#lost sols

[seerya]

Every Andy Weir book in a nutshell

[lostsolsdestinyblog]

What is Destiny and Who is it For?

What is Destiny and who is it for?

Such a weird question for people to be asking 4 years and 4 months into the life of this franchise, and yet that’s what is happening after another complete meltdown day yesterday. I’ve written tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of words on the game on the forums over the last 4 years. I spent 2 ½ years discussing it on a podcast. This game, this franchise, have been an integral part of my life and I’ve made (and lost) friendships over it as well as experienced things I never would have dreamed possible when I first logged in back in September 2014.

It’s been a journey filled with ups and downs, not only for myself, but for the game, the company, and the community as a whole. Anyone who’s spent a modicum of time on these forums know the trials and tribulations and how the game has constantly been in a state of flux, reinventing itself as the decision makers at Bungie (and Activision) try to figure out what it is they want this game to be and what they think we want it to be.

I’m not going to recount the story for the hundredth time of how they came to make decisions they did throughout D1 and into D2 or the part the community itself played in sabotaging ourselves with the way we’ve handled giving feedback and communication on our end, but I want to look at yesterday and the meltdown that began 24 hours ago with a single tweet that ignited all the anger and resentment that has been building up within the everyday player population since Forsaken released.

I don’t know what anyone else was expecting Niobe Labs to be. Bungie had stated that it wasn’t going to be a Dungeon, but that was all the information that we had gotten ahead of time. From the way the quest chains to unlock the first 3 Forges worked and then into the 3 week break between Izanami and Niobe Labs, I was expecting another quest chain, but deeper and on a more epic scale. Where the first 3 forges had ended up being more leveling content rather than endgame, I expected Niobe and the next Forge to get into the real meat of this content release.

My friends and I were genuinely excited to log on yesterday morning and speculated how difficult whatever tasks we had to run would be in a fireteam with a random or run solo or in twos. So we log on and I fly to the tower just as soon as reset happens and before I even landed Bungie’s tweet goes out.

“Niobe Labs is waiting to be discovered with a puzzle that needs solving.

Once completed by a fireteam, Bergusia, the final forge, will be unlocked for all.

Watch the best and brightest attempt the puzzle”

And just like that I knew it was a failure and what the day would become, but what I can’t figure out is how this keeps happening and where the disconnect is between the studio and the silent majority of their player base.

I was fortunate enough to have been at the Summit. I listened to the backlash about who was invited and the speculation of what the purpose of it was. I had my own thoughts on why it was happening and from what I experienced over 3 days in Bellevue, I was really happy with the experience and thought it was exactly what I’d hoped it would be, which was step to healing the giant rift that had developed between the developers and the community over the previous year. I understood the community concerns over the presence of mostly streamers and high profile content creators, but I also knew they were integral to repairing that relationship as they have so much influence and their negative takes had been so amplified and damaging to the game on a PR level year one.

I didn’t expect a complete 180 from all the progress D2 had made in creating a game that was so accessible to everyone. A game that I had spent 850 hours playing year one and still enjoyed the hell out of. Destiny 2 year 1 was not a dead game and it didn’t suck, but that was the mantra we heard repeatedly throughout the year from players that streamed the game or were heavy content creators, including leading up to and going into the Summit.

Destiny 2 was not perfect and had a laundry list of areas it needed to improve and had been improving since launch. It needed

·         a better story and a return to lore

·         more extended endgame content with rewards to chase after the initial content was finished and just more things to do with the gear and weapons we had

·         most players felt a return to rng weapon rolls, I still contend that just more unique weapons would have been a better option as seeing our 10th Better Devils is still our 10th Better Devils regardless of the random roll

·         a return to 6v6 in Crucible and a new sandbox

·         more new cool content and less bringing back things taken away when D2 reset the franchise

·         a better mod/perk system for weapons and armor

·         better realized content like Iron Banner and Faction Rallies

·         better raid development for hard/prestige mode. These excelled in D1, but got progressively worse throughout D2

·         more accessibility and thought to solo players

And here’s the thing. Forsaken delivered on most of that in spades.

·         It has a much better story and incredibly deep lore.

·         It not only had the more expanded endgame with content like the Shattered Throne and constantly evolving Dreaming City, but a 2-3 month climb just to level to endgame to begin with. Then add in all the exotic quests and pinnacle weapons, titles, etc and there is a ton more to do.

·         Random rolls are back and they do make us look at drops again, I’m not sure how much more exciting they are, but it didn’t take anything away from the game really and has been a plus.

·         6v6 returned to QP and the new sandbox might be the best ever in my opinion.

·         There are tons of new cool things in the game from the Shattered Throne, to the Dreaming City itself, bows, new supers, and even the forges can be cool

·         The mod system is light-years better than year one and weapon perks much better. Armor still needs work and desperately needs the ability to re-roll perks, especially on exotics

·         Faction Rallies hasn’t returned, but Iron Banner has been so much better than year one and even events like Festival of the Lost and The Dawning have been incredible steps forward from what we saw in previous iterations

The only areas on the list we didn’t see things get better was with the raids and solo experience, but they tie directly into my next point. We had all that positive change and all those things to make what was already a very good base with D2 (despite the over-the-top hate), and yet Bungie also decided to add a bunch of changes that seem geared completely to the streamer crowd that significantly in some cases and completely in others, undermined all the positive changes that had been made.

·         “Meaningful infusion” requiring Masterhancement Cores was the biggest mistake. For all we needed more to do with the cool weapons and armor we had year one, once we got those cool new things to do, we couldn’t play any of it with the weapons and armor we love. So honestly what was the point and why are we playing and grinding for “sweet loot” if we can’t even freaking use it? And all the comments of “just wear lower gear and don’t infuse everything” are bullshit. I’m sorry, but constantly getting and holding onto weapons and armor in my inventory to maybe eventually be able to use or infuse is goddamn ridiculous. I don’t play this game to carry crap around in my inventory; I play to use the things I find fun.

Add in the fact that apparently it was Gothalion who championed meaningful infusion while at the Summit (must have been in his groups sessions) as well as he and Broman’s responses to infusion compliants that “we need to wear trash to appreciate good drops” and “it’s good that players get bottlenecked by infusion” and yeah, you can start to see where yesterdays tweet wouldn’t sit well with the community.

·         The leveling system and 2-3 month grind were different and not necessarily a bad thing, but combined with the constant battle to be able to infuse and use anything, along with the decisions to make regular legendaries drop way too low and to not allow us the choice to just play the content we love, be it Crucible, Strikes, Gambit, patrols, adventures, whatever, and still make progress leveling, ultimately made leveling more of a chore and less fluid than it could have been. Add in the decision to then immediately make us start leveling again as soon as we finally got to 600 and it was too much. For myself the fallout from that is I don’t play my Titan or Warlock anymore and doubt I will for a long time, if ever again. It’s too much. I hate playing when I don’t like how my character looks or feels and I have a fully leveled Hunter with weapons and armor I like and I’m done with the BS that is infusion.

·         RNG. RNG. RNG. On top of RNG. Titles were an awesome addition and something that had been suggested going back to D1. The RNG nature of the requirements really soured the experience. Getting exotics to drop is ridiculous. Some got them all in weeks and others went over a month between drops. It’s awesome we have all these cool perks on armor, but it’s almost impossible to put together sets of gear we actually want to wear with perks that work for how we want to play (Auto Rifle perks on arms that let you hold a bow drawn indefinitely isn’t ideal)

·         Freaking power-gating and the raids. D1 raids were awesome. They were challenging, but the normal modes were still incredibly accessible and seasoned raiders could take new players into any of them and teach them the mechanics and allow them to experience that content too. Then there were the hard modes with the challenges for the hardcore raiders and they were all on point and true endgame for the most hardcore. Leviathan still hit that combination pretty well although the tuning made it where the Prestige mode never got any easier even when we got full sets of drops from the raid. The Lairs then turned gimmicky to handle Prestige modes, but even that was better than what Forsaken brought. One difficulty that isn’t even really that difficult at level, but the fights are ridiculously mechanic heavy to where they take 5 time longer to explain than to actually do the encounters and the only real difficulty is in the power-gating. Power-gating which kept 99.99% of the community from being able to even beat boss #1 on release day whilst setting up the Chase for the World’s First for the big name streamers. It’s a decision that not only made raid release day, which was basically Destiny Christmas for tens of thousands of players, into a massive letdown, but it ultimately transformed Destiny raids from the true endgame they were with VoG, Crota, King’s Fall and Wrath, to mid-tier leveling content that was pointless after hitting 600 outside players grinding 1KV. We all took off work only to not be able to do shit in the raid and those complaints were met with disregard and/or disdain, but then what happened? Black Armory release day did the exact same thing. Here’s the release day for the first DLC of the year 2 season pass and “Oh sorry, you can’t play it for a couple weeks, but hey let’s go watch the streamers who can insti-level and have limitless time and resources go run it while we go back to leveling the same content we just got done leveling. Players were pissed and it was yet another embarrassing black eye for the studio that they had to address and walk back. I have tons of respect for the people who work at Bungie. I have been given tremendous opportunities by them and have friends within the studio. I feel guilty and bad in my critiques at times because I know they genuinely care about Destiny and the community, but I also hate seeing the game and the studio constantly trip over their own feet like they did yesterday and I hate that this game is being so dictated by trying to appeal to and appease such a small segment of the population. After the Last Wish and Black Armory release day failures and disappointments, how did yesterday happen? Like I said, the instant I read that tweet, I knew exactly what damage had been done and where this was going to go, so how did it get sent? How did this “event” get put into a timeline as upcoming content to play, rather than left unannounced for player to discover and dig into? Or if Bungie wanted to still announce it, why not give details stating it would be a massive (and massively difficult) community ARG to figure out how to unlock the final forge? No one went into yesterday expecting what we got, not even the streamers; and I know they’re getting a lot of heat, but honestly after all the shit-takes from them year one and the cesspool they turned the community into, I don’t feel much sympathy for the negative reactions they’re getting to this game they have apparently pressured Bungie into making Destiny now.

·         PvP. I have no qualms saying pressured because we’re living with a Crucible that is the product of a massive high profile player campaign to keep sbmm out of QuickPlay so the top players could have a farming ground to stream 7th Columns and 50 kill games. I’ve put up the statistics of how only 7.8% of the players I face or top 10%, but in 195 games 7.8% is still 193 top 10% players and they’re in over half our games running full pinnacle meta in most cases. It makes me not want to play and none of my friends want to play it, but the streamers are happy.

So yeah, that’s why people are pissed and that’s why yesterday’s tweet went over like a lead zeppelin. Yesterday never should have played out like that and by simply communicating what the event would be or leaving it a secret to be randomly discovered would have avoided all the drama, anger and resentment. Hyping it up and then posting a link to go watch it streamed made it appear to be a set-up to boost the streamers and not actually an event for actual players.

Destiny 2 is still a great game and it would not take much to make it a great game for everyone and not just the top 10%. I really hope that Bungie is listening; paying attention and learning, and I hope that someone with decision making abilities starts advocating for the silent majority again. 

Thank you.

[seerya]

Proof or it didn't happen

[lostsolsdestinyblog]

The Destiny Pendulum: One player’s experiences with investment and what it means to be a Destiny player.

Destiny is a pendulum. Over the course of 4 years the needle of that pendulum has swung back and forth across the level of investment necessary to fully experience the game; from vanilla D1 and forever 29 thru vanilla D2 and everything being accessible right out of the gate thru today.

Much like the game itself, the way in which I experience Destiny as a player has also gone through its own swing from solo to full fireteam and back to mostly solo. What hasn't changed over the last 4 years is that Destiny in all its forms has still had a great experience to offer. The demographics of whom it was best for has shifted over those 4 years, but regardless of where it was I have played the hell out of the game and seen where it succeeds and where it has missed the mark.

Forsaken is the best Destiny has ever been in many ways. The amount and quality of the content is incredible. The Tangled Shore is one of the best destinations Bungie have ever made and it is largely an afterthought a week or two into Forsaken, that's how good the rest of the expansion is. The story, the classes, the abilities, the supers, the sandbox balance, the Dreaming City and its evolution... all of it is fantastic, but how we experience and play the game has changed dramatically from where D2 launched and the pendulum is back where D1 began.

When I started D1, I played a Hunter and that was my class. A couple of months in I decided to try a Titan and then that was my class through TDB and into TTK. It wasn't until 7 months into TTK that I started playing a Hunter again and really started playing a Warlock too. There were quite a few reasons for this. I met a group of people that I became friends with and started raiding with them every week. Destiny also started moving away from being quite as grind intensive and made upgrading and leveling much less punishing, and then as TTK progressed we started getting into the long droughts between new content drops and so playing the game on all 3 characters kept it fresh and interesting as I would go through phases of really getting into a particular class and subclass and heavily playing it for a month or two before switching to another.

Over the course of D1 the game became very accessible and player friendly for those who weren't able to play every day or live and breathe the game, but D1 had other problems and they were issues that couldn't be fixed without starting over. By the end of year 3 the sandbox and balance were in a constant state of things moving backwards. The overall design of the original weapon systems was such that there wasn't really any ceiling to build to and any changes to one aspect of balance broke things for something else. The other major issue was delivering content.

We will never know what the original plans for the game were and how it was envisioned to play out, but we do know that the original vision wasn't what Bungie had hoped and we have seen since September 2014 that Destiny has been as much of a learning experience for the developers as to what it is and should be, as it's been for us.

There was a lot of salt on the forums for 3 years of D1 over many things, but by the end of year 3 the focus of player ire was generally weapon/class balance, connectivity and content droughts. With D2, Bungie tried very hard to fix those things.

Weapon and class balance saw static rolls, a reworked weapon system that put the focus on primary play, reworked supers to where everyone had versions of roaming supers, neutered grenades and melee, and ultimately classes that all played similarly and didn't have any real strengths over other classes in any area.

Connectivity was addressed through lowering team sizes in PvP and moving to playlists to not fracture the player base as much, as well as upgrading the infrastructure of how we connect to the game and each other.

Content droughts were addressed by changes to factions and the addition of Faction Rallies to go along with Iron Banner to give players a couple events each month to log in and play for a week between DLC releases.

Every change to D2 was a reaction to the player experience in D1 and what Bungie got from our feedback as to what mattered most to us; and people may forget that although there was backlash after the beta, the first month of D2 was widely hailed as a huge success. Then things went off the rails.

Faction Rallies, Iron Banner and the token system didn't work how Bungie had hoped and a year later are still works in progress. The things that Bungie got from feedback that players wanted most out of the PvP experience... 1:1 balance and a focus on connection turned out to not really be what players wanted, including the players who had railed on forums and in videos for those things in D1.

Then Bungie started to lose the big name content creators who play for a living and who had suddenly found that they didn't have the endless grind for new things to play on stream or a sandbox that let them stream or make montage videos of their sick individual Crucible skills. But for all the negativity and hate, there were a lot of players who never left as well as a lot who only left because the game allowed them to. It allowed players to put down Destiny for a month or two if they wanted and to play other games and do other things, while still being able to jump back in whenever they wanted without missing a beat.

Year one of D2 was never a bad game and it was never a dead game. I had more awesome weapons and armor sets that I actually loved than I ever had in 3 years of D1. I played all 3 of my characters extensively. My friends and I still ran the raids and the game still kept us interested and invested, but we did other things as well. The game wasn't perfect and there were a lot of things that needed to be better, but the developers were quick to react to our concerns and begin to address them.

4v4 was a mistake that had a huge impact on groups like ours that had been able to go from raids to other content together in D1. With the way teams were fractured off in D2, it made keeping a 6 player group together a difficult thing as players were always being left out to do anything else.  

The weapon and classes while incredible balanced, led to very passive play and the rise of team-shooting.

The lack of any control over what game modes we played in PvP forced us to have to play things we didn't like to maybe get a game or two of something we did enjoy.

The story and lore weren't deep enough and lost the dark tone that had drawn in players with the d1 Grimiore, Book of Sorrows, etc.

There weren't enough new drops or deep grinds to keep the hardcore-grind players invested and the constant stream of content and things to do (Faction Rallies, IB, The Dawning, etc) didn’t pan out the way Bungie had envisioned.

There have certainly been things worthy of criticism along the way with Destiny and there will always be ways it can be better because making games is hard. Making a game with the depth and scope of PvP and PvE in a seamlessly matchmade, online, persistent experience like Destiny… that is real challenge.

So here we are in Forsaken and it is a beautiful game and it is all the things I said to open this talk, but it is also back to vanilla D1 levels of grind and investment needed to play and enjoy the game; and I understand why we are here and why it has released so far skewed to that end of the spectrum, but I think the game would benefit from dialing things down just a little bit.

I played 2147 hours and 7 minutes of D1. That is top 6%. I played 895 hours on my Titan, 532 on my Hunter and 479 on my Warlock. I had 239 hours on deleted characters.

I’ve played 1001 hours and 42 minutes in D2, 150 of which have been since Forsaken released. That is top 3%. I’ve played 241 hours on my Titan, 241 hours on my Hunter and 311 on my warlock. I have 207 hours on deleted characters.

I play and have played a lot of Destiny. I’ve played way more D2 to this point than I had D1 and for the last 3 years I’ve played each of my characters pretty damn evenly. I don’t know if that will continue.

As a player who has been this invested, who has played alone and with friends, who has raided constantly for 3 years and who plays each character regularly, I’ve found that I’ve hit a wall with Forsaken and I cannot continue to play this expansion as I have played Destiny since TTK. I took off work launch day and played the hell out of all 3 characters trying to push as much as I could for the raid that our team all took off to run on its release day. Despite the insane hours I put in those first 10 days, I (and most of the players who played that day) didn’t come close to being ready.

I spent the following couple of weeks running every single thing I could for powerful engrams on all 3 characters and, even playing every day and as much as I could when home and awake, it was a struggle to get it all done. It was still fun and I felt I was making progress each week, but a month in things have changed. Grind is great. Chase is great.  A game that we don’t experience all in a week and have to be in for the long haul is great, but when I’ve logged in for the last week, I’ve felt like the Dunkin Donuts dude from the old commercials.

“Time to make the donuts”

Only It’s time to go run another 15 tier 2 Blind Wells, then time to run another 3 ascendant challenges, then time to run another 24 Dreaming City bounties, then time to run another 15 Crucible matches, then time to run another 9 gambit matches, then time to run another 9 strikes, then time to run another 9 story missions, and oh crap, what is the flashpoint? Have to run that. I also need another 36 bounties for my Ikora rewards, and I have to do the clan bounties because whatever progress I have won’t roll over and I’ll have to start back at zero next week if I don’t get to 100%, and I have these exotic bounties I should do, and isn’t the Malfaesance boss spawning now? And It would be great to get into the raid some more and I should try to do the Shattered Throne… and you get where I’m going with it. There’s a hell of a lot to do, but THERE IS A HELL OF A LOT TO DO.

And all of that is great and it is good for the game and the overall health of the franchise, but then on top of that we need to have meaningful choices for infusion and have to farm and grind materials just to use some of the things that drop for us?

I’m sitting at a high Power Level of 565 on my Titan. I’m at 150 hours a month in and I’m not wearing any gear I want to. I’m struggling to be able to use the weapons I want to. I can’t use shaders or mods because I don’t feel like constantly reapplying them to whatever the next armor piece I have to wear is. I’ve run the raid 3 times and I’ve not once gotten to play it how I want using the weapons and gear I want and I’ve come to the realization that to continue on in Forsaken I may need to go back to how I originally played D1 and pick one character and focus on that because playing all 3 is burning me out.

I’m on a pace so far in Forsaken to play 1800 hours this year and that is not sustainable for me, but maybe Destiny just isn’t a game for the type of player I have been anymore. That isn’t to say it is a bad thing because I know many like these changes and as I’ve said, overall I think most of the changes are for the betterment of the game and so again maybe it’s on me to re-evaluate how I approach the game and maybe it will all be better in the long run, but I think that very much depends on where the game goes from here. 

If we get to the next DLC and we continue to play with the things we are building up to and collecting now and we reach a point where we’re all playing maxed characters and can go back and start focusing on another character because there isn’t another steep climb, maybe it will be okay. But I’ve already seen Gothalion pushing for this level of grind and investment in each of the DLCs and if that is the case, I honestly don’t know how much further I’ll make it as an everyday player.

Destiny as a hobby is awesome. Destiny as a job is not, and a month in and still looking at a ways to go before I can rally experience the game how I want, it is beginning to feel more and more like a job. We have so many things to keep us invested and to do to level and to grind for. There are all the things I wrote out 4 paragraphs above as well as a world that keeps evolving and adding new things to do and experience, and there are random rolls on weapons and armor to chase and rare exotics… and somehow all that isn’t enough and we have people who play for a living telling us and Bungie that we also need to work our asses off just to use our gear; and if we want to play Gambit or Iron Banner and not be at a huge disadvantage, we need to keep pushing our levels up because removing SBMM, lowering kill times, making everything more lethal and building in more skill gaps wasn’t enough for the elite PvP players and streamers, they need power advantages the first 2- 3 months into the expansion as well.

So where I am now is it is Wednesday and for the first time since Forsaken dropped I didn’t run anything to try to level up yesterday after reset. I ran 2 public events on my Titan and I logged out and watched Lost. Last week I did the Dreaming City (minus Shattered Throne) on all 3 characters and helped a couple friends do their Blind Wells after I’d finished mine. I did enough to get another 6-7 powerful engrams on my Warlock, but none of them were higher level than what was already in the slots they dropped for, so at this point I think I will focus my Titan this week and see where I get and maybe do some DC on the other two this weekend or Monday.

I don’t think the progression system is bad. I don’t think the long term investment approach is bad. I have been asked why I feel the journey should be over sooner and that isn’t my point of any of this feedback.  I may need to adjust how I play and look at the game differently and that is something I am willing to do, but regardless of whether I go forward focusing a single character instead of playing all three or not, I believe there are some changes that would make Destiny a better game for everyone without sacrificing anything for the heavy grinders or players who play for a living.

1)      Drop the “infusion should matter” approach. Infusion cost and “meaningful infusion” have zero effect on progression. The only thing they do is prevent players from using the things they want and again, what is the point of playing to get things that we can’t use? I don’t need to use weapons and gear I hate to appreciate the things I like. I’ve played 3149 hours of Destiny. I know what I like and what I don’t and I want to play the game with things that are fun and that I love, not with things I hate for a chance to maybe play how I want in the future. The only players that benefit from creating a bottleneck on gear choices is the players who can no-life the game and have more advantages over others based solely on how much they can play and not in what they have earned playing.

2)      If there will not be huge leveling experiences at each successive point in Forsaken going forward, I think the overall 215 level grind and pacing is okay and I think for the most part very well done. I have friends who have limited playtime and only play one character who are at the same power level as I’ve gotten to grinding all 3. There doesn’t really seem to be the pronounced slingshot effect of leveling all 3 that existed in each previous versions of the game. That said, if each DLC is going to push our max power level significantly higher and put us back into a deep grind to level cap, I believe that the time it takes to reach the cap playing at average player’s playtimes should be significantly lowered. I’m still probably 3-4 weeks from level cap. If we’re talking November until I can really play with and use the things I want and start to get into mods and setting up gear sets with optimal perks… that is just too long for the brief time I’ll get to play how I want before going back into another deep dive. I think the sweet spot should be a month for the average player to hit cap if this grind will be repeated. To that end I would love to hear what the plans are for the future of Forsaken and our Power journey.

3)      Power mattering in PvP isn’t fun and should be removed. The only thing it’s good for is one more way for the players with the most time to punish those without. It also does not jibe with the philosophy of taking our time to enjoy the journey as it is another thing that really pushes us to need to be higher levels.

4)      Revamp how legendary and powerful engrams work. Currently regular legendary engrams essentially became blues once we hit 500 as far as power progression was concerned. Then once we got to about 520 or so, most powerful engrams essentially became the old regular legendaries.

Currently we have 3 consistent ways to get actual powerful drops without raiding: completing the 2 weekly Dreaming City bounties for overall weekly Petra challenge, the weekly DC bounty for completing 8 daily bounties, and Prime engrams. The rest of the powerful rewards only drop one power level above our max character power level and so are very often at or below the item already in the spot they drop in.

We have a ton of things to do to get powerful rewards, but it is so disheartening when you run 5, 6, 7 dailies or weeklies in a row and spend an entire day or two playing and not a single powerful reward is an up. If we get a slot or 2 that are anchoring our overall power progression and they won’t drop, it feels like each thing we do for a powerful reward is time wasted until the thing we need drops. To this end I think the regular legendary drops should have a chance to drop within 5 of our character power level. It doesn’t have to be a high percentage chance, but would allow us more chances to raise those anchor spots and not waste so many powerful drops when we get a bad run of RNG. I also think there should be some changes to the way powerful engrams work. I think that having them drop one power level above our character level is fine for the daily challenges, but the weeklies should be more rewarding and I wish would drop 3 above our character level. This would give more of them a chance to be an actual up for a spot without drastically decreasing our overall leveling time and it would make the weekly more worth the time investment. This would all also give us more freedom in how we approach leveling and allow us more time to play the things we want rather than what we currently have to, particularly when trying to play with friends because right now everyone is so focused on having to do all these different things and everyone are at different steps in the process. These changes would allow more freedom to help with things we may have already done or just spend time doing things like strikes or PvP with friends and still feel we’re able to get things that can potentially help if we have spots holding us back.

5)      Rethink initial content release schedules, particularly for raids. If Destiny is now a journey to be experienced over time and not rushed through, it would be great if the content release schedule was in sync with that philosophy. I still don’t understand how the raid was released with almost the entire player population excluded from running it at launch and almost every secret has been discovered and the final boss 2 manned before most players have even set foot in the encounter. There was enough content at launch that the game would have kept players invested just fine a couple weeks longer and the raid could have dropped and been just as awesome while being accessible to a hell of a lot more players, and again like the current infusion setup and power mattering, it’s one more thing that just doesn’t fit with this new philosophy of not having to experience everything right now. This also would have given the Tangled Shore more time in the spotlight and we could have potentially just been getting ready to really get into the full wonder of the Dreaming City instead of sitting on our first reset there. 

I’ve written a lot and some of this I’ve covered before and all of it is just one players experience and thoughts on the game, but one last thing I would like to say is that whatever decisions are made with the game going forward (and there is already a plan to address infusion in some form and we’ll see how that changes things), at the end of the day Bungie is listening to our feedback and the devs are doing everything they can to make this game the best it can be. They have and will continue to build on, refine and improve the experience and although I am hitting a wall with things right now personally, it doesn’t take away from what has been achieved with this expansion so far and if they do find it is a bit too far towards the grind end of the spectrum for a significant amount of the population, it’s something that can easily be adjusted. It’s better to have too much of a good thing than not enough and D2 Forsaken is a good thing.

[lostsolsdestinyblog]

Destiny 2: Forsaken Initial impressions after one hell of a first week of play

We are officially one week into Forsaken and though I have previously waited to post detailed opinions until after the first month, since there is just so much that we’ve experienced in the last week, I’m going to give a take on this initial experience.

First and foremost, Forsaken is so far in my opinion the absolute pinnacle Destiny experience we all hoped it would be. This expansion is incredible and there is almost too much to do and take in, and to that end it can get a bit overwhelming at times. That is not a bad problem to have though and is really a testament to everyone at Bungie and the work they put in to all aspects of the game over the last year.

Story/Campaign

There are many things to cover but I think the first should be the story, lore, campaign and endgame story. This has been nothing short of magnificent. Forsaken took a real hold on me right from the opening cinematic and maintained it all throughout the campaign, through the closing scene and kept going. From the speech Ikora gave when we got back to the tower, to the dialogue when we visit planet vendors, it is deep, it is rich and it is heartfelt. I haven’t even had time to begin thinking about digging into the new lore section of the Triumphs, but all the responses I’ve heard from those who have are nothing short of glowing.

Art/level design/worlds

I don’t know exactly what I pictured as exactly what the Tangled Shore would be like, but it managed to exceed any thoughts I may have had. From the real look at the full Prison of Elders to the wreckage of the Queen’s assault on Oryx, It is just phenomenally done. The crashed Tomb Ship in particular was just a complete OMG moment for me and really managed to hit me in the feels being back in that environment.

The weapon and armor designs are really fantastic this go round too. I know the return of some of the old D1 gear has been hit or miss with people, but I feel like it fits the narrative and there are enough brand new designs to really give people a choice of aesthetic.

The Dreaming City

To the art and design, as GLaDOS would say, this is a triumph. The zone is very reminiscent to me of WoW’s Timeless Isle and that is such a cool thing to have in Destiny because it was easily the best zone I ever played in WoW. I haven’t gotten to do a ton of exploring there yet, but it is a much larger space that I envisioned and full of way more secrets and challenges. I got to finally do quite a bit of the Blind Well yesterday and, after a dozen or so completions now, I think the event is awesome. I think the last 3; Archon’s Forge, EP and now the Well have all been incredibly fun and have managed to have uniquely different reasons for being so. I think these events are a great thing for the game and look forward to each new one we get, but I wish they could get the matchmaking right.

The one place this falls short again is that it’s so difficult to get a larger group of friends together to play and I know the matchmaking in the Well has already been covered by Paul Tassi and others, but I think it goes beyond matchmaking in this instance.

The Dreaming City is the raid zone. Everything there is building up to the raid and yet we are limited to 3 player fireteams and this to me if I could change one thing about Forsaken would be #1 on the list. It should have been a 6 player fireteam zone. I understand all the technical reasons for how Destiny’s worlds work and the challenges of moving us between the different public and private bubbles while matchmaking seamlessly and also keeping us able to be joined at any time by those in our fireteam, but this is not the regular patrol zone. The Dreaming City is a standalone area from the Tangled shore and as such I wish could have been designed to accommodate the bigger groups.

Even if it entailed limiting each area within the Dreaming City to a max of 6 rather than 9 and tuning the enemies/challenges accordingly, I think it would have been worth it. One of the biggest mistakes D2 made for me at launch was forcing raid teams to fracture to do anything else in the game and I think it ended up hurting the game. This is something we discussed at the Summit including wondering if we could get a 6v6 Gambit (the response being that while the idea is good, the mode had been developed, tested and perfected to feel good for 4v4 and they didn’t want to chance changing things and it not feeling as good so close to release.

The return of 6v6 QP and IB has done a lot to give those groups more to do, but I just can’t help but think about what a bonding experience this could have been for raid teams to all be together playing through the Dreaming City and unlocking the secrets around the raid before going in together and I hope it’s something that is considered for the future.

Gambit

I was extremely fortunate to have been a part of the first group to get to play it and it was incredibly fun when we did, but also a bit overwhelming to really get a full sense of everything that was going on. During the Gambit stream a couple weeks ago and then in the free trial day I really got a chance to pick up a lot of nuances and rules of play that I didn’t catch going in blind and it has been exactly what all the rave reviews throughout the spring and summer have suggested. The mode is incredibly fun and deep, the maps are fantastic and the different map/enemy combos really do make it feel quite different every time.

I know there are the complaints we see about sleeper, etc, but honestly I haven’t seen any strategy/weapon that can’t be countered by adjusting your own teams approach so far. The only issue I’ve had with Gambit has been the networking and rules around players dropping/joining. I don’t know how unique my experience has been, but when I play with friends I get zoo errored out of almost every match and usually a game or two in, right before the rewards. In a two day span I was only able to successfully complete two matches. It cost me hours of leveling and not only did I lose out on a bunch of powerful engrams rewards, it also punished my clan mate playing with me as she didn’t get credit for doing the matches with me towards her clan bounty when I kept getting kicked at the end.

To this end I don’t know if the issue is server side or with my Xbox, but it’s been painful. My other issue is with the systems surrounding the disconnects. It has given me a message asking saying I got unexpectedly removed and would I like to rejoin each time, but I have never successfully made it back into a match. I get another zoo error every time and once that fails; there is no way to just join on teammates in an in-progress match. The other issue is with the ban system. I understand that it sucks when people quit and there should be some way to curb that, but I think that right now the system is punishing to many players who’ve been kicked/had the game freeze/get stuck flying in from orbit forever. When the system becomes a punishment to players who are at no fault, then I think it’s time to rethink the system.

Bounties/dailies/ weeklies

There are so many and this is both awesome and overwhelming all at once. I like that bounties are back. I think they give a real reason to go to all the places within the game and have given me reason to actually go do heroic story missions, strikes and adventures. I think to that end these have been a grand slam, but I also think they are a bit overly complex.

I think here the biggest issue for me has been the removal of goals from the milestone page. I was so lost the first few days trying to figure out where I needed to be and what I needed to do to level up and progress and I really wish that we could track more than one bounty at a time and that when tracked, they would be pinned to the milestone page. I know there is only so much space there so it may be a limited number, but I miss not being able to just pull up that tab and see where I need to go next and my progress.

I didn’t even know the daily heroic adventure existed until day 4, and again, there is so much to do now and it is awesome, but it could be a little more defined how things work and when they reset. I know there was also the unintended rested on Saturday that threw a wrench into things, but it’s been hard to prioritize what to do when to not lose things because of the 4 day vs weekly resets. I think it would have been better to just have 7 unique daily events that reset each week along with the weeklies.

Progression

This one it’s still early to really be able to fully give opinions on as one week isn’t enough to get a sense of a 200 power level climb, but I can give my thought on things so far. The first thing is the initial grind from 35/380 to 50/500. I thought this was done really well and the pacing particularly on my second and third characters was really good. I enjoyed the repeat trips through and was able to be perfectly setup for the next grind on each of my 3 characters.

Initially I was taken aback by the high cost of infusion like everyone else, but that has become a bit less of an issue post 500 and I understand the reasoning behind the changes and trying to change the way we think about choosing/upgrading gear. I do have some reservations on upgrading gear still though. Some people had the luxury of having huge stockpiles of masterwork cores, mod components, planetary mats, etc going in and I understand it would be kind of broken for them to basically be able to buy as many of whatever they needed while other have to grind, but I really can’t imagine this system not being punishing for new players or those who didn’t have stock piles.

I’m currently almost our of masterwork cores and not finding many in the world and it’s got me to where I’m just equipping whatever gear I find at higher levels and not wearing the armor I want or in many cases using the weapons I want to. I didn’t mind this on the journey to 500 going through various blue gear, but I don’t like having to play the real endgame using things I don’t really want to and wearing gear I don’t really like.

All that said, so far progression post 500 has felt very good. I’ve managed to gain at least 3-5 levels each day (high of 518 atm) and I’m struggling to complete everything I can that gives powerful gear across all 3 characters before they reset… and that is with the fact that I didn’t do my initial weeklies before the Saturday reset and so lost out on a week’s worth of those activities. Whatever issues Warmind had with capping our progress and particularly in making it difficult for solo players to progress after their milestones were finished have been not just corrected, but made infinitely better in Forsaken.

I actually had to force myself to take this break from trying to finish everything I need to do in order to write this. There have been some bumps in the road so far with the accidental reset, players glitching things and for me, the issues staying connected to Gambit, but as a whole I think it has been easily the best leveling system Destiny has had so far for both solo and fireteam play.

Random Rolls/Exotics/mods

To random rolls, I think they’ve been handled very well since being brought back. I think the possible variations along with the perks themselves have made getting a good version of any weapon a pretty safe bet when they drop. As far as armor rolls, I really haven’t even begun to really look at or care what the perks are at this point as there is no way I can find a set and wear/infuse it as I go with the infusion economy as it stands now, so I’m currently just infusing exotics/ like-kind-items and my few crucible pieces on my titan that have my grenade cooldown mods. Unless there are changes I don’t see myself really trying to build full sets until I hit 600.

Weapons I wish just has glimmer cost associated when infusing say any hand cannon to hand cannon and not just the same kinds of them. I think that would help things a lot and allow us to use what we want more often as we level.

Mods are so much better than before and exactly what I had wished they would be for a long time now, but I am worried that the economy system here is going to be too punishing. I did not have a stockpile going in and I have been able to but 6-7 so far, but I don’t have enough to buy anymore at this time and I’m not finding them as I play. I think I’ve gotten only one or two the last two day. That isn’t going to cut it.

Sandbox/balance

Again it is so early to really get a full sense of things but from what I have played so far of PvE and PvP, this is really, really good. There are so many incredible weapons in every weapon slot/archetype and the ways we can set up to play are just crazy deep. I know there have been the complaints about Sleeper, Telesto, shotguns, etc, but honestly I have not seen any weapon stand out in what has killed me. I’ve seen so much variety and even when I run into a player who is really good with whatever they have equipped, I don’t feel like I’m lacking in ways to combat and counter them. When there are weapons in literally every class that you can say is truly phenomenal, the devs really knocked it out of the park and I really hope that the philosophy of putting it on players to find great weapons that fit their play within the sandbox stays and we don’t see things start to get nerfed because players feelings get hurt when they die to (x) weapon/ability/super.

Supers/new subclasses

These have been nothing short of spectacular. I decided to play my Warlock first at the last minute and on a whim went with the new arc subclass. I can’t even adequately describe how much it exceeded my expectations for what it could be. It feels so powerful and just perfect. I have since unlocked the solar and it’s also amazing (though seems to take a bit too long to level each node compared to the other subclasses).

I did the void Hunter first and outside of a garbage right bumper on my xbone controller it’s been really fun, but probably the biggest surprise so far is the Titan. I decided to do the defender first and it’s the first time in all of Destiny that I can truly say I love the subclass. It just feels so spot on now both in its support capabilities as well as being able to really hold its own offensively.

The only thing that has been an issue I’ve seen is the way we acquire the ability to unlock new supers. I understand tying them to the Blind Well to encourage players to really get in there and try it, but I hope that isn’t the only avenue and that we will have chances for them to just drop anywhere the further we progress with the odds getting higher. I cannot imagine this not being the case and us somehow reaching 600 without unlocking everything.

Final thoughts

Again it is still so early in this expansion and there is still so much to see and do in weeks and months to come, but this has been such a Triumph for pretty much every aspect of the game. Yes there are things like Blind Well and the Dreaming City that I think can be even better, but that is the key phrase, EVEN BETTER, because they are already great. I think at this point that would be the area I’d like to see the game grow and improve from here. Weapons, balance, leveling, investment, story, lore, design, new modes… all those things have been taken to entirely new levels of greatness. Now I want to better be able to experience it all with more of my friends and our full 6 player fireteam, be that in areas like the Dreaming City, PvP, and hopefully eventually patrols.

It’s been a hell of a ride so far and we’re a week in. I can’t wait to see what this week brings and into the future :)

[lostsolsdestinyblog]

Thoughts on the Last Wish experience and journey to get there from an everyday player and longtime raider

We are now almost 3 weeks into Forsaken and as the game experience progresses, so does the player experience. Without a doubt this is the best version of Destiny I have ever played, but within that as I have progressed I have seen and experienced things that I still feel could be improved and today I would like to focus on 3 of them that are all intimately connected within the progression and endgame experience; the raid, powerful rewards and engrams, and infusion. I’m going to start with the raid and as I go through, the other two will wind their way into the narrative.

I did not raid when vanilla D1 launched and it was well into TDB before I ran into a group of players in the crucible who invited me to their PvP team to do the Titan Bubble strat and then from there asked if everyone wanted to do a HM Atheon and Crota. We ended up doing both successfully as well as a HM Crota and it was cool. I was a hardcore raider in WoW for years, but none of my friends played Destiny so I was a solo player for a long time. It led to a deeply developed perspective on Destiny endgame for the player without a ready fireteam which is a perspective I try to give voice to and advocate for in my game feedback to this day.

Midway through TTK, I met my friends I play with now and they were very heavy raiders. When I joined them, we would run King’s Fall 5, 6, 7 times a week because it was so fun and we wanted to not only run it ourselves, but allow as many others as we could to experience it. We even went so far as to organize a bungie.net community raid day and got about 30 different sherpas to join up and bring teams to get players through who’d never raided before.

When Rise of Iron and WotM released, it was my first day one Destiny raid experience going in blind. We ended up getting to the Zamboni the first day and beat it and the rest on day two, and I learned a couple of things from the experience; the foremost being something I was worried about going in, that the raid dropping so soon after launch would force a rush to level and take away from the story experience and it did. So leading up to the release of D2 I gave a lot of feedback hoping that the raid would be released a couple weeks after release in order to give the story and rest of the experience a real chance to shine.

Unfortunately this did not happen and the raid was released the first Friday after launch and it had the impact I feared. It forced those of us who wanted to go into the raid blind day one to power through the campaign on 3 characters and ultimately it ruined the vanilla D2 story experience for me to where there are cut-scenes and adventures that I have still never run to this day.

So here we are at Forsaken and once again I have given a lot of feedback on my belief that the campaign, strikes, Nightfalls, etc should really be more of a focus as the initial endgame and build players up for a few weeks running that content before dropping the raid. I brought this up on the forums, on twitter and at the Summit. When it was announced the new power level cap would be 600, I hoped even more that there would be a significant delay to the raid release and when it was announced it would be the second Friday after launch I was at once glad it wasn’t week one, but very unsure that would be enough time to not have to do an insane grind to be raid ready.

This is where I would like to shift for a bit to the leveling/progression system. Throughout Destiny’s lifespan, there have been many different approaches to how we level. Within D2 we saw some extremes from vanilla where exotics and weapons were thrown at us early and often, to Warmind where we had very limited ways to get powerful drops each week and solo/small team players really struggled to level up to even be high enough level to raid, which was the best place to get leveled.

Things had to change with Forsaken and for the most part so far I think the progression system is the best it has ever been and has laid a foundation for which all future releases can be based off of. There is so much to do and so many ways to get powerful rewards now that there is always something to do to try to keep pushing forward. However, like any new system there are things that could be improved upon still and particularly in the days leading up to and now after the raid, those things have become quite apparent; which brings me back to the raid.

The decision to push it back ten days verses three ultimately made for a better launch week. It gave me a chance to really enjoy the campaign and the phenomenal work the writers, storytellers, artists and design teams did there. The leveling experience from 385 to 500 was very well done and went exceptionally smoothly outside of infusion costs which I’ll get to in a bit. I leveled all three characters to 50/500 the first weekend and had my main up to around 506ish, but that’s when the raid really started to loom and was compounded by the fact that we were less than a week out and still had no word on what the level requirements would be for it and where we needed to get to in order to participate.

I don’t think I need to say that raid launch day is like Christmas for Destiny raiders and as such, we had been so hyped for the new raid for a long, long time and adjusted schedules/took off work to be able to go in at launch. Thankfully within Forsaken’s new progression system there are a lot of ways to try to level up and playing pretty much every waking hour the final 3 days after the reset Tuesday (including a couple almost all-nighters), I was able to get my main up to 529 despite a streak of horrid RNG that saw me go 8 powerful engrams in a row at one point without getting an up in the slot they dropped for.

I was still apprehensive I hadn’t done enough despite basically playing the game every moment I wasn’t at work or asleep for 10 days, but it had been data-mined that the raid requirement was 520-550 so I was hopeful we’d be okay. My team had all gotten even further than me at between 536 to 541 and they had to play even more than I did and grind like never before on three characters to get there.

So it’s Christmas (raid day) and we are all there at launch and go in and it’s awesome. It’s a beautiful space and the mechanics were complex but fun and we were able to figure them out; the problem was the encounter was 560 and as much as we were able to basically figure out all the mechanics and knew what we needed to do, we weren’t doing close to enough boss damage at our levels. We gave it a go for a few hours and stopped to try to level more, then went back in and were still ultimately under-leveled to actually be able to compete in the first encounter.

I do not want to take anything away from what the raid is or what was achieved by everyone at Bungie in creating the overall experience and excitement that day with the raid world’s first chase, but as a raider and someone who’s team had looked forward to that day for so long and grinded so hard to try to be ready, it was ultimately anti-climactic and disappointing. Now the raid is out, everything is known and the game world has changed as a result of the raid being beaten and we’re still probably a couple weeks away from being leveled enough to give it a serious go.

I know there is a lot going around now about the raid being too hard or people need to shut up about the difficulty of the raid because it is good for the game if ultimately only a small portion of the community can play or beat it. I think while everyone is entitled to their opinions, it is these extreme generalities that you have to be one or the other that have ultimately ended up hurting the game in the past. I think that Forsaken has done a lot to correct going too casual in year one of D2 and ultimately I think the leveling/progression system so far has been very well done and will keep us invested and moving forward well into this expansion, but I also believe that all of that has been undercut to a degree the last few days.

It is okay to say that there should be things in Destiny that not everyone will get, but to say that not everyone should have the opportunity/ability to play the premier endgame content is not right in my opinion and to release a raid that only 18 people were able to complete in the first 24:02 verses 37,581 for King’s Fall was ultimately not the best approach. That is 37000+ players who if playing Friday, most likely didn’t get a chance to even beat the first boss let alone try to figure out any of the rest of the raid before it was all completed.

I was leveling my Titan this morning and a banner popped up on my screen as I did the mission that was unlocked by the team that beat the raid and it was advertising the Bungie Rewards program and saying I could get a reward if I beat the raid by Tuesday and it was kinda a slap in the face since there was realistically no way that 99.9% of the player base could be leveled enough to do that. The only players who could attempt this raid were people who either play Destiny for a living, have ungodly amounts of time to grind, or exploited Prime Engrams to level faster; and I don’t know if that was by design because the entire raid experience seemed like a love letter from Bungie to those players, but it could have still been that without leaving out the rest of the community.

I’ve raided since WotLK in WoW and as such I don’t go in expecting to beat raids on the first play through, but what I do expect is to make progress and to get some drops that will help in subsequent attempts. Destiny raids don’t play out over the course of days and weeks like WoW raids did when I played, but essentially it has been the same experience as we would beat a boss or a few and gear up to where we could finish. Spire took us 3 weeks to get to where we could do phase 2, but we still got to play the raid and get drops along the way.

We got nothing for our time and effort on Friday. There wasn’t even an ability to farm adds for moderately decent drops and ultimately I did not feel like it was respectful of my time or what I had to do to be there that day; and if that was going to be the case, it should have been stated weeks in advance what the requirements would be to not waste so many players time and effort.

The raid released too soon. Full stop.

It should not take power-leveling 3 characters 15-20 hours a day and spreadsheets of where and when to do what to be raid ready 10 days in and if you want to go with a raid release that is going to require a 3 character grind, the opening of said raid should not be level locking players who’ve put in that effort. There was simply no way this raid could be done without extreme leveling measures the first 10 days. I have teammates who put in 12 plus hours a day for 10 days and were still 20 levels under the first boss and what I don’t understand is why the raid just wasn’t scaled differently.

The opening boss could have been 540 and it would have still been challenging for everyone without level-locking most of the players. From there the rest of the bosses could have scaled to exactly the same levels they ended up getting to and it wouldn’t have affected the chase at all. Riven still would have been the same level and taken thirteen or however many hours to beat just her alone. The players who weren’t able to cheese or no-life their way to 550-560 would have still had a chance at raid rewards for their time and effort and everyone could have won.

That day was a great day for the game, studio and community in so many regards and I just wish it had not cut out 99.9% of faithful raiders to get there; which brings me back to leveling and infusion going forward now that we have solid goalposts to aim for to be able to attempt to clear the raid and I’ll start with infusion because it was an issue in the raid attempt itself.

The infusion system is not okay right now. It was one thing to have to drop our gear we prefer to use to level through the campaign, but I’m at 530 on 2 characters and I am to where I can maybe infuse a few weapons I need, but I’ve given up on armor completely. I used the last of my Masterwork Cores to put together an optimal-perk raid set and that cost me hundreds of Legendary Shards at the Spider to get to do that. I am now out of them and stuck wearing whatever high level armor pieces drop and at what looks like weeks until we hit 600 and I can get to wear an armor set I want and begin to think about putting a set together with mods/perks.

I dismantled my favorite D2 Titan armor set ever today that was completely masterworked and had my grenade cooldown PvP mods on it because I cannot afford to keep upgrading those pieces with the current infusion economy. I will just have to keep putting the mods on whatever gear I have at the time and getting them back when I dismantle them when something new drops and I don’t think that is what the system was intended to be. I know people who have lost thousands of Legendary shards at Spider without knowing because of his unnecessarily punishing MC costs doubling with every purchase. I have other friends that have chosen to spend shards for cores and now have neither and are basically hosed infusing anything. The system needs to change and it needs to sooner rather than later. I understand we could infuse too easily in year one and the game needs more thought into choice and consequence, but this is way too far that direction.

Then we have powerful rewards and engrams. Ultimately I think this system has been pretty good, but there are a few areas I believe it needs to improve. While there are tons of ways to get rewards in Forsaken and to continually level up without hitting soft caps or barriers to progression, the level things drop at has become more of an issue the further past 500 we get.

It started with regular legendaries basically becoming infusible blues at 500. They just drop too far below our character power level. Right now if we have any slot that is far below everything else we have equipped and anchoring us, only powerful rewards can raise them. This is a problem when you get 6 or 7 in a row that drop at or below the level of what you had equipped in a particular spot because say your boots are 10-12 PL lower than the rest of your gear but won’t drop. Regular legendaries need to be able to have a chance to drop within 5 of our character level to have other avenues to bring up those anchor spots without wasting powerful rewards.

This was an issue not long after crossing 500 and is becoming more so now because once you get to 520 or so, most of our powerful rewards only drop one power level higher than our character power level and so now even without gear or weapon slots anchoring us, there is a good chance that whatever powerful reward drops is not going to be an up. I ran my daily crucible, daily Gambit, weekly Gambit, the new mission unlocked from the raid, and turned in 2 powerful engrams this morning on my Titan and out of 6 powerful rewards, 5 were below my equipped item and did not raise my PL. The one that was an up was 1 PL above what it replaced.

Currently normal legendary engrams are performing like blues. Most Powerful engrams are performing like previous normal legendaries and in order to get the really good powerful drops, it requires doing the overall weekly Dreaming City (complete 3 weekly bounties). So while I have goal posts to be able to raid and the ability to continue to push forward constantly throughout the week, it’s baby steps outside of the Dreaming City content and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but feels unfortunate again by the release schedule of the raid. If the raid were still a week or two out, I’d say the regular legendaries would still need the chance to drop within 5 of our level, but the rest was okay. As is though, I think that locking most powerful drops to one level above our character is a problem as players try to reach raid requirements and they should have a random chance to drop anywhere from one to five over our character level. They could even be weighted to the lower end, but there should at least be a chance at a better up.

Also notice I have said nothing of exotics and leveling because they are so rare they are a non factor.

So those are my thoughts and I hope what has come through is that I still love Forsaken, the raid, the grind and the progression. The difficulty of things is great and it is okay for some things to be harder to do and achieve, but I think some of it could have and should have been approached differently and I hope the experiences of myself and other players like me will be considered in the future when planning content.

One last thought as well on the (not as, but still) early release of raids. While the raid release didn’t have the effect of taking away from the campaign and story that previous raids have, I do think that it rendered the Tangled Shore kind of meaningless only 3 weeks into the expansion and that is a bit sad. It feels like the patrol zone equivalent of the Farm at this point and it’s such an incredible zone that I wish had gotten a bit more time in the spotlight before the focus shifted to the Dreaming City (which is a hard act to follow after going there).

Thank you very much.

[seerya]

You know, they should ask Matt Damon to shoot Lost Sols as a short film because I want to see Mark Watney pull a Fall Guy over the Fucking Ravine with his Mars rover just to then go "Great. That was total ass. Now I need to do the whole thing again with the fucking trailer. Yay!" Peak comedy.

[seerya]