While Director's Cut #1 left me with some troubling concerns (as much as a videogame can anyway), Director's Cut #2 of 3 here has me more pleased then not. This is because, for one thing at least, I don't have to guess anymore.

I'm going to leave my largest post for the inevitable 3rd and final post. I'll put a pretty bow on it.

But when we look to the future, we feel like the Power system may benefit from a rework further down the road. There’s real potential in creating more agency for players, figuring out if Power should be prestigious or not, and taking on the challenge of how to keep players relatively close together Season after Season, while still allowing them to make progress.

I'd be happy if they ditched power altogether and replaced that "prestige" with ornaments or other visible badges rather than just a number. But really my only gripe is the rush to level up to raid. I hate that first week or two of each new release. I feel like I have to drop everything and grind or else I will be a hindrance to my raid team.

I have to disagree with you here.

People are already making pretty diverse builds with the system we have now. Yes, it’s always focused around killing things and that won’t change. But there’s some pretty great builds focusing on different exotics and keeping buffs going.

It’s a good direction for the game to go.

All of this said, Power in Destiny 2 is still imperfect.

Yes it is. By virtue of the fact it exists at all.

Also… the RPG elements. I can't help but feel this is a fool's errand to try to bring these out. The game just isn't an RPG. It's an MMO FPS. In a real RPG, there are many paths to success beyond shooting. You can customize your character in Deus Ex to win by never firing a shot. But with the goal of the game being 'kill things quickly', there's basically just going to be one set of customizations that is optimal unless the game activities incentivize or allow other types of play. But when the game is built around playing things over and over as efficiently as possible to get gear…

I don't think it's going to work.

Deus Ex is a poor example to compare with, by virtue of the fact that DE has never professed to be an action game. DE games have generally been story driven, with various avenues of approach to advance the story. To my knowledge, there isn't an activity in all of Destiny that you can complete without firing a shot; short of a couple of patrol types, and seasonal things in social spaces. That is say that there is a specific action-gameplay loop that underpins more or less all of the content. Completely apples and oranges. Destiny has never professed to be a "real" RPG by your subjective definition.

Destiny is an action shooter before anything else that defines it. Bungie has been an action-game company all along. You know this better than many. So stop being a stick in the mud. If you want to challenge yourself; go spec a 100% support Warlock and carry a team through Reckoning without firing a shot. I'm sure it can be done.

It's a meaningful critique to say that the focus of the time spent ingame is being deliberately shifted by design. Or even that the grind-game is being expanded, and the result will likely be more of that same grindy behavior expected of the player base, with longer intervals between feelings of success, because now that players have been playing for years and know what feels good, they've essentially moved the goalposts to make the goals the players have now established for themselves harder to achieve by orders of magnitude.

But claiming a thing is not another thing that it never professed to be is pointless.

Furthermore, I'm pretty sure that A) Bungie is aware that there's always going to be a meta, and B) they value a range of player choice within said meta; as nobody finds a lack of options desirable in a game they've made into a hobby. I feel like bringing the viability of Ward of Dawn forward is just one example of this.