The Forsaken Grind (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Monday, September 17, 2018, 09:29 (2263 days ago)

There's been a lot of talk about the grind and leveling in Forsaken, so I thought I'd look into exactly how much time its taking me to progress towards raid level.

Using this website, I did a little number crunching and determined that since the launch of Forsaken, I've spent slightly more than 75 hours playing Destiny 2 on the Xbox One. So, basically a 2nd full time job. This is way more time than I usually spend playing videogames, but the release of Forsaken happened to coincide with my daughter going away on a trip, so I found myself with a lot more spare time than usual.

So, while I'm nowhere near the kinds of hours that the professional streamers put in to the game, it's safe to say I've sunk a lot more time than the average player.

Here's where I'm at so far:

Titan: 531

Hunter: 531

Warlock: 519

These are all the max potential level of each of my characters (meaning they each need to equip my 3 highest-level weapons to hit these ranks).

I ran my Titan pretty much exclusively during the first week of Forsaken, then ran Titan and Hunter most of the 2nd week. I only just ran my Warlock through the campaign over the past couple days... she's already 519, so getting up to the 500-520 range has clearly gotten faster with each successive character, but then seems to slow down to a crawl around 520-530.

Most of my time has been spent doing activities that can increase the light level of my characters, with a few little detours here and there. I certainly haven't done every single daily and weekly milestone on every character. I did them all with my Titan during the first week, but as I've spread my playtime across multiple characters, its meant missing a few opportunities for powerful engrams on each character because there just aren't enough hours in each day for me to get everything on every character.

It also appears that the act of leveling up is not as simple as it first appears. Not all "powerful rewards" are equal, so to speak. Powerful engrams from different sources appear to have different "soft caps" tied to them. In short, they'll all have the potential to increase your light level, but some drops will provide more of an increase than others, depending on your current level at the time of attaining these drops. This is all quite complicated, and not explained explicitly through the game's interface. These nuances, combined with good old fashioned RNG, could lead to substantially different rates of power increase for different players.

So, what target Light Levels are important in this expansion? Most of the activities within the Dreaming City are 540-560, although we've already encountered at least one enemy who is 585. There's also the Nightfalls, which I believe are 540. And then there's the raid. I believe the final boss is 580.

With all this in mind, and with the expectation that I won't be putting in the kinds of hours going forward that I have in the past 2 weeks, I'll be surprised if I hit 565 before Halloween. Just an estimate, obviously. RNG could swing in either direction. I mention 565 specifically because that's about where I'll probably feel comfortable raiding. I could certainly beat the first encounter or 2 long before that, but I don't like starting activities that I can't finish.

For the purposes of this post, I'm not going to voice any judgements on whether any of this is good or bad. Just wanted to illustrate the amount of time it is taking for a "hardcore player" (<- not a term I like, but I think we all know what I mean by it) to climb up this level grind. I might reply to this post with some thoughts on the nature of the grind, but for now, I'll leave it at that.

*edit: formatting