i got brown noted by the destiny loading screen when i had e coli

right, but i still have a feeling that won’t quite be what it is in the final game. it would be a really weird regression for them to do this, but i could be wrong.

i never actually got power ammo in any of my matches, but the situation you described is one of my main concerns with the pvp power ammo supply.

with the limited scope of the beta it feels like there are a lot of stompers in the quickplay playlist, might get better when the beta opens up to all later in the week.

worried about pve, the strike felt like A Destiny Strike with trickle and an extra bullet spongey boss, really hope we don’t have to grind them to make that number high enough to raid

pvp is looking good, though!

titan still super fast despite the skating nerf, having bubble and an offensive orb generating super is excellent

I actually liked the boss encounter as it progressed through each phase, you had to change up how you approached things though each one, but it’s pretty brutal restarting it from the top if you happen to wipe.

Some of the power weapons feel really underwhelming? The sniper rifle and grenade launcher especially. Purple ammo dropped more consistently than it does now, but still didn’t feel like nearly enough.

I thought the headless Vex in the final stage of the boss were fun. In general the mix of enemy types in PVE feels much better. My memory of cabal in D1 is there’s basically normal guys and shield guys, but now you also get fire guys, dog guys, sword guys, guys who jump and hover, etc. I felt like I was doing a lot more repositioning and jumping around in combat to deal with the different enemy types. Combined with the dawnblade ariel abilities and what seems like improved use of vertical space in the different arenas, it was pretty good! I assumed going into it that I could just plunk down a healing spot and shoot guys but it didn’t really work out. Maybe that’ll happen later when everyone knows exactly how/where to cheese stuff and strikes get really highly choreographed.

The grenade launcher doesn’t seem too effective but I had a good time trying to do stupid ricochet shots with it. I would like PVP mode that’s just that.

Apparently you can dip into the vex milk at the end of the strike to take arc damage, activating the perk on that exotic they gave warlocks for infinite ammo with no need to reload.

I wish I had thought of that.

I didn’t even notice that this was a thing when I was looking through the voidwalker skill tree:

Some more notes:

  • Homecoming has the first occurrence of a bubble with campaign mission scripting enabled (VoG spawn is debatable) that is also public to people outside your fire team. Both times I’ve run through the mission there were other guardians at the center of the tower helping me fend off the incoming attack. It makes the world seem more inhabited by other players than it was in D1 where for most of the story missions, you were in bubbles that no one but your fire team could be in.
  • As the resident bad jumper, I would love to know how many average deaths per player there were for the bit where you destroy the turbines.
  • Cabal feel much easier to deal with than they were with D1, and weapons just feel like they are biting off much more significant chunks of their health bar than they did before. However, my brain is mapping PvE damage to what it expects the PvP damage to look like, and it’s falling far behind those expectations. No matter what weapon I use in PvP, everything feels much worse than it actually is because of that mismatch in expectations.
  • Also in the mental game folder: shotguns feel so much more satisfying to shoot in D2 than they did in D1, even though I know for a fact these shotguns are worse than Felwinter’s/Matador/Party Crasher.
  • I don’t know if they’re planning to do this in the final release, but I assumed when playing through Homecoming was that the reason everything felt so powerful is that they buffed everything in that mission just to make it feel devastating when your light gets taken away at the end of it. The strike feels like it’s the same though, so whatever.
  • I am more bothered than I expected to be by Sentinel/Dawnblade/Arcstrider just being available out of nowhere without any explanation as to where these subclasses came from, or what happened to the old subclasses. If we are now in a world without light, why do the Guardians have shiny new light-based abilities? Why is there a recommended light level when I die to an enemy if there’s no light? This is some “use the Start button to shut down your computer” level shit. (I am expecting the new subclasses to be gated off by level cap or story progression in the final game, but I still hope it’s explicitly addressed somehow.)
  • The animation on the background of the director screen is not a seamless loop and it is very jarring when you catch it looping.
  • You can get hosed for revives in The Inverted Spire because if someone misses a jump, their ghost can stay at the top outside of jump range. If you’re last guardian standing, you have no good options aside from standing around for 30 seconds or wiping.
  • There is some /r/raidsecrets stuff going down in the strike btw
  • I haven’t ventured into Countdown yet but I would be down for trying it over the weekend (or Monday) if someone else wants to come with. Don’t think it’ll be a very good experience if I just go in with randos.

yep
maybe sunday when the social space is open?

yeah i’d give some more pvp a go on sunday.

i feel like a lot of tuning needs to be done on the pve side, it’s very dry.

many of the “power” weapons feel very underwhelming, snipers especially (mine did 900 damage to the boss, which i could match with a couple of bursts from my gun). grenade launchers don’t seem to do much more than tickle enemies. Shotguns do feel good, as do fusion rifles, but if they’re going to restrict so many different weapon types to one slot with limited use they really need to make each one a compelling choice and give them potency.

what’s worrying is, i feel like this is stuff they should already understand.

abilities also feel weak and come far too slowly. i remember a couple of times in the strike a cluster of enemies would spawn and i’d go to look for my grenade and it wouldn’t be there. my abilities were never there when i wanted them to be, but even when i used them they seemed to have little effect. melee i just began to stop using entirely because even when charged it has little potency, not worth risking getting close.

the new nova bomb is puzzling. it’s supposed to aggressively track enemies, but in some cases i’ve seen it just fly away from stuff. It’s so slow most enemies can just step out of the way. You can shoot it to detonate it, but it should be able to hit stuff well enough on it’s own! it’s a huge spirit bomb of dark energy after all!

most everything i killed was with one of my two primaries. in one of the bungie podcasts they referred to the new weapon system as “freedom loadouts” because of the new “options” it gives you, and wow does that sound like the equivalent of enjoying the smell of your own farts.

On the flip side, it’s made pvp pretty good (it’s too bad that’s not what I enjoy about destiny the most) though there are lots of kids complaining about their abilities being gone, and that if they wanted to play a “gun game” they’d play cod, i even saw a guy complaining it was “too much like halo”, and the irony was rich.

At least it seems that the internet is pretty vocal and unified about the rough pve experience, hopefully they can tweak some of this stuff and not stick to their typical bungie hubris.

but pessimistically i don’t know how well it speaks to the future of the game to where their solution to the multitude of design problems in D1 is to make load-outs more restrictive and everything weaker.

I stand by my prediction that Destiny 2 isn’t going to grow the player base in the way they intend.

everyone getting their super a minute or so before timeout in pvp is a fuckin’ mess

and yet i can imagine internally bungie thinking it’s the best shit, making every match “feel exciting right up to the last minute, ending with a clash of supers!”

yeah I don’t buy it. Being able to switch between say an auto and sniper or scout and fusion without worrying about ammo gave you a really wide range of effective engagement distances and probably more importantly it felt cool.

Also yeah getting into melee range feels really dumb as is bc your ability is never up when you need it and you probably don’t have a shotgun to fall back on.

I think they did themselves a disservice by nerfing both the damage and the cooldowns for abilities. I don’t think anyone’s issue was that there were too many grenades or melees going around (and ditching strength/discipline helps reduce the extreme cases anyway), but rather stickies that can one hit kill are just stupid and shouldn’t have been in the game.

That’s fine but that was Mayhem was for. If they wanted that, they should have kept it around instead of running supers into the ground. As it is, everyone gets them so late in the game that the fate is likely decided by then and supers have no impact at all on the game being played. If you want supers to be a potential turnaround mechanic, at least get the cooldowns timed correctly.

Man, I dunno, PvE feels really good to me but I don’t think my usual play style was negatively impacted at all by any of these changes. Maybe I’ll give it another shot with hunter later.

the absence of intelligence/diligence/focus or whatever and the very long ability cooldowns makes me suspect they’ll be some system in place for lowering those cooldowns in the full game

i think i am just being a humbug. anyway yeah, all this stuff is pretty fixable.

i rolled a titan and had a much better time of things. my shotgun held 7 rounds at once and that felt pretty amazing.

I’ve seen some of the spreadsheets on /r/CruciblePlaybook list armour perks that would boost ability cooldowns but I don’t know if that is speculation or just that nobody can be bothered to link to proof anywhere

found one

whether or not this will be in the final build, who knows! but seems likely.

i don’t know, manipulating those stats was such a staple of d1 that i can’t imagine they won’t feature prominently in d2 one way or another

yo why did nobody tell me dawncaller has the twilight garrison air dash