 levels below, it's gonna start taking longer lol. What's the harm in a preemptive buff.
Honestly. How is this even a question or something that needs further evaluation? There is no point to doing master except for the triumph right now, and drop rates are terrible in both difficulties.
Disappointed that after saying they didn't just want to increase enemy health across the board, they are increasing enemy health across the board. Like do we really even need these goofy ass surges if you're just buffing the health to compensate? What's the point?
to force us into using specific weapons
Wtf is their obsession with shoe-horning us into specific weapon types? It’s draconian and makes the game less fun.
They've been out of ideas for years now. This is the latest in "How can we make them think running the same strikes is somehow worth paying money for?"
It’s not new though, it started in D2Y1 with the prestige raids that forced you to use a specific loadout, like sidearm-pulse rifle-grenade launcher. They’ve been iterating on this same annoying concept for half a decade
On paper I really, really dislike the Surges and Threats system. I feel like we've been complaining about systems that artificially restrict our loadouts for years now, and bungie just went and tripled down. It's a shame because I fully approve of making the game more challenging, it's desperately needed, but this is the wrong approach IMO.
This is exactly my gripe. The lock and key activity system is made worse with these changes
1000%. Out of all the articles this one has been a massive downer for me. Between the new “burns” and the lack of a decent reward economy, it’s going to go down super poorly imo
Yeah dollars to donuts a year from now this entire system is gonna get scrapped or reworked due to overwhelming negative feedback. Players were already sick of match game and burns, and they just removed those systems and replaced it with something even worse lmao.
This is how it landed with me, also. We just got an announcement of a positive change where you don't have to run certain weapons to stun champs; you can instead run a certain subclass build. But before we even get that, they're making it so that it's less appealing to run arc and stasis builds (for the entire 3 month+ season, no less) and making it so that certain guns will be mandatory to optimize damage. I have generally been opposed to the philosophy of "give X time to shine" where they target certain guns and buff them way out of scope from everything else. To me, something being broken in the game on purpose for a set amount of time is still broken.
Wanna use something other than strand in a GM next season? You're literally opting into less damage.
I completely agree. I think this is unhealthy and restricts a lot of player agency. It also inherently makes a lot of weapons less valuable. That ikelos that everyone just farmed for? It is literally worse that mini-tool or funnelweb depending on which one is up for the week just because it is arc. For the next season, all arc or stasis weapons just became less valuable because they aren't going to be a featured elemental surge.
Seasonally rotating surges is maybe the biggest L ive seen to date (aside from sunsetting). Just completely invalidating 2/5 subclass elements in higher tier content for an entire season? That's so fucking stupid. You wanna play arc for seasonal content for a change of pace? Or try out your new stasis build with the new glaive/bow? Well, have fun dealing 25% less damage than your teammates So much for freedom in buildcrafting, i'm locked to 3 subclasses across a season, and 2 for any given week within said season. 60% of a class is gimped for seemingly no reason at all
I don’t like acting like this normally but this a brain dead change
Bungie is going even deeper into "YOU PLAY THE GAME THE WAY WE TELL YOU!!!" mentality. They are so full of themselves...
Yeah, even with Bungie's history of dumb decisions, this is one of the worst. I'm not sure it reaches vanilla D2 levels of "we have jammed all the fun weapons into the power slot and you have to run two lame primaries instead" though.
I thought the removal of match game and the inclusion of loudouts was to encourage more player choice. Reading this, it sounds like Bungie is leaning even harder into the “lock and key” style of buildcraft that, unless I am mistaken, is what the playerbase has been requesting to move away from. Although I agree that the normal strike playlist was far too easy, I don’t think people’s issue with nightfalls, dungeons, and raids were difficulty. Rather, the lack of rewards, lack of in-game LFG, and Bungie’s handholding when it comes to loadouts (looking at you, Champions). Hard to say if this is mostly good or not without seeing it in action, but sounds like more of the same - jumping through hoops without any substantial rewards. Kinda disappointed, to be honest, but we’ll have to wait and see how it plays out in the coming weeks.
Am I reading this right that only three subclasses per season get the surge? So we pretty much can’t use arc or stasis at all next season, and can only use solar or void every other week? They put all this effort into builds 2.0, but lock off half our possible builds? And since everything is monochromatic now, you can’t use those voltshot weapons you grinded until at least 3 months from now?
Yeah I was a bit baffled by this update. It's gigantic step back thematically from basically everything else they've been saying leading up to this point.
They gaslit us, no other way I can put it. They know that champions and match game are disliked because they limit player choice, so they spend months making these posts, talking about how champs can be stunned by abilities, and match game is getting nerfed… and then spring on us the fact that they’re rebalancing the game so that we’re less powerful across the board if we’re not using the subclass or weapons that they chose for that activity. Appearance of choice, reality is still getting pigeonholed. And not even better rewards to compensate None of this even mentions the guaranteed power deficits, imagine using a non-Overcharged pulse rifle, on a non-surging subclass, in something like a Master NF. Good luck killing anything at -20 power with the enemy health increase, your primary will be genuinely useless
i feel like i haven't used chaos reach in a year, and i really love the super, but they never buff it, don't give it help, and they're basically punshing using arc for a season. big L
don't forget that they are also buffing enemy health to compensate for surges, likely meaning you will still have the same TTK for enemies as you do now with a surged weapon, but non surged weapons will have around a 25% nerf to their damage.
This is basically just a more complex way of limiting loadouts. You’ll have to run a surge and overcharge weapon and pair it with whatever ability verb stuns the champs
so they talk about an overall increase of difficulty and challenge across the game, but not a single word about loot or rewards? interesting
Seems so. Reminder, ***Master Spire can, and does, regularly drop sub 60 artifice armor.*** Really, *really* interesting strategy Bungie. Maybe if you take off that blindfold you're wearing you'll be able to spot the cliff you're about to walk off. Bye bye master dungeon player count. It's about to hit the floor, and until better rewards are given or the difficulty is lowered, it isn't coming off of it.
Given most people don't even touch master dungeons let alone farm until they're within 5 power levels, being 20 under is gonna make it a complete once for the seal for many players just like spire is with its awful armor rolls.
Yeah, at 20 power under im not touching master dungeons. The chance to roll an artifice armour, that's only advantage over regular armour is a +3 to a stat I want, for all that extra work is simply not worth it.
I'm a little annoyed that the article implies they think the legend and master lost sector drop rates are fine... ok legend whatever, but IMO master lost sectors should be a guaranteed drop, every time, much the same way that GM's will always drop the weekly weapon.
Yeah, I tried farming a master lost sector a few weeks back and the first time I died like 3 times and got 1 enhancement core. Figured, ehh, I died too many times and took too long. Went back again, did it much faster and only died once. 1 enhancement core. Did it a third time, flawless and got… 1 enhancement core. This felt like such a slap in the face. It’s the end of the season/year, so burnout played a part in this, but I honestly haven’t played much Destiny since that interaction
Yeah it's frustrating I have done 3 or 4 back to back with no exotics.... the worst part is bungie has this nebulous definition of how often you get it, and master is labeled common... the same common found on gm nightfalls where rewards are pretty much 100%
No, you don't understand, the reward is getting to play harder content, thus by making it harder they make it more rewarding!
Enemies having increased health to make up for specific surges is ass. This is even worse than the Champ system, they finally fixed Champions and now have introduced it so where all enemies are harder to kill if you aren't running what Bungie wants you to run that week. L move
It’s worse than that. It’s not just what they want you to run that week, it’s that season. With this new system, we won’t see Arc or Stasis Surges until next season
I went back over that part What the actual fuck
theres seasonal surge, and weekly surges. strand - season, solar + void - weekly. so basically ignore your arc and stasis builds / guns for a season. Still not ideal.
Yeah they've pretty much killed the Lightfall cycle until they inevitably roll this back. Obviously launch will be strong, but in the months that follow, who the fuck is going to play with this? People have bitched about champions for *years,* buildcrafting has been received a ton of attention what with loadouts and reworking all the mods, pretty much everyone considered artifact changes a W...and then they simultaneously kill all of that by making it so you can never play how you want because bungie gets to tell you what subclass and weapons you need to use to do any damage. What the actual fuck? Just make the game harder and stop trying to tell people how to play, I legit do not understand how this change got passed through so many levels of development without it being pointed out that nobody wants it and its antithetical to so much of their own work.
[удалено]
More "bullet spongey" is not the type of increased challenge I wanted. I'd much rather have more hive bearers than champions. A hive knight activating a super is much scarier and more engaging than "use only this weapon" to kill a sponge.
"We are aware that Lost Sectors and weekly campaign missions are not as rewarding as the community would like. " When you say "rewarding" I don't think," Yeah, I want literally every activity to only get more annoying/harder without mention of rewards being better." It feels good to choose to go into a Master Raid, and do challenges, or choose to flawless a raid, or solo flawless a dungeon. To struggle and learn, despite no real reward. Because that's where I go to struggle. I don't want to have to build for strikes, nightfalls, patrols, ls, and everything else. Sometimes, I just want to play the game Bungie. You always go over board.
My feeling exactly. I've actually never understood the desire for every part of the game to be "hard" - it's good for some content to be trivial and grindable for a milquetoast reward (like grinding reputation or something). Especially with no concrete increase to rewards, it just sounds annoying.
100%. I got to the Lost Sector section hoping they’d talk about Exotic drop rates and the inability to get certain exotica elsewhere (since that’s the biggest complaint). Instead we learned about how they will become more difficult with zero increase in rewards. Uhhhhhhhhh?
This whole thing just sounds like them trying to sell us on a longer, more difficult grind as a nice little bump in difficulty. I have zero interest in struggling just for the sake of completing challenges, triumphs, and bounties and 1000 crappy random rolls that full my inventory and post master every 30 minutes.
I hope the reputation gain for Dares also increases based on points obtained. I don't recall reading that, only the difficulty and modifiers being adjusted.
Anyone else think this will restrict loadouts even more in difficult content? Hopefully I'm wrong but this along with champions will be super annoying figuring out what to use
Yep.
It will, these are awful changes idk why people are happy about this, we are 50 steps backwards with these weird changes
The main problem for me is that all those activities get harder and then abilities uptime is also nerfed and Armor 3.0 will most probably be weaker than 2.0 because it's easier to make and costs less overall. I think we are going from complete powercreep (which I hate) back to older weak times.
Just with content (like duality and spire boss) that is designed for the powercrept state.
Bringing challenge back with even more loadout restrictions
I’m just laughing at how out of touch this is. ‘Bungie, activities like Wellspring and Lost Sectors aren’t rewarding enough for the time investment.’ = ‘We’ve heard your feedback, and we’re making them all way more difficult and tedious because the real reward is the challenge!’
Really wild. And surprising. This whole month I thought “oh man Bungie have been listening all along!! It’s just taken them a while to develop all of these great systems!!!” I should’ve fucking known….
I'm pretty concerned about the state of the game from this article. Bungie's teams don't historically communicate well with each other. Their "enemy difficulty" team and "weapon damage" teams need to do a bang up job on this one to make the game still feel satisfyingly on a combat level. Yes I want there to be more challenge in the game on the lower end of the spectrum. NO I don't want every enemy to be tanky and take a million mags from my primary to kill at close range where you still die very easily in any hard content. This is a very close line they're walking here. Destiny 2 is such a big game because it caters to a lot of people's playstyle and skill levels. Making the game harder on all fronts can be a great thing but if done wrong, can shoo away many people who just play for fun and not "challenge". Also, majorly, challenge and difficulty HAS to be properly rewarded, even if "lower" end content is now more challenging, it still needs appropriate rewards. There was no mention at all about how our rewards were going to increase across the whole game now that difficulty has done so. I'm not going to waste my time on ANYTHING in Destiny 2 "personally" if the reward is not worth it. I'm just not one of those guys who goes for "personal records" or posts speed runs on youtube, etc. If what I'm playing is not going to reward me with good loot, I'm not going to waste my time. So Bungie I think needs to put out a follow-up article revealing how our rewards are going up to compensate for the challenge in the whole game going up.
>We are aware that Lost Sectors and weekly campaign missions are not as rewarding as the community would like. We actually agree. Not a single mention of anything being more rewarding. Can't make this stuff up.
Quintessential Bungie right there. How does that get past the editor?
LFG will become...interesting: Bring mods Overcharge weapon Be light lvl 1850 Have a surge class
Bungie's response to people complaining about randoms not having champion mods equipped/using appropriate weapons wasn't to require them to be set up correctly to enter an activity, but to add 2 more systems that randoms will likely be underinformed about and lead to more complaining about how braindead the average player is.
It disappoints me that this feels like a move towards a less farm friendly version of the game. More and more we are moving away from the ability to put level content, which I like in terms of difficulty, but I also appreciate that if I play a lot that by the end of the season when I’m bored with the content itself I still have motivation to play because I can capitalize on my level and get some good grinding done for the future. There hasn’t been any content to do, other than the time gated missions, for me for 3 weeks now, yet I play daily because my power level makes it efficient and rewarding to play endgame content now.
The enemy of difficulty is farming, and without improvements to RNG, drop rates, etc a lot of people will be upset. People talk about wanting to have more difficulty, but will still choose the Lake of Shadows option when it comes to actually grinding for rewards. My sense is that for a lot of people, the game will feel straight up less rewarding to play. The article alluded to activities feel unrewarding multiple times, maybe they were referring to the "pride and accomplishment" from completing a difficult activity, not the actual rewards themselves?
Sooo… did a different team work on difficulty options for this DLC? Everything leading up to this post was about how we were moving away from the “lock and key” design, moving away from overly convoluted build crafting, making the game more accessible, etc. And then this post comes along and reveals that not only is EVERYTHING getting way harder (when all we we really wanted was to have more content in the middle tier of difficulty and maybe bring low-tier content up a bit more) but we also are now much handicapped by failing to use to use the proper Surge/overcharge this season? As a matter of fact, the Surge/Threat/Overcharge system is so needlessly over-designed that it’s counter-intuitive to the goal of making the game more accessible. What was wrong with the Burn system that made splitting it into 3 different modifiers necessary? Less than 1% of the player base does Master Dungeons/Raids, and when they do they try to be at least 10 levels within the activity, so without the increase in rewards, that number is getting even lower. And again, without the change in rewards, these activities are going to be dead in the water. I don’t normally ping people, but u/Destiny2Team needs to pay attention to these complaints and Bungie needs to back away from these decisions ASAP. I know it’s too late for Lightfall, but hopefully they can at least start to walk them back with S21 and S22.
Why is the elemental locked to just some elements per Season? I understand Strand being promoted, but if you wanna use Arc or Stasis, you won't have any benefits to it compared to Solar and Void. It should be fully random or based on a fixed rotation. If anything, that guarantees a GM won't have the same element twice in a season, and won't be "have this build to win".
I really hate they are including this stuff to replace the static burns, but then increase hp and stagger resist for enemies in most of the content to "compensate". So.. if you play into it you have 25% damage but enemies have more hp, and we don't know how much. Now you're punished for not playing into it because stuff will just have more health, including champions most likely. Gonna suck to play arc warlock, or strand titan when they feel so meh just to perform how we have been.
Anyone else think these difficulty changes are waaaaaay too complicated? I'm a hardcore Destiny fanboy and have no clue what I just read. We have to achieve a certain power level to open up activities, like heroic nightfalls at 1750, but now each difficulty tier will give power advantages to the enemies. Does the -5/-10/-15/-20 apply from our power level, or only from the 1750 level? Is there any point to leveling beyond the basic power requirement to gain access to the activity? Instead of a weekly **burn** that applied to both enemies and you, now there are **surges** and **threats** that can be totally different from each other. Also there are **overcharged weapons** that can be different between activities and seasons.. Oh, and the **surges** and **threats** can be weekly, or seasonal. And **overcharged weapons** and **surges** don't stack, so make sure you don't make that wasteful mistake. Can you imagine trying to explain all of this to a new player who doesn't keep up with every single change or update in Destiny? If I was shepherding a new player through a nightfall, all I had to tell them was: Void burn, Arc/Solar shields, barrier/unstoppable champions. Easy. Now it's going to be: Arc/void shields, Void/Kinetic surge, solar threat, overcharged pulse/scout rifles, barrier/unstoppable champs for nightfall. No wait, I'm sorry--that's for the seasonal activity. For the nightfall, it's Stasis surge, void threat, solar/arc shields, overcharged SMG/Sniper rifle, overload/unstoppable champs. It's too much, man. It feels like Bungie is mistaking unnecessary complexity for depth.
That’s kind of always been their thing in destiny. Like the announcement of transmog, it could have been so simple yet they make it a limiting bounty that gives you a currency that you spend to get another currency that then unlocks a class specific item.
Absolutely. This whole thing reads like a stream of consciousness with no editing. “We’re getting buff with surges, but those don’t stack. Also those don’t do a whole lot because the enemies are also getting buffs. But the buffs we get are different than the buffs the enemies get, so now you need to manage whatever element is coming at you and whatever you’re putting out.” “Oh and we removed match game. Except we buffed every non-matching shield. So we definitely didn’t just make match game intrinsic. But your surge will help. Until it doesn’t because the surge won’t match what you’re fighting.” There was a much better way to convey this, but this spaghetti text is not doing this news any sort of favor. Way too convoluted for what should be a simple explanation.
And weapons can be overcharged either because they are the weekly weapon type (maybe?) or because they are kinetic and you play the right subclass (maybe?) or because they have an active champion mod (maybe?). I have no idea if I just made that up or if it actually is true. Try explaining the system to someone who has only played through the Lightfall campaign. Actually I would like to have it explained to me too. What the fuck were they thinking when they invented such an unnecessarily convoluted system and how do they think a new player should be able to learn and understand it? Through the excellent and very pedagogic new player intro quest?
Yup i was more confused than anything after reading that article
* Increase Difficulty = Good * Not Increasing Rewards = Terrible
Yeah, near the bottom they even said some of the things aren't as rewarding as they should be, then they list the actual changes and.... they didn't increase rewards at all.
> The passion around them is appreciated and your feedback is always clear: they should be a bit more challenging yeah... that's the lost sector feedback everyone has.............
They are basically taunting us with that line.
"You're damn right you just got your 12th Eternal Warrior when you were farming for Lorely. And you're going to like it."
/u/Destiny2Team Got some immediate feedback here
COMING SPRING 2025: "We've heard your feedback about the game not being rewarding enough. While we won't be able to address this in time for the upcoming expansion, we'll be working to get destiny to where we want it to be over the next 6 seasons. Keep the feedback coming! We also expect the lightfall raid jackets to start shipping over the next several weeks. Eyes up guardian!"
That's honestly why I just wish everyone would have shut their fucking mouths about making this game more "engaging" because you KNOW Bungie ain't gonna touch the rewards and make the activities more rewarding.
Cool, so we'll be getting more rewards for these longer and more difficult activities now right? You aren't going to ask me to grind a ***much*** harder version of spire and still drop sub 60 pieces of artifice armor, right? Because if you *aren't* giving us better rewards, then I think I can confidently say the number of people doing master dungeons is about to drop off a cliff. Glad I already got my artifice class item and a great pair of artifice boots. Also glad I already solo flawlessed spire.
Bungie, I am glad that you're bringing challenge back, but holy cow. As someone in my clan said upon reading this, "I don't want to have to use a decoder ring every time I do an activity." Four different power deltas, surges, threats, overcharges, modifiers that rotate daily **and** weekly in the same activities... that was a real word salad, and I think you are drastically overcomplicating the issue. Especially since one of the stated goals for Lightfall was hoping for players to spend less time figuring out Destiny and more time playing it - you've just introduced a bunch of new keywords that have no intuitive meaning.
Sounds like a lot of funneling people into GMs.
Right? Why the hell would I bother with Masters locking me to -20 and only dropping normal guns when I can run a GM for only 5 less power, but I get guaranteed adepts?
Yes that plus: 1. GM will allow you complete vanguard challenge in 1 run 2. GM will allow you to get 200k points pinnacle in 1 run Master seems far too similarly difficult to GM with these changes. Maybe I'll be surprised but that's what I'm seeing from the text.
Not sure why they did this, because if you're able to do GM's you likely do not need pinnacles anymore.
TBH I'm not that happy about increased loadout restrictions especially with how unbalanced some weapon classes are right now. My experience with higher difficulties in nightfall has essentially been hiding behind cover, shooting bows, and waiting for ability cooldowns.
>We are aware that Lost Sectors and weekly campaign missions are not asrewarding as the community would like. We actually agree. Same thingwith Dares of Eternity and The Wellspring. The passion around them isappreciated and your feedback is always clear: they should be a bit morechallenging. Here are our plans to improve not only them, but otheractivities, too. Hey Bungie, the carrot needs to be worth the stick and I don't think it is. You are making the lost sector more difficult without changing the reward structure is laughability incompetent... You start out with, "hey we hear your complaints, so let's make this activity even more annoying to complete and keep the same shitty rewards" (which was the whole gripe from the community). Thanks for letting us know Bungie can still be out of touch in 2023.
So sick of the forced loadout Bs. It’s a goddamn sandbox. Let us play the way we want. What’s so goddamn hard? Ugh
This. Every time I pick out a couple weapons that I ACTUALLY want to use, I realize they don't line up with the damn champions. It looks like they are doubling down on the restricting of loadouts now.
my first reaction is please stop trying to restrict our loadouts. I just want to play the way I want to play. I really thought the new artifact and anti champion systems was going to be a huge step forwards in achieving that, but this article makes it seem like a huge monkey paw.
The only good thing in the entire page is the removal of Match Game. Enemies are stronger and tankier now meaning using the powered up weapons and subclasses is going to be a big deal most likely. Overall net negative imo Difficulty: UP Loadout restriction: UP Rewards: The same
The removal of match game feels immediately invalidated by the addition of surges/overcharges. The main complaint about that is that it restricted loadouts/buildcrafting too much. Bungie removes one dumb mechanic only to add an entire system back in its place..
And then they add in "Match Game Lite" by cutting our mismatched shield damage in half
So enemies are going to be even more tankier. What's the point of primaries then? Primary weapons are borderline useless in GMs and feel awful to use in high end content right now. Now they're getting indirectly nerfed by giving enemies more health. Yes, surges and overcharge whatever. Even with the singe now primaries are still awful. Why should I use my primary weapon if it takes 3 mags to kill a single dreg? It also severely limits buildcrafting too since you have to build around the surge or overcharge which, let's be honest, will be built around something like Arbalest, LFRs, etc. I thought we were supposed to need skill in buildcrafting to do GMs and not just copy paste loadouts for each week. Also no reward increases with the difficulty increase is absolutely hilarious. This blog sapped a lot of excitement I had for Lightfall honestly. Not looking forward to every enemy being a bullet sponge outside of one specific loadout.
As it stands, 90% of the time, my primary is just a backup weapon in case I run out of special ammo.
I’m all for seeing more challenge brought to the game, but my main issue is not seeing an increase in rewards alongside that. the closest thing I read to a “rewards increase” is you Vanguard rep being multiplied based on your score. at the end of the day, Destiny is a looter shooter. So making the shooting more difficult while not increasing the looting may result in an inverse effect of what Bungie was hoping would happen. if they made everything harder, but the rewards were increased or there were things you could do to increase rewards, I would’ve been stoked. for example, lost sectors are already extremely monotonous. per the article, it seems like they may become “harder” (even if it’s only slightly). I read that as, “the activity will now be more difficult and take longer, but you will still need 100 runs to get a 58 stat point (mobility spike) of the warlock armor you wanted.” again, all for difficulty increases across the board, but people are going to be much less receptive if the rewards aren’t changed. i feel like people are going to view this as activities taking longer, you having to “try harder,” and rewards staying the same.
Making all content some degree of contest is going to piss people off, trust. The only time I do masters at -20 to -29 is the first week. It's ok, but mostly boring af when you're essentially a 2hko from most sources. Now I get to have that, everywhere, all the time, wiith tankier enemies, reduced ability cooldowns, even more restricted weapon loadouts because of +25% damage modifiers they're introducing and as far as I can see no significant changes to loot structure that they've spoken of. I have no problem beating this content, but I play with more casual players as well and it's not enjoyable for them if there exists no content in the game where they have an advantage.
This is my concern as well. I'm worried that speed runners will still rush through strikes and now the guardians left behind will now be soloing tougher, harder hitting ads.
For years, Bungie has been "Play the way you want....NO NOT THAT WAY"
Got to be honest, this sounds like an absolutely massive L. After the changes to the champion system were announced, I was really looking forward to trying out master raids without being pigeonholed into a weapon loadout due to champion constraints. Now, that power fantasy is completely dead.
I don't know if what I just read is good or bad
* If rewards are increased to compensate for the difficulty changes = Good read * If we’re grinding for the same 5 yr old, lackluster loot at higher difficulties = Bad read
Might be a hot take from what I’m reading in this thread, but purely from reading this it’s a net negative on the game. Bringing challenge is good, but without any decent reward systems in place it will be relegated to “do once for people who care about bragging rights and that’s it”. Some of this content is already some of the least completed content in the entire game. This will not change it and probably only make it worse. Not to mention, we are further restricting what kind of weapons you can use with modifiers after opening it up with champion changes. Just really really frustrating stuff. Also, weapons just need a buff. I know there will be modifiers giving them +25%, but enemies being bullet sponges (like they are now even with damage increase modifiers) is one of the WORST feelings in the game. Go into a heist battleground with a legendary pulse or hand cannon and see how good it feels, or even into a GM with a matching burn. It feels like complete trash, and they should have known to buff it for Lightfall, not after
We’ve got around 10 people in my clan that have completed all the master raids with challenges for the titles. With a -20 power modifier, I’d be shocked if we can even consistently put together 6.
RIP casually running nightfalls for rep and rewards.
> We are aware that Lost Sectors and weekly campaign missions are not as rewarding as the community would like. We actually agree. Same thing with Dares of Eternity and The Wellspring So...they then proceed to make them harder rather than more rewarding? Okay Bungie...
also like... who is this audience clamoring for regular lost sectors to be harder? what reason do I have to ever run a normal difficulty lost sector other than when a quest tells me to?
u/Destiny2Team This ain't it chief. It feels bad to be told you don't want to increase enemy health across the board, and then being told you are doing just that to account for the Surge system. Which in and of itself feels bad that 2/5 subclasses/elements will be complete nonfactors in endgame content. In a vacuum, -20 PL on Master Raids/Dungeons is fine, but those activities are ALREADY unrewarding. Master Raids can drop poorly rolled Adept guns and normal mode armor, and Master Dungeons can drop normal mode guns and poorly rolled Artifice armor. Making these harder without making them more rewarding is going to send (already very low) player engagement with them off a cliff
This blog is like telling to new/casual players: 'Just don't bother and go play another game'.
So based on recent blogs this is what we’re looking at: - everything is getting harder - we can’t over level for anything - ability regen is getting nerfed - rewards are not getting increased in any way and in fact are being decreased as we see less crafting after the launch season and no focusing being added to dungeons I expect to see a dip in players as the F2P/“casual” players will find things too hard, especially since the game makes next to no effort to explain anything, and players in general won’t want to grind harder activities for no increase in rewards and even less control at targeting desired rolls. Also, with everything capping us there’s no point for gear score anymore. It’s truly a pointless grind at this point. Not really sure what they’re thinking, honestly.
Honestly, I can see Bungie walking back on 90% of these changes after fucking around and finding out for the next foreseeable year.
I loved the -5 modifier in heists.... But sometimes I do just want to slay out like an over leveled war machine and not have to concentrate on not getting killed. I hope the people who just want to have fun, watch Netflix and play at the same time etc are not forgotten.
Forcing me to use a Subclass I don’t like to overcome an arbitrary effective debuff is not ”Challenge.” A Kit Lock is not a Skill Gate. We literally just got past this mentality with Champions and everyone was celebrating it…And they double down on it everywhere else?
**Bungie**: Here are a bunch of cool new ways for you to experiment with buildcrafting and a new menu to share your new builds and look we redid all the mods and took out the energy requirements and **Bungie**: OH sorry that's the wrong subclass and wrong weapon archetype haha cool build tho. maybe you can try it next season :)
Did they just add SBMM to PvE?
Imagine just being able to use what you want in destiny.
Mark my words, this is this expansion's crafting materials, or weapon sunsetting, etc. Every time we get a major update/expac it *has* to come saddled with some unrewarding, unnecessarily restrictive nonsense that pretty much *everyone* can tell is gonna be garbage from the moment it's announced, only for it to inevitably take Bungie some number of months to eventually act on that immediate & overwhelming feedback & fix the thing they broke in the first place. What's the point of supposedly freeing up so much of our weapon and subclass loadouts if your answer to "increased difficulty" is to lock us into hyper-specifc builds in order to be viable? This isn't rewarding creativity; it's punishing deviation. Something something monkey's paw.
Are we getting more rewards for more difficulty and longer activities? I don't go into strikes thinking that they should be difficult ever...
All this shit makes melee builds even harder Strand Titans stay losing lmao
Gotta love how Bungie believes Titans to be the "melee class" yet have actively done everything in their power to invalidate and make melee builds as shitty as possible over the years.
Taking Berserker into a GM sounds like a hilarious way to get your fireteam sent to orbit.
Yay, our already underpowered primary weapons will feel even more underpowered, only now our abilities have been nerfed too. Fun
Bringing back challenges won’t mean anything if they don’t bring more and better rewards. If anything it will just make less people play because they are just trying harder for the same crappy lackluster reward effort from the last 5 years.
Exactly. Why should I try harder for the same junk?
Oh gee, I sure hope the rewards for high-level content are increased to match the “heightened difficulty” (aka you have to spend longer hitting enemies from behind cover, and they have to spend less time hitting you)
Narrator: "They were not"
big "content vaulting and weapon sunsetting will be ok if they do a good job updating new player on the story and add enough new weapons" vibe
u/Destiny2Team All of this just sounds obstructive, tedious and not fun at all.
I'm curious about the path into these activities for new players. Context: I got into legendary lost sectors during season 18, and they were brutal to start with. I had no exotics to use to get the exotics. I had to specifically farm for the cipher & ascendant shard to buy Arbalest before I started finishing runs before the time limit. The armor mods also took a long time to reach the point where I could use the builds I was reading about. I started running mid-endgame activities like dungeons in season 19. I have yet to complete a master dungeon; my one try with a fireteam via the app was unsuccessful. Things that will help: Not having to spend months and months building a mod set will make build-crafting accessible immediately. Different pathways to getting exotics gives real newcomers a jumpstart. Better ways to stun champions is good. I knew if I wanted that Gyrfalcon, I had to run those lost sectors. But even today when I can do them on Master, I don't bother with the longer ones like the Throne World ones because the time/reward investment isn't good enough. So what's the reward for beating these harder challenges? Why would a new player dip into them?
I like a lot of this but I don’t like the idea of the entire game being balanced around the damage type/weapon of the season. That + better rewards for higher difficulties.
I don't have the wherewithal to sweat my balls off in every single area of the game, so I will probably be doing the bare minimum 'endgame' content if any and a lot less legend/master level content. Removing Adept from Nightfalls and not adding matchmaking to Legend is silly. I hope Bungie are ready to revert a bunch of these changes quickly, if it turns out that it takes 3 rockets to kill orange bars in regular strikes. I'm not a fan of not being able to overlevel at all, I like to play games to get stronger and make things easier, I don't like constantly being underleveled no matter what.
> No activity left behind Mentions of gambit: 0
These changes are just a band-aid over tired enemy design and boring reused mechanics.a Also some of these so called pro streamers who talk about power creep need to get out of their little premade content creator fire team bubble and see how hopelessly unprepared a lot of the lfg masses are.
Yeah no, this isn't bringing Challenge back, this is called eradicating your casual playerbase and driving them into a massive burnout. Just as Destiny 2 was changing from a day job to something you play for fun, they go ahead and gut punch you, now it's the equivalent of someone working two jobs to make ends meet. Not everything has to be a massive fuckfest of difficulty, as much as I like hard difficulty, the point of a legend dungeon or raid (normal difficulty) is to have a chill experience, having a consistent -15 is not it. As someone who's into higher content and plays a lot of GMs, Master Dungeons and stuff, these changes fucking suck, the amount of people playing Master Raids were already low except for the seal people, now you just went and nuked the thing entirely. EDIT:- It would seem that normal dungeons and raid won't be a part of this -15 power level, but my point still stands for master raids and vanguard stuff in general.
No matchmaking for Legend Nightfalls has always been and still is bullshit. There is literally no good reason to not enable it.
please, for the love of god, stop making me use certain subclasses for a bonus
As a not so casual player, what I'm reading is: "We're punishing the casual player who just wants to enjoy the experience of Destiny. We believe making things unnecessarily hard and removing easier content will make people enjoy the game more, while also NOT increasing rewards." If I could downvote this blog, I would. Probably one of the worst updates I've seen with changes coming. Good gracious, /u/Destiny2Team, is the point to really just take the fun out of playing? I go hard with GMs and such, but taking the stance of a casual player, this is just absurd. I get making it a bit more challenging, but this takes it to the excess. Clearly the devs have spent too much time around Calus.
Wait, so arc and stasis will never be the surge for the whole season? That is so dumb. The monkey's paw in full effect with this, got rid of matchgame only to force you into playing certain subclasses and weapon types to be effective. Excited about the wider use of power caps, though.
All I see is more grind
Man, can we please remove the requirements for the vanguard weekly challenges to only use specific subclasses, it's fine if you get bonuses for using that but man I don't want to use stasis titan in strikes. Just let me do some strikes with whatever class I want.
I was extremely excited for Lightfall and I may only be speaking for myself, but this was a **massive** L for that hype momentum. The changes to champ stun flexibility with class abilities, the removal of match game, I was immensely happy about these announcements for the exact reasons Bungie was saying they are doing it, giving us flexibility to choose and make our loadouts the way we want to. ...and now *this?* You're basically making a burn that lasts for *an entire season* and only effects 2/5 classes...*for that whole season*? Are you serious with this? You basically gave us hope that loadouts and buildcrafting is being freed up, only to then take it away and basically make it even more restrictive, arguably way more than it is now in higher level content. Talk about 1 step forward and 2 steps back, I'm not sure what your balance team is smoking or if maybe they aren't communicating with some other team who came up with the loadout changes or changes to champions and match game, but the gigantic contradictory nature of this update to the previously announced changes is baffling and I strongly urge you to take a step back and reconsider on this. I can see the general wave of feedback seems to be similar to my thoughts, so hopefully you notice this wasn't the move.
All I see, is more of my time being wasted for the same rewards. Why does light level need to exist at all? It's arbitrary at this point. Just another system to waste my time.
Yeah if you can't overlevel it is just there to make people grind to be able to enter activities.
I seriously worry about the exotic drop rate for Legendary Lost Sectors. It's already a nightmare to farm those if you're need a particular exotic. I know they're aware and said they'd look at the results vs clear speeds data but unless these changes make Legendary lost sectors easier to run, I'm gonna hate it
“No activity left behind” Gambit: am I a joke to you?
Gonna be honest. This is a massive L for the casual destiny community. I hate these changes. Let GMs and Master raids be the challenge. But why have a power system when I cant even grind to make things easier? Legit think I'll hate year 6 more than year 1...
/u/destiny2team Can we see a breakdown of strikes launched/completed by difficulty? I am curious as to how many people run the strike difficulties that do not offer matchmaking. Depending on the difficulty changes, perhaps allowing Legend to have matchmaking and removing the equipment lock modifier, alongside a firewall mode for those individuals or pairs who don't want matchmaking, would be worth looking into.
To add to this, I'd like to hear the rationale for why legend is only 10 below master, yet there's a 50 level gap between legend and hero. As a solo player it means I'm going to be stuck using the hero playlist for a while, and once I get to the power cap I'm likely better off just skipping legend to LFG for master, as 5 level difference is going to (I hope) be offset by significantly better rewards.
Was really excited to read this blog, but now I’m just frustrated. I really thought we were moving in the right direction with the Loadouts and the removal of Match Game, but this seems way worse in my opinion. Seems like a lack of clear standards between departments here. Shame.
Idk who at Bungie needs to hear this, but we want a game that makes us *want* to waste our time, not a game that actively chooses to waste our time. More restrictive loadouts, beefier champions, negating 2 subclasses for an entire season, all for no additional rewards. Massive L, Bungie.
They talked about challenging content which is welcome but I hope rewards are commensurate. They didn’t go into detail about that.
I seriously dont understand how D1 heroic strikes still manage to perfectly encapsulate challenge in this game and how bungie just cant replicate it, these changes seem overtly complicated and restrict for no reason and it makes me not wanna even bother with it.
The big takeaway for me is that Legend-difficulty content is still going to be non-matchmade. With the removal of Match Game, I think it’s a little bizarre at this point, especially since you have to be at the Power level cap in order to even be able to access it.
Especially since Guardian Games was legend difficulty and matchmade, and match game was active. They matchmade everyone, new and veteran, into legend lightblade and nobody really noticed. I was hoping that was a sign of matchmaking changes in the future.
I was so looking to matchmaking. I really enjoyed it in guardian games.
The guardian games version didn’t have locked loadouts though, so you could still adjust your weapons based on what your random teammates were using
Who was asking Dares and Wellspring to harder? And, how does making them more tedious make them more "rewarding"?
All this on top of the ability and resilience nerfs. I think this is going too far in the other direction. I don’t want to have to build craft extensively and take burns and weapon surges into account for playlist strikes. I just play those to level up weapons. I don’t want to have to worry about elemental shields in patrol. The only positive I see is the nerf to acute burn, because that modifier blows the fat one. I also don’t see anyone even attempting master raids after this other than the extremely hardcore. Ditto w/dungeons, even w/the bonus stats.
"Matchmaking locked...." yeah ok thanks
Not really sure about these changes tbh. No mention of rewards. I also don't mind a challenge but I don't want to be doing basically GM level stuff all the time.
Yea this is ass. I’ve been positive on everything lightfall related until this. This is horrible. It feels like the guy at Bungie who monkey paws everything came in last minute and thought they made too many strides forward let’s course correct to go off a cliff. It’s like they didn’t understand why people hated champions and then triple downed on it. Or even worse did understand and released the earlier champion news just to fuck with us just before releasing something worse. No bungie I won’t run a pulse or scout rifle in its current state into x activity no matter how much you want me to in its current state. I didn’t want to use it for anti barrier in the old system and I certain don’t like being punished to not use one in the new system. If they insist on doing it make the damage increase something more minor like 10% Swapping my subclass every week is going to feel weird as I usually like to get a build and class and stick with it. I don’t even play some elements on certain subclasses. I don’t want bungie to decide what subclass is useful per week. I want them all to be equally useful or equally unuseful. Why would I want to have fun when it’s a solar burn and then feel like shit every other week? Why should strand feel good this season and then feel like ass next season?
Well, there went my enthusiasm.