THAB 05/31/18 - Year 2 Reveal Event Details (Destiny)

by Korny , Dalton, Ga. US. Earth, Sol System, Thursday, May 31, 2018, 20:28 (2157 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Renown is lost when players are defeated by enemies, so be careful when you're attempting to loot a Lost Sector with high Renown!

So uh, does that mean they are going to actually make lost sectors hard? :-p

Reading these stats, not as many players are attempting Escalation Protocol with a fireteam of three as our designs intended, mostly because of how difficult waves 6 and 7 are.

Maybe the rather punishing light level requirement has something to do with that too…

It seems to me the best thing to do would be to scale the difficulty with the number of players in the event. They said it themselves: they have the ability to 'switch' the enemy levels to different values. So why not set the difficulty based on the number of current players? Why not spawn extra enemies for additional players? It should be such that more players is always advantageous, but not overwhelmingly so. I remember while playing Diablo 2, if a player joined the game "Diablo's minions grow stronger". It was the same type of system designed so that large groups don't completely steamroll, yet single players aren't hopelessly overpowered by the enemies.

In Borderlands, not only do the enemies get stronger when people join you, but the quality of the loot drops also increases (and you can stack drop-rate-boosting artifacts on characters, too).

I think you're over-estimating how much effort Bungie put into the difficulty flags.

I think a better solution for Escalation Protocol would have been to have two modes by default:

Normal- Activated like it is already. It's much lower-light, but the more people you have in your fireteam, the tougher it is, and the better the chances are at loot drops.

Heroic- Doing two Patrol missions, a Heroic Public Event, or successfully completing three Normal waves of Escalation Protocol will rile up enemies in an area (reward you with a Heroic Token). You can hold down the activation Button longer on a tower to trigger Heroic Escalation Protocol, which is at the current difficulty that it's been at. It's very tough, but clearly doable, and you have a higher chance at Catalyst drops on every boss fight. Completing Three waves at this difficulty guarantees Legendaries, with a high chance at being at or above your current Light level (If you do get a Powerful engram drop on wave 3, you will have to beat Wave 5 to reset a reward cooldown so that Wave 3 can drop a Powerful engram again). Solo players who help you complete at least three waves also have a higher chance at a Powerful/exotic Engram drop. You can also get exclusive ornaments for Ana Bray's armors, apart from the existing EP armor set.

Now randoms have a much higher incentive to help you, while you have a higher incentive to activate Heroic Escalation Protocol, but lower-light/solo players can also experience a version of the content in its entirety, and have it be rewarding!