THAB 8.09.18 (Destiny)

by cheapLEY , Thursday, August 09, 2018, 16:27 (2375 days ago)
edited by cheapLEY, Thursday, August 09, 2018, 16:33

The Weekly Update is live, and it's a big one this week.

The combat reveal stream is posted first thing.

Weapon mods will be locked with the August 28th update, so get your weapons sorted by then. As we've discussed, make your weapons the elements you want them to be. A short list of current elemental weapons will be moved to Kinetic, so their elements will be removed--don't waste your time with them:

• Baligant
  
• Shepherd’s Watch
  
• Hawthorne’s Field-Forged Shotgun
  
• Alone as a God
  
• Perfect Paradox
  
• The Frigid Jackal
  
• Silicon Neuroma

The new trailer for the Dreaming City is next.

The investment team lays out some goals:

• We want to bring back the days when you are impressed when you see someone at max Power in the Tower.
  
• The experience of leveling and then powering up should be meaningful.
  
• Players should have a sense of discovery when earning rewards from different activities.
  
• When players accomplish something difficult, the rewards should be special or unique.
  
• Not all of the sources of Power in a week should be apparent on the Director.

Sounds promising!

Some more cool changes are outlined. Rewards will be tied to difficulty. If you complete something while underleveled, you'll get even better rewards. Exotics will now always be higher power than your current Power Level again. There are now more activities that operate on a different cadence than the weekly reset, giving people more opportunity for rewards.

There's also this paragraph, which I don't actually understand:

When players earn powerful rewards, these items should never scale down to where they do not give an increase in Power. Even if your Power is 100 over an activity’s recommended level, it should still grant a reward at least one Power level above your current average. This means that players should still benefit when grouping with teammates who haven’t accomplished as much as they have.

Is this different from how it is now? If you do an activity that gives Powerful Engrams, they're always Powerful Engrams, it doesn't matter what the Power Level of the activity is. Are they implying that "Powerful Engrams" are no longer a thing?

Milestones are changing pretty drastically. Milestones now seem to be more focused on quests and "non-repeatable" activities. The old weekly milestones are moving to something called activity challenges, and will not appear the Milestones tray. Activity challenges will appear in the tool tips in the Director when you highlight an activity.

Lots of other big changes:

Strikes have three power level pools: 300, 400, and 500. Once you're 40 power above the next threshold, the previous one will no longer be on your Director, to keep matchmaking healthy. So, once you hit 440, the 300 power option will be gone.

Nightfalls are also changing. Prestige is going away, but base Nightfalls will be more difficult. Players can also select between three different Nightfall strikes. This is to help players seeking specific Nightfall loot, so we don't have to wait so long for the Nightfall to come back up.

Meditations are gone, to be replaced by the Heroic Story Playlist, at 500 power. No mention of any Redux-style reworks. With that, Ikora's tokens are also leaving, as is the armor she offers (so get it, or complete your Solstice set, if you want it).

Heroic adventures are coming to all destinations. Flashpoint weeks will see one Heroic adventure selected per day.

Heroic modifiers will be shared between strikes, story missions, and adventures.

I hope you all want to farm that spinmetal some more!

Destination materials will become the primary source of destination reputation, and destination materials will be a cost to infuse weapons and gear. (Seriously, fucking why?) Tokens will no longer be rewarded, but you will still be able to turn them in if you have them.

Gunsmith reputation engrams will increase in cost from 40 gunsmith materials to 100.

Iron Banner is back next week. Starting with Forsaken, Power Level will matter again.

Trials of the Nine is going away for Season 4 while it gets a total rework. I'll never be a Trials player, but that makes me happy. Trials felt awesome in D1, with tons of people here playing it weekly and making Lighthouse runs, and now no one cares about it in D2. I hope to see it brought back to relevance.

Faction Rallies will be on "hiatus" when Season 4 starts. They want to make adjustments, it sounds like, and "focus on some other areas of the game that need attention and reevaluate some of the fundamental aspects of the event."

There's a big section on Eververse changes. I won't copy/paste it here--go look if you care. The big one is that Tess is going to have bounties that reward Bright Dust. Picking up bounties requires a "bounty note," but they don't elaborate on what that is. Seems like a potentially good move. They've also committed to sharing Bright Engram probabilities (though on Bungie.net, rather than in the game interface). They're adding Legendary Weapon skins and Ghost projections (whatever that is).

They're adding a few more boosted Valor XP weekends before Forsaken:

Double Valor Week
Start: 10 AM PDT on August 10, 2018
End: 10 AM PDT on August 17, 2018

Triple Valor Weekend
Start: 10 AM PDT on August 17, 2018
End: 10 AM PDT on August 21, 2018

Final Double Valor Weekend
Start: 10 AM PDT on August 24, 2018
End: 10 AM PDT on August 28, 2018

Player Support Report, Movie of the Week, and Nightfall scores end the update as always.