just invited you!
Thanks! Pretty stoked to get into this, my only time spent with the og Destiny was this year and it felt like the “live” experience was already over and everything figured out.
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i was thinking about the gauntlet and i’m pretty sure it’s my favourite destiny raid encounter
I totally agree with you! There’s something super great about how the learning of each of its mechanics is paced, especially in relation to how quick each execution part is. It strikes such a good balance between those two phases, in comparison to previous raids where learning what to do is followed by a difficult slog of perfect execution. King’s Fall will haunt me forever.
So I said this in the raid group yesterday, but it kinda surprised people and I wanna know if I’m alone in feeling this: I’m not really feeling Destiny 2 once you’ve gotten to raid-ready power level.
Most of the loot system changes greatly reduce the amount of friction between starting the campaign and getting to an acceptable level to enter a raid, and I commend Bungie for making these changes, as it makes it much easier for the average player to get to experience the greatest content in the game. However, there are no longer any reliable, deterministic ways of getting specific loot items, and that limits your ability to chase after specific builds.
By the end of D1, you had a weekly allotment of legendary marks you could go out and complete activities to get, and you could turn in those legendary marks for specific items at vendors. All of that has been stripped out and replaced with the token system in D2, where you turn in something like 25 vendor-specific tokens in exchange for a vendor engram, containing a random item from that vendor’s loot table. If you want a full set of Nessus armor, there is nothing in the game you can do to work towards a Nessus armor set aside from grinding away endlessly at Nessus activities to get tokens and roll engrams until you get all the armor items. (And for pretty much any planet aside from EDZ, it doesn’t take long before you’ve exhausted all of the side content.)
The infusion system also became more frustrating, because you can no longer infuse with any weapon in a slot, but instead have to infuse an auto rifle with another auto rifle and whatnot. This is a pain in the ass, because beyond 265, legendaries will only drop at a lower light level than what you currently are, and therefore you are not only chasing exotics to infuse with, but you are hoping for exotics in a specific subtype of a specific slot if you’ve got a certain weapon you want to infuse up. If you infuse the exotic, you also lose 5 of its power unless you’ve got a legendary attack mod lying around because exotics are all equipped with a +5 attack mod.
Fixed rolls also play into this to some extent. Age of Triumph was an interesting time in D1 because all faction vendors had weapon perks rotating weekly, and that meant you actually had a reason to check into the vendors every week in case anything they sold was an upgrade on your existing loadout. In D2, once you’ve got a Better Devils, there is no point to any other hand cannon you come across because you have the best one in the game already. Hope you’ve got what it takes to infuse it.
I don’t blame Bungie for going the route they did with the systems in D2. I see how they benefit the casual player to give them a nice gentle ramp up from 0 to 265 power, and usually you aren’t really putting too much thought into your weapon and armor builds until you’ve played the raid once or twice. But once you’re past that point, I just found every opportunity D1 gave me to express my creativity to be cut off by being entirely reliant on RNG, and if I wanted that, I would be playing fucking Granblue Fantasy.
I think Destiny 2 is great if you want to treat this like a 20-hour game and play the raid with people a couple times, but having the main way I enjoyed playing the endgame gutted out of it means I don’t see myself dumping hundreds of hours into this game like I did with D1. This probably means it’s going to be way more accessible and less daunting for a bunch more people, and it’s probably the correct market decision, but D2 endgame feels meaningless and empty to me in a way that D1 never was to me.
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I think Datto and I had a psionic connection because:
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I thought I would like fixed rolls but I agree that in practice it just means there’s not really anything to chase after. And with armor being like 95% cosmetic, it feels like there’s a huge reduction in viable and meaningfully different builds. I was doing trials last night and literally every team had 3 or 4 MIDAs (with the occasional nameless midnight), 3 or 4 mini-tools / uriel’s, and wardiff coil / play of the game / the suros rocket launcher with the name I can’t remember. I would be fine just playing to collect cosmetic stuff, because I’m extremely vain, but none of the sets are super appealing to me atm and the shader system makes it a pain to switch your gear around anyway.
The advantage of fixed rolls is that it does make the game easier to balance, but the flip side of that is you can boil down every weapon class to a single tier list, and everyone will gravitate towards whatever the highest item they have on that tier list is. There was always going to be some of that, because having deterministic loot sources like in D1 meant you could at least get the best vendor weapons and build off of that, but it seems even more extreme in D2.
Even if you value a specific perk higher than the majority of the community (Icarus is a good example of a polarizing D1 perk), if the perk is only found on guns that are disadvantaged in other ways to the top of the meta, then that perk might as well not exist.
For me, I used to be willing in D1 to go in with a specific gun or archetype that had suboptimal ttk if it had a perk I thought would compensate, like firefly or third eye, or if it dropped with a scope with high aim assist or whatever. Now that variability is gone, and the best gun can be had by completing a pretty short questline, so why bother with anything else? I guess the upside is that greater uniformity in gear has elevated the role of skill in pvp. Or at least the role of sticking really close to your team and all training your MIDAs on the same guy.
we did the thing again
don’t really get the ‘greater uniformity’ thing
the overwhelming majority of people i matched up with in year 2/3 of destiny ran the one viable roll of eyasluna with the occasional rebel on a vendor hawksaw
A meta will always converge towards the top options over time, but it does feel like dramatically reducing the amount of possibilities in weapons has made the convergence happen almost instantaneously. It certainly doesn’t help that MIDA is being given out to every single player for completing a short quest.
man i’ll be excited to be able to raid in like… when i have more than an hour of free time available.
yeah sakurina, i kinda feel you. i am a bit bugged that like everything in the game has sort of become a loot gachapon: put in tokens to the EDZ guy to get a random EDZ item, zavala to get a random vanguard item, gunsmith for a foundry weapon. oh? you leveled up and got another bright engram! sparrow/shader/emote gachapon. there’s lots of stuff to get, but no reliable way to get it. i think it would bug me a lot more if i had a lot more time to put into the game right now, but as it stands most things i get are new to me so i’m kinda just happy to get anything.
it’s an improvement over destiny 1 for sure, but it also feels like they forgot about a bunch of improvements they made over the course of the rest of destiny 1?
thanks for the free raid and trials weapons guys, btw! (lul) i got the scout rifle but the really lackluster new version of firefly makes me really, really bummed i sacrificed my cool full-auto veist scout rifle to infuse it that actually felt better than this raid full-auto scout rifle.
yeah i honestly feel like i’ve been liberated from having to grind strikes to roll the dice and maybe get an imago loop with a roll other than performance bonus + take a knee
i played a lot of pvp in the first few weeks of destiny 1 and 6v6 suros was as much of a thing at this point, just you had to shoot into a cave or - of course - grind strikes to get it
i’m not massively into the pvp meta and the mods system is terrible but i will not miss the strike grind
yeah, the current pvp meta seems to stem from this - on paper mida would lose to a bunch of other scouts/pulses in some situations if it didn’t have high caliber rounds and this nerf already happened in the first game
handcannons are also back in the ‘ghost bullets’ taken king era and they’re only viable if you have the handcannon from trials or the hunter exotic boots that have ‘your hits will actually register!’ perks
it’s certainly a little more obvious that this game doesn’t have the same amount of content as subscription mmorpgs but it never did
not going to lie i’m also enjoying that schadenfreude re: youtubers in a panic over not being able to phone in a vendor reset video every week
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mods are kind of exactly what i expected them to be: safe and boring. can’t really do anything interesting with them because then edge-cases risk destroying the sterility that preserves the Great Balance. so instead, you get to add 5 attack to a weapon and the ability to change a gun’s element (probably the first and only good idea someone had for this shallow system).
yeah it feels like something they threw in at the very last minute
there’s the beginnings of something interesting there - the counterbalance perk from the first game now exists solely as a mod and in theory a hunter can stack two of them and maybe make something with janky recoil direction viable but to get anywhere with them you’re basically hammering the ‘buy random mod’ button from banshee until you lose all of your glimmer / get the thing you want
also rye i miss playing destiny with you and i’m really looking forward to running the raid and having a chat sometime
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wtf this is a thing?
lord
i do think stuff like counterbalance being a mod is the more interesting places to go with those kinds of ‘non-perks’. i’ve said this before but so many of the perks in destiny are just bland as oatmeal. getting a gun with a perk like ‘your first shot has more accuracy’ is just not exactly the kind of thing that makes me want to pump my fist.
like if the core gameplay weren’t best in class i’d have a really hard time getting behind this game (but maybe it’s best in class because they intentionally limit the number of variables???)