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Bungie promised that it’s bringing challenge back to Destiny, and in this week’s blog post, Bringing Challenge Back To Destiny, it outlined exactly what that means. There’s a lot of numbers, specifics, and details in the post that explain how baseline difficulty will b💞e changing in Lightfall, but after reading the post twice, I still can’t quite wrap my mind around what all of these changes really mean. One thing that’s clear is that these are so much more than simple value adjustments to incrementally increase difficulty. These changes represent a philosophical reset about how Bungie is approaching challenge in the new year, and I suspect it’s going to 🍌have a much bigger impact than we previously expected.
All of the major system overhauls and rebalances coming next season꧂ are meant to serve two purposes: streamlining and opening up buildcrafting, and making all of Destiny’s content more engaging and evergreen. I’ll take on each of those topics separately. We’ve already seen how the new loadout and mod system will work in , but this post gives us more insight into the way that high-difficulty content is changing to make way for a wider variety of builds.
Along with the removal of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Match Game, Bungie is also making big changes to how Burns works next season. Instead of a 50 percent increase to incoming and 25 percent outgoing damage of a single energy type, Burns are now being split into two separat🐼e modifiers: Surge is a 25 percent increase for damage dealt, and Threat is a 25 percent increase to damage received. This is a buff to survivability since you won’t be taking as much bonus damage from Burns anymore, but more importantly, separating Surge and Threat creates more opportunity for build variety, since each activity will have its own unique combination of Surge and Burn that rotate each season. Further, a second Surge will rotate weekly alongside the featured Surge throughout the season, effectively doubling how many damage options you have. For Season of Defiance, Strand will be the Featured Surge, while Solar and Void Surge will rotate weekly.
This makes it seem like Arc and Stasis will be effectively useless in high-level content for an entire season, but there’s a new modifier called Overcharged weapons coming in Lightfall that gives the same 25 percent damage buff to a featured weapon type. It looks like a redundant modifier at first, since Overcharged doesn’t overlap with Surge, but the benefit i🔥s that you will now have the option to use an Overcharged weapon instead of a Surging subclass (or Surging weapon type), meaning you can run Arc or Stasis and still have the damage bonus. With these new modifiers, there should be a lot more ways to craft viable builds than there used to be under the old Burn system. As long as you have a Surge subclass, Surge Weapon, or Overcharged weapon, you should be able to keep up with the challenge.
You will need to utilize these buffs, since virtually all of the content on Destiny 2 is getting harder next season. You can see all the power level adjustments for yourself in the , but essentially, Bungie is introducing the power level delta from Master Raids and Grandmaster Nightfalls - otherwise known as levels caps - into most content. Weekly Campaign Missions, Nightmare Hunts, Empire Hunts, Seasonal Battlegrounds, and all Nightfall levels will have scaling power level delta that caps your power level below the maximum to increase the challenge and prevent you from overleveling. You will still be able to overlevel Normal Raids, Dungeons (), and Lost Sectors, but you will see a difficuඣlty increase in some of those activities. The Vanguard Ops playlist will now disable power level, meaning there’s no way to overlevel even the most basi🐠c playlist activity.
These changes are going to be divisive among Destiny players. There’s no more ‘turn your brain off and grind’ activity in Destiny, and you’ll need to at least consider the Surge and Threat modifiers on every activity, even if you don’t plan on respecting them. Bungie doesn’t want any activities to 💟become dull and trivial a few weeks into the season anymore, and these changes are designed to combat that fatigue and make things a lot more engaging.
There’s some important details missing in the blog post, and some confusing parts that we’ll need clarification on. Bungie writes about making these activities more rewarding through challenge, but there’s no mention anywhere of actual rewards. We know that the Vanguard Ops playlist will have a new scoring system, similar to Nightfalls, that increases the amount of Vanguard rep you earn based on your performance. That’s a nice way to reward us for the increase in difficulty, but what about the rest of these activities? Why do I want to play harder versions of Wellspring, Empire Hunts, or Lost Sectors? What is♋ the incentive to grind if power level is no longer going to be a factor?
I’m also not clear on what the power deltas actually mean. One heading states “Raids And Dungeons Get The Power Delta Treatment”, but it doesn’t say what the power delta is going to be. The “No Activity Left Behind&rdq꧒uo; section says Lost Sectors should be more challenging, but they’re apparently getting a +20 combat delta, so wouldn’t that make those activities easier?
There’s only a -5 power level difference between Master and Grandmaster, which doesn’t seem like much difference at all. Keep in mind, however, that power level does not scale linearly. Five levels at the highest end of the scale will actually make a big difference. You also 𒐪have to account for the additional champions and modifiers that make GM inherently more difficult than Master, even if their power level was equivalent. That said♌, I think it will be hard for players to justify ever running Master once GM is available to them.
The biggest take away from this whole thing isn’t the increase in diffic𝓰ulty, but the fundamental change coming to the way power levels work. Now that every Nightfall has a power cap, there’s no value in grinding levels to overpower them anymore. Once you hit the Pinnacle cap for the season, increasing your power level will have no eff๊ect on your actual power. This is a huge change from where Destiny was just a few seasons ago, when grinding hundreds of levels on the battle pass to earn a few extra levels of Artifact Power was essential for high-level content. If we’re not grinding simply to make the number go up anymore, that’s going to be a big adjustment.
W𝔍e don’t know how Guardian Ranks work exactly, or how that new level system will interact with power level. Based on this post though, power level will merely be a barrier to entry to each increasingly-difficult activity, and nothing more. I think that’s going to be for the best, but Destiny will need meaningful things to pursue outside of power levels to keep players hooked. This post leaves a l🌸ot of questions unanswered for now, but luckily, we only have to wait a week to find out how it’s all going to work.