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Initial thoughts on the new season? (Destiny)

by Korny @, Dalton, Ga. US. Earth, Sol System, Wednesday, March 06, 2019, 11:39 (1849 days ago) @ cheapLEY

I played with Speedracer, Ragashingo, and Kameron. We burned through everything so fast I didn’t even know there was anything special happening besides “kill everything.” I mean, seriously. I’ve done more challenging Public Events.

Yeah, that's why I'm hoping Tier 2 and 3 integrate more compelling mechanics than "Kill". If you are with a group that can actually talk to each other, Tier 1 is a joke, and you very quickly fall into going through the motions just to pick up your armor drops (until you inadvertently upgrade your synthesizer lol).

I like that you don't absolutely HAVE to have a synth juiced up to get drops, because the thought of using up your coins, then having to play another dragged-out Prime match just to get more sounds like... Not a very sustainable loop, since Prime can likely get stacked pretty hard against you, and not every team you're with is ready for sweaty Gambit...


But back to the mechanics. "Kill everything" is fun for a quick pick-up game, but I'd love to see risk/reward options available, like Heroic events somewhat do (especially the Fallen Tank as a great example of doing extra work to get some more literal bang for your buck).

You haven't unlocked access to either one, but Warframe has two modes very similar to Reckoning: Kuva Survival, and Sanctuary Onslaught, and each implements different mechanics to keep you playing longer, but they also don't force you to stay in them.

Kuva Survival differs from regular survival in that you can turn the Life Support towers into Kuva syphons, which sacrifices the Life Support you could have gotten from them, but if you can defend them successfully for one minute, you're guaranteed a minimum of 200 Kuva (an endgame resource) from each one you convert, but if the enemy destroys it, you get nothing, and you completely lose the ability to use that tower for Life Support. So you have to make a choice at each one, and the longer you survive, the harder it gets. And that's a mechanic layered on top of the regular survival mission goals and rewards.

Sanctuary Onslaught is almost the same as Reckoning on the surface, as you have to fill a meter with multikills and such in a small arena with endlessly-spawning enemies. The difference is that Onslaught has randomized enemy factions and sub-factions that spawn on a collection of equally randomized tiles. You won't fight more than one faction per wave, and the mode has an AABC reward pool that gives you drops every two waves (among other Spoilery rewards).
There is also "Elite Sanctuary Onslaught", which is obviously tougher, but isn't random. Every week gets a curated set of 10 waves, so you can plan ahead with your team, and there are exclusive cosmetic rewards that you can get on completion apart from its own AABC reward pool.

Both of these modes have been implemented into the Nightwave that we discussed recently, and have some real challenges tied to them (Sammy and I did one the other night where you have to survive an hour in Kuva Survival without using a single Life Support tower. It got super intense near the end, and we were drowning in Kuva when we beat it, apart from the drops, the 20 5-minute-milestone rewards, and the other challenges we completed during it, and the huge amount of rep and Wolf Tokens that we got from the Nightwave as a result.

Just rewards on top of rewards for doing something challenging.


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