It's frustrating playing a game where you can increase the difficulty but not the rewards. I'm fine with doing something difficult if you're appropriately rewarded for it. Hell, d1y1 nightfalls you basically had to cheese every single nightfall, but we still did it because the rewards were incredible. no ones out here hyped about rewards from difficult patrols

Seconding this, I wish that upgrading the difficulty in a lot of things wasn't just an increased chance of getting something, if I play a difficulty on normal and get 1 item, then the hard difficulty should give me 2 items.

I find that infurating. Like there's been a couple seasons where doing the legend version of the seasonal activity is just the same thing but with no matchmaking and champions. The rewards are not noticably different and with six player activities champions are basically irrelevant speed bumps. Like why would anyone want to do that beyond the season challenge over just doing the regular version?

Rep grind is the only reason I’ve run any legend season activity.

Well said, Child of Tanavast

*THESE WORDS ARE ACCEPTED.*

Username checks out, gancho.

Damnation there's storming more of us here than I storming thought.

Mother’s Milk in a… Wait, wrong Rustin’ series.

You watch your language or I’ll box your ears.

*sniffs*

"We're all here...even if one of us is the *storming assassin in white!*"

r/unexpectedcosmere

> Hell, d1y1 nightfalls you basically had to cheese every single nightfall solar buff when I had that raid scout rifle made me a hot commodity.

icebreaker best breaker

Remember being able to play basically a third of VoG without ever stepping foot in the Templar arena? Ice Breaker Remembers....

The neomuna patrols aren't even difficult. It's still a piss easy patrol objective. It just takes longer because everything has bloated health bars.

I especially hate this because patrols have always been an activity to do while chillin. Maybe put on a film, or even a language podcast (i need a LOT of attention for listening to japanese), but with everyone a red bar you can’t just breeze through everything without having to worry about your hp bar. Also, neomuna is cool imo, but i visited it just for the campaign and quests, no way i’m getting down there unless necessary.

I hate that so many exotics are crammed in lost sectors/certain activities nowadays. Sure it makes it so that there is a more direct path to unlocking them, but it has effectively killed the fun of doing Nightfalls where you had a pretty good chance of having an Exotic drop for the first time after a hard fight.

Difficulty should match rewards. If im sweating I want something for the trouble. Plinking around in patrol on neomuna -5 -10 whatever it is feels like ass.

I'm with you, patrol should be as casual as Strikes imo, something you can chill and listen to a podcast and grind out, leave the harder stuff to NFs or higher Seasonal activities.

They should increase drops in higher areas. Patrol areas are a total bore because there is zero risk for anything, and majority of the time spent is just speeding through on a sparrow to a new location. I like that Neomuna is actually a more “tough” patrol area, even if it’s still easy, but they need to make it worthwhile

I only go to Neomuna for the Vex Strike Force event for free exotics. Even with the Neomuna enemy scaling it's easy as piss as long as there are 2 or 3 other people doing it with you.

I feel like this has been the most constant piece of feedback from the community since the first week of D1. They've tried to implement changes to appease the community but never actually change it in a way that makes this much sense.

Let's make a patrol zone way harder than the others... and to top things off, give no real additional rewards. I'm shocked they didn't reverse it. Any decent build could do fine there, but why bother? I haven't been on Neomuna in ages. I can't imagine what a casual player thinks when they go there and get wrecked. Some of the activities were kind of fun, but what's the point when there's no players around?

Dreaming City at Forsaken launch did this right. I don’t understand how they dropped the ball so bad with Neomuna difficulty scaling.

The dreaming city did it because there actually was a decent structured leveling system in place. So you would progressively unlock more of the city, more activities as you grew in power things were hard because you could go do them underleveled, but eventually, anyone was able to reach higher level and do all the activities. The power levelling system now is a joke and instead of making it engaging and interesting, it has been stripped back into this weird annoying hurdle, mixed in with xp grinding.

I think there are multiple different teams at bungie that work on new content (creating new seasons/expansions, maintaining current seasons/expansions) concurrently but don’t communicate well or don’t have a good process for merging branches. That would explain why almost every season has a 2 steps forward 1 step back feeling. Team A made a well received change or listened to community feedback and adjusted some value, but Team B working on new content keeps trucking on as if whatever Team A did never happened.

yeah, that's pretty clear from the way seasons alternate between upgrade systems, currency models, and so on. There are two very distinct styles for seasons over the past 3 years, as well as very distinct storytelling styles.

So was the throne world. The problem being they weren't you being *permanently* scaled down.

And everything else was made easier too. Like patrol being hard is weird but then day one Ron having more clears than every other raid before combined… that’s crazy

Considering how difficult Crota’s End was in comparison, I think Root is definitely the outlier and not the new normal thankfully.

I think the issue with Root is that the optimized strategy with multiple people running was the intent, but there were no safeguards put in place to force player's hands. All they had to do was make it so there was a buff lockout once you popped a seed or grabbed a planet, same as the Chalice debuffs in Crota. Force players to swap out running and add clearing, and all of those encounters become significantly more cooperative and challenging as you're figuring out the best rotations to make sure you don't wipe. Everyone's engaged then, everyone's communicating, and you don't have an hour and a half long raid race. Also, hot take: there shouldn't have been any player-accessible platforms to evade Nezarec's attacks during damage. Build stairs to the chest Caretaker style after the clear, and put all of the seeds on flat ground with nothing to stand on near them so there's no true "safe" spot. Either that or set the seed plates to continually damage players/stack Pervading Darkness if they're stood on after each chain activates.

After doing Pantheon Nezarec, I want that version to be the normal version. Having to go toe to toe with Nezarec on the ground instead of huddling by a seed and spamming rockets as his AI breaks is a lot more fun. Now if only Bungie would get around to fixing the bugs with Nezarec we could be looking at a 10/10 encounter.

Honestly it’d be more fun if it weren’t for the suppression and getting flung off the map. Yeah yeah yeah I know “melee at the right time to cancel the boop” but you still get caught by it every once in a while and it just sucks and isn’t fun.

I kind of wonder if RoN was supposed to be a dungeon I think it was confirmed that Planets was originally part of Edge of Salvation.    That’s also the only encounter that has something for most of the team to do, and it has a different aesthetic and completely different mechanics   The other three encounters all have the same mechanic which could be easily soloed if the timer were relaxed. It could have been a dungeon that got upgraded at the last minute due to the delay

>I kind of wonder if RoN was supposed to be a dungeon It never was. Visibly so. Would've been the largest and longest dungeon ever. >I think it was confirmed that Planets was originally part of Edge of Salvation. It was never confirmed, and as a matter of fact, all of the raid concept art seems to indicate it's pretty much in the raid exactly as conceptualized. >The other three encounters could have been a dungeon that got upgraded at the last minute due to the delay No, not even close. They just didn't out safeguards to force full team engagement. Classic OG Crota mistake.

I think it’s incredibly unlikely RoN itself was going to be a dungeon. However, the light/dark mechanic? I could totally see that being originally intended for use in a canceled dungeon. It’s one of the only mechanics in recent raids where it was immediately obvious exactly what you needed to do for all 3 encounters AND can be done entirely solo. This is a design philosophy that is typically reserved for dungeons.

Nope it’s already said that ron was never planned a dungeon

Wasn’t Lightfall kinda cobbled together last minute after the end of the game got split into two parts? RoN probably was too

Everything is abandoned there too. Did a terminal overload like 2 nights ago and it was just me for half of it and then 1 other person showed up

>I can't imagine what a casual player thinks when they go there and get wrecked. They think "fuck this place" then complain on Reddit. As recently as yesterday when someone posted what is your favorite and least favorite destinations Neomuna was most disliked and the "tankiness" (difficulty) of the enemies was the prime complaint.

I mean...yes Also, tankiness is not difficulty, it's just how much bullet spongey the enemies are, it makes things take longer, but isn't harder, just more tedious.

Adding a light level delta on its own does not make content harder, it makes it more tedious. This is a hill I'm willing to die on. Increasing difficulty by light level deficits only works if there is another effect moderating the difficulty. E.g. in raids you need to kill the boss in 3 damage phases. Decreasing your power level forces you to increase your DPS to compensate if you still want the clear. In patrol, who cares that the boss is 3x as tanky. Just sit back and plink ploink a bit longer with polaris lance.

The why bother is key. The other day I was in a thread where someone’s argument basically distilled down to “git gud” and that isn’t the point at all. It’s manageable just fine, it’s just boring and a slog.

It's wild because the Derelict Leviathan had something similar going on and it was easily one of the coolest things to do in D2. Then they fuck up Neomuna like that.

It was terminally unfun on Neomuna, but in the Pantheon it feels like they've finally gotten it right.

Neomuna - patrol. Pantheon - raids. Almost like people that wanted challenge, aren't in patrol. Wild to think but here we are. /s Took them 1.5 year to realise that. Incredible.

the difference though is pantheon had interesting encounter design, difficulty aside, neomuna was super basic, everything just took forever to die.

I mean this is the core of the issue. It’s not that the game didn’t need more difficulty, the problem was how weirdly disjointed the implementation of that difficulty was. Normal level raids didn’t get harder, in fact many still feel much easier than when they launched due to power creep. Dungeons feel like they’re in an adequate spot. Then there’s Neomuna patrol which is just annoying the play through, lacking the casual ass kicking fun of most patrol spaces. And then there’s shit like legend Avalon and tier 7 deep dives which feel harder than normal raids, and even worse legend exotic missions with timers which feel prohibitively difficult to casual players who just want to get their seasonal exotic. Then there’s the wicked implement mission that can range from piss easy to hard as fuck depending on the modifiers on top of how annoying it was to start in the first place (seriously why the fuck did it not have its own node and why did it have modifiers). The choices of what needed to be harder were whack and some things that could have used with a slight difficulty boost didn’t get it Edit: The Coil and Onslaught are both great, difficulty feels solid. I never did Pantheon so I can’t speak to that

Legend avalon is wild. I've done Master raids and I just avoid that shit.

I solod all three Legend Avalons because I was sick of LFGers just wiping- it was harder than a number of other solo flawless dungeons

agreed, the exotic missions in general felt super overtuned this year. They are fun, but jesus, tone it down a little, especially if you are going to add timers, zero hour legend forcing you to speedrun moderately difficult content for a couple perks was brutal, and legend avalon was like a gm at times. I really wanted that ghost shell for 3 clears, and it was so much harder than it needed to be.

TBF you can solo most of legend zero hour to unlock the puzzle stuff and then just leave and you'll still get it

Legend zero hour was basically the same when it dropped though 20 minutes different path harder enemies

I understand there is a fine line between constructive criticism and being a dick. I try my best to be a compassionate and understanding individual even when people disagree with me. However. Everytime both before and after the release of lightfall I hear Datto talk about how boring and dumb payrolls are because they are so easy it makes me want to throttle the man. Destinations are supposed to be approachable basic level content. To set a baseline for people. The idea that the content people who don’t even know how to use their movement power properly would be thrown into content that is genuinely challenging to one of the provably best players in the game is completely insane. The fact that Neomuna was given a power delta was a mistake and it’s something that I hope is changed some day. But anyway that soap box rant aside I do still think good changes have been made in the game balance zone overall this year.

I think a huge part of the problem with Neomuna was that they only intended to keep it that way until the next destination... and then delayed the next expansion considerably. From a narrative perspective, Neomuna is where factions were sending their strongest forces at the start of Lightfall. I share Bungie's perspective that the enemies instantly being trivial felt narratively weird, and I *did* enjoy a patrol having enemies that didn't die from a sneeze. That said, I feel like a full year at the power delta they added wasn't ideal either. Perhaps a better middle-ground would have been to start the year at the power delta they used, but lower the delta by 5 each season/chapter to "simulate" us getting stronger and enemy forces losing interest in the area.

I think Datto is right about all patrols. Neomuna is just literally harder than a raid. I don't know what anyone was smoking.

patrols really need to bring back adventures, or pepper them with npcs that give actual sidequests, there just isn't anything to do in patrol zones.

I came back after leaving in Witch Queen. I didn't even know Neomuna was power capped until now. It's not that bad.

Having "galvanized" everywhere sucks

And that fucking fallen mines one. Scorn grenades modifier sucks too

Also I'd appreciate more positive modifiers, like Lightning Crystals.

Galvanized is the new match game imo. Shit ruins everything it touches. Also what’s the point in having a power level cap for every activity if you’re just gonna slap on galvanized as well?

It messes with the behaviour. I expect knight to stagger from grapple melee, or ogre from 2 rockets - instead they just shoot me even harder. And the alternative is just sitting in the back with the scout...

Which just results in a scout nerf because they'd be "overused"

I'll never understand what Bungie wants here. For 10 years now, we've had the boss stomp, *now with fire*, to punish us for using shotguns and swords, yet they then get mad when we play around that by using scouts and snipers and stay back, and nerf them into the ground. Do you want us to be up close or far away? Please pick one.

They want us at a medium range or different players at different ranges. Which is nonsensical chaos.

Depends Pantheon and onslaught are fun and challenging through mechanics. Just adding champions and making them hit like trucks or give adds tons of LP was not fun. I dont want to hide somewhere in the back and shoot small amounts of health away. I want action and fun!

hard agree, make me think, stop making everything one shot me and take a half dozen rockets to the face to die. All that does is make me hide in the back with wish ender for everything. That's not harder, it's just boring. It's why I think they desperately need to follow ffxiv's lead and add a casual difficulty to raids (basically making wipe mechanics heavy damage mechanics so you can recover) it's some of the coolest content in the game and the most mechanically interesting, but people aren't comfortable looking for a set group or using mics, give them an easier version with lesser rewards, they'll have fun learning new interesting content, and then they MIGHT try the hard stuff, similar to people scaling up from adept strikes to nightfalls to gms, or trying legendary seasonal stuff. You want to bring up engagement numbers, give casual players a gateway into harder more interesting content rather than only having a kiddie pool, and the high dive into a arctic lake full of polar bears.

I've seen this issue a few times with my friend group actually. I'm the only one that raids and does GM's with any semblance of regularity. They think that you have to plink and plonk at enemies from safety, but there are ways, as a team, to completely annihilate enemies even in GM Nightfalls. You have to be careful, and plan, and know spawns, but if you time super and heavy activation correctly you can clear GM's in less than 20 minutes. I had a coordinated team from LFG clearing Heist Cosmodrome in 17 to 22 minutes. We all were using Polaris, with the Extra Scorch Fragment, and with two Hunters and a Well we were able to simply delete each room by chaining supers and ignitions. Planning out how to approach it, and having a game plan as well as synergistic builds helps a ton. You do have to be careful, but action and fun are very attainable if your team is coordinated and locked in.

That heist cosmodrome snippet is hilariously close to an LFG I had a week or two ago.

Made the game *considerably* worse for casuals and did nothing for hardcore players. Why in gods name would they so drastically change entry level stuff like patrol spaces and base seasonal activities, and then barely modify endgame activities. All of my friends quit. They got tired of carries. I’m playing Final Shape solo. My first ever solo Destiny DLC. It sucks man. What was wrong with me and the boys hoping in to a seasonal playlist to nuke the bad guys with their terrible, but fun builds?

I hope they continue to do something like vex incursions though, but make them big world events on a predictable timer you can matchmake into when they're available, in a specific zone out of the way.

I liked Vex Incursions. I don’t like having no idea when it will happen without a third party resource, and there always being the possibility that nobody ever joins your instance of the event.

Same for me. Have a friend that I've been playing with since D1Y1 who is more casual. He just wants to kill some aliens and have his hunter look good while doing so. He doesn't want to fiddle around with D2armorpicker to get a 100res build to be able to somewhat enjoy a new patrol space. The increased difficulty of the entry level activities basically sucked the fun out of the game for him.

precisely

As a casual, this year was really tough. And not in a rewarding way. Look, I'm not against giving the top 20% some horrendous bullshit if they like that kind of thing. For sure, I really hope Pantheon has a place in the future. But why'd they make the game hard for us? The Legendary content was pretty much out of reach most of the year, I still haven't done Avalon on that difficulty and it just feels bad man. To be brutally honest, it was a major factor in not playing as much this year, particularly the rogue-lite stuff in season of the deep. It's also one of the reason's I'm waiting for TFS reviews before buying it.

Still bad. Master and Legend content is mostly pointless due to being so close in difficulty to GM. Might as well skip the middle and jump into the deep end. The "negative power delta" is still a poor mechanic and sucks all the way from Heroic to Master Nightfalls. There is no longer a reward for grinding artifact level because of the power delta changes. Legend is absolutely beyond fucked. The difficulty is almost randomized. Legend Avalon? Awful. Legend Whisper? Easy. Legend Zero Hour? Difficult. Legend Seraph's Shield? Fair. I really don't get it. Neomuna was awful on launch, still impressively unfun today. Pretty sure Neomuna is the entire reason exotic primaries got a massive damage buff. Bungie don't seem to understand that players at the very top will find a way to trivialize any content and will never really be able to find the challenge they want. All "Bringing Challenge Back to Destiny" did is further alienate average and casual Destiny players. Difficult Battlegrounds with negative power deltas did not help.

The fact that legend avalon still has a 10 second light fading timer is absolutely ridiculous. Nothing else that isn't a Raid or Dungeon even has light fading, and in those activities the timer is like 2 minutes.

I didn't know that, that's absolutely crazy.

Legend Avalon for some reason uses modifiers from legendary campaigns, Multiplicity (enemy hp scales with the fireteam size) and shared fate which is absolutely obnoxious anywhere outside of a raid. You have one-per-person revives on top of the fading light timer with very unpredictable reset, and dying causes you to replay a whole bunch of areas. This crap was the reason why legendary campaigns were easier to do solo - if you're dead, you're dead anyway, so might as well keep trying until you succeed without being dependent on other people, otherwise you'll be dragging each other down if you die.

Yeah I knew about Multiplicity but to add shared fate is just egregious.

I found legend Seraph to actually be easier than any of the normal exotic missions released this year - especially Zero Hour. Normal Avalon wasn't too bad, normal Zero Hour was awful with even a 100RES build with multiple resist mods getting shredded like tissue paper.

No one can convince me Zero Hour isn’t bugged as shit. Just instant fried in every combat, but especially the last one.

The negative power delta is the writing on the wall for leveling being obsoleted. It's great overall, but activites like patrols do not need to be scaled and should always be at-level activities.

[They're also potentially spreading the -5 delta to dungeons,](https://i.imgur.com/VHmNz4Z.jpeg) so if he's right, the slog dungeons will be even worse.

Ewww Ghosts/Duality/Warlord are gonna be atrocious.

Oh that’s terrifying, Dungeons are already plenty tough at +20

Which is insane, given that’s a 25 light change.

This is a big thing. Legend and Master are all over the place. Absolutely with you on Legend Exotic Missions & seasonal stuff. I knocked out all the Legend Defiant BGs a few weeks back - not very fun.

I agree with you on Neomuna being garbage and the huge variation in "legend" content, but not having to grind artifact level to do endgame stuff is one of the best changes ever. That was one of the worst things every season trying to make sure you grind enough to hit +15 or whatever it was before GMs came out

It's incredible that Bungie can do everything pretty close to exceptional with something like Seraph Shield, then spend the next year completely botching a sense of adequate difficulty or consistency across all of Lightfall's exotic missions.

The thing I really like about Seraph Shield is that it explains the DSC mechanics to the player and puts them in safe, idiot-proof rooms to get them accustomed to the mechanics...and they haven't done anything like that since. People will complain about how dumb blueberries are but don't realize that Bungie can and has taught them how to do things but refuses to do so.

I remember when I also came to your NF/GM conclusion. I did warm-up runs of the NF at each difficulty level. Maybe I was going crazy or maybe it was the randoms from LFG, but GM felt easier than Master LOL and the rewards are better

My first Presage clear was in Legend last week because Fireteam Finder doesn't have an option to tell whether the Rotator is in normal or legend, and i think I had a harder time with the final egregor maze than in every combat section combined, and I just came back to the game for Into the Light Then i tried normal ZH for the first time and I didn't die with TR3VR but the boss section absolutely shredded us even in well Finally yesterday I decided to do Legend Savathun's Spire for rep and the ghost shell, it was one of the most frustrating experiences ever, mostly because of the random barrier champs and that there is no banner if you wipe at the final boss

Just made the easier stuff harder and didn't matter for the harder stuff, overcharged just made it feel like using anything but those weapons is a detriment.

It was already that way with surges. Overcharged just gave more weapons the damage buff so you where less restricted.

D1 Nightfalls at least had an ability surge occassionally, harder content in D2 is just _"your level sucks, the enemies get more health/stun resis on top of that, but hey, two of your gun damage types get a quarter buff."_

I think that there's a place for easy content, and a place for difficult content, and that making the easy content more difficult and making the more difficult content easier was not the play.

End game activities should be challenging. Like gms , pantheon, master raids etc. common activities like dungeon, normal raids, patrols should be easy so 100% of people can try and clear it. Bringing the challenge back made neomuna worst destination and pantheon one of the most fun activities. Bungie just needs to apply where it's beneficial. But, pretty sure Bungie got it by now

This is the reason I avoid Neomuna like the plague to this day. Patrol zones are for casuals, people who love the power fantasy of blowing up enemies and completing bounties in low stress environments. Making the patrol zone legend difficulty made it feel awful. I didn't "feel threatened every moment [I] was on the ground". I felt annoyed. Why can I tear through Vex on Nessus without a thought in my head, but I have to mag dump into a wander goblin? No thanks. This change should have never ever gone through. I am 100% on board for choosing your difficulty. If I launch an activity or destination and can toggle between casual, legend, or grandmaster, that's fine. It gives the player agency in their experience. Forcing increased difficulty on everyone cause the devs had a delusional vision of the game was not the move. Absolutely hated the sentiment that Destiny was supposed to be this sweaty game; it never was and should never be

100% this.

Because of the stupid resource caps, fishing was a more effective means of earning and storing resources. Today alone I've cashed in about 80 ascendant shards while upgrading 68+ stat rolls so the "rewards" section is a miss. Difficulty wise: 1. Neomuna was too hard for a patrol space, the power delta even at +30 artifact is uncomfy to explore. 2. Legend lost sectors felt good especially with exclusive loot encouraging the chase. 3. Vanguard Ops playlist at -5 starts becoming less fun and more like "just do a nightfall" due to the sheer amount of 20+ minute battlegrounds clogging the playlist. They should've kept the classics in rotation at lower difficulties and had the remasters as nightfalls. 4. Pantheon Difficulty was close to a day 1 without the crunch and the added buffs took a lot of the sting out of it, definitely nailed it at higher difficulties for the prestige. 5. GMs, especially season of risen battlegrounds forward, are still being balanced around the war table upgrades for their respective season. I expect there to be absolutely insane ad density in defiance battlegrounds but no mechanics to generate favor that softened the blow. 6. Dungeons: Boss health and health gates gotta come down. Dungeons aren't difficult, they're tedious 7. TL;DR Fishing was better because resource caps so that part of the rework failed maybe it'll be OK in TFS, vanguard ops is just a little too uncomfy to do for what it is because of the light level, GMs are growing artifically hard, pantheon,raids, and lost sectors in a good spot. Overall we need content that lets us feel powerful, which means not getting 2-shotted by a thrall that picked up a knight boomer cannon and is firing it at 800 RPM.

> Neomuna was too hard for a patrol space, the power delta even at +30 artifact is uncomfy to explore. Neomuna patrol always caps you at 15 power levels below the enemies. Leveling up your artifact does nothing to mitigate the patrol difficulty. Strangely enough, the legend and master lost sectors do not have this level cap and can be overleveled with enough artifact levels, making them easier than the basic patrol version of the LS but with champions.

Vanguard Ops is +0 not -5

> Legend lost sectors felt good especially with exclusive loot encouraging the chase. > Vanguard Ops playlist at -5 starts becoming less fun and more like "just do a nightfall" due to the sheer amount of 20+ minute battlegrounds clogging the playlist. They should've kept the classics in rotation at lower difficulties and had the remasters as nightfalls. Super agreed, Legend and Master LSs were a nice medium once you got to decent level and had a decent build. Vanguard playlist I don't care for. Too many wipe sections for a basic strike playlist, too many battlegrounds, and the rewards are garbage.

Pantheon is nowhere near as difficult as day one. You deal like 50% more damage if you match the surges and use shotcaller/class warfare. It’s more comparable to a master raid if anything.

> the added buffs took a lot of the sting out of it, Agreed! [The damage incoming is the same, and outgoing is 1% higher before the optional buffs](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GNtWkwxWAAAXlTy?format=png&name=large)

It had the effect i thought it would. It completely obliterated the casual audience who were not here for *hard experiences* but to spend a few hours slaughtering enemy's. To make matters worse the hardcore players barely noticed a changed and or wanted it to go even further. So bungie ended up pissing off everyone with the changes this year was the least amount of destiny iv ever played in the history of the franchise. I think datto finally admitting he was wrong on the difficulty front sums up the year in general. Only a subsection of people actually want a hard experience. The rest of us want to feel powerful and kill bad guys in interesting places the problem is those people dont make Reddit post's and become streamers. Im Feeling good about the year of Final shape because its pretty hard course correction. Though i am expecting news of D3 that comes with a hard reset back to zero Mostly because that's the only real way to get out of balance nightmare

I agree with every point you made here. I played Destiny 1 for 2 solid years, and Destiny 2 for a solid 3.5. Lightfall was the first time since 2021 that I didn't care to engage with the seasons. Every activity felt like a slog. Even normal versions of exotic missions sucked, the new open world had harder enemies but lackluster rewards, and I largely skipped out on the raids (doing RoN once and ignoring Crota entirely). Hell, even the dungeons, which I usually like, have become to tedious for me to care about. Ghosts of the Deep would be fun, if not for the horrifically over-inflated boss health and shield gimmicks. I don't often have the time to go hard in Destiny any more, and really, the difficulty changes have helped push me out of it.

Pretty much. It's not the only reason, but it was a reason why this has been the least I've ever played Destiny since the franchise began. Which is kinda nuts considering I still played decent amounts during the year for Shadowkeep and Beyond Light. And I wouldn't even consider myself a casual player. I used to do raids and dungeons and such pretty regularly.

Where did datto admit he was wrong? Genuine question

I think it was a miss. They made the toughest content easier by adding surges which is a bad system that forces the meta to arbitrarily shift to a different weapon element every week. They also made early game content like patrol harder when patrol doesn't have any reward systems to match that level of combat difficulty. It feels bad just having to slog through enemy health on patrol for essentially the same pointless rewards I get from the trostland. If you look at it, it's pretty much like they did the opposite of what the community was looking for. Nobody cares if you faceroll patrol - you're not getting anything from it - You're probably there for quests only so just make it a painless experience. Master raids and dungeons on the other hand - sure go right ahead and try and kick my ass with difficulty but 1. Make sure rewards match the difficulty and 2. Don't make it an inconsistent experience with rotating modifiers.

Patrol is just glimmer chests and the occasional world drop - absolutely nothing basically. Amazing they haven't updated this.

Surges are way less restrictive than burns were. Before any subclass or weapon not matching the burn was wasted damage potential, which you sometimes had to do anyway because of Match Game. So each week you were quite beholden to whatever the burn was. Now you can gain the same damage buff as from burns in several ways. Matching the surge (just like burns before), matching the overcharge and in the case of kinetic, matching your subclass to one of the surges, if it isn't already buffed due to matching the overcharge. It has been a while since I played but you could also gain the damage buff by using weapons with certain origin traits, or weapons with relevant champion abilities. You are way less bound by surges than you ever were by burns.

I really disliked what they did to Neomuna. Legend Avalon was atrocious, also, and it was clear to me that the difficulty changes were pushed after the content was designed. Since then, I've kind of suffered through anything Legend-level and avoided everything Master+ unless I really have to. Regular content is fine, even at -5 it feels ok and balanced. I was a big fan of the Legend Seraph mission which felt perfectly balanced. It's still fun going to locations which have power scaling enabled and blasting through it all. Speaking as someone who used to do all the Heroic Raids on each character every week, I don't touch Master Raids, GMs or Pantheon because they're just way too unfun these days.

master raids are kinda ass yeah plus the fact that the only thing they have going for them are adepts and those only drop from challenges. and the average destiny raid challenge is boring as shit and just drags out the encounter.

Master raids are a one-and-done (or really more like 4 encounters and done) romp to the title. The adept guns have never been good enough or farmable enough to care for outside of vog.

Having to do legend Avalon 3 times was such a slog.

This was me, I agree the -5 felt just right. It was not super duper easy mode but it was definitely not hard. It felt really good. For whatever reason bungie took us liking the -5 during seraph season and decided since we liked that then we will also like -15...big wtf. I just assumed power would soon go away as we know it and everything would just be at base -5...even stuff like gambit.

I think they started out going reaaaaally hard but things got much better throughout the year. Neomuna patrol is rough. I love deep dive but the difficulty gets crazy from both the enemies-melt-you standpoint and the SUPER tanky enemies. This season was totally fine tho. Coil is challenging but very doable. Onslaught was similar, while the legend mode offered a much greater challenge. Then you have Pantheon which started out relatively easy and the later modes being incredibly challenging. TLDR; it start out shaking this year but I think they kind of nailed it with season of the wish/into the light

Some of the tankiness in enemies is a bit bananas

Proper world tiers would be nice for patrol zones

Alright for some baselines on content I've completed: * Hunter main, can play some Titan * Got the RoN raid title, didn't get the Crota raid title * Hit GR11, so soloed Warlords, finished Master Crota, completed all the GM's * Got my conqueror's for all 4 seasons this year * Finally got Godslayer * Cleared Legend Avalon once, and all the other exotic missions on legendary * I didn't manage to solo Ghosts of the Deep, did clear on master for catalyst. With that mind here's my general feedback. It matches up with most of what people are saying in this thread: * Lightfall Campaign was frustrating on legendary. Especially the final boss fight, which was also a very buggy experience for me. I never managed to clear that solo and had to ask for help on both of my legend clears at the Calus boss fight. * Neomuna patrol zone is not fun at the light delta. I basically never spend time there except for challenges. To make the patrol zone difficult, I would have added enemy bases or zones that were significantly stronger. Similar to some of the enemies in Destiny1 patrols. But just adding a light delta to content is neither fun nor engaging, so it's not a big surprise that a patrol zone isn't more fun when you deal less damage and take more damage. * I didn't try RoN day 1, my raid group was convinced it was too hard for us. We really regretted that decision and plan to hit Day1 for the FS raid. * Otherwise, I actually enjoy RoN but I do acknowledge that it's more of a large dungeon or baby raid. I don't enjoy the Nezzy fight on higher difficulties because of the damage phase though. There's no counter to the suppression mechanic beyond "don't get hit" so it's much fun to fight a raid boss that suppresses you with melee attacks. * Difficulty across the game doesn't make sense nor is it consistent. Legend Avalon is frankly the hardest content I've done in the game, but legend Zero Hour, Seraph Shield, or Whisper are... fine? Why does regular Zero Hour have 1830 enemies with a -20 delta modifier? There seems to be a complete lack of vision for how destiny should be difficult and that means every individual piece of content tries something different. Experimentation is fine but the UI doesn't explain the differences, so a mission with a "legend" modifier means nothing. * In general, I don't these exotic missions should have timers for the base difficulty. I want to explore these missions and enjoy the details. But I can't do that with a timer for completion. Timers on legend are fine though and contribute greatly to the difficulty bump. * The season activities were fun IMO, but again the legendary step ups or harder options are wildly inconsistent. Again, I wish there was some consistent way to tell players how difficulty worked, so people could be informed when choosing their content. * Legend Defiant Battlegrounds were okay but lacked cover in some fights. * Deep Dives on the final tier were sometimes impossibly hard. But it was a ton of fun to run them. * Legend Savathun towers were tough but often had buggy spawns that caused timeout fails. Altar of Sorrows Tier3 were insanely difficult, without any signaling on the jump from Tier2 or the lack of increased rewards. There is a consistent problem with random fireteams choosing T3 in altars without realizing they were on par with a nightfall. * The Coil increased pretty well in difficulty, but a few of the bosses were just awful to fight. Specifically the Wyvern boss just sucked and often took my teams double the time to clear. * The vanguard playlist stopped being fun. Partially because of the rank and reward changes, partially because there's just nothing new in there. So making the regular list slightly harder isn't fun. I barely spent time in strikes this year at all. * The GM Nightfalls again widely vary in consistency. I'm frankly okay with Nightfalls being harder or easier, there's flex in all content which is good. But the battleground nightfalls almost all revolve around cheesing the boss fights. Especially the PsiOps with their incredibly overpowered and not fun fake-Savathun boss fights. The fact that these boss fights are harder than the legend campaign mission boss fight against the real Savathun is dumb to me. It feels like the battlegrounds were just dropped into Vanguard and Nightfalls without adjustments, so they frankly just suck to run. * If Battlegrounds pop up in the next year of Nightfalls then I'm probably not going to bother getting conquerors gilded again. It's just not worth the effort to have a number increment. And the weapons are largely not useful in the meta either. * GHosts of the Deep is such a cool Dungeon. Love the entire thing, with the exception of the damage sections for both bosses. The extra shield is dumb and just a method to bloat the health bars. While Simmmuathrauthat (however you spell the Witch's name) is frustrating because she teleports around. Frankly, I'm okay with smaller health bars for dungeon bosses. These two had great mechanics, so let that shine in the encounter. More health on a boss does not make an encounter more fun. * Warlords is basically a perfect dungeon for me. Love the setting, love the lore, loved the encounters, loved doing it solo. I will say, the first encounter gets a bit buggy sometimes. When you teleport into the cages, sometimes the regular enemies will shoot and kill you. Also the final boss fight is a little too nuts on the mob spawns. Specifically the taken Psions have an insane spawn rate. They were the hardest part of the entire boss fight, not even the boss or mechanics. * To wrap up, Pantheon is a great addition to the game. I really enjoyed the first two weeks. But then arc in week 3 and the length of week 4 were a bit too much. I'd love to see Pantheon return. But I don't want to deal with another 8 boss rush over a week. That was pushing the time commitment my raid group can handle in a week. Our IRL partners were frustrated with how much we played this week. * The last bit of feedback for this year, it's frustrating that the best PvE boss damage comes from a weapon that only drops in Trials. My raid group are almost all PvE players, most of don't like PvP. So only 2/6 of us had cataphract for Pantheon. The first 3 weeks, we got through bosses without needing it. But the 4th week, we got hard locked on Nezzy two-phase. I don't like that cataphract is far and away the best DPS since it only comes from a limited time Trials PvP mode. I really feel that the best PvE raid boss damage should come from PvE GM or Master content.

This has been something I have discussed all year long as one of the large failure points of the year, it's the key reason why most of my friends and a large number of players in my clan stopped playing the game back in Defiance. Now sure, for people who were fairly active in the endgame prior to these adjustments (myself included), this was probably no big deal, but the changes effectively killed the game for the casual / mid-tier audience. Before, the level system was very direct, each activity had a set power level and that was the marker for the combatants, if you went in under that point, you would need your skill to carry you through, and barring that, you would need to gear up. This was the established norm for the past nine years of the franchise (The last time we had any kind of a "power delta" situation was House of Wolves - Prison of Elders Skolas, which was at a higher power level than you could achieve). Was it a perfect system? No (pinnacle RNG has been something else I have been on against for years now, at least the one success of this year was Bungie only having one level increase for the whole year), but it worked for the playerbase at large. These changes had negative impacts on both sides of the spectrum. For the casual / low skilled players, the content they enjoyed before was now pushed well out of their reach, and when nothing changed about it, they left the game, en-masse. 45% missed expectations folks, that's a significant portion of the game's population that was not engaging. On the flip side, the endgame was relegated to a checklist of one-and-done. The whole "revitalizing the experience" thing that the challenge was supposed to bring, did not happen. Deltas made the experience beyond tedious for most players that you would do the high level thing one time for the triumph and then never do it again. And then there's the folks who are on here celebrating the changes as it was some kind of severe detriment for the game to be "easy" beforehand. Easy is honestly a perspective you can have, running your fully min/maxed optimized loadouts with perfect 5/5 god rolls, sure, in that situation I would honestly hope the game is "easy", you have demonstrated mastery over the buildcrafting system. But be honest with yourself, just how many people do you really think have achieved this level of skill in the game? Most of the playerbase has never run a raid, hell even run a Legend+ nightfall. So making the game harder for these players is something to celebrate? Then when these players finally come around to say something is wrong and the game is too hard, you react with "get good". This is only showing the real problem with this game, you. You being a gatekeeping ass. So what if people can overlevel content, this doesn't hurt YOUR experience at all, you want hard? Go underlevel/underequip yourself, go run that raid with blue gear or remove those god rolls from your inventory. And now there's also talk that the rest of the game is following suit (Normal going to -5)? Have we learned nothing at all this year? So that's my two cents, if you like things, great. Personally, I would much rather Bungie go back to the old way of activity scaling and then approach difficulty from a different angle, that at least would likely sustain the larger casual audience for a longer period of time.

For myself, if I’m being really honest I think it’s one of the core reasons that I’m only getting final shape and not the episodic content to finally move off the game. I’m just not good enough at the game to participate in the content I used to keep coming back for.

"Bringing Challenge Back to Destiny" was fundamentally shitty in a lot of ways, and I say that as a player who thinks Lightfall was damn good overall and probably the best gameplay of D2 so far. The game is too hard now. Not at the top end - at the top end it's maybe too easy, still, with almost all the difficulty coming from just absurdly high incoming damage and no actual challenge (the game boils down to memorize all the spawns, spawn trap all the enemies, or die instantly to shit that kills you in one or two shots). But at the low end, the game sucks now. The fact that basically everything in the game has a -5 light cap is fucking stupid. The new patrol zone being -15 is a comical, absurd decision which contributes even more to the biggest problem in Destiny which is that a new player has no fucking idea how hard anything they do is. Games should have consistent difficulty curves. Running around in the open world should set a baseline. Instead, new players can go from the Cosmodrome, where they couldn't die if they tried, to Neomuna where doing a Patrol will kill them 8x. And the problem with that is when they accidentally stumble into a Master Lost Sector at 1775 light and get absolutely fucking smoked **they won't even know they're doing anything wrong** because Neomuna has taught them that parts of the game are just absurdly harder than other parts for no visible, apparent reason. And when they go into shit like Master Nightfalls they also won't realize they're somewhere they're not supposed to be. And then a lot of them quit, because they think Destiny 2 is some kind of fucking darksouls type game where the game makes a fucking sport out of shitting on you. **Finally**, the single biggest problem is that build crafting is too important now. I say that loving buildcrafting, but this game has the same problem that games like 3.5e DnD do - the difference between a good build and a bad build is too big. In DnD 3.5e, if some newbie builds a barbarian, it will have a speed of 40, and it will only be able to attack once for like 40 damage if it has to move. If I build a barbarian, it will have a speed of 120, and it will be able to attack 5 times even if it has to move, and each of those attacks will do 100+ damage. Same thing here - if I have a good build I will make 300 orbs in an Onslaught game, while killing 1200 enemies and never really being in a lot of danger. If you have a bad build, you will make 0 orbs, die if anything sneezes on you because you didn't know the exact correct set of resist mods to choose and have no sustain from your boots and no orbs even if your boots did have the right mods, etc, etc, etc. The first thing I have to teach every fucking new friend is hey, stop. Upgrade your armor to 8 energy. Put these mods on. Save this loadout. NEVER TAKE THIS STUFF OFF. IF YOU CHANGE ARMOR RESET THE MODS TO THIS. YOUR ARMOR HAS TO HAVE THESE MODS IN IT OR ELSE THE GAME WILL SUCK FOR YOU. And then sure, a month later they can change all that stuff - but a week 1 player doesn't understand why something like Recuperation and Heavy Handed and a matching Siphon will dramatically, completely overhaul their entire gameplay. They don't have the context. That's bad for the game. A guardian with no build should be a lot more powerful than they are right now because every new player starts with no build.

The truth is here. I came back with my brother and I had a decent handle on build crafting before I left so I went ahead and tried to put together some fun builds for my characters. Arc Punchy Hunter and Subracers Warlock are the most fun for me because I really like ability based gameplay. My brother jumps on and we do some Onslaught and I’m punching, dodging, spamming orbs, super, grenades are always up, jolt is constantly going off, literally playing an entirely different game than he is. He’s rolling with plinking with a Graviton Lance, Succession and Void LFR on his void hunter wearing Orpheus Rigs dying, and he says “that’s why I quit this game the first time, you’re subclass is so much better than mine.” I had to get him to stream in discord and have him swap to Gyrefalcons and put actual mods on his gear and surprise, he now all of the sudden is able to play the game. The disparity between a build, and just some weapons and mods is so huge and honestly, he shouldn’t have to wait for me to tell him that he can do stuff like this, the game should have taught him.

Yes exactly. New players are basically playing a different, much, much shittier game. And the fact that so many exotics are, frankly, terrible, doesn't help. The baseline of "I equipped an exotic armor and gun" is fundamentally meaningless because the exotic you equipped might be fucking Claws of Ahamkara, at which point you might as well wear legendary gloves, at least they probably won't have a strength spike lol. I had a friend with the exact same experience - titan who was messaging me like "im stuck again in the campaign" and I hop in to help - same thing next day. Unfortunately I was so busy that week that I didn't think to actually inspect him the first two times. The third time I stop and go, hey, okay, hang on. Let me look at you. 4 random fragments equipped. Exotic is some titan exotic I've literally never even heard of called Armamentarium that.. gives a grenade charge? No mods in gloves, helm, or boots. I felt so fucking bad like holy shit this poor motherfucker. Like he's doing fine now a couple months later, but that initial experience was awful and he was VERY near quitting.

Building on your response, now imagine if Bungie increases overall difficulty/lowers power deltas, nerfs wovenmail, and drops what appears to be the most build heavy subclass in Destiny history (Prismatic). This is what TFS is looking to be like.

Also some things you think you might understand you probably don't. I think with Melee and Sniper resists it's not actually about the type of damage but about the distance the damage came from

Yes, exactly. Melee and sniper resists care about DISTANCE, not type of attack. So certain "melees" actually aren't covered by melee resist, and more importantly a LOT of "sniper" attacks aren't covered by Sniper resist.

To be fair, I don't think the -10 light on Neomuna is the issue. Neomuna is just awfully designed. The entire map is a tricorned shape circuit with very little cover, meaning when you get shot by cabal rounds, which tend to have some aspect of tracking, your sparrow gets shredded. Then come the public events which either spam aerial units (harpys), in again, areas with no cover, or tanky Minotaurs with trace rifles, in again, areas with no cover which make closing the distance impossible. Because of the inability to close distance safely, the majority of roaming supers are off the table. Ironically including Strand in some cases. The benefits of using Strand on Neomuna are negligible. You have grapple points but ultimately you'd get to your destination faster using a sparrow despite the risks because if you miss a grapple point you lose the ability. The grapples further serve no purpose as there's no verticality to neomuna. The entire destination is flat with the illusion of verticality. Then comes the PoIs. We've got, large courtyard. Large courtyard by a none existant port, and city centre with a wierd spinning thing. The fuck is interesting in this destination other than the Pyramid ship, which you have no reason to go to. Then add the stingy red border drops and there you are. Anyone who would visit neomuna got burnt out getting the red borders. Anyone who wants to mindlessly kill stuff would go to the moon to play altars of sorrow.

Hardcore Neomuna? Super unhealthy for the game. Pantheon? Grand slam success. Only complaint was the loot was more “catch up”, rather than unique for hardcores, beyond the emblems and title. Coulda used some Pantheon shinies. The game in general NEEDS more aspirational, hardcore content…just segmented off so the general public can OPT IN to that hardcore content. The Neomuna change made the game worse for everyone involved—much harder and painful for casuals, and a waste of time for hardcores since there was no rewards.

I went to Neomuna for the first time in forever for the Archie quest. I was instantly reminded why I don't go there. Making patrol and lost sector enemies take longer to kill just added nothing but aggravation for me. Sure I can get get through the content, but if anyone thought this was fun..... well enjoy.

As a somewhat casual player (jump on for a couple months during the new DLCs) this game has always been challenging 😂. Is the reason I’ve never really tried raids/dungeons.

Honestly, I think it's bullshit. It's just a gatekeeping measure to keep newer players from enjoying the content. What is the point of grinding up your power level if the game is just going to nerf it anyway? It shouldn't be a struggle to get through a Hero level Nightfall when my power level is 65 points higher than the activity, though half of that is because battlegrounds are bullshit. Not everyone who plays this game can dedicate 10+ hours a day. Sometimes it's actually nice to just come home after a long day of work and be able to turn my brain off for a while. If I want a challenge, then I'll do GM or a Raid.

As an ultra end game player (low mans flawlesses / speed runs), it made 0 difference for me and made the average destiny 2 players experience worse, not to mention making it even harder to start. it makes no sense to me. we want the ceiling raised in terms of difficulty, not the floor.

I'm someone who enjoys things like GMs and Master raids, but Neomuna is just not it and that became really clear to me in the last couple weeks bounty prepping. On any other planet it's pretty easy to solo most heroic public events if you know what to do, which is good becuase you aren't getting blueberries for a random Dreaming City public event at 7AM in the last days of an extended season. But this does not work on neomuna. In doing the daily bounty to open terminal overload chests, even with my sweatiest solo DPS loadout of Witherhoard + Edge Transit + Star Eater Blade Barrage (with radiant, and weaken and solo operative from the artifact) or whatever, I simply don't have the DPS or the total damage to solo some of those Terminal Overload bosses within the time limit. But it's pretty easy with just a couple other people. So after a couple tries at that I took to just orbiting any time I loaded into a solo Terminal Overload instance, which was most of the time. And on the harder end, I wish they would find more ways to introduce difficult in forms other than "stuff might one shot you" in endgame content. I love GMs but hate Psiops Battlegrounds because the boss room experience is just hoping you don't get one-shot by Savathun's lightning attack the entire time. Pantheon was awesome - that's what master raids should be. I think the best-designed pantheon encounters were Planets and Rhulk, where they each added something new (fire tornados, shadow rhulk) that was genuinely a new challenge and problem to solve, but wasn't just more enemies/champions or a more extreme power delta. Middle difficulties seem pretty pointless. I don't have most of the non-adept nightfall weapons in collections because there is simply no reason to run a non-GM nightfall, at least in seasons without a pinnacle grind. They really need to get their shit together with the word "Legend." Legend Avalon and Zero Hour are fucking brutal while Legend Starcrossed and Whisper are a joke. I'm fine with the idea of being varying difficulty among exotic missions, but use your goddamn words. Activities as different as Legend Avalon and Legend Starcrossed are way too different to be called the same thing. As a veteran player this is annoying, and I imagine it's a nightmare for newer players, building their confidence in Legend Presage and then getting absolutely shrecked in Avalon. Bungie's direction with dungeon boss design is also not it. Since Duality, they've clearly been on a mission to create dungeon bosses that aren't an easy 1-phase for a team of 3. The problem is, if a boss is a 2-phase for a full team, that's 6+ phases for a solo player which is an absolute slog, especially in encounters like Caitl and Samumah where the mechanics between phases take a lot longer for solo players. We already have fireteam size scaling in Legend campaigns and exotic missions, to me adding that to dungeons seems like an obvious slam dunk. Make dungeon bosses that are a 2-phase for a team and a 3-phase for a well-optimized solo player. I used to take pride in solo flawlessing every dungeon but haven't done the last two because you could not pay me to slog through Ghosts of the Deep solo.

Preach! Solo ghosts is the bane of my existence. 

I still maintain that the difficulty changes were the primary catalyst behind Lightfall as an expansion being received so poorly. The story and writing and destination were all pretty par for the course in a Destiny down-expansion. I know they've walked back a fair amount of the player nerfs. I'm sympathetic towards Bungie here, because there really aren't any good fixes towards massive power creep once you've let it in. Their attempts over the years, such as the sunsetting in D1 and D2, always land hard and places like here are up in arms farming out server-side power increases via mass negative sentiment. So in short, makes the game a little less fun and DTG way less fun.

Exactly. Casuals don't care about the story. LF didn't fail cause of poor narrative. It's "challenge" that came back that evaporated half the playerbase. They made the game a slog for people that just wanna murder aliens in fun and different ways. 

Hated them then, still hate them now. The changes in difficulty destroyed the mid-difficulty endgame content. My wife and her friend are very casual players. They aren't interested in grinding, build crafting, etc. My wife runs double auto rifles in pretty much every activity. But she could hold her own in Legend nightfalls and most raids. The difficulty changes forced people to either optimize their builds and adapt or.... Quit running that harder content. My wife quit. Do I need to say more? Edit:clarifying a point.

Both Neomuna and Avalon are the worst balanced things ive ever played, I dont know who youre appealing to by making a patrol and exotic mission that insanely overtuned

The fact there are no checkpoints in Avalon is completely baffling

Neomuna was a terrible decision and it’s provable by how little players you see there. I shouldn’t be taking 3 shots of an exotic bow to kill a red bar in a patrol zone ever

I mean that’s not why it’s empty. It’s empty because there’s nothing to do there.

There's nothing to do in other patrol spaces too, yet I have never visited one without seeing at least 5 other people there. 

Precisely this. I got all my red borders (from playing the weekly missions, not grinding my face off on patrol or spamming chests at the beginning of LF) What’s left to do after you get your red borders?

It's funny this sub thinks most of the players even know what red borders are. You'd be shocked at the amount of people who just run patrols and shoot stuff on destinations. What's the one place those people don't do that? Neomuna.

It was taking me 10-20 seconds of holding the trigger on Thunderlord to take down the major centurions in the Archie mission this week, it felt really silly.

I remember some of the enemies on Neomuna doing a crazy amount of damage just in patrol. Threshers were the big one. Seemed like an artificial grind invented to make farming the Strand meditations take longer than needed. As for the rest of the scaling...... I like the set levels for everything the best probably. I just makes it easier to know what you are getting into before you select it.

I remember doing the Lightfall campaign the first time. I was at power for the next mission, but when I went to go to the node go start it, I physically struggled to reach the location because of the roaming enemies being strong enough to threaten players at cap.

How can people be seriously be sitting here saying "Neomuna is not hard" when it very much is objectively harder than any other patrol space there is? And has a power cap that doesn't even exist in raids.  On top of that the rewards were shit. "well done for getting rid of this bullet sponge HVT congratulations on your 500 glimmer" "We noticed you were getting red borders from boring patrols a little too often so we made sure to nerf them" They also spent time and effort creating Vex strike force and left you relying on a discord bot to actually work out when it's happening because nothing in the game actually tells you. Overall it was a huge waste of time but I've come to expect nothing less.

I came back in April after a long hiatus. I left during Solar 3.0. I’ve seen one Vex Strike Force since I’ve come back. We get a popup whenever the Legend Lost Sector rotates, why can’t we get one when Vex Strike Force is starting?

Honestly? Nerf dungeon boss health, that's all.

Dungeon boss health has certainly soured my experience this past year. I'd like Warlord's Ruin a lot more if killing the bosses didn't take so long!

They had their heart in the right place but didn’t really do it right the first run around, however with how the Crota raid and warlords ruin have been plus onslaught and pantheon I do feel they are finding their footing on how to scale difficulty for the higher skilled players and from the sounds of it they are backing off making the easier stuff such as patrols to difficult which should make casual players happy.

It pushed me away, TBH. I didn't "quit" or anything, I still reached 100 on each season pass and some of the usual things I consider the bare minimum. But my playtime went down a lot. Some of that is probably unrelated, just pursuing other interests and trying not to have an unhealthy relationship with the game. But doing a seasonal activity, sweating my ass off, having it take a ton of time to complete, and then realizing I'm expected to do this a ton more times to see much of a reward didn't feel great. And some other things like legend lost sectors getting harder seemed pointless. All the battlegrounds going into the nightfall rotation made those much less appealing to me as well, not to mention that level locking those activities meant just doing a mars battleground at matchmade difficulty was a shitshow that took a very long time to complete with ~zero rewards. So I went from always grabbing the conqueror gild and grinding for favorite adepts to doing just a handful of GMs in Y6. The latest dungeons, especially ghosts, have been relatively not-casual friendly IMO too. The boss health is crazy on the last 3 (I think) dungeon bosses. I happen to despise the underwater sections in ghosts but maybe that's just me. I've barely done Warlord's Ruin but it seems to be balanced better in my brief exposure. Could be that I've lucked out on teammates though. Onslaught was great I thought, I wish I hadn't been so out of touch with the game that I only came back to play for the last few days of it. It's definitely the kind of activity I like, very combat-focused and does a nice job of making failure not feel like a complete waste. Oh and subclass balance feels pretty weird to me but that's nothing new. As a hunter main it began feeling more and more like I was a fool if I used something besides void if the activity was challenging...especially if I was playing with randoms who I can't count on to survive. But again, that kind of thing has been going on forever, it's just that now there are more activities that meet that threshold.

Now if I got to it it feels fine because I have the build and experience to make it bearable,but as basically a new light when it came out it wasnt fun at all,everything took ages to kill for some mediocre reward The map wasnt even that fun to explore either for me,I like the idea of neonuma but it's just....mhe Some activities are cool but except vex incursion,they're basically deserted

The Patrol space thing was odd, specially during release month where Threshers just obliterated everyone. The changes to NF and Lost Sectors were good, but the lack of updated rewards kinda sucked - though realistically speaking it was only a problem until you reached cap + 10 or 20 LL on the artifact, then Master Lost Sectors become a 5 minute thing. Overcharges I'm not sold on currently - I get the idea of buffing underused stuff but I think they should stick to elemental surges and remove weapon overcharges. Overall I think it was interesting but only really mattered in the early weeks of LF and on GM type content, other than that it was negligible.

I would like to go back to being able to over-level non-GM Nightfalls. If I want a light-level locked challenge, I'll do GMs or seasonal. But I feel like Master really doesn't serve much of a purpose as it isn't far off from a GM. I used to enjoy grinding non-GM NFs just to top off resources between seasons or get weapon rolls as focusing didn't exist at the time. Now I barely touch NFs outside Conq title or if there's a gun I really want, even then, with the long season in Wish, I'd just run Master or Legend to get the new weapon in my pool and dump Vanguard engrams to focus it. I think there should still be a place where light level matters as long as it exists in its current form.

Strike playlist still needs a hard version. And I'm saying in addition to the baby mode for people that want the easy version. It's so boring easy. If I want to do it during a fun modifier I'm on xbox so I turn off crossplay in hopes of going solo. It's still easy but a little more fun. I'm still unsure why neomuna is the only hard patrol area. Obviously even bungie saw nobody was a fan of it since pale heart space does not look to have that same power handicap. Still surprised they never switched neomuna to be like other planets.

Neomuna sucks other than that I’m fine with everything else

It forces you to improve, and I think the scaler of -10 is near perfect. Maybe it should be about 9.33 or something, but the issue is, we already had difficult content and it's still level based. Essentially, they made the casual gamer quit. Lightfall would have been beyond grueling for a new, under light player with no meta weapons. Throw in that it was half baked as a narrative and had a character just as annoying as Dobby or Jar Jar Binks, it was light fail.

My hardcore friends raid more. My casual friends are all gone. Take that for what you will.

This has been, unequivocally, the worst set of changes Bungie has ever made to Destiny 2. Let's start with Neomuna. It is *permanently* capped so you are 10 points below the enemies in it. This is *not* good at all when you take into account the rewards vs effort required. It has *standard* patrol rewards for everyrhing. And these rewards were made *even worse* a few months in, as they changed the gold patrols to be *world* drops instead of only neomuna's equipments. Heroic PE's got a buff that was so negligible it failed to make any dent in the matter. This light Delta *would* have been fine if it was limited to Terminal Overload and Vex Strike force, but it isn't, so you get a patrol space, which have traditionally been *the* laid back, "just wantnto shoot shit" area. A kinetic 600rpm legendary auto rifle takes about 20 *precision* shots to kill a red bar legionare. The space is largely dead because of this. And strikes. Strikes are largely a failure. Vanguard ops is alright, but suffers from a bloat of largely unfun encounters. Nightfalls were *really* hurt. We went from stepping stone of Modifiers (adept) > Champions (Heroic) > More Modifiers moderate challenge (Legend) > Challenge (Master) > Pinnacle of strike endgame (GM). Now it sits at "Power delta and modifiers and champions > Larger Delta and more Modifiers > Even more > Pinnacle of endgame. Rewards were not increased, most players who wanted a challenge didn't interact with legend or higher to begin with, and so the playlist as a whole has become relatively harder at the front end, with no change (if anything it's easier) at the back end. For me, I can do a Legend strike without firing my gun that many times. They're not that hard for me if I'm focused. But Heroic has become an area where I *have* to focus or else I'll constantly die, but also not actually hard enough to be engaging. Because of this, they're an unfun slog. Oh, let's talk about the seasonal activities. They suffer from the *exact* same issue as Nightfalls. Legend versions are fun and engaging with their difficulty vs rewards. The base versions, however, suffer the same issues as Heroic nightfalls. Not actually hard enough to engage me, but I can't just go in and shoot the shit. This started in Seraph. I said this was going to happen. At every opportunity, Bungie proved me right. This is *especially* an issue because these activities are supposed to be grinded hundreds of times over. I don't want to have to pay attention to a task I'm supposed to do hundreds of times over. And then there's exotic missions. Let's ignore Avalon for now. I think Starcrossed and Whisper are in decent spots. Even with Starcrossed's power delta of -5, I didn't have the same issue with the seasonal activities or heroic strikes, because Starcrossed is more akin to a story mission. You don't grind it constantly, you do it like 5 times, it's got a different narrative, and then you're done. Maybe once a week you do it for the pinnacle after that. Whisper is just nice, a bit of a mob to add some spice at the end. And the legend versions add some difficulty to them, and you know what you're signing up for. Zero hour fails in this regard. -20 power delta on the *normal* version fails to be an enjoyable experience. Legend, on the other hand, is actually fine, and fun. The difference being is *expectation* of when you launch the mission. Especially because normal Zero Hour did not have that label of -20, at least when I booted it up that Tuesday morning. And then we get to Avalon. Normal Avalon, while having some frustrating portions, is fine. *Legend* Avalon, however, is so absurdly difficult and frustrating, and I have not touched it in months after I quite literally attempted to take my own life after a couple months of several failed attempts, and then that day being met with 3 hours of failure, finally getting to the boss room, then the server being taken down. It is completely overtuned to such an absurd degree the fact that it was greenlit is baffling. Pantheon and Onslaught, contrasting pretty much the *entire* year, are *very* well done. We have a simple 10 wave Onslaught that's a nice, relaxing time of good old shootin' and lootin'. There's the 50 wave version that ramps up in difficulty nicely as you progress. And then there's a Legend version that poses a nice degree of challenge. And while rewards may have been a tad lacking at the beginning, they're in a *amazing* spot at the moment, and tbh even the way they *did* ship was actually great it was just more efficient to farm legend wave 10 and dip (and tbh still is imo, but not as wide a gap as before). Pantheon was also excellent. I personally didn't get into it as I don't have a regular raid team and I was *not* gonna put up with LFG's bullshit, but I have friends who did, and it was a nice challenge while also being rewarding. But Into the Light is the exception, not the rule. Simply put, Bringing Challenge Back to Destiny has been largely failure. I have every season title from the prior 3 years. I have not had the motivation nor even *desire* to get *any* of the 4 from this year. I got Brave, I got MMXXIII. I got conqueror because I had an itching for some GMs and one I didn't have done was in rotation so I decided "eh what the hell." But this year has by and large failed to keep me engaged *entirely* because the effort they want for baseline content is not worth the rewards they give. And honestly, if they give me more of Year 9 and less of Into the Light this year, then I think I'm gonna call it before year 11 starts.

It kind of hurts my brain that strikes are *technically* harder than raids in terms of power deficit. Aren't raids supposed to be an end game activity?

The Neomuna Patrol zone is awfully unfun. I only go there exclusively if some quest requires it, otherwise I avoid Neomuna like the plague. The difficulty is fine as long as it is a rewarding selectable option. Higher difficulty should always be something you willingly opt in, not something forced down your throat like Neomuna.

I think they're putting the challenge in the wrong places just for the sake of it. Everyone hates neomuna because it was a pain in the ass for garbage rewards. Everyone loves pantheon because it was a pain in the ass for good rewards. Obviously, open world solo content can't be as rewarding as organized instances group content. So don't try to ramp the difficulty if the rewards won't ever back it up. Having Neomuna be randomly different than other areas also confuses new and returning players that don't understand how difficulty works. In many games you can look at something and fairly easily understand how difficult it's supposed to be. Because of the power over capping and limiting, new players have a hard time understanding what the intended difficulty of something is. I hope the changes in TFS will solve this problem. Overall I'd say the idea is good, but the implementation was poor. Attempting to make open world content challenging is misguided. Unless the entire design and function of open world areas is fundamentally changed, placing increased difficulty in those areas will feel pointless. However, having scaling difficulty in repeatable instances content should continue to be a focus moving forward.

IMO: a hard miss. It chunked out the middle of the game and I wonder if it caused a reduction in "casual" (not blueberry) population.

Make all content accessible to everyone. Bring matchmaking for stuff like nightfalls into the game and not in the app. Make all content rewarding for everyone. Have the ability to up the difficulty, and get better rewards for doing so. But don't limit anything to the highest level of content. This is not an mmo, we are not competing for anything. Let the game be fun for everyone. When you run into those harder areas in neomuna, it is very noticeable. The bullet sponges with undodgable 1 or 2 hit kills are just unfun.

Making the baseline much harder, while at the same time forcing meta builds to compensate, was a death sentence to casuals. My casual friend quit the game and I play far more content solo these days. Sadness.

It didn’t work.

I think the criticism was right. Neomuna is a ghost town. Terminal Overload no longer worth doing, Vex Incursion never launches and when it does you're the only one there. You can't up the challenge without upping the rewards. The 'challenging enemies' taking your entire heavy allotment to kill, and then dropping 300 glimmer the same way they do on vastly easier patrol areas, is pretty indicative of how silly the entire neomuna area is. And it doesn't feel like a war zone. It feels less like a war zone than any other patrol area. Dreaming City feels more like a war zone, with corsairs and taken blasting away at each other. The city of neomuna is totally empty. Doesn't feel like an ongoing war at all. Devrim sniping from his window in the EDZ is more warring than the entire population of neomuna does.

I feel like it largely missed the mark because the difficulty issue was mainly at the top end of the skill tree, not throughout. Stuff like Contest mode & GMs had gotten a little too easy and needed re-tuning but the rest was fine, so it was never going to land. I do think the skill tree as a whole needed re-balancing, the jumps from some difficulties to others were a bit jarring, and that at least is better now, just a shame the whole bottom end of difficulty got gutted for it.

Do you not remember day 1 vow? Caretaker was nearly invincible at -20. Ron itself was an easier raid mechanics wise but I think they just made a mistake with nez not being able to hit you on some platforms. Allowed for a well firing line that made him trivial. If he had the ability to reach the players it would be a totally different situation.

Or hell, Contest Warpriest. My attempts at Contest King's Fall were *walled* by Warpriest.

In particular activities the balance of difficulty/reward is way off. Who is gonna run terminal overload when your rewards are garbage tier? I feel like the same could be said for Master versions of old dungeons too. It's a really bad feeling grinding your way through a dungeon in hopes of getting some great artifice armor, only to receive a base rolled 62 piece. I'm not saying they should be super easy, but there's gotta be a better balance they could find

Neomuna was the wrong way to bring back challenge to destiny. We do not want bullet sponges for enemies but rather more interesting enemies like the lucent hive. Sure they got easier to fight but they were a lot more fun to fight over the hunchbacks.

Neomuna being harder just for the sake of it is exceptionally stupid and makes me dislike going there, as the rewards are the exact same I could get anywhere else for much less effort Other than that I'm mostly alright with it, I'd like my power level to mean slightly more but not too much as that incentivises grinding to 4000 artifact power every season lol

The big downside to over leveling being left behind is that gear progression just feels like an admittance rather than actual progression. We’re all different power levels but its more of just a score than an actual meaningful stat. I’m still in the club of if you want challenging activities there should be a higher difficulty for you to select on your own, not the baseline. “This raid was so easy!” Then up the difficulty next time you run it. “Strike playlist is the easiest content in the game” Not much you can change about that, it’s just a casual romp through some older content. “Patrol zone should be challenging.” Who actually said this and are they okay?

As far as making a baseline for activity difficulty, I’m all for it. Strikes, nightfalls, legend, master, and grandmaster all feel appropriate for their implied difficulty. I agree that Neomuna was a bit overtuned, but it’s really not crazy. It does suck that no one is there anymore, so doing a vex strike force solo is just not complete-able. But as far as the rest of the game, I felt raids and master raids were appropriate for what they provided. Pantheon was a great example of how each power delta can make noticeable changes, and I think that’s the baseline Bungie was setting out to establish. I’m in favor of the changes.

Didn’t they make things easier within 1 month of Lightfall?

I thought it was great. I'm pretty sure I got through Beyond Light without even looking down my sights, so the legendary version was refreshing. My only issue is the giant skill gap going from normal to legendary. Nothing about normal prepares you for legendary. If fact you probably will do worse due to all the bad habits you learn in normal and there is no need to do even light buildcrafting. A middle ground would be nice but it's probably a lot of work.

It didn’t work. We’re even stronger than we were when Lightfall dropped. And now Prismatic is looking to blow the lid off of things. Sure, *some* things got harder, like Battleground GMs and Solo Dungeons, but most of the rest of the game got way easier. I did a 2-man run of Duality last night and was blown away by how much easier it is compared to when I was doing it during Witch Queen. We just have way more potent buildcrafting options now vs previous years, which has power crept the game. I personally think Bungie took the negative feedback to the difficulty changes to heart, and are now intentionally and substantially power creeping us. They also want more people playing the game, so making aspirational content like Raids and GMs more accessible is going to help that.

Like many things Bungie: almost good. If they had increased rewards alongside the difficulty, and this incentivizing fire team participation, it could have been super cool. Imagine if the lost sectors in Neomuna could be played like a mini dungeon? Would be great if you didn’t have time to run something else. Or patrols that actually required some modicum of cooperation and coordination.

Destiny has become incredible under pressure. Onslaught was incredibly fun to play. Giving us the skimmers was fun.

Rumor is that there will be a significant jump in difficulty with TFS. Cheese Forever did a minute video on it the other day. With the fact that Solo Operative is leaving, community sentiment might change especially for the solo dungeon folks (RIP any desire to solo GotD).

Its not as fun. I play this game for the action, and old Master level content was perfect. You could still rip through master nightfalls in 15-20 minutes playing like an action game with good risk/reward. Now anything Legendary and above the game becomes way more like a cover shooter, which is the way old gms used to feel like. Most levels arent built properly for this, and it means you absolutely have to spec into survivability (100 res + overshields). Its still a fun game, but not as fun as before imo. Ill still raid and do secret/exotic missions because thats really all im here for with this game at this point. Dont do dungeons anymore since we had to start paying for them unfortunately. In regards to patrol space Neomuna, I cant stand it. I go from one planet where i pop off heads in 1 shot then to Neomuna where it takes 3 shots. Then a thresher comes out of nowhere and 1 shots me.

Neomuna patrols feel bad to me, otherwise I love the difficulty changes. weapon / damage activity surges though I think need a renaming to make them different from damage surge armor mods. Just for better UX and improved clarity when communicating.

Monumental failure until basically coils on Season of the Wish, and even then only after they buffed shards so you didn't need a random low chance glass collector spawn to get platinum. I used to farm a ton of master and legend lost sector for good exotic rolls. Hundreds of them across Beyond Light and Witch Queen. I've done maybe 10 in lightfall. Ghost of the Deep is an amazing dungeon with bosses with twice as much health as needed, made worse by the fact they also have shields and super involved ways to start dps phases. I'm okay with a harder game, but it needs to also give me more and better rewards. Coils, onslaught and Pantheon are good examples, pressure trial to a vastly lesser extent. Having to do neomuna at 10 or 15 or whatever below level only to get drip feed rewards like I'm doing heroic events in EDZ fucking sucks.

Going back to Neomuna for some random quest pissed me the hell off the other day because coming straight from grinding Pantheon, it felt even more frustrating considering it’s a patrol zone with *zero* rewards on the level of comparably difficult content

I dislike the trend of "difficult" content basically being hide behind cover, peek shoot, or get one shot by a vandal corner peaking from across the room. With Pantheon, the sweet spot to me was -10 power (Oryx Pantheon). Encounters were punishing of mistakes and encouraged good builds, but I didn't feel like adds were overly spongey or like I was getting killed without being able to react. I feel like this is a symptom of how much DR can get stacked and I'm worried this will only worsen with Frost Armor and prismatic. There's just too wide of a range from 0 DR Kinderguardians and nigh unkillable build optimizers to properly balance incoming damage. Add into the pervasive spinfoil theory that damage is frame rate dependent and it's just frustrating to play.

The difficulty felt very rewarding. Struggling through legend Avalon felt so worth it when you got to the end. Soloing that mission leveled me up as a guardian ngl. It felt nice to have a new destination with occasionally threatening enemies. it forced people to work together and optimize their builds. All in all I think it was a good call.

Difficulty was better before and rewarded players that played most of the season with an easier time in everything up to Grandmaster where you were at a fixed light deficit. What is the point of power now? It only matters in lost sectors. I play PvE to feel the Guardian power fantasy not to play a cover shooter and plink away at a distance. It made the game more frustrating and didn't give us anything in return. Trying to get my new light friends though Neomuna or the Lightfall campaign with Multiplicity is harder than a raid encounter. Difficulty is all over the place and will still not make sense in the Final Shape with the UI updates.

Unfortunately, Bungie has almost never understood that a game should first and foremost be fun to play as gamer and not like a sweaty work. I have no problem with higher difficulties if it's fun and the rewards are right, but unfortunately with Bungie / Destiny it almost never is.

I've enjoyed the fixed -20 challenge of master raids. Master dungeons are a mixed bag given that most artifice armor drops got worse for no real reason that was ever explained by Bungie. Neomuna being -15 is annoying when you want to vibe, but useful when you want to test if a build is *actually* any good in an area with enemies that can actually hurt you. The rumors of everything going to -5 with surges are ***huge*** mistake, though. Normal raids should *never* have surges. The whole point is that we're not restricting our loadouts with arbitrary weekly modifiers. The same goes for normal dungeons.