New GI Article: Destiny's Raid Philosophy/Scope of New Raid (Destiny)

by Durandal, Thursday, August 27, 2015, 18:31 (3165 days ago) @ Doooskey

From launch on, raid gear has had two functions. The first is gating progress into the end game hard mode. You needed all the raid armor to complete the hard mode. You needed those weapons with bonus damage to oracles, you needed to be 30 on the level 31 raid, or you just couldn't do enough damage quickly enough.

The second was status. Having that full set of raid gear and equipment made your character unique in the tower. Walking around with a hunter in full crota gear and shader got you numerous invites (at least for me). The Mythoclast is a status weapon, even post nerf. People hate on the Necrochasm precisely because it is so hard to get and yet is outclassed by purples.

HoW and PoE gave us armor that is high level and easily accessible, but not really having any benefits outside the raid. Having a full set of gear makes PoE much easier, but by that point you are really only chasing status items anyway.

So separating gear from that gating function is a welcome improvement. The initial promise of Destiny implied lots of different ways to max out. You could PVP, PVE or some combination there in, and whatever path you took there would be a way to reach that top level. What it turned out to be was you needed to farm VoG, CE to be top tier. Even after IB added top tier armor, you needed those elemental primaries to make nightfalls less of a slog.

Now that nightfalls and Xur won't be the main way to get exotics, players will have a larger diversity of appearances and gear, and you will have a better idea of what they like from the gear they have.

I hope we also see more damage types on primaries, and more variety in weapon types as well. The elemental primaries are a big restriction currently and force people to often run weapons they don't find ideal.