Destiny 2: Lightfall

[Nate Dogg III]

Yeah it's just bugged to fuck. It's incredibly annoying.

 

Falling out with this a bit. The redesigned progression system is very frustrating, they still put the weekly milestone wall up in front of you but seem to do it even earlier now. I've been sat at 345 for days now, and not a single drop outside of milestones has made a difference to my overall PL. That would be fine were it not for the fact that all the content in front of me is a higher level than I'm going to be properly capable of for a couple of weeks at least. I struggled through Heroic Strikes for the milestone and quest progression, and it was fun and brutal, but you really are just working on a milestone, because the drops are rubbish (they really should drop at at least the recommended power level for the activity, giving meaning to you pushing yourself through them underpowered). Escalation Protocol is beyond me unless I luck into a busy instance. Datto says I shouldn't attempt the new raid until 370. Apparently the previous raids will drop gear above PL but a) I have no raid group, b) I didn't like the Leviathan raid at all, and c) I don't like the idea of running old content, after a new expansion drops, to be able to tackle the new stuff. 

 

It's all a bit of a mess really. The masterwork exotics should be something to chase but with such mad RNG on the catalysts (I've played 20 hours since the expansion launched and only had one drop), and very little happening while I wait for them because my power level is so static, I'm left with this feeling that I've got nothing left to do, even if I've actually got loads.

Still feels great though. There's nothing else like it.

[Kryptonian]

What’s this bug @Mr Ben? With the name coming up

[Ghost Pirate 101]

Some SGA for those running Leviathan to power up-

 

Exotic engrams from the underbelly chests are powerful drops, so make sure you do a chest run during or after the raid. 

[K]

I'm still into it - after all of a week - because there's just so much stuff to do. There's the milestones, the story missions, the post-story quests, the adventures, the  weapon forge quest from Curse of Osiris, the ornaments to unlock, masterworks to create, masterwork catalysts to chase, etc. Xur had new stuff last week. It feels like there's stuff to look forward to, as well as stuff to get on with. The ornaments are a nice incentive, I enjoyed unlocking the last set of vanguard ornaments. The Crucible ones cam fuck off though, there's no way I'm getting 150 sniper kills.

 

There does seem to be a lot of distance to cover before you get to 370, though. It feels a bit like the Rise of Iron days, except now you can't get high-level drops from the Crucible. It might help bridge the gap a little if there was an activity you could pick away at like that to give you a bit more power. It feels like this expansion is aimed at the high-level players, so hopefully the September one will bring everyone back in - one thing that does worry me a bit is that the steeper progression curve will leave more casual players behind. I don't want to go back to the days of friends with limited time to play being absolutely stomped.

[K]

19 hours ago, Gorf King said:

 

The Ornament for it's not bad either.

 

 

It's a great gun now, but I haven't ended up using it as much as I might because it suffers a little as you go up toward endgame and enemies' health is so high that you don't get headshot kills sufficiently frequently to trigger the ammo replenish/healing effects enough to make them really count. That might change as I stop being so hideously under-levelled, and it's still great at clearing trash mobs, but there are other DPS solutions in PvE that might warrant the exotic slot a little more. It's still excellent, but it has plenty of competition.

 

Which is a good thing, because it shows that the reworked exotic weapons are great. It's funny you mention Armanentarium because I got that the other night, too, and I was really disappointed to find it just added another grenade to a couple of subclasses, and had none of the other benefits of the D1 version. I don't see what they couldn't just make it as it was in D1 and have it hold extra heavy and (I guess) energy ammo as well. They do need to make a rework of exotic armour similar to that of exotic weapons, where they throw 'balance' out of the window and reach for power and fun instead. At the moment, the only exotic armour pieces I really rate as truly exotic are for the Hunter, which has a decent-to-amazing one for each subclass - Angry Bird Head for the orange man, Chest of Tubes for lightning rod guy, and All The Ropes, All The Time for the sneaky dude. All exotic armour should be that good really, and every time I ditch the Hunter and strap on a set of oversized Titan shoulder pads and jewelled crotch dome I lament at how ostentatiously bulky the set is for what little it really accomplishes. 

 

(The Escalation Protocol set does at least look great, though.)

 

Even when underlevelled it feels pretty great, just because one of the perks auto-reloads, and the reload is amazingly quick for a hand-cannon anyway. It's a struggle going back to, say, Better Devils after a few rounds with Crimson, as you have this seemingly endless period of vulnerability when you're reloading the gun in slow-motion. With Crimson, the bullets (and the hits) just keep coming. That said, I did struggle a bit on the Heroic Strike playlist with the one-hit-kill melee modifier, as it wasn't quite fast enough on really big mobs, and if even one thrall got to you, you were fucked.

 

With the exotic armour pieces, I thought they were a bit boring in D1 as well, outside of a few instances where they had really tangible effects like the Helm of Saint-14 & Greavsie-889, or the Armanananananamentarariariaium. There was that one where you got one extra ball of light in a super, or the one where you had a smaller turning circle when sprinting, and other such game-changing perks. They need to beef them up a lot, as at the moment, I'm choosing loadouts based on how they look, rather than what perks they'll give me.

[Flub]

25 minutes ago, K said:

There does seem to be a lot of distance to cover before you get to 370, though. It feels a bit like the Rise of Iron days, except now you can't get high-level drops from the Crucible. It might help bridge the gap a little if there was an activity you could pick away at like that to give you a bit more power. It feels like this expansion is aimed at the high-level players, so hopefully the September one will bring everyone back in - one thing that does worry me a bit is that the steeper progression curve will leave more casual players behind. I don't want to go back to the days of friends with limited time to play being absolutely stomped.

 

I'd just like to be able to chip away at my gear without having to chase weekly milestones or run super hard content. I like running around the open world with maybe a non-heroic strike here and there. There has to be a better balance. Chances are once I get my Hunter and Warlock geared up to the 340s I won't be playing again until September. I can't believe that's the Bungie business plan.

 

I was really hooked on the game again until I read up on the new grind.

[K]

Just now, Flub said:

 

I'd just like to be able to chip away at my gear without having to chase weekly milestones or run super hard content. I like running around the open world with maybe a non-heroic strike here and there. There has to be a better balance. Chances are once I get my Hunter and Warlock geared up to the 340s I won't be playing again until September. I can't believe that's the Bungie business plan.

 

I was really hooked on the game again until I read up on the new grind.

 

I suspect the grind won't be that difficult - after one week, I've got weapons and armour at 350, after being well below that at the start. It'll be interesting to see where I am after this week. And I try not to think of it as a grind - it's a series of activities that I really enjoy, with a few incentives in place to act as little rewards at the end. When I stop enjoying the actual shooting, I'll just stop playing the game for a bit.

[Flub]

The problem for me is that as far as I can tell at 345 the numbers stop going up for me in the content I enjoy doing. I don't really want an end game challenge. I just want to run around shooting aliens a bit to relax. Fine if I'm not the target audience now though. I can just come back in September

[ph0rce]

As long as you’ve got a raid team, which I understand isn’t possible for everyone, then the progression is just fine ( well as fine as it’s ever been ). 

 

The fact that they’ve made all the raid drops powerful, but not increased the difficulty, is a nice touch, and the exotic engrams from the crap chests too. 

 

Outside of that, you’ve got the milestones, the forge tablet weapons, the chance of drops from the Cayde chests, etc. 

 

I mean it’s not perfect, but it’s totally workable. The new weapons make the grind fun again, plus masterworks & catalysts to chase.

 

They need to sort out the armour as someone said above, both in terms of perks & also some variation for the masterworks, as they are useless at the moment. The perks on the raid armour show that they could do something cool, even if the Titan raid armour is the ugliest thing in the world. 

[Gorf King]

You can still run around shooting aliens a bit to relax, though. You don't need anything higher than 345 for that (350 with mods). And even if you do that, you'll get more powerful stuff each week from the milestones that relate to just doing the easy level content (flashpoint, Nightfall (really odd to say that now, but it's among the easiest things you could possibly do, basically a low-level strike), casual Crucible, etc). So if you only log on a bit each week you can just go super-casual for a few hours and still get some stuff to level you up a bit.

 

It's also easier than ever - if you get a group or LFG - to get powerful gear from the first two raids, as they're now super under levelled even for casual players yet give powerful rewards.

 

Having said that, I'm like Nate in that I haven't got a raid group (and cba to lfg it), and also like Nate in that I just don't like Leviathan (not the difficulty, which it hasn't got, but the activities in it and the whole tone of it I find a bit grating). So basically I'm just getting the same powerful engrams that someone playing super-casually can get.

 

It doesn't really bother me though, because there's nothing I really want from the game, with the exception of that Escalation Protocol armour set, simply because it's the first armour set I've seen that looks really great. And unfortunately that will require a big group and/or very high light levels to bag, on repeated attempts over the course of a few weeks. So that's some time off, and at the moment I've some doubt that I'll last that long, because just crawling through the weekly milestones won't hold my interest (I don't really want to just log on and do patrols and public events, and the new NF, but I wouldn't have wanted to do only that for very long in any version of Destiny).

 

I think progression is a problem, but the far bigger problems are still that there's nothing much all that desirable in the game - the armour in particular is almost 100% suckage from a utility point of view, and with the exception of the EP stuff, looks pants as well - and that end game. We all know it can be a pita to get a regular raid group together, and it's even harder to do that newest, latest raid blind, with all the struggles that entails. But we also know it's been the best thing about the Destiny series. I just don't think the concept of raid lairs, tied to a place (Leviathan) that's tonally so out of whack with the rest of the game, is compelling enough to justify all the effort. Admittedly, I have no idea beyond the opening-the-door section what's in the new lair, but although the mechanics for that bit were quite enjoyable, my first and only foray into it at the weekend brought back some of the old (and bad) feelings from Leviathan: that I was just engaging in a mini game totally disconnected from the story and characters I'd encountered in the campaign and subsequent adventures. It just felt like an optional add on. 

 

They really need to get back to something like TTK, or even Wrath or Crota, in terms of introducing a new enemy, and seeing their story right the way through to a final confrontation in the raid. Make it part of the experience, rather than a tacked on bit at the end. Make it tonally, aesthetically, narratively satisfying and of a whole with the DLC. Here, it should be (might end up being, but doesn't start that way) all Rasputiny and Hivey. That EP armour set should come from the raid really, and have perks. Remember the armour and ornaments we got from the raids in Age of Triumph? And the exoticised weapon sets? Man, how fucking great they were to look at, and how even better they were to use. Just super desirable, and every set tonally part of the content it capped off. Looking at the stuff on offer from the latest mini raid it simply doesn't seem worth doing (apart from for light level), and being in that opening section just feels like dropping out of the world of Rasputin and the Hive gods to go play in some Disney Roman theme park again.

 

They desperately need to get their act together for Taken Queen and make the whole of the journey through the new content congruous and satisfying all the way through, both in terms of the epicness of the rewards and the epicness of the journey itself. Give the whole journey some weight, and consequence, and glory at the end. When the most attractive part of the DLC is basically a glorified public event (EP), and it also gives the coolest rewards - and you realise this, so you design it to take weeks to get to a level to beat it unless you grind out old and unattractive raids for light level rather than any rewards you actually want - you've really got a problem.

[Flub]

6 minutes ago, Gorf King said:

You can still run around shooting aliens a bit to relax, though. You don't need anything higher than 345 for that (350 with mods). And even if you do that, you'll get more powerful stuff each week from the milestones that relate to just doing the easy level content (flashpoint, Nightfall (really odd to say that now, but it's among the easiest things you could possibly do, basically a low-level strike), casual Crucible, etc). So if you only log on a bit each week you can just go super-casual for a few hours and still get some stuff to level you up a bit.

 

 

 

 

That's good to know. Cheers. And lol. I didn't even know about Flashpoints. That's rewards for doing the stuff I like. I'd better get those unlocked

[Mr Ben]

3 hours ago, Kryptonian said:

What’s this bug @Mr Ben? With the name coming up

When you launch the heroic strike playlist it usually says in the bottom left hand corner in large writing "Heroic Strike Playlist" with its modifiers above those words. However when it bugs it will change to the name of the strike, such as "The Inverted Spire" with the modifiers above that. Cancel it, and launch the heroic strike playlist again, until it doesnt do that and the words dont change.

 

I cant verify that that was the issue 100%, because prior to that happening, I did the Earth strike with the Taken, and it stuck me in front of one of those Taken blight things that cover doors that you have to shoot, but kept me in a loop of "joining allies" all the time, regardless of me shooting the blight and then moving through the door. I had to launch a Crucible match to get out of the loop (and then cancel that, once I left).

[Scruff]

3 minutes ago, Mr Ben said:

I had to launch a Crucible match 

 

My condolences. Sorry for your loss

[K]

3 minutes ago, Mr Ben said:

I cant verify that that was the issue 100%, because prior to that happening, I did the Earth strike with the Taken, and it stuck me in front of one of those Taken blight things that cover doors that you have to shoot, but kept me in a loop of "joining allies" all the time, regardless of me shooting the blight and then moving through the door. I had to launch a Crucible match to get out of the loop (and then cancel that, once I left).

 

I think that's a separate bug, because I've been careful to only go into the strike playlist when it doesn't give the name of the strike, but have still fallen foul of that 'joining allies' loop. It seems to happen quite frequently on that strike, as I've seen it a few times with people dropping out and being replaced by players who get stuck in this loop.

[Mr Ben]

Yeah, I did that strike with no issues later, likely as no-one quit out.

 

2 minutes ago, Scruff said:

 

My condolences. Sorry for your loss

 

7 minutes ago, Mr Ben said:

 I had to launch a Crucible match to get out of the loop (and then cancel that, once I left).

[K]

Having a player trapped in that loop can actually help you on that strike, as it's impossible to wipe. It gets very tedious having to wait out the clock after the two active players get killed, and it's obviously no fun at all for whoever's in the loop. Not exactly the optimum way to do it.

[Mr Ben]

What was even stranger was that all 3 of us in the strike were trapped in the same loop, at the same spot.

[Qazimod]

It seems odd that they haven't really tweaked the milestones to take the DLC content into consideration. Or maybe they have and I haven't done enough of the old milestones... but milestones were one of the most welcome features of D2, and I kind of expected EP and Heroics to feature more prominently. The same could be said for the clan goals as well - no attempts to try and integrate the new content into the goals for those that have that content.

 

I guess it might be because not everyone has the content, but that never stopped them from plastering the D1 map with icons I couldn't touch until I caught up with the bundle that launched with TTK. 

[Kryptonian]

5 hours ago, Mr Ben said:

When you launch the heroic strike playlist it usually says in the bottom left hand corner in large writing "Heroic Strike Playlist" with its modifiers above those words. However when it bugs it will change to the name of the strike, such as "The Inverted Spire" with the modifiers above that. Cancel it, and launch the heroic strike playlist again, until it doesnt do that and the words dont change.

 

I cant verify that that was the issue 100%, because prior to that happening, I did the Earth strike with the Taken, and it stuck me in front of one of those Taken blight things that cover doors that you have to shoot, but kept me in a loop of "joining allies" all the time, regardless of me shooting the blight and then moving through the door. I had to launch a Crucible match to get out of the loop (and then cancel that, once I left).

 

Thanks

[Flub]

Are milestones per character or per account?

[Nate Dogg III]

Character. 

[DonRumsfeld]

Borealis is a beast in the Heroic strikes this week. Zhan and the Inverted Spire boss both down very quickly.  I guess any void sniper should do the trick though.

[Broker]

Does escalation protocol scale up from 370 after the first wave? 

 

Also so what are all the things that drop on mars for? I’ve got a Rasputin weapon thing, and a glowing cube memory thing, and 3/4 resonant somethings?

[pinholestar]

2 hours ago, DonRumsfeld said:

Borealis is a beast in the Heroic strikes this week. Zhan and the Inverted Spire boss both down very quickly.  I guess any void sniper should do the trick though.

 

Tractor Cannon, Nightstalker & a Void energy weapon gave me the most fun I've had in this game since release. Paired with teammates who are also running Void weapons it's a combination that just absolutely obliterates bosses.

[Mr Ben]

That would be handy on the ogre in Escalation Protocol, as long as you can get close enough to hit him with the tractor cannon.

[Flub]

I'm starting to see the appeal of the Warlock jump but it's very situational and tends to rely on you being up high in the first place.

 

I also can't decide which gun I like the best out of Sunshot and Graviton Lance. Explosions seem much easier to chain with sunshot but GL needs less reloading.

[Flub]

[Hexx]

10 hours ago, Broker said:

Does escalation protocol scale up from 370 after the first wave? 

 

Also so what are all the things that drop on mars for? I’ve got a Rasputin weapon thing, and a glowing cube memory thing, and 3/4 resonant somethings?

 

The glowing memory thing is part of the hidden stuff. There's loads of little markers around that need shotting (with correct element). You get a bit of lore and it progresses you towards a reward.

 

The Resonant things - get 4, make a key, find a chest where it hints by following the sound

[K]

This is an interesting article on Destiny’s worst strike (including both games), and why it’s so frustrating to play:

 

https://kotaku.com/the-most-hated-strike-in-destiny-2-1826049384

 

Its good to hear that Bungie are apparently thinking about how to make it more fun. Top of my list would be stopping or massively reducing the invisibility aspect, a lot of the time it feels like the scripting has broken because there’s no boss to shoot and no indication of where he might be. 

[Phelan]

Glass on heroic strikes can fuck right off. Just spent an hour on Mercury strike then had to go to orbit or wreck everything in my house. The boss one shot kills you, the splash damage is immense and you only have half health so you die with one but from Minotaurs. It’s not fun in the slightest. 

 

Its on par with the above article as one of the worst to play.