I like this idea, and I have another suggestion. (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Saturday, November 28, 2015, 20:31 (3071 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Destiny is firmly rooted in and probably not changing from a game about investment. So why is the end game so bad in Taken King? There's an easy fix.

The problem is essentially you reach a point where you still need to progress, but can't because you are not getting the drops. You could get a drop, but the light level could be too low to matter. So, you can play and not progress at all.

Bungie should consider adopting a rule:

The player will always progress, no matter how small when they play.

How could they do that? Simple. Allow you to infuse lower level items into higher level items. It would take more (perhaps a lot more) to start leveling up the gun, but if you had a light progression bar on the guns similar to you have on your character, and infusing simply raised that up, it would go a long way.

The higher light level the gear you are infusing, the more the bar goes up. Now, no matter what you get, you always have something you can use, and you can still have the "fun" of getting good random drops.

I see no downside at all. It even adds more decision making. Do I use this to level up a weapon, or do I dismantle it for weapon parts? Etc.

So I think this is a cool idea. But I have another, more drastic suggestion: go back to the way character level and upgrading gear used to work in House of Wolves.

In the lead up to TTK, Luke Smith talked a lot about moving away from the "vertical" power climb and shifting focus towards a more "horizontal" power expansion. In other words, get players to their maximum power level quickly, then let them focus on expanding the tools and abilities at their disposal. Not to sound snarky, but I feel the current TTK progression system has created the exact opposite situation. At this point, ive scrapped hundreds of pieces of new gear, many of which may have provided interesting build options, because they were too low level to be viable. For someone like me who enjoys the most challenging end-game activities, light level is everything. And getting your gear up to the 300-320 range is such a long, tedious task that I simply can't expand my arsenal "horizontally" to explore options. I have my 1 set of armor and a half-dozen favorite weapons, and everything goes into slowly raising their levels. Frankly, it sucks.

Ironically, we already had the exact system Luke Smith was describing, back in House of Wolves. Players were easily able to hit max level within the first week or two. The "vertical" climb was minimal. Instead, the focus was on the "horizontal" expansion of gear. Acquiring new weapons and armor to allow our guardians to adapt and play different rolls. The icing on the cake was Etheric Light. With EL, we had the ability to take any Legendary gear in the game and boost it straight up to max level. Many players had vaults full of old gear, and thanks to EL those collections were brought into that "horizontal" expansion, rather than simply taking up vault space like all of our year 1 gear does now.

For me, the proof is in the pudding. 2 months after HoW launched, I had full sets of PoE, Trials, IB, and raid armor, and a bunch of other miscellaneous armor on all 3 characters, all of it max level. I could spec out any subclass for various different PvP builds, raids, PoE, night falls, or even just for looks. And I could do it all while maintaining that max level. Plus I had a huge selection of weapons, exotics, elemental primaries; weapons for any playstyle I wanted to try, all max level.

2 months after TTK, I have exactly 1 set of armor per character, and 2 of my 3 characters can't even do the heroic raid yet because their level is too low. And if I want to do the hard mode raid with the 1 character who is able to, I only have 1 specific combination of weapons that will allow me to do so. To me, the whole Light Level system of TTK is a complete train wreck.

Now if we could have TTK's fantastic content with HoW's end-game progression system, THAT would be something :)