Destiny 2 - Out Come The Big Guns (part deux, redux)

[Gorf King]

Rllmuk Destiny 2 clans (please go to the relevant thread in Online to see how to apply etc)

 

Rllmuk Renegades: https://www.rllmukforum.com/index.php?/topic/301604-rllmuk-renegades-clan/

 

rllmuk Overlords: https://www.rllmukforum.com/index.php?/topic/301612-destiny-2-xbox-one-clan-rllmuk-overlords-muko/

 

Rllmuk Establishment: https://www.rllmukforum.com/index.php?/topic/301885-rllmuk-establishment-clan-ps4-to-hell-with-those-renegades/

 

How to Heroicise public events (credit to https://www.reddit.com/user/thatdudereeg)

 

 

A mini guide to levelling and power in Destiny 2

 

Early game

The very early game is simple: just play through the story missions. Along the way you’ll start to open up activities outside of the main storyline. You should try some of those out as you go along - they are marked for recommended power levels, so just pick the lower ones of each type and give them a go as you progress. If you do this, you’ll hit character level 20 before the end of the story, and if you don’t hit 20 Zavala will automatically rank you up to 20 right at the end.

 

Mid game: what power means and how it is calculated

From 20 onwards is where the real power game starts. At character level 20, you’ll start to take more notice of the other number on your character sheet, your power level. This tends to be approximately 10x more than your character level as you go up, so if your character is at level 19, your power level is generally somewhere between 181-199.

 

Your power level is the sum total of the most powerful loadout your character can equip. Each character can equip 8 items that have power associated with them - 3 weapons, 4 pieces of armour, and a class item. The weapons have a value called Attack and the wearables have a value called Defence - these are just synonyms for power. To work out your character’s current power level, the game adds the power of each of the equipped items up, and divides by 8. This gives you your current power level.

 

The game compares this overall power level to the power level of the enemies you face, and this determines how much damage you give to and take from them. If you are under their power level you do less and take more damage, and this gap increases the higher they are over your power level. If you are exactly on par, your weapons so 100% of their damage to the enemies and theirs do 100% to you. If you are overpowered, the game quite quickly puts a cap on the disparity, so you can still easily be killed by enemies in the starting area if you get careless and are overwhelmed (e.g. in a hectic public event) - so you’ll never be totally overlevelled, like you can be in games such as Diablo. But if you are below the enemies’ power level, you will eventually be unable to damage them at all and they will one-shot you. For this reason, if you are dramatically out-powered you will often be barred from certain ‘impossible’ activities until you have levelled up.

 

Mid game: power bars and getting more power 

To level your power up, you need to obtain higher power items. These come in the form of drops from enemies, from chests, and from rewards for completing activities and from NPCs. You will be introduced to a variety of NPCs throughout the game, most of whom will accept various from of tokens from you in exchange for reputation points. Enough of these and you will rank up with them, earning a reward in the form of a new item or two. Tokens are gained by completing activities in the world, such as strikes, patrols, public events, Crucible matches, etc.

 

The game determines the power level of the next drop/reward you get by looking at your overall power level and giving you an item that is one or two, or sometimes a few, points higher. In this way you eventually build your gear and weapons’ power and that of your character.

 

Currently the maximum possible theoretical power of any item - and therefore your character - is 350. For context, strikes are pitched at a recommended minimum power level of 140, Nightfalls at 240, and the raid at 260-280. Prestige (hard mode) Nightfalls are pitched at 300, and it is likely that the Prestige mode raid will be higher still.

 

Mid-late game: more detail on the power game above 265

Those are the basics, but the way in which Destiny works out your average power level deserves some more detailed explanation.

 

When looking at what level item to give you for your next drop/reward, Destiny doesn’t just look at what you have equipped. It also looks at the items you have in your inventory, in your vault, and even on other characters, and works out what the highest value loadout from all these items your current character could possibly equip (this follows the rule that you can only equip one exotic weapon and one exotic armour piece at any one time). Having worked out your max power loadout, the game then drops a blue or purple engram a small number of points higher (though exotic items drop higher still). But this only happens until your character reaches power level 265.

 

Purple/blue drops and engrams seem to stop rising in level at 265. This makes many people think they've hit a plateau when they get to 265, as when they get to 266, then 267, they're still getting drops at 265, under their current power level. This remains the same until you hit 271, at which point they drop at 266. And this continues on, so at 280 you get drops at 275. You always get purple and blue drops at 5 levels below your level.
 
So how do you progress? The two basic elements of progression beyond 265 items are getting 'Powerful' engrams - purples that drop at over your power level - and exotics, which drop like powerful ones but also have an extra +5 mod plugged in by default. So above 265, you'll need these to actually improve your overall power level - do activities like the weekly milestones, Nightfalls, the personal Clan clan xp contribution, and other activities that give powerful engrams to progress. And anything - which is literally anything - that might give you exotic drops if you're lucky. The 'normal' engrams are still good for getting gear and levelling up guns and armour you like to something approaching your level. And they're good for breaking down into materials too. (You can level up weaker items that you like by applying a higher-level item to them, but this consumes the higher item and also costs legendary shards, which you can only get by breaking down other legendary (purple) or exotic (yellow) items.)
 

+5 mods and exotics

If the above is true, why am I 271 and still getting drops at 265?, you might ask. That's probably because you have two exotics equipped. As I explained above, every exotic comes with a built-in +5 power mod, which means that two of them (one weapon, one armour) add +10 power, which gives you an overall +1 power level (ignoring decimal places). So your real power level at 271 if you have two exotics equipped is actually only 270, and you'll therefore get 265 drops, 5 levels under, because +5s are always ignored when calculating the power of your next drop: they are of use in the field, but not for levelling progression. And similarly, if you have extra +5s plugged in to other gear you've equipped, these too will count towards your power in the field but not in levelling - you'll always get normal drops 5 levels lower than your actual power minus all the +5s.

 

End game: 300 and above (where 300 is the cap, 305 with a full +5 set)
The same pattern continues as above except that once you reach 300 without mods, some vendors' engrams are offered at 295, some at 296-299, and at least one at any one time at 300. These appear to rotate on 30 minute cycles per planetary vendor, and a longer cycle for some tower vendors (notably Ikora and Zavala). So it's possible to wait until a particular vendor hits 300 and cash in all your tokens during that 30 minute window in order to stock up on more 300 equipment. In this way you can get infusion fuel to bring all your subpar items up to max level.

 

How do you find out who's selling the 300 items? Either the old-fashioned way - travel to each vendor and try your luck until you get a good one - or make use of one of the resources spring up which rely on reports from Guardians to flag up who's selling 300s. http://destiny-vendor-gear-tracker.com/ seems the most reliable one so far.

 

In my experience, blues (and sometimes purples) also drop in the field at 296-299 or 300 from time to time. This may be related to the times when the planetary vendor cycles to the higher number value. The relationship here is not clear at the time of writing (03/10/17).

 

General info

 

D2 Release dates

PS4 and Xbox 00:00hrs Wednesday 6 Sept (i.e. midnight Tues) in all regions - but disc copies might be able to access servers earlier as soon as NZ is up (1pm Tuesday BST)

PC Tues 24 Oct 6pm BST

 

Event release dates (PS4/Xbox)

Raid - 6pm Wed 13 Sept

Trials - 6pm Fri 15 Sept

First Faction Rally - 26 Sept - 2 Oct

Iron Banner (Control) - 10 Oct

Prestige mode raid - 18 Oct

First Leviathan raid challenge Tue 31 Oct

 

PS4 exclusives

Strike - Lake of Shadows (European Dead Zone)

Armour - Terra Concord set for Titan, Tesseract Trace IV for Warlock, Icarus Drifter for Hunter

Ship - City Apex

Exotic weapon - Borealis sniper rifle (switchable between all three elemental damage types)

PVP map - Retribution

 

Trailer 1 (March 2017):

 

 

Trailer 2 (May 2017):

 

 

Moving from D1 to D2

You won't carry over the gameplay substance of your character or weapons/armour from Destiny. You will carry over what are essentially personalisations and a few honorary cosmetics. From The Road Ahead announcement announcement: 

 

Quote

Destiny 1 power, possessions, and Eververse-related items and currency will not carry forward. [... but] we do plan to preserve your character personalization. We are going to recognize the dedication and passion you’ve shown for this world. Specifically, the class, race, gender, face, hair, and marking selections for all characters that have achieved Level 20 and completed the Black Garden story mission will carry forward. We also plan to award those veteran accounts with honors that reflect your Destiny 1 accomplishments.

 

It's also got Cabal in it and lots of cutscenes.

 

Eyes up, Guardian.

[KriessG]

First! Despite the fact I stopped playing Destiny after TTK I'm well up for this and expect it to be great, they've learnt a lot and this got delayed I believe to give them more time to work on it. I like the sound of this being more populated.

[PeteBrant]

Is there any word (read: Idle speculation) on whether there is going to be a hard reset and completely new guardians? At first I was anti this. But I think Destiny needs to freshen up and let the existing Guardians retire, put thier feet up and let a new crop have a go. Hard reset I say.

[Gorf King]

No word on that at all bar the really early stuff where they said you'd continue on, and the later stuff suggesting there'd be a harder reset.

 

Personally, I'd like it to be all-new, even to the extent of getting rid of existing classes - burn it all to the ground and start again (except for the existing races and planets themselves, which ain't gonna happen of course). But I doubt it'll go anywhere near that far. I expect they'll get rid of all your levels, and gear, and stuff like that, though. It will be a reset in that sense. It has to be, for the sake of welcoming new players on a fairly even playing field. It'd be a massive mistake if they didn't do that imo, and I'd also rather just start from scratch myself.

 

I do think they're treating this as an entirely separate and new game, based on the lore and events of the first - a sequel rather than an expansion.

[Stanley]

Yeah has to be hard reset to create a level playing field for old and new players alike. Allowing players to import characters, armour, weapons etc. could put prospective players off. 

[Black Cat Supremacist]

I've accepted the characters aren't transferring across despite the suggestion that they would pre Destiny 1. Obviously part of the original selling point was multiple games in which your character continues their progress. That's OK, it's not happening, so be it. But I do think there should be some sort of token gesture to the Destiny 1 players that put all those hours in. 

 

Despite it being possibly my most played game ever and the one that has defined this generation for me, I have had always had a feeling that Bungie don't really know what they're doing. They also badly need to work on their PR skills. 

 

 

[Gizamaluke]

A more open approach with Destiny's lore and best of genre mechanics has me very interested.

[Purin]

60fps multiplayer I hope.

[Muz]

Excited about this. I think if there is a visible performance difference between it running on the ps4pro and scorpio it'll probably be will probably sway me towards buying the scorpio.

 

As much as I am looking forward to it...does anyone have as much fear as me of it taking over your life again?

[Gorf King]

I can't see me switching from PS4 even if there is a visible difference (which I doubt there will be): the most important thing about Destiny is the team(s) you're in, especially the availability of end-game content squads for raids etc, and unless there's a massive migration from PS4 for this title there's always been a far more active end-game community on PS4 on this forum. Plus, despite expecting a kind of reset, I'm sure some carryover will happen - even if cosmetic - and I can't see that happening across platforms.

 

I'm hoping D2 does dominate my gaming time, because although I've played some great titles since the Destiny monoculture died out, nothing's captivated me as much as it did in its prime, and I'd love for that to happen again. The online scene on PS4 is fractured to pieces now, everyone playing bits of other titles and flitting from one to the next. It'd be great to see several pages of my friends list all active in the same game and the clan roster all fleshed out live again. I don't think any title other than D2 is likely to make that happen.

[Jonathan_Kerr]

I never played Destiny. I didn't have a PS4 the time it was released and by the time I did, I think most of my friends had moved on.

I'll definitely give D2 a look. I heard a few complaints about the first game, but also that Bungie addressed most of them?

[Harsin]

My worry is that it's goi g to be built from the ground up for microtransaction bullshit.

[Gorf King]

3 hours ago, Jonathan_Kerr said:

I never played Destiny. I didn't have a PS4 the time it was released and by the time I did, I think most of my friends had moved on.

I'll definitely give D2 a look. I heard a few complaints about the first game, but also that Bungie addressed most of them?

 

A lot were, but it depends on the complaints. It'll never be truly open world (I hope), so those that didn't like the closed-down episodic aspect of it won't have ever got on with it. The missions were repetitive in vanilla, and although they got a lot less so, and more varied, in subsequent expansions, they're still designed to be played over and over again. Which brings us to grinding, and to RNG - that stuff has been toned down a bit (e.g. by having some specific quests for specific rare items rather than RNG), and by creating more routes to levelling than just the core PvE endgame - but ultimately it is a game based on levelling up and acquiring gear. So people who just wanted a shooter where everyone has the same weapons and abilities, and you don't have to complete specific encounters or achieve particular levels, won't have been turned by the new content.

 

Basically, it remains an online RPG that is also a shooter, so all those mechanics you'd expect in an online RPG are still present at its core, and that's unlikely to ever go away. Which means 'grinding' through doing the same encounters but with different modifiers etc, and completing raids with big teams several times over so you get the best chance of what you want dropping. At the same time, Destiny isn't as demanding of time and teamwork as many MMO endgames are, and I'm sure there'll be other people who'll complain that it lacks the depth and complexity of some of them (Destiny's far simpler in many ways, and doesn't have stuff like crafting in it - at present anyway). So it'll be impossible to get that balance right for everyone.

 

I share Harsin's concern about microtransactions in D2 (apart from cosmetic ones) - I suspect those have turned quite a profit since they've been brought in and would hate to see them start to actually give in-game advantages to players. I'm also a bit worried they try to make it too 'open world' and dilute the quality of the best encounters (I don't mind the repetitive, PSO-like structure of D1; in fact I like it); and that they do something - anything - to fuck up what I think is the perfect control feel for a console shooter. But whatever they do, they'll always fail to satisfy a large portion of the internet. I think what concerns me the most is that they'll try to do that, and fuck up the best things about the game in an effort to please everyone. (For example - I hope it'll never be pitched on the PvP side as a balanced, 'competitive' shooter, because in trying to do that with D1 they took a lot of the fun out of it imo, including from the previously insane greatness of some of the PvE weapons.)

[BarryL85]

We all know i'll be balls deep in this. 

 

[Black Cat Supremacist]

1 hour ago, Muz said:

Excited about this. I think if there is a visible performance difference between it running on the ps4pro and scorpio it'll probably be will probably sway me towards buying the scorpio.

 

As much as I am looking forward to it...does anyone have as much fear as me of it taking over your life again?

 

Nah, I was happiest when it's all I wanted to play. Since the content ran dry I've dabbled in a lot of other stuff but none of it has gave me the satisfaction Destiny did. The only other thing that's caught my attention long term this gen was The Division but it got old long before Destiny ever did. 

[berties paw]

Looking forward to starting over again. Spending all this time with the family is a real drag 

[SpagMasterSwift]

The thought of the first Destiny being over is actually making me feel a little emotional.

[LiMuBai]

I'm not sure how they could implement this evenly between new and old players, but I'd love it if you could import your existing D1 character into D2, but then there's an unavoidable death scene at the end of the 1st mission that kills off everyone's characters. And then a new ghost comes along and resurrects you (without your gear obviously) so everyone starts fresh.

 

Maybe an initial bonus mission for existing players? 

[Gorf King]

That's a fantasy a few of us have had - a free DLC mission released later this year to a faraway place that ends in your unavoidable death and that of your ghost (so you can't res). Cue cutscene at the beginning of D2 some hundred years later where your corpse is brought back to life on that distant planet by a new ghost who has, he thinks, finally found the God Slayer of myth. Sans abilities or weapons, of course, and with a convenient (and necessary, for corpses) case of amnesia. So that's how you became legend.

 

Of course, if the Mega Bloks thing is true, it kinda goes against that. Unless the attack on the Tower is the DLC, and old Saladbar tosses his last, along with you. I'd be ok with that - the destruction of everything we knew - but I'm not sure I could get through Cayde's Last Stand without tearing up and rage quitting.

 

They'll probably do neither thing though, because I can't see them ditching all those characters they haven't even developed properly yet. And unless they've changed their minds again, I do know (and I don't count this as a spoiler because it was on a Bungie live stream many months ago) that they'd scripted, or even recorded, a lot of future dialogue with Mara Sov. So setting it too far in the future probably isn't on. There'll likely be a much smaller gap between the two titles, but this makes it much harder to have a hard reset and for that to make sense. I suppose that never stopped Bungie before though.

[Qazimod]

As I've mentioned one or two times I'm a pretty casual player (I still haven't raided and I've only ever used one character class) but do enjoy playing online with my brother - we're at the point where we're taking on Nightfalls as a duo and just scraping through (him at 400, me at around 390), and despite the grind I do like the combat.

 

My one hope for the sequel would be kinder RNG with rewards, or just increased probabilities of good drops (by "good" I mean "things with equal or better attack/defence compared to what you currently use") whilst you continually dismantle bad ones. (D1 might already do this - I don't know - but if so it's not very noticeable.)

[Gorf King]

D1 does always do that (by comparison to your overall light level rather than the individual item's level). Except for some plateaus where it goes a bit wonky, and with the caveat that certain types of drops or activities or rewards have ceilings.

[Uncle Mike]

I can't wait for this. I assume we'll just get some OG cosmetics for being Legend already.

[Qazimod]

1 hour ago, Gorf King said:

D1 does always do that (by comparison to your overall light level rather than the individual item's level). Except for some plateaus where it goes a bit wonky, and with the caveat that certain types of drops or activities or rewards have ceilings.

 

Aah, I definitely noticed in things like Iron Banner and SRL that the goods were getting slightly better each time. I didn't know how much of the rest of it was luck.  

[LiMuBai]

Please dedicated servers please...

[Shimmyhill]

I can't wait to see what Bungie manage to get out of the machines now they aren't held back by the last gen, the art style etc is amazing at times in Destiny.

 

Looking forward to getting the band back together, I miss the party chat as much as the gaming - such a relaxing game to play at times it was!

 

Ohh, where is the switch announcement

[markh]

Great work on the post Gorf, you make one hell of a wrench...

[Hello Goaty ♥]

Will it carry your characters over?

 

Morning! Edit:  i was at work and couldnt read the entire thread. so thaks very much for the negs.

 

it was a harmless question

[Nnooo]

14 hours ago, Jonathan_Kerr said:

I never played Destiny. I didn't have a PS4 the time it was released and by the time I did, I think most of my friends had moved on.

I'll definitely give D2 a look. I heard a few complaints about the first game, but also that Bungie addressed most of them?

 

You could have joined me at any time bastard

 

Still my most frequent and most played game!!

[Pob]

7 hours ago, Hello Goaty ♥ said:

Will it carry your characters over?

I'm stunned Gorf didn't address this in his initial and follow-up posts. 

[auntyclimax]

19 hours ago, Muz said:

Excited about this. I think if there is a visible performance difference between it running on the ps4pro and scorpio it'll probably be will probably sway me towards buying the scorpio.

 

As much as I am looking forward to it...does anyone have as much fear as me of it taking over your life again?

 

I'm thinking the same, even as a Pro owner.

 

The biggest thing that would hold me back is the amazing PS4 community. I'm sure it's also great on XB, but there wouldn't be any talk of gin, sitting in our pants, Kan's random appearances mid game...

 

This will be tougher than Sophie's choice.