Conflicted Feelings... (Destiny)

by Morpheus , High Charity, Friday, August 10, 2018, 01:12 (2374 days ago) @ cheapLEY

Between now and the preload on August 28, use your Year 1 mods to lock in the elemental damage type you want for your Year 1 weapons. They will retain that damage type after the mod deprecation. On August 28, the old mod slot will go away, and you will no longer be able to insert any mods into Year 1 gear or change the elemental damage type.

So since we won't be able to do modifications or change elements, does that mean we're switching back to Destiny 1 RNG? Does that also mean that the damage level for weapons will also decrease for everything Legendary modded?

Speaking of...why? To all of it.

Some weapons will be moving to the Kinetic Slot and will not retain elemental damage regardless of what mod you had applied. The IKELOS Sniper Rifle and Shotgun will be locked to Solar. Here are the Legendary weapons that will be moving to Kinetic:

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

So unless we delete those weapons, we'll have two Kinetics equipped instead of one, in a world of strikes filled with elemental...well, whatever their version of 'Burns' is?

(Just for all you Picardies. ;-)

We want to bring back the days when you are impressed when you see someone at max Power in the Tower.

This instantly confused me. What days? You mean max level, right? Because the only way you can see people's power at all is if you followed every single one around the Tower and spam Back to inspect them one by one(or used the roster).

The experience of leveling and then powering up should be meaningful.

I want to believe this Bungie, I really do...but even in Destiny 1, when I was leveling up in Strikes and Raids, a good 80% of my rewards were—in terms of power level—not very rewarding.

When players accomplish something difficult, the rewards should be special or unique.

This raises my negativity/skepticism red flags off the charts. This exact same promise has been given to us time and time again since 2014, and from past experiences in Destiny 1 the only time I ever felt the rewards I got from difficult activities being "special or unique" are as follows:

• Opening Skeleton Chests(not the Strike boss rewards, but physically using a Key.)
  
• When Three of Coins procs
  
• Raids(they'd better!)
  
• Challenge of Elders rewards/Prison of Elders(now that was an excitable experience!)
  
• Occasionally Nightfall--entirely RNG, but there have been fruitful bounties.
  
• Faction Rank-Ups(technically doesn't count since that isn't a difficult activity)

In Destiny 2, Heroic Strikes usually meant a handful of blues(and maybe a legendary), typically only a small amount higher than your current light, and a whole bunch of rep tokens that got you the same four weapons forever. And the legendary engrams just gave you infinite Heiro Camo, or other class equivalent. That's why I quit playing those—no sense in busting my ass all kinds of ways for weaker rewards than what I get just for killing a major in Patrol.

Now I haven't had a chance to do Raids, and Nighfall is still too challenging at my light level, but unless "difficult activities" means something very specific that they're going to list out specifically, I'm still very doubtful.

In Year 1, an activity such as the raid would have an absolute range of Power that it could generate. Rewards would grant only a small difference in Power level, even if you were overcoming the challenge while under-leveled. In Forsaken, we are scaling the Power production of all content by the difficulty of that content. If you manage to beat the raid while 40 Power under the recommended level, you should expect to receive more potent rewards.

This sounds like a contract, or fine print at the bottom of a commercial. Stuff like this is very worrying. If you beat a raid while under-leveled...there's not supposed to be a "you should expect". There is supposed to be a "will". If you and your fireteam pull off something as difficult as that, you shouldn't be flying to the Tower hoping you get something much better. You should be overjoyed that you and your friends managed to do it together, and exclaim to your friends and Tower denizens, "Holy shit! Look at this kickass reward I got! It's SO much higher than the stuff I have now! Hey party leader, can we go to Patrol/Crucible/Strikes so I can test this bad boy out?" That is meaningful leveling/powering up. That is impressing people at the Tower. That is getting something special and unique.

The Milestone tray has been revamped in Forsaken, and will now specifically show the most important, nonrepeatable quests for every player of Destiny 2. The campaign quests are a good example of this. Meanwhile, our world quests for destinations will now live in the Pursuits section of your character inventory. Many Milestones from Year 1 have been converted to activity challenges. These will continue to grant powerful rewards, but they will no longer be displayed in the Milestone tray. When you access the Director, you’ll see activity challenges in the tooltip of the associated activity.

I'm actually pretty happy about this:While I like seeing what I need to do next, Nightfall, Crucible and Heroic Strikes do not need to stay at the forefront of my objectives. Good call.

Once you’re 40 Power over a given playlist, it will no longer appear as an option for you to select.

I also like this idea; hopefully it won't put too much pressure on repeated matchups.

Meditations are being retired and replaced with a Heroic story playlist. New campaign missions will be featured at 500 Power, while old campaign missions will be set to a Power level relative to their release. This ensures legacy players can still enjoy story activities at their leisure.

I thought our new max Light was going to be 400, but I guess not. This is better than going to the Tower 3 times in a row, but still no freedom to select missions?

Activity modifiers will be shared across Heroic adventures, Heroic story missions, and strikes. This ensures that each day you know what to expect from the PvE content that you play as a ritual, and that when we balance and tune modifiers it’s happening across the game. This will include one weekly singe, one daily buff, and one daily debuff.

So does that mean the modifiers are all going to be the same in every PvE activity?

The Brawler and Grenadier modifiers will have their recharge times adjusted to ensure they’re noticeable. Adjusting your equipment for either also has a rather significant impact. We’ve seen some pretty crazy plays by the new Solar Hunter in our playtest. Some experienced players out there may be reminded of the feelings found when they equipped Nothing Manacles in the past.

But....but you....nerfed Nothing Manacles. Heavily. So...we'll feel like we have an extra grenade?

Destination materials will be a part of the cost to infuse different weapons and armor across your arsenal.

So...you are switching back to Destiny 1.

Destination materials will become your main source of reputation on their respective destinations.
Destination tokens and Rare destination materials are no longer awarded, but you can still redeem them for reputation if you have them in your inventory.
Anything that previously granted destination tokens or Rare materials will reward Common destination materials moving forward.

So, all the rewards we'll get for opening chests, doing public events, target drops, completing missions and (Heroic) Adventures...will be flowers. And in the case of Nessus, Vex poop.

Before anyone complains that this is trivial, it's about the principle of at least getting multiple types of rewards. They might all mean the same, but the fact that you can get rare materials worth more from searching, normal materials from picking up resources, and tokens from completing missions and events--at least makes me feel like I'm doing more than one thing on a planet.

The Gunsmith will also be updated in Season 4. In Year 1, this vendor required 40 Gunsmith Materials for one reputation package. This will increase to 100 Gunsmith Materials.

Reminds me of that classic Deathless bounty on D1--You used to earn a large amount of points and rep for earning 9,000 XP without dying. Then Bungie decided to change it to earning 10,000 XP and the rewards dropped to less than half.

There is also a new Power Play rule where capturing all three zones will lock them down for 20 seconds. At the end of the Power Play, all the zones are reset to neutral and must be recaptured.

That. Will. Work. Out. SO. Well. XD

Starting in Season 4, Iron Banner will be updated to enable Power level advantages, like in the days of old.

It hasn't been in the first place??

Each Bright Engram grants one bounty note in Season 4
These Notes can be exchanged for a three different tiers of weekly Eververse bounties
Tier 3:Costs 6 Eververse Bounty Notes, Rewards 150 Bright Dust

Everything that isn't an Emote or a Ghost Shell is thousands of Bright Dust.

Leading up to the beginning of Year 2, you’ll see multiple opportunities to earn Valor points at an accelerated rate including a special triple Valor Iron Banner weekend.

Since I don't know anything Crucible, does this Valor stuff apply to Crucible as a whole, or just in (shudder) Iron Banner?

All these crazy changes are making it really hard to decide on whether or not I want to get Forsaken. It really seems like it might not be worth the money...