Destiny 2: Lightfall

[DonRumsfeld]

Have they changed the way you get the Powerful Engram for Heroic Strikes, I ran three this afternoon and have only a 33% completion for it.

[Gorf King]

Nope. 

[DonRumsfeld]

I did use a Gift of the Vanguard token on two of them.  Must investigate.

[pinholestar]

59 minutes ago, DonRumsfeld said:

Have they changed the way you get the Powerful Engram for Heroic Strikes, I ran three this afternoon and have only a 33% completion for it.

 

I had this too. Just ran 2 heroic strikes & didn’t get credit for either of them, neither in the milestone nor for the weapon quest. 

 

I got to 345 through quests, vendors & all the open world stuff & then started handing in milestones. Got a cloak & an exotic at 351 as rewards (so 346 base power essentially, as they both had the 5 power mod already in them). That’s taken me to 346 & I had an exotic engram decrypt at 346 too. 

 

They weren’t lying when they said it will take even the hardcore players months to reach the higher power levels. Powerful engrams appear to be only very small increments above your current power level. Haven’t run the raid yet so maybe the gains there will be more significant. 

 

I know they said they wanted to increase the gap between those who dedicate hours & hours every week & the more casual player & it’s good that not everyone will be max light level within a few weeks, but I suspect they may adjust it to make it just a tad easier as it’s looking to be an incredibly long grind as it is now.

[Hexx]

Does power even mean anything though?

[DonRumsfeld]

@Hexx Yeah, the Heroic Strikes are quite challenging now with your character being underpowered. Escalation Protocol last night seen me unloading a full auto rifle clip into a Thrall at power level 345, so I reckon that later in the event it’ll be like going down the stairs at the very start of D1. 

[pinholestar]

Well it does in the sense that the Escalation Protocol evidently requires a group of players to be a much higher power level than everyone is now in order to have a chance at getting rewards from it. The new raid layer is going to require a higher power level too, I assume.

[Janski]

Eek!

 

 

[Mr Ben]

Oh well, looks like you can disregard the first reddit post I linked to in my previous post

[pinholestar]

Having handed in a few milestones now it looks as if they give rewards with a base power level that's equal to your current power level including the +5 you get from mods.

 

i.e. If you're currently 346 you'll receive rewards that are 346 also, but once you've installed a +5 power mod in them they''ll be 351. I'm up to 350 now but still haven't done the raid which I expect will drop rewards a few levels higher.

 

This is all assuming you've got over the soft cap of 345 first.

[Ferine]

My initial impression: I'm fairly sure they've broken the frame timing, at least playing on a Pro outputting to 4K. It really undermines the feel of the game, arguably the series' one consistently good through line.

[Gorf King]

39 minutes ago, pinholestar said:

Having handed in a few milestones now it looks as if they give rewards with a base power level that's equal to your current power level including the +5 you get from mods.

 

i.e. If you're currently 346 you'll receive rewards that are 346 also, but once you've installed a +5 power mod in them they''ll be 351. I'm up to 348 now but still haven't done the raid which I expect will drop rewards a few levels higher.

 

This is all assuming you've got over the soft cap of 345 first.

 

Its almost that, but not quite - you get powerful engrams at your base level +5, regardless of whether you have actual +5 mods (or the weapons themselves) equipped. Blues hang back 5 under you base power level, and the majority of standard purples are par, or 340 for me at the moment (I'm 342 pure, so 347 if I modded everything +5 (which I haven't) - there's a 347 engram waiting for me with Zavala.

 

So I reckon you'll get that bunch of +5s every week for your menial milestones, and eventually grind up that way, but it'll take an age. You'll prolly need to do the raid activities to expedite your levelling, which seems fair enough. It's just odd that the current raids are all 300 but (I assume) award top level engrams.

[pinholestar]

8 minutes ago, Gorf King said:

 

Its almost that, but not quite - you get powerful engrams at your base level +5, regardless of whether you have actual +5 mods (or the weapons themselves) equipped. Blues hang back 5 under you base power level, and the majority of standard purples are par, or 340 for me at the moment (I'm 342 pure, so 347 if I modded everything +5 (which I haven't) - there's a 347 engram waiting for me with Zavala.

 

So I reckon you'll get that bunch of +5s every week for your menial milestones, and eventually grind up that way, but it'll take an age. You'll prolly need to do the raid activities to expedite your levelling, which seems fair enough. It's just odd that the current raids are all 300 but (I assume) award top level engrams.

 

Ah yeah that’s what I meant, I didn’t phrase it very well & was just needlessly complicating it with mention of mods I think.

 

The Nightfall being considerably easier than heroic strikes doesn’t seem right at all. After the real challenge of some of the heroic strikes this week, especially with the enemy one hit melee kill modifier, the Nightfall was an absolute cakewalk. And the raid dropping the highest power rewards but only requiring a relatively low power level is something of a contradiction too. It seems odd that they’ve re-engineered the grind to require those activities to make any serious progress but haven’t adjusted their difficulty in response.

[Van]

I haven't finished the previous DLC and I'm currently 200 miles away from my PS4.

 

If someone could let me know what emotions I'm supposed to be feeling right now that'd be great.

 

[KartoffelKopf]

Whoever it was who asked ‘does light matter?’ I can confirm that yes, it does. Me, Baring and Finite just took 1hr 20mins to do a single heroic strike. We were all 340-345 and just getting slaughtered and one-shotted by the genesis mind solar gun

 

It was ridiculously fun. Obviously in a few weeks we’ll breeze through it but for now it’s good to have a challenge and a need for a team strategy back in strikes.  

[Mr Ben]

We had the same issue with the new strike, because of so many thralls who can, obviously, one shot melee kill you. No radar meant it was a right twat, but we did it finally. Drops were naff, but we were only doing them for the milestone.

[mechamonkey]

I’ve missed this and really enjoyed my run through, solo of course, got to feel like a proper hunter in every release and savour it before the rush mentality sets in.

i felt like I’d missed a few cutscenes, I’m quite glad I had read the grimoire cards again lately, otherwise it would have made even less sense.

im guessing the next DLC will be a full on the band is back together vs the darkness affair.

anyway, bravo for the post storyline activities, with that and experimenting with the new exotics I’m having a great time, not looked at any spoilers yet so probably missed loads but it’s only a couple of days in so plenty of time for that before burnout. 

Finally without spoilers, that final voiceover was epic with the volume up, absolutely spot on!

[pinholestar]

Yeah, for all the (valid) criticisms of the story’s writing & brevity, that final encounter & voiceover was quite a moment. I feel a little sorry for the sound team at Bungie. They’re doing phenomenal work only for the rest of the company to sully it with their undercooked offerings.

 

Talking of beautiful sounds: Graviton Lance absolutely wrecks fools in the Crucible.  The exotic reworks are by far the best part of this update. So much so that I’m regularly changing up my loadout just for shits & giggles as I grind out patrols, strikes & secrets. Many of the core problems baked into the design are still there but the moment to moment firefights are now much closer to where they should be & it feels much more like Destiny 1 did at its best.

 

I can still see myself playing this for a couple of weeks & then leaving it though. I went in as blind as possible to this expansion & have deliberately not looked up any of the secrets so that the rewards will remain a surprise when the quest lines are seen through to completion. But once those are done I’m still not seeing much to keep me coming back every week like Destiny 1 did. I think the focus on cosmetics & most of the armour being ugly as sin is a large part of that. Monster Hunter, FF14 & Battlefield are more than enough to scratch that compulsive multiplayer/MMO itch for me these days.

[KartoffelKopf]

Esoterickk, the complete nutter, has beaten Escalation Protocol already. One of the people on his team was 370!? How is that even possible?

 

Anyway, looks like you need a key to open the last chest which could be annoying if you don’t have one. 

 

 

[Gorf King]

24 minutes ago, KartoffelKopf said:

Esoterickk, the complete nutter, has beaten Escalation Protocol already. One of the people on his team was 370!? How is that even possible?

 

Finish the campaign, do all the milestones and some of the quests, do the raids, switch characters and do most of that again. I'm already seeing a 347 milestone engram waiting for me at Zavala (352 with a +5) and I've only done five milestones on a single character - no raids at all (or even the Crucible milestone, or prestige Nightfall). So although I'm not hardcoring it this time around, if you want to I reckon it'd be perfectly possible to get to actual raid/endgame level in time for the raid activity, the same way it was for vanilla. (I'm guessing the raid lair is recommended at 360 or maybe 370, but knowing Bungie and D2 it wouldn't surprise me if it were set lower than the prestige Nightfall or possibly even heroic strikes.)

[Nate Dogg III]

Still enjoying this. It's so weird (in a good way) running around with an inventory that's 80 per cent exotics and having to make tough, fun choices about what to use. That Borealis masterwork is going to take me an age – I need 450 kills with a gun that caps out at 19 rounds, and that's before you take into account the fact that I absolutely cannot snipe for shit, and the fact that there are all these other fun guns I want to use.

 

Crimson is insane. I always loved it but you only had like 100 rounds and they ran out so quickly. Now you have 500. That's the sort of buff we all wanted to see. 

 

Anyway, finished off the campaign, dying my customary four times on the final boss, had to really tear myself away from it at 1am, and am already itching to get back. I don't think it's ever going to exert quite the same hold on me as D1 did at its peak, but that's probably for the best to be honest. 

[K]

Had a quick go on the Crucible last night. They really need to make the 6v6 mode a permanent fixture, it's clearly better than the standard 4v4 setup. I did have fun though, and Crimson seems to be extremely well-suited to PvP as well as PvE, to the extent that I fear it's going to get nerfed, even under Bungie's new regime where fun is temporarily permitted under certain strict conditions. That gun is flipping nuts - it reminds me a lot of Bad Juju, in that it has two seriously useful perks and would still be a great gun even without them.

 

Do you need to complete the story to unlock exotic masterwork cores? I haven't had any drop at all so far.

[Nate Dogg III]

2 minutes ago, K said:

Do you need to complete the story to unlock exotic masterwork cores? I haven't had any drop at all so far.

 

No, I got mine during a story mission, I think. I assume the drop rate must be very, very low, especially on the ones that just ask you to kill things.

[MDY]

Tarantula was REALLY good on the final boss - does Javelin level damage on a crit and much easier to hit consistently with..

Used Graviton Lance a lot last night - so fun! Need to see how much chaos the whole fireteam using them would cause..

 

I got the Borealis masterwork core also.. that's gonna take a while.. there are a few spots in the new area you can probably lazily rack up a few distance kills though..

Think it dropped after a public event - a failed escalation we got a few rounds into (?)

 

[instasis]

Played through 3 of the expansion missions in less than 2 hours last night, and that included doing two adventures, 2 patrols and grinding events for a while to ding lvl 28 so I could progress.

 

It's astoundingly lazy. Frame rate on a standard PS4 seems fucked too.

 

I guess I'll knock the final mission on the head tonight and then I got my money's worth from last year's pre-order? 

[K]

I'd say playing through the expansion story and then stopping is doing it wrong (in Destiny generally, not just this expansion). The expansion seems more focused on the sandbox, the game systems and the progression, rather than on new content, and so far at least, seems to be pretty successful.

[Mr Do 71]

9 minutes ago, Pelekophoros said:

Played through 3 of the expansion missions in less than 2 hours last night, and that included doing two adventures, 2 patrols and grinding events for a while to ding lvl 28 so I could progress.

 

It's astoundingly lazy. Frame rate on a standard PS4 seems fucked too.

 

I guess I'll knock the final mission on the head tonight and then I got my money's worth from last year's pre-order? 

 

Frame rate seemed crap on my Xbox One, as well.

[Nate Dogg III]

The frame-pacing does seem a bit off, yeah. 

[Thor]

Glad it wasn't just me. I noticed the framerate felt "off". 

[K]

I noticed that too. It's particularly obvious on the loading bit just after the title screen, with the little gyrating icon in the bottom right. Also, is it  just me, or does it take much longer to load your character after the title screen now?