Destiny: Wot I think (Destiny)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Wednesday, June 18, 2014, 11:40 (3599 days ago) @ kapowaz
edited by Cody Miller, Wednesday, June 18, 2014, 12:11

But what differentiates a good player from a great player? The scenario you describe where a boss takes a long time to kill presumably will be variable based on this player skill, but it's unclear to me how the gameplay offers opportunity to do optimal or just okay damage. Is there such a thing as a skill rotation (using certain abilities when off cooldown, in a particular order)?

No, your knowledge / skill can definitely make fights go faster. The Forbes write up said they were in the strike for 3 hours, however I've done it on legend in a little over 30 minutes (this was with good people with voice chat). But damage output is damage output. Go try to kill stuff in the caves behind the dried up ocean. You do 1 damage.

I'm surprised to hear you have little to say about the player investment system so far, but you've touched on something I always wondered about: just how much your character's gear level impacts on the difficulty of combat. The answer appears to be: substantially, which is disappointing but not that surprising. What it does mean is that areas of the game will be either trivial (and thus, probably ignored) or impossible (and similarly ignored) at different stages as you level. Again, based on my experience of WoW (a game with millions of players) this leads to 'ghost towns' in the underpopulated areas, whilst everyone focuses on the content they can actually play. It'll be interesting to see how much this affects co-op play in the final game, and whether it might result in areas feeling devoid of (human) life.

It seems like explore mode puts out guys your level, so I think you'll always be reasonably challenged. I'm not sure, again, given the low spread of possible levels in the alpha. I didn't touch much on the investment system, since it's impossible to see how much content is spoils given the low level cap. It most certainly WILL spoil content in the full release, the only question is how much and to what degree. The investment system is a mistake, but nowhere near as bad as it could have been.

What can mitigate it significantly is if there ends up being a large amount non grindy stuff to do in explore mode.