Would you kindly give me your thoughts? (Off-Topic)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Monday, February 29, 2016, 19:41 (3033 days ago) @ Claude Errera

My 2 cents: TTK is a big improvement over year 1 Destiny as you play through the story, side missions, and raid. But I find it to be a step backwards from year 1 when it comes to the end game. The story is better, the questification of the mission structure works well, there's a nice variety to the missions and strikes, you level up at a nice rate, and the raid is a great end-cap to the entire thing.

When it comes to the end game, I think Bungie unlearned a lot of what made HoW's progression system work so well. Loot drops are painfully sparse, and there is now an additional layer of RNG when it comes to acquiring new gear (2 layers in some cases). Let's say for example you really want the Raid hand cannon. You could run the raid 15 times before you get it to drop. But the raid weapons now come with randomized perk rolls, so when it finally does drop for you, it might have crappy perks. So you run it a bunch more until you get the perks you like. Except now the damage values of the weapon drops are random as well, so even if you get the gun you want with the perks you want, it might have a lower attack level than you want, so you'll need to get lucky with other drops in order to "infuse" it up to a higher damage level.

Okay, so first off, nobody wants that hand cannon - its reload speed is glacial.

(Fine - no more jokes.)

It was worth it :)

I'll agree that there are a few levels to the 'get what you want' puzzle... but there are a few points I'd like to make:

1) I don't really understand the whole "run it until you get the perks you like" complaint - yes, there are 'god rolls', but if you're willing to live with a 'god - 1' roll, your waiting time drops by an order of magnitude, or more. There are certainly crappy mods... but the chances of getting DECENT mods are actually pretty good.

I think this is where a few issues sort of collide for me. On the one hand, I find a lot of the year 2 weapons (primaries in particular) feel outright bad unless I get just the right roll on them. So there are quite a few cases where I'll get the same gun a 5-10 times over before it finally drops with a roll that I find fun to use.

Then there's the PvP side, where every tiny little advantage can be important. If I'm using a decent Doctrine of Passing against a highly skilled opponent with a perfect Doctrine of Passing, he is going to win every single time. "Decent" just isn't good enough in that case. And since infusing weapons up to Trials levels can be a bit of an investment, I don't want to spend the materials and infusion fodder on anything less than an excellent roll.

2) If you absolutely can't live without a particular roll, yes, you'll have to run things a few times to get it... but you might be exaggerating on the actual numbers. I've run Warpriest 2 or 3 dozen times, I'd guess, and I have worse luck than EVERYONE I've played with for Defiance of Yasmin (sniper rifle) drops. I ran it half a dozen times before the first one dropped. And then I ran it ANOTHER half-dozen times before one dropped above 312.

But if I look back now, I've had 6 or 7 drop, at least three of which were over 315. That's one every 3-5 runs... and like I said, I've never played with anyone who has worse luck than I do for that particular gun. Most people get one every other run or so. So 15 runs for a Zauli's Bane might be a slight exaggeration. :)

I agree that Challenge mode has made the raid weapons far easier to come across, and I think that's great. But I don't think I'm exaggerating that much ;) I must have run the warpriest challenge 9 times (3 characters per try) before I got the sniper rifle I wanted. Considering that Challenge mode essentially yields double drops, that's A LOT of drops before getting the one I wanted. But that's fine. Not really a big deal at all. But when you apply those drop rates to activities that don't have a challenge mode, it becomes more frustrating. Aside from a single class item, a ghost, and a single pair of gloves, I've never had a item drop above 314 from Trials or Iron Banner, and I put a lot of time into both activities. 6 months into TTK, that feels a bit crummy to me. It's still not a big deal at all, but I can't help but ask "why?". Why keep the drop rates so low? Yes, it's silly... but it would be nice to get a drop every now and then that makes me say "wow, look what I got!" without having to add "too bad it doesn't have good perks" or "too bad it's only 302". It's kind of insane to me that you don't get a guaranteed 320 drop for going to the lighthouse or from a rank 5 Iron Banner package.

3) And the worse your luck is (and the more you have ammunition to argue with points 1 and 2 above), the less good your final argument is (the need to run EXTRA times to get infusion fodder). If you really had to run 30 raids to get a couple of specific-perk guns, I GUARANTEE you've got high-level gear to infuse those drops with, even if they land at 280 (which they won't).

You sir are greatly overestimating my available vault space lol. I have 2 empty weapon slots. That's it. I don't have room to hold on to unwanted drops as I get them. So I either infuse them into something I've already got, or scrap them.

I will definitely agree with you that they scaled back the loot drops in the TTK endgame, in comparison to the HoW endgame... but I don't think it's as bad as you're saying it is. (For perspective: I've gotten every single gun available in King's Fall, at least once - and usually more than once. I got my VERY FIRST Vex Mythoclast, and my VERY FIRST Vision of Confluence, last week - despite well over a year's worth of running VoG. I got my VERY FIRST (and only) Black Hammer about 3 months after I got a Black Spindle, despite many months of running Crota. So while getting EXACTLY the right gun might be harder now than it used to be... getting the GUN itself is actually easier.)

Agree with you 100% there. I think the key difference to me is that in year 1, when you finally did get that weapon you were hoping for, there were none of the caveats that exist now. You never said "I FINALLY GOT A FATEBRINGER... oh, the perks aren't great". The drop rates were certainly too low then, but you knew what you were getting when it finally dropped. This time around we have higher drop rates, but I'd argue that the chances of getting the "ideal" drops are even lower. I'm not convinced that it's an improvement. Is there really an argument against making every single normal Oryx drop a 310 and every single heroic drop a 320? Would that not be an instant improvement when it comes to the enjoyment players get out of the activities? Considering we still might not get a roll that we want, at least it would be awesome infusion fodder. Yes, there is challenge mode, but I see that as a solution to a problem that should never have existed.