Rexatality
Member
Disclaimer: Keep in mind that this thread is more about Destiny 2's PvE, so don't expect any talk about PvP since I'm not knowledgeable about PvP
Its been a month since Destiny 2 and it made some pretty nice improvements in number of things from Destiny 1. But there are a number of things I find very questionable, including some stuff from Destiny 1 that were removed or not added to Destiny 2. The thread's premise as per the title is gonna go about the stuff
Gameplay:
The gameplay of Destiny 2 is still good, the guns still feel good and shooting aliens in the head always feels fucking relaxing. But, there are a few things that I find it questionable in terms of gameplay. For example, in Destiny 1, your abilities (super, grenade, melee) recharges faster based on your armor stats (Intellect for supers, Discipline for grenades, and Strength for Melee). Those were replaced with resilience, mobility, and recovery. Yet, those stats are mostly useless for PvE. Mobility doesn't affect your sprint speed, resilience is better off at 4 and nothing more, so that makes recovery the only useful stat for PvE. And worse than that, your base abilities don't recharge as fast as D1 used to and the cooldowns effects from the cooldown mods are negligible at best
Secondly, your movement feel slower in D2. There's no Titan-skating anymore, you don't feel fast as lightning, your grenades (save for pulse grenades) don't feel powerful as they used to. And lastly, I'd like to talk about the weapon loadout system. I'm not sure why Bungie felt it was necessary of them to put Shotguns and Snipers to heavy weapons (now known as power weapons). I'm sure they did that to make so Shotguns and Snipers don't become too prevalent in PvP or make the raid encounters too easy, but only few types of power weapons are used in the game. Personally, I've seen more people use shotguns, rocket launchers, and fusion rifles than the other three. Snipers aren't used for the most part and Grenade Launchers which replaced Machine Guns with a number of exceptions aren't good due to the blast radius and their damage.
Mods:
Mods were newly added to the game, as supposedly to enhance the perks or stats of your gear and weapons. Yet they feel underutilized. The recoil mods isn't used much, and most players would use legendary mods to increase their gear value by 5. Hell, once you use the mod, you can't use it again which can be seen as a problem because Im pretty sure not a lot of people would like to waste their glimmer just so they can get enough of 3 specific blue mods to turn them into legendary
If this is Bungie's solution to the random rolls that was removed in Destiny 2, then they didn't do a good job at it. The mods system needs be expanded to have 3 slots. The mods could be three with one where you can change the attributes of a weapon (range, reload speed, stability, etc..), one that adds perks (Third Eye, Headseeker, Drop Mag, etc...), and one that increases power level which we currently have
In addition, it would be nice to earn legendary mods through completing weekly endgame activities like with Nightfall, Crucible, Raid, or even Flashpoints so we dont have to waste glimmer and dismantle legendary mods just so we can get legendary mods.
Exotics:
Exotics are gear and weapons that players wanna chase for as they could have perks that could change their playstyle or the way their character plays. In other terms, players want them to fulfill their power fantasy. But with a handful of exceptions ), they feel underwhelming in some parts
For a while, after year 1, Bungie made the exotics as a way where it could fulfill a particular playstyle and not just be strong at everything like Y1 Gjallaharon or the infamous Y1 Vex Mythoclast. An admirable goal, but at this moment, they don't feel like the kind of exotics where you really want to get them, you simply get them from Exotic engrams through Public Events or get one of them through story missions. And at this moment, theres no Exotic Questlines, which sucks because those stuff were fun to do
Lucky Pants's perks basically increases your HC ready speed and initial accuracy. And Mechaneer's Tricksleeves just increases your side-arm's reload speed. That's it. Those perks belong to legendary armor. Not exotics. The problem is that Exotics dont feel unique for the most part (Some like Hallowfire Heart and Wings of Sacred Dawn have perks that are basically cut from the subclass trees) and the ones that are unique or just plain fun to play are few (Actium War Rig, Sweet Business, Tractor Cannon, etc )
I know well see more Exotics as time marches on, but Id like to see Bungie get more creative and put more unique Exotics in the future
Moving on....
Legendary gear and lack of exciting perks:
Legendary gear is where you basically you grind and earn through the weekly endgame activities or other activities like Public Events. However, the legendary armor perks only comes with recovery, resilience, and mobility. Considering that recovery is the most important stat and both resilience/mobility have little to no beneficial effects in PvE, there wouldnt be a lot of armor options for players, especially for Hunters. Theres not even any perks from D1 like increasing grenade throw distance, more ammo for a weapon type, less cooldown for your abilities, less cooldown for grenades when using melee kills, none. And that makes getting the legendary armor less exciting.
While some of the legendary weapons are quite good (Nameless Midnight, Nightshade, Last Hope, Antiope-D, etc ), the fact that their perks are static and not randomly rolled every time you get them makes it unfortunate because it means a bad legendary gun will be bad forever. But Ill discuss the issue of static rolls later on.
And now, onto the raid...
The Raid:
Ah, the raid. The one endgame activity where players fight against tough encounters, defeat the final boss and get loot as a reward at the end of it.
Im somewhat mixed on the Leviathan Raid. The encounters are pretty good, although the Dogs encounter was a source of frustration for the first week, but thats been handled as we already got familiar with the Raid encounters. Exploring the Underbelly was pretty cool, but it got tedious overtime. But my main issue is the loot themselves. When you complete the encounters, you usually only get raid tokens you use for the raid vendor at the Tower to get the raid gear and they have lower PL than the ones you get from the raid themselves. The raid armor pieces and weapons arent even 100% guaranteed to drop from completing encounters save for Calus. You want to me to use the tokens? Fine, but at least make the drops from the raid more guaranteed. But thats not the biggest problem I have with the raid.
The biggest problem is the lack of raid-specific perks from the gear themselves. Why the weapons dont have a perk that increases damage against Dogs? Why they dont have a perk that increases damage against the Cabal? Why theres no perk for armor where you can move faster when holding the orb? Or a perk that increases damage against Calus? I could go on. I dont understand how the designers behind the best Raid (And it's Wrath of The Machine IMO) managed to mess up few things that didnt need fixing. And it doesnt help that the Prestige mode of the Raid dont allow you to increase your power level.. So not much motivation to do the Prestige raid unless you want to do it for the challenge
And unless youd like to read the lore on the raid gear or feel like collecting them, theres not much motivation to get them as they dont have unique perks anymore.
The endgame grind or lack thereof:
So now, we go to the crux of the main issue. The endgame itself. Destiny 1 has never had a perfect endgame. In fact, Bungie put their time trying to make the endgame more welcoming to players over the years with The Taken King and Rise of Iron. In fact, the difference between vanilla Destiny and Destiny Rise of Iron is night and day. And with Age of Triumph update, there were a lot (Remastered old Raids to 390 light level, New raid armor ornaments from remastered Raids, Weekly heroic strikes, Weekly Nightfall, etc ). Hell, even before Age of Triumph, there were Strike loot and Strike scoring which gave a lot of players a motivation to grind the strikes.
Destiny 2, however, abandons the QoL changes and improvements that was made from TTK and RoI. In fact, all you do every week is for the milestones, namely: Nightfall, Crucible Call to Arms, Flashpoints, Raid, and Trials. Thats it. Theres not much motivation to do Strikes because you cant even select the Strike you wanna play, theres not even Heroic Strikes or Strike loot anymore. Those Lost Sectors and Adventures that Bungie talked about? Theyre pretty much irrelevant after 265 PL. No private matches, no armor ornaments, or even armor sets that makes you feel you want to have it no matter what.
But the worst part about Destiny 2s endgame is for me? The chase for loot doesnt feel exciting anymore. The removal of random rolls didnt help that either
For those who arent familiar with random rolls, every time you get a specific weapon, you get a random set of perks. That means every dupe of the same weapon will have different rolls of perks everytime. For some people, it made the chase for the perfect roll of the weapon they want to get very exciting. For others, it was tedious and annoying to the point it soured the game for them. As Destiny 2 has shown, Bungie took the latters feedback and removed random rolls out of the game. The mod system, as I said previously, is half-assed in its current state and not a good workaround to the static rolls.
So why is the the removal of random rolls is a problem? For one, it makes chasing the Namless Midnight youre looking for is less exciting because you know the second or third Nameless Midnight is always the same. And if a legendary weapon is considered bad, you wouldnt be able to change it and make it better through random roll of perks like random rolls used to do. And what if you want to change the explosive rounds perk to Outlaw perk for Nameless Midnight? With static rolls, thats not possible. And the reskinned weapons is a problem with static rolls. I know Destiny 1 had numbers of reskinned weapons, but at least they felt different from each other due to random rolls. And it's not like anyone put fucking gun to your head and forced you to grind the same weapon until you get the perfect roll
Now I understand the fear of missing out, I understand that you have to overly grind just so you can get a perfect roll for Eyasluna and that the layer of RNG behind the random rolls wasnt good. But its not like anyone forced you to do it. And if anything, they couldve solved the problem of random rolls affecting PvP by disabling it from PvP or remove a handful of useless perks that wasnt beneficial. However, Bungie took the easy out with the random rolls. And knowing they design their game around the parity of PvE and PvP, I dont see much changing until they decide that designing both modes separately is beneficial for both players in the long run and it would allow them to get more creative with PvE and be less shackled for their quest for a balanced PvP
As it is now, The mod system is not a good substitute and needs to be expanded, especially with the lack of chase for loot or rather the loot itself feeling bland and boring for the most part. (I get that some people play Destiny for friendship, but loot should feel exciting to chase for as well)
I understand Bungie doesnt want Destiny to feel like a second job. But it should have replayability. The fact that a month later and people are getting bored shows that the theyre designing the game the wrong way. The hardcore players feel alienated because everyone get the rewards and they dont get to reap the rewards for their effort in playing tons of hours.
Call me elitist all you like, but I'm a firm believer that you shouldn't get to max level unless you're willing to do endgame activities like Raids, Nightfall, and Trials. What's the fucking point of doing those activities if you can easily get max level through Public Events? Public Events should be an avenue to get gear, not a sprint that will get you to max level
So To conclude this, Destiny 2 is more of a sequel to Destiny 1 vanilla rather than Destiny 1s Year 3. Now, dont get me wrong, it might be good for people who hated Destiny 1. But for me, I like to grind. I like to have a game where I play it every day just like people who play League of Legends, World of Warcraft, DOTA 2, and Overwatch. Destiny 2 doesnt accomplish that for me because the endgame is lacking.
Now, Im not gonna quit the game forever or anything. Im in it for the long haul, because I know things will improve with Destiny 2, but I sure as hell wish I didnt have to wait for DLC for the game to get better.
Its been a month since Destiny 2 and it made some pretty nice improvements in number of things from Destiny 1. But there are a number of things I find very questionable, including some stuff from Destiny 1 that were removed or not added to Destiny 2. The thread's premise as per the title is gonna go about the stuff
Gameplay:
The gameplay of Destiny 2 is still good, the guns still feel good and shooting aliens in the head always feels fucking relaxing. But, there are a few things that I find it questionable in terms of gameplay. For example, in Destiny 1, your abilities (super, grenade, melee) recharges faster based on your armor stats (Intellect for supers, Discipline for grenades, and Strength for Melee). Those were replaced with resilience, mobility, and recovery. Yet, those stats are mostly useless for PvE. Mobility doesn't affect your sprint speed, resilience is better off at 4 and nothing more, so that makes recovery the only useful stat for PvE. And worse than that, your base abilities don't recharge as fast as D1 used to and the cooldowns effects from the cooldown mods are negligible at best
Secondly, your movement feel slower in D2. There's no Titan-skating anymore, you don't feel fast as lightning, your grenades (save for pulse grenades) don't feel powerful as they used to. And lastly, I'd like to talk about the weapon loadout system. I'm not sure why Bungie felt it was necessary of them to put Shotguns and Snipers to heavy weapons (now known as power weapons). I'm sure they did that to make so Shotguns and Snipers don't become too prevalent in PvP or make the raid encounters too easy, but only few types of power weapons are used in the game. Personally, I've seen more people use shotguns, rocket launchers, and fusion rifles than the other three. Snipers aren't used for the most part and Grenade Launchers which replaced Machine Guns with a number of exceptions aren't good due to the blast radius and their damage.
Mods:
Mods were newly added to the game, as supposedly to enhance the perks or stats of your gear and weapons. Yet they feel underutilized. The recoil mods isn't used much, and most players would use legendary mods to increase their gear value by 5. Hell, once you use the mod, you can't use it again which can be seen as a problem because Im pretty sure not a lot of people would like to waste their glimmer just so they can get enough of 3 specific blue mods to turn them into legendary
If this is Bungie's solution to the random rolls that was removed in Destiny 2, then they didn't do a good job at it. The mods system needs be expanded to have 3 slots. The mods could be three with one where you can change the attributes of a weapon (range, reload speed, stability, etc..), one that adds perks (Third Eye, Headseeker, Drop Mag, etc...), and one that increases power level which we currently have
In addition, it would be nice to earn legendary mods through completing weekly endgame activities like with Nightfall, Crucible, Raid, or even Flashpoints so we dont have to waste glimmer and dismantle legendary mods just so we can get legendary mods.
Exotics:
Exotics are gear and weapons that players wanna chase for as they could have perks that could change their playstyle or the way their character plays. In other terms, players want them to fulfill their power fantasy. But with a handful of exceptions ), they feel underwhelming in some parts
For a while, after year 1, Bungie made the exotics as a way where it could fulfill a particular playstyle and not just be strong at everything like Y1 Gjallaharon or the infamous Y1 Vex Mythoclast. An admirable goal, but at this moment, they don't feel like the kind of exotics where you really want to get them, you simply get them from Exotic engrams through Public Events or get one of them through story missions. And at this moment, theres no Exotic Questlines, which sucks because those stuff were fun to do
Lucky Pants's perks basically increases your HC ready speed and initial accuracy. And Mechaneer's Tricksleeves just increases your side-arm's reload speed. That's it. Those perks belong to legendary armor. Not exotics. The problem is that Exotics dont feel unique for the most part (Some like Hallowfire Heart and Wings of Sacred Dawn have perks that are basically cut from the subclass trees) and the ones that are unique or just plain fun to play are few (Actium War Rig, Sweet Business, Tractor Cannon, etc )
I know well see more Exotics as time marches on, but Id like to see Bungie get more creative and put more unique Exotics in the future
Moving on....
Legendary gear and lack of exciting perks:
Legendary gear is where you basically you grind and earn through the weekly endgame activities or other activities like Public Events. However, the legendary armor perks only comes with recovery, resilience, and mobility. Considering that recovery is the most important stat and both resilience/mobility have little to no beneficial effects in PvE, there wouldnt be a lot of armor options for players, especially for Hunters. Theres not even any perks from D1 like increasing grenade throw distance, more ammo for a weapon type, less cooldown for your abilities, less cooldown for grenades when using melee kills, none. And that makes getting the legendary armor less exciting.
While some of the legendary weapons are quite good (Nameless Midnight, Nightshade, Last Hope, Antiope-D, etc ), the fact that their perks are static and not randomly rolled every time you get them makes it unfortunate because it means a bad legendary gun will be bad forever. But Ill discuss the issue of static rolls later on.
And now, onto the raid...
The Raid:
Ah, the raid. The one endgame activity where players fight against tough encounters, defeat the final boss and get loot as a reward at the end of it.
Im somewhat mixed on the Leviathan Raid. The encounters are pretty good, although the Dogs encounter was a source of frustration for the first week, but thats been handled as we already got familiar with the Raid encounters. Exploring the Underbelly was pretty cool, but it got tedious overtime. But my main issue is the loot themselves. When you complete the encounters, you usually only get raid tokens you use for the raid vendor at the Tower to get the raid gear and they have lower PL than the ones you get from the raid themselves. The raid armor pieces and weapons arent even 100% guaranteed to drop from completing encounters save for Calus. You want to me to use the tokens? Fine, but at least make the drops from the raid more guaranteed. But thats not the biggest problem I have with the raid.
The biggest problem is the lack of raid-specific perks from the gear themselves. Why the weapons dont have a perk that increases damage against Dogs? Why they dont have a perk that increases damage against the Cabal? Why theres no perk for armor where you can move faster when holding the orb? Or a perk that increases damage against Calus? I could go on. I dont understand how the designers behind the best Raid (And it's Wrath of The Machine IMO) managed to mess up few things that didnt need fixing. And it doesnt help that the Prestige mode of the Raid dont allow you to increase your power level.. So not much motivation to do the Prestige raid unless you want to do it for the challenge
And unless youd like to read the lore on the raid gear or feel like collecting them, theres not much motivation to get them as they dont have unique perks anymore.
The endgame grind or lack thereof:
So now, we go to the crux of the main issue. The endgame itself. Destiny 1 has never had a perfect endgame. In fact, Bungie put their time trying to make the endgame more welcoming to players over the years with The Taken King and Rise of Iron. In fact, the difference between vanilla Destiny and Destiny Rise of Iron is night and day. And with Age of Triumph update, there were a lot (Remastered old Raids to 390 light level, New raid armor ornaments from remastered Raids, Weekly heroic strikes, Weekly Nightfall, etc ). Hell, even before Age of Triumph, there were Strike loot and Strike scoring which gave a lot of players a motivation to grind the strikes.
Destiny 2, however, abandons the QoL changes and improvements that was made from TTK and RoI. In fact, all you do every week is for the milestones, namely: Nightfall, Crucible Call to Arms, Flashpoints, Raid, and Trials. Thats it. Theres not much motivation to do Strikes because you cant even select the Strike you wanna play, theres not even Heroic Strikes or Strike loot anymore. Those Lost Sectors and Adventures that Bungie talked about? Theyre pretty much irrelevant after 265 PL. No private matches, no armor ornaments, or even armor sets that makes you feel you want to have it no matter what.
But the worst part about Destiny 2s endgame is for me? The chase for loot doesnt feel exciting anymore. The removal of random rolls didnt help that either
For those who arent familiar with random rolls, every time you get a specific weapon, you get a random set of perks. That means every dupe of the same weapon will have different rolls of perks everytime. For some people, it made the chase for the perfect roll of the weapon they want to get very exciting. For others, it was tedious and annoying to the point it soured the game for them. As Destiny 2 has shown, Bungie took the latters feedback and removed random rolls out of the game. The mod system, as I said previously, is half-assed in its current state and not a good workaround to the static rolls.
So why is the the removal of random rolls is a problem? For one, it makes chasing the Namless Midnight youre looking for is less exciting because you know the second or third Nameless Midnight is always the same. And if a legendary weapon is considered bad, you wouldnt be able to change it and make it better through random roll of perks like random rolls used to do. And what if you want to change the explosive rounds perk to Outlaw perk for Nameless Midnight? With static rolls, thats not possible. And the reskinned weapons is a problem with static rolls. I know Destiny 1 had numbers of reskinned weapons, but at least they felt different from each other due to random rolls. And it's not like anyone put fucking gun to your head and forced you to grind the same weapon until you get the perfect roll
Now I understand the fear of missing out, I understand that you have to overly grind just so you can get a perfect roll for Eyasluna and that the layer of RNG behind the random rolls wasnt good. But its not like anyone forced you to do it. And if anything, they couldve solved the problem of random rolls affecting PvP by disabling it from PvP or remove a handful of useless perks that wasnt beneficial. However, Bungie took the easy out with the random rolls. And knowing they design their game around the parity of PvE and PvP, I dont see much changing until they decide that designing both modes separately is beneficial for both players in the long run and it would allow them to get more creative with PvE and be less shackled for their quest for a balanced PvP
As it is now, The mod system is not a good substitute and needs to be expanded, especially with the lack of chase for loot or rather the loot itself feeling bland and boring for the most part. (I get that some people play Destiny for friendship, but loot should feel exciting to chase for as well)
I understand Bungie doesnt want Destiny to feel like a second job. But it should have replayability. The fact that a month later and people are getting bored shows that the theyre designing the game the wrong way. The hardcore players feel alienated because everyone get the rewards and they dont get to reap the rewards for their effort in playing tons of hours.
Call me elitist all you like, but I'm a firm believer that you shouldn't get to max level unless you're willing to do endgame activities like Raids, Nightfall, and Trials. What's the fucking point of doing those activities if you can easily get max level through Public Events? Public Events should be an avenue to get gear, not a sprint that will get you to max level
So To conclude this, Destiny 2 is more of a sequel to Destiny 1 vanilla rather than Destiny 1s Year 3. Now, dont get me wrong, it might be good for people who hated Destiny 1. But for me, I like to grind. I like to have a game where I play it every day just like people who play League of Legends, World of Warcraft, DOTA 2, and Overwatch. Destiny 2 doesnt accomplish that for me because the endgame is lacking.
Now, Im not gonna quit the game forever or anything. Im in it for the long haul, because I know things will improve with Destiny 2, but I sure as hell wish I didnt have to wait for DLC for the game to get better.
