Destiny 2: Lightfall

[tnman]

2 hours ago, Max Damage said:

Is there a rllmuk D2 pc clan?

 

I got the game from the Humble monthly, finished the main campaign with my warlock and may start doing some strikes etc. Is the season pass worth it?

 

Yes there is, link's in my signature.

 

Season pass is worth it if you feel that you want to have a bit more of what you've just had and will keep playing for some time. If you think you'll move on to another game in a week after rinsing the campaign, probably not.

[Max Damage]

Thanks, I'll look into the clan stuff if I stick with the game.

[Gorf King]

When Randos Get Snarky

 

 

[Mr Ben]

 

You even had the right emote for the right moment.

[Lyrical Donut]

8 hours ago, Gorf King said:

When Randos Get Snarky

 

 

 

You should've waited until a pack of explosive Thrall were close enough before the res for maximum impact.

[Uncle Mike]

Anyone want to do Raids and such tonight on PS4? I think we've got 3 so far.

 

 

[lordscotland]

iron banner rank up drops appear to give decent light level rewards at least

[Gorf King]

What's 'decent'? Powerful, or on par with overall level?

[lordscotland]

Seemed powerful, but it was on my alt who wasn’t fully levelled so may be premature...

 

[Janski]

I'm getting IB drops on par with my level.

[Mr Ben]

Ok my previous post about Saladman's inventory seems to be wrong. No idea why, but in game at the moment, the armour is not purchasable at all, so either bungie are lying, or something else is going on in that screenshot.

 

Apologies for giving anyone false hope about getting Iron Banner armour.

 

Oh and Eververse is selling an Iron Banner pack with the Iron Banner emote for about £10.....that didnt take long.

[Nate Dogg III]

That emote thing is so fucking dumb. Like I can't believe they would do that after all the work they've done to try and earn back some goodwill and trust. Just stick it behind some ridiculous token grind so it's at least theoretically achievable.

 

No doubt that his been pushed upon them from higher up but if you can't push back on this stuff you might as well pack up and go home. No one's going to buy it. They might as well put "[username] is part of the problem" in the killfeed whenever someone uses it.

[Gorf King]

Aye. I don't actually like the emote, so it's not a particular issue for me, but the contrast between its cash-only availability and the virtual impossibility of getting the armour plus ornaments for one character from actually playing IB in season 3 couldn't be more telling. 

 

I find galling Bungie's insistence on giving me a very limited number of tries each week (milestone engrams in general play; rank up packages in IB) at stuff which is RNG-based in their latest attempt at a reward/progression system. In the power game, I think it's fine - though sometimes frustrating - to insist on having the dumbest loot available, and on top of that to make each upgrade so miserly. So last week, my Titan had arms as his strong slot, which of course led to three of my five 'powerful' engrams being arms, giving him no progression at all. And the Warlock's Leviathan drops, due to similar bad luck and miserliness, gained him less than one whole point of power overall. Even this week, with the latter having done most of another fresh Leviathan run and got every non-raid powerful engram currently available, he's gained a total of three power points, taking him from 361 to 364 natural. Slow grinds are one thing; ones that are capped so tightly and don't either have smarter loot, or allow you to keep banging your head against the power wall beyond a few limited tries, are terribly unsatisfying when the purpose of your power climb is to tackle an event that caps out with level 400 enemies. And no non-exploitative way of getting a big enough team together to do it in the first place. (Hello, EP armour, the only armour I actually want.) 

 

Turning to IB, in season three it seems you have to have earned that armour from previous runs (which I haven't) in order to use the ornaments. Setting out down the grind of this IB, and just hoping that in some later run, or even a later season, they'll make available the armour to plug them into, is a real turnoff from the multiple grinds necessary. 

 

It's against this backdrop that Bungie make the IB emote something of which you can actually just say 'yeah, I want that,' and get it - but not by working for it, instead making it exclusively available from Eververse, for $10. And this against the backdrop of people complaining about the best stuff being in Eververse. In that context it's laughably tone deaf that Cozmo replied on the subject saying they're giving people what they want by not making it an RNG item but something you can get directly, hence no loot box, hence they're listening to the community. 

 

There remains something deeply unpleasant about Bungie's attitude to progression and rewards in their RPG, and after spending a fair bit of time back in the saddle I'm more convinced than ever that Eververse is at the pernicious heart of it. That, and an inability despite several attempts to build a loot, reward and progression system that feels more satisfying than frustrating.

 

On the other hand, Graviton Lance. So I guess you just keep plugging away.

[El Spatula]

Is iron Banner supposed to have drops less than your power level (and shite drops at that). I've just pinged 350 and all the drops where blues at level 339. Helpful!

[Gorf King]

Yes, it's not an activity that requires power, and it doesn't reward with any. 

[El Spatula]

Hmm. No idea how I can get above 350 power then. Nothing is dropping at more than 340

 

Guess I'm gonna have to try and party up for Nightfalls!

[Gorf King]

Yeah, you've got to do all your milestones, plus raids.

[Nate Dogg III]

I'm quite happy just doing the milestones now and climbing up a few points each week, to be honest. I found it frustrating at first (and it still is when the game flings another load of sidearms, SMGs and swords at me) but I've made my peace with it now. Unless my raid group magically comes back to life in September I'm quite happy for Destiny to just be this game I chill with solo for a few hours a week.

 

That said, it's still dumb that 98% of the drops you got are mathematically useless. It's bad enough that the legendary loot pool is so unexciting, to make it all worthless as well is just silly.

[Mafro]

I played some Iron Banner for the first time since the first one of D2 last night to get the crucible milestone out of the way. Surprisingly won four in a row then of course the last game was a mercy loss of me and 5 other solo players vs a clan. Banner loot seems shit and I didn't realise the drops were capped at 340 or 354, I remember the last time I played it seriously (I think the first one after TTK) and loot was dropping above your LL so that was a bit disappointing. Got tractor cannon drop so that was worth it I guess.

 

Still haven't seen the PS4 exclusive strike or the two Mars ones show up in rotation yet. This is ridiculous.

[El Spatula]

I did get Vigilance Wing mind, which seems awesome and kills mans very effectively. 

[Marmite]

1 hour ago, Nate Dogg III said:

I'm quite happy just doing the milestones now and climbing up a few points each week, to be honest. I found it frustrating at first (and it still is when the game flings another load of sidearms, SMGs and swords at me) but I've made my peace with it now. Unless my raid group magically comes back to life in September I'm quite happy for Destiny to just be this game I chill with solo for a few hours a week.

 

That said, it's still dumb that 98% of the drops you got are mathematically useless. It's bad enough that the legendary loot pool is so unexciting, to make it all worthless as well is just silly.

1

 

They've really fucked up the legendary engrams. Having one drop in the wild used to be a source of excitement, but now they essentially function the same way as blues (in terms of power level), except they might come loaded with a mod (and you get legendary shards for deleting them). 

 

They are introducing a mechanic for the heroic strikes that will drop a higher light level reward every between every 3-5 attempts (up to 360 I believe). I think they should stick a random chance against legendaries decrypting higher than your current power level. It would make them exciting again and give people that slim chance of levelling outside of the weekly milestones. 

[Gorf King]

Just now, Marmite said:

They are introducing a mechanic for the heroic strikes that will drop a higher light level reward every between every 3-5 attempts (up to 360 I believe). I think they should stick a random chance against legendaries decrypting higher than your current power level. It would make them exciting again and give people that slim chance of levelling outside of the weekly milestones. 

 

The 360 increase at the end of May will help people who haven't played much, but for anyone who's been doing all their milestones it'll surely come too late, for we'll all be over 360 natural by then. The sceptical part of me - which has now levelled up exponentially after feasting on Bungie's past progression exploits - is in full voice and tells me that Bungie must have known this before release. That it's just lip service, and their aim of retarding progress for people who wanted to be rewarded from day one for hitting the harder content has already been achieved. Almost like this wasn't a mistake at all, but another example of time-gated progression that did exactly what it was intended to do, at the expense of Heroics being next to useless for avid players both now and after the 29 May update.

 

The 360 cap is fine for me and reflects the difficulty of the content, but would have to have been in there from day one for it to be meaningful.

[Marmite]

Agreed. Wouldn't it be nice to be running around above 360 though and every now and then find a purple engram on the floor that moves you up a power level or two? Same for exotics, gone are the days those drops were exciting. It's all dupes and current power level now. We don't even get something useful like an exotic shard for deleting them now! 

 

I'm sure putting a very low random chance against those wouldn't speed up progression too much, but it would make drops feel more relevant more of the time. I'm not against milestones per se (yay, its reset day) but it would be nice to still have other ways to move forward when pissing around solo in the wild.

[Flub]

It looks to me like Bungie is struggling to figure out that classic MMO issue. Once people get to the level cap what do you expect them to do? It's a tricky one. You can't make enough content manually to keep everyone happy. Certainly not Bungie with their awful workflow. They need to work smarter. I've long thought that what MMOs (And games as a service like this in general) is really good quality procedually generated content. That's not easy to make either unless you're willing to do the r&D work upfront.

 

Unfortunately what I'm seeing is Bungie flailing around with quick fixes at weird extremes. I remain to be convinced that Bungie actually have a plan. The September expansion should be interesting but I'm not holding my breath. You have to laugh when their current solution is "Stop them getting to the cap as fast"

 

It's a shame really. The core gameplay is superb

[Gorf King]

They've solved it, to an extent, before - they're not exactly new to this game now. It doesn't have to be procedurally generated content, just varied and rewarding. In D1, the modifiers in strikes, the daily heroic, the various permutations of Challenge of Elders, the scoring, the rotating challenge modes in raids, all that stuff plus events like Iron Banner, Trials, sparrow racing, etc. All this added up eventually to a quite varied roster of activities with varied and attractive rewards for each.

 

The problem they had with D2 is that they started by binning all that old content. Then even in the limited new content they didn't add the variety of modifiers, challenges, rewards and incentives they had developed for D1 - for example, in vanilla D2 it was baffling that there were no heroic strikes, and they've only fairly recently added them in (though still no daily heroic story missions etc). They also have the problem that the rewards for most of this stuff just aren't there - heroic strikes in D1 ended up giving unique and actually useful (or at least attractive) gear and in RoI also formed a bridge for power levelling between the soft cap and the raid stuff (and Iron Banner took this even further, which does nothing at all now).

 

So the thing for me is that they'd largely figured all this out by 2017, and for some reason decided to unlearn it all.

 

I'm not even bothered about having to grind to get up to level, it's what you can or are allowed to do to get there that gets a little stale. The thing that holds most promise for me in this expansion is Escalation Protocol, and that's both way higher than my level and also obviously really well suited to bigger teams than three. Bungie just haven't made it legitimately possible to have bigger teams than that in planetary activities, and have basically made you run the same relatively low level stuff for many weeks over just to get you within spitting distance (bear in mind the end level enemies in EP are LL 400, way above even the max level you can reach). I just don't think there'll be enough people/enthusiasm left around in a few weeks to have a proper go en masse - the old content you have to do over and over again for milestones just isn't varied or rewarding enough in itself to justify a month or two's solid play.

 

Warmind's what most people say it is - a step in the right direction, but still badly flawed and not rewarding enough to justify longer-term effort. It's maddening given that by the last year of D1 we thought they'd solved all these problems reasonably well, but instead of making improvements upon that they decided to chuck it all away - including the stuff that worked brilliantly - and come up with something that felt like a first stab at it. As others have said, it felt like D2 was the beta, and the D1 in its last couple of years was the sequel. And the way they're slowly 'improving' D2 by copying over some of the ideas from D1 just enhances that impression. The right direction in this case appears to be backwards in time.

[Flub]

Part of the problem as well will be the well known workflow problems. When it takes 8 hours to load something up to edit you aren't going to be pushing out content and changes like Epic can. Pushing out tweaks and changes and new little nuggets to do can go a long way to reduce burnout.

 

I was disappointed they never did anything more with the generated stuff they introduced in Osiris. That sort of tech can be pushed in lots of different directions and can be used for group and solo content of various difficulties. Hopefully they'll have something in the pipeline.

 

Infinite forest this month.

We're going back to the moon to tackle the hive.

Various selectable modifiers. 

Solo, fireteam or raid configurations

New unique rewards scaled by instance difficulty

Every run different.

 

I don't play a huge amount but progression has felt really disjointed. When the game launched I played the campaign, ran a load of public events and ended up at a decent power level (I can't even remember what it was now). I stopped playing because I got bored running public events. I came back to play Osiris and it needed 200 power. Exactly what I ended the original campaign on. I did that and ended up at maybe 285? I come back for Warmind and had to grind to get the 310 power recommended to do the "campaign" (Lol. Just got around to doing it this morning. Blink and you'll miss it. I enjoyed the last fight though). I'm having fun grinding legendary shards this time though and have a nice selection of weapons to play with so I'm still playing. I'm not expecting my power to go much past the  346 it currently is before I burn out again though.

 

Variety and replayability. But don't focus entirely on group content as the end game. Even WoW occasionally remembers that

 

But hot damn does it feel good popping a thrall with Sunspot and the entire room exploding. More of that pls

 

 

[Gorf King]

I think I agree with their vision of endgame being essentially a heavily co-operative experience, requiring good coordination and communication to beat the toughest challenges. I just don't think they've provided a solid enough framework to facilitate that (Guided Games is a complete bust, the 3/4/6 fireteam split is a backwards step even from D1, and the lack of proper instance queuing or bigger premade teams for Mars' EPs is a major impediment to the enormous fun you can have in that activity with a big group). Nor have the rewards for getting there been good enough to date, or (in Warmind) the route varied or tiered enough.

 

I wouldn't like them to simplify endgame activities themselves though, not to the extent that proper teamwork isn't as necessary as it is now. That would lead to a Warframe-like 'endgame' where you can just solo the whole thing and be matchmade for everything. Which is fine in its own context, but for me Warframe lacks what I'd call an engaging endgame: it's fun to play and blast through Sorties and the Eidolons with randoms, but there's no real challenge to anything, no sense of a real goal or a real epic event, no massive feeling of satisfaction at an achievement. I like Warframe in an entirely different way, and for anyone just wanting to shoot the shit (and aliens) with mates, free of the hassle and difficulty of something like Destiny's raids, I'd recommend it highly. It also does things like a meaningful mod system, and proper class and weapon customisation, so, so much better than Destiny it hurts.

 

But you just don't get the epic raid-level events in a game like that, and I think if Bungie started making the ultimate 'endgame' activities totally accessible to people who don't want to use teamwork, that by definition would take much of the complexity out of them. And I like that complexity - but like anyone, I need to be incentivised to do the work necessary to work out and beat the challenge. I think if I could just solo queue my way to max level it'd diminish at least some of the attraction of that difficult content. They really need to work on ways of getting people to that level and making that proper team-based stuff more attractive and accessible. Guided Games sounded like it would a good step in that direction, but they royally screwed the pooch with that and I honestly can't see it being the solution now.

[Flub]

That's not what I'm getting at though. What I'm trying to say is that focusing entirely the super hard teamwork focused endgame they do now is actually leaving a lot of potential customers out in the cold.  Although given the workflow stuff they probably don't have much of a choice. By all means keep all that stuff but if that's all there is you're not making best use of potential player base.

 

It's not just about the journey to max power. It's about what you do to keep those players playing (And potentially spending) once they get there. What are you guys planning on doing once you all hit max power? I don't even care about being max power. I just want to play stuff that's fun. I think what the games as a service genre (Bleh) needs is someone to come in and shake things up. Bungie is slowly failing to learn all the stuff other online games failed to learn and we're not really advancing. I'd put Bungie just about ready to make Burning Crusade but I don't think they're capable

 

Bungie has a huge dev team. Is it a bad thing to suggest they try to cater for a wider audience? Don't dumb things down. Widen the scope. Remember that people like to do different things. I'm just suggesting things they could do.

 

Also guided games was never going to work because people are shit.

 

 

[Flub]

Saying all that I must give a shout out to Fortnite. Epic are doing a bang up job of getting content, updates, changes and events out there. Sure it's a much more limited game but dat workflow must be on point.

[Flub]

While Warframe is nice nobody does this shit like Bungie

 

https://i.imgur.com/9Zx5tvN.mp4