While we know that Destiny 2 would endure some growing pains as it entered its new slimmed-down Prophecy era, I’m not sure that players would have predicted that one aspect would be this painful.
That is the power grind, where it takes a whole lot of work to even do the “normal” grind to 400 to start getting decently good tier drops. But the grind from 400 to 450, the current max, is arguably the worst in the entire history of the series. And Destiny 2 has had some bad grinds in the past.
The two others here are Forever 29, the famed D1 launch-era grind where it was extremely difficult to tick past the final figure because of weekly lockouts, albeit you could still farm almost anything you wanted as you waited. Then, there was a hefty grind to 600 in the Forsaken era, but that offered a wider range of pathways there.
Edge of Fate’s grind here is worse than both for many, many reasons.
- Once you hit 450, almost the only way you can power up is from “Pinnacle” drops.
- There is only a 5% chance to get an end-of-activity Pinnacle drop with a 20 run pity timer, outside of a few exceptions like Solstice or Zavala offerings.
- Getting those Pinnacle drops in any reasonable amount of time effectively requires you to run a handful of Solo Ops, namely two, to be able to get the most chances as quickly as you can. Which is not quickly.
- With these random Pinnacle drops you have no control over which slot you get them in, so it’s a 5% chance on top of a 1 in 8 chance to get the slot you’re looking for.
- 450 is not a pointless place to reach. When you get there, you now have bountiful access to Tier 5 gear, the best in the game, when previously that’s only possible for 400-449 players from those Pinnacle drops or special, weirdly generous events like Solstice.
- The 450 grind, by the time you reach it, is about to be useless. When the next “Major Update” comes with Ash and Iron, it will now be relatively easy for everyone to hit that point and then you will have to do the exact some grind again to get from 500 to 550. If you really go hard you might, if you’re luck, have a couple weeks of farming at 450. But even players that have played a ton (I’m at over 100 hours and just 405) won’t even get close. Those that have hit 450 universally do not recommend anyone else attempt that grind.
So, surely Bungie is making significant changes to this, right? Wrong, as for one future buff they have about four nerfs. They are:
- Solo Ops will now give you one less power, making the attempt to grind those even worse than it is now.
- The best Pinnacle Ops are all having their drops reduced by one.
- Only three Fireteam Ops out of all of them are getting increased drops.
- The one clear buff is that any drop at the end of run has a chance to be a Pinnacle, not just one of them. But bonus drops would get used up in one run. You’d essentially be forced to run a “featured” farm gear one every day to double those chances. Chances which would still be very low.
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Pushback to the announced nerfs and tiny buffs, has been extremely forceful among the community. It feels like Bungie is utterly afraid to let players advance to high tiers in anything approaching a reasonable time frame, pushing the grind for active hours over anything that feels rewarding or like a good use of your time. It’s possible they come back to the table with changes, but effectively all these nerfs need to be reverted, Fireteam Ops need double or triple rewards and progression needs to be more than 5% drop chances or random holiday events.
But The Portal is a hard problem to solve. No matter what, if the system is like this, even with increased drops players will still just farm the 1, 2 or 3 most efficient activities because that’s what this system encourages. There are larger, structural problems at play here that do not seem close to being fixed.
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