You can also consume a Synth to give that stat a +3 for 30 minutes. So consume a Sentry synth to get +3 to your Sentry stat. If you do so, you’ll see another icon on your character screen below your Recovery, Mobility, and Resilience stats. Hover over that icon to see the perks and at which thresholds they unlock.

Your Sythensizer is a weak one, which means you can make the Tier 1 armor. Each piece of Tier 1 will have a +1 to either Invader, Reaper, Collector, or Sentry, depending on what Mote you spent. If you complete one of the bounties, you’ll get a Tier II Sythesizer where you can make +2 armor in a harder version of The Reckoning. Next week the +3 version will be available. Spending a Synth for the boost means you can wear four pieces of the +3 armor and still hit the maximum threshold so you can still use an exotic armor piece.

Given the very different pace of the boss means that blockers and invasions during the match are really quite important to establishing that dominant position. 2+ blockers drains motes from the enemy bank meaning they have to collect more than just 100 to summon their primeval. Having multiple blockers is always more important than delaying their banking. A few well-timed Blockers and an Invasion can completey swing a game. This makes the Sentry role important.

Going forward once people have Prime Perks unlocked the ebb and flow in Prime will be substantially different than it is right now.

You have to wager your Mote at the start of The Reckoning before completing it. If you are unsuccessful that mote is gone and you have to drop in a mew one.

As for Gambit Prime, it seems like filling the bank is just pointless game mechanic designed for us to kill bad guys to collect heavy ammo. Every game I've played, one team has summoned a primeval immediately, then proceeds to do zero damage to him. 5 minutes later the second team summons, and both primevils have full health. It then just goes in a constant back and forth of invaders invaders invaders. Multiple cycles of DPS on the boss that yields zero results, until one round...for some reason...he melts like butter in lava. Sometimes it's the 3rd cycle, sometimes it's the 6th.

So in regular Gambit over time (and helped by killing the envoys) your damage is buffed by the Primeval Slayer buff. In Gambit Prime the buff goes up every time you drop the Primeval's shield. So the first time you drop his shield you're basically doing nothing to him. By the 3rd round you can do decent damage, but in most the games I've been in it's almost always canceled out by Invader kills (even a single kill). 4th round and on he just melts if you saved your heavy and supers.

I don't understand how any of these synths work. I'm supposed to synthesize a mote? I've got a weak Synthesizer...I have these synth consumables. I consumed a sentry synth, won a game of prime, nothing noticeable has happened. I dunno. Played 3 rounds of Reckoning, beat the boss on the 3rd attempt...nothing happened. After each round, went to collect our loot from the little mote bank thing...nothing happened.

As for Gambit Prime, it seems like filling the bank is just pointless game mechanic designed for us to kill bad guys to collect heavy ammo. Every game I've played, one team has summoned a primeval immediately, then proceeds to do zero damage to him. 5 minutes later the second team summons, and both primevils have full health. It then just goes in a constant back and forth of invaders invaders invaders. Multiple cycles of DPS on the boss that yields zero results, until one round...for some reason...he melts like butter in lava. Sometimes it's the 3rd cycle, sometimes it's the 6th.

I've only played GP with blueberries and it has been a pretty fun game type. More fun than regular gambit. And I can totally see how playing with an organized team would be a blast.

But as for the mechanics and results...I have no idea what is going on. It's cool that this game is adopting more and more RPG elements but it would be nice to know what the hell to do! Instead of constantly having to Google and Youtube everything.

...literally as I'm typing this I learn how to use the weak synthesizer. After I've already won 4 of 5 games I've played. facepalm. Well, twas a good B-day playing new stuff but my eyes are bleeding heavily and my face is about to fall off. Signing off.

Don't burn that last Envoy if you're being or are about to be invaded. That way you only proc damage phase when perfectly safe.

Only invade once you see their Primeval being hurt. That way, you'll definitely mess up their damage phase.

The boss cannot be burned to death in the first phase. If it gets down to about a third of its health in the first phase, it will raise its shield back up, no matter how much time has passed. It can, however, be burned on the second phase without safeguards.

Circle of Light buff + Wardcliff Coil + Taken Armaments. No further elaboration needed.

-Because of the damage scaling, you can actually put yourself at an advantage against the enemy by letting them summon their primeval first, then spamming them with Blockers (especially the 15 motes), since they can no longer Invade (Although we did get some Invaders post-primeval for some reason. Bug?). Combine that with invasions, and the enemy will have a tough time saving ammo for their third damage phase. At which point they'll also have to deal with a number of blockers. Almost won a 3v4 game with this accidental strat (especially satisfying when I dropped a tether in the middle of the Blockers, and let the enemy team find it the hard way after I had left).

- Just like regular Gambit, locating the enemy invader is really easy. They don't spawn on a point where enemies are coming in, and thanks to the new algorithm, they likely won't spawn next to a teammate. Keep your eye on the radar for the gaps in these factors. That red blip will give them away.

- Grenade launchers do even more damage now. Great for groups, the boss, and Invading. Furthermore, Fighting Lion uses primary ammo, so you'll likely never run out. Other than that, Linear Fusion rifles are still great; two shots for an Invader, and the boss stands still out in the open. If you have Jotunn, I can only assume it's also a good all-around weapon.

Fun gametype overall, even if each match is a bit long.

There's also this random quest to kill Taken bosses in the Dreaming City. I need 10 or so more, so hopefully this leads somewhere interesting. (No need to tell me it doesn't... I'm not banking on this being some major plot thread or anything.)

On the Lore front, there are six short-ish new books that are pretty interesting:

• Dust - Seems to reveal the true identity and some motives of the Nine. Pretty cool stuff on a hard scifi level.
  
• Ecdysis - Follows a member of the Yang Liwei's crew from leaving the Sol System, to becoming an Awoken, to becoming a Guardian, to becoming someone who is lost in grief and is completely obsessed with the Nine.
  
• For Every Rose, a Thorn - More stories from Shin Malphur about his life, The Last Word, and the Shadows... Guardians who are following somewhat in the footsteps of Dredgen Yor. This book contains quite the twist! (Though, the one Reddit thread I saw on the twist misunderstood things, I think.)
  
• The Man With No Name - Seems to be the origin and early decades of the Drifter. He interacted with the Iron Lords a good bit.
  
• Book: Stolen Intelligence - Sorta an "ongoing tales across Destiny" type collection of intel collected from across our solar system. Touches on things like the state of the remaining Eliksni, whether the Vanguard is relevant anymore, strange alien occurrences not caused by any known faction, questioning how the Red Legion were able to launch their surprise attack on The City, what Callus and the Leviathan are doing, more strange alien happenings that involve Eris Morn and frightening dreams, and the Drifter yelling at / having conversations with the Nine.
  
• The Warlock Aunor - Ongoing messages from a Warlock of the Praxic Order who is convinced that the Drifter is as big a thread to The City as the Hive or Vex or Cabal.

In general, I think this ongoing pace Destiny has established recently is a good thing. I like the ongoing flow of Lore. I do miss in-game story content, though. So much is in the air and at a pause right now, I eager to see what is actually next. But that might not happen until the Fall, after these three Seasons have run their course.

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.

The Reckoning I'm less sure about. We only ran one tonight, and it seemed pretty underwhelming. Hopefully higher tiers really kick it up a notch.

I ran it with randoms, which increases the difficulty since most of them were afk, constantly dead, or wandering around up top. At one point I died and a blueberry stood 3ft away from my ghost, looking right at it, and didn't revive me. I could tell he was tapping X and not holding it down long enough. Sigh.

I didn't know how lucky I was with my first group. The key to success is multikills, and we had two tethers, a Slova Bomb, and a Blade barrage. Rounds were about 3 minutes from drop to reward. After a bunch of runs, I got bored and went to do the Prime bounty to get my Invader helmet.
The next time I came back to get the armor pieces? Hooo boy. I have not seen such ineptitude since I was playing Comp. We're talking teammates running away from an easy rez, ignoring the summoned boss, dying, dying, dying. And dying. Splitting from the group, and dying.

The few times they went for a rez, the dead guardian was surrounded by enemies, and they died. Once, when I revived one, but got killed in the process, they literally ran through my ghost and left.

I must have matchmade with six or seven groups before I found one competent enough to finish the Primeval, but man. That first group of mine was something special.

But I did run it with some good randoms too. It was fun. If your group stays together and attacks each group one at a time, it goes pretty fast. I do like how it's only 6 minutes a round and I can come and go whenever I need to. It fits my usual short time to play well.

That part was fun, even though the one map became pretty stale in a single evening. Enemy spawns aren't 100% random, so you can somewhat map approaches, Super hotspots, and good cover spots fairly quickly. Hopefully Tier 2 and 3 are more interesting mechanic-wise, and will mean more experienced players running them. I don't quite see the loop between this and Gambit Prime sustaining the game for three months, but that really depends on what the other tiers bring to the table. Reckoning is so far not what I thought it would be, and really feels like Bungie took the wrong lessons from Escalation Protocol and other games that have the same kill-meter-based horde mode.

That said, it had me playing Destiny more in one night than ever before, so there's that...

Another little thing turned me off the new grind very quickly; I upgraded my synthesizer to the level 2 version (I think the call it “mediocre”?). My first thought was “cool, now I can craft better versions of the new armor”. Then I looked at how it worked and saw that creating level 2 motes eats up twice as many of the little tokens that you collect from Gambit prime, and right away I thought “well I’m not going to bother with any of this until I have the level 3 version... why waste the resources on armor that is going to be outclassed within a week”. Seems like a bit of a design flaw in the grind loop to me, but again, that’s just my take on it.

They use 'middling', not 'mediocre'... but you didn't even touch on the worst part of that particular mechanic:

There are 4 weekly Prime bounties, one for each character type - get a bunch of wins in Reckoning, and do a bunch of damage in Prime, and you finish one. You can only hold one at a time.

Finishing the first one gives you 2 items (and some infamy rank): a helmet for that character type (the only way to GET a helmet), and an upgraded synthesizer.

Once you have the Middling synthesizer, though... you can no longer earn Level 1 armor in Reckoning (because you only earn armor at the highest level your synthesizer can create). But that means once you complete ONE of those weekly bounties, you effectively lock yourself out from the other 3... because Tier II Reckoning events won't be available until Friday.

And when they ARE available, you'll immediately earn a Tier III synthesizer, which will lock you out of the last two options (until the 15th, when THAT opens).

I spoke to someone on the Gambit team last night... and that might just be an oversight in the mechanics. But it's a pretty annoying one, at least in the early days.

(I have 4 pieces of armor for two different sets, but cannot earn the 5th piece for either one, ever... because I don't have access to a synthesizer that can ever make Tier 1 armor again. All this is to say... be careful about using those weekly bounties.)

The Reckoning I'm less sure about. We only ran one tonight, and it seemed pretty underwhelming. Hopefully higher tiers really kick it up a notch.

I ran it with randoms, which increases the difficulty since most of them were afk, constantly dead, or wandering around up top. At one point I died and a blueberry stood 3ft away from my ghost, looking right at it, and didn't revive me. I could tell he was tapping X and not holding it down long enough. Sigh.

But I did run it with some good randoms too. It was fun. If your group stays together and attacks each group one at a time, it goes pretty fast. I do like how it's only 6 minutes a round and I can come and go whenever I need to. It fits my usual short time to play well.