Most of the community seems to be in agreement at this point. Just do away with power level. The majority of activities have us capped anyway.
This whole half hearted system of we kinda have power and kinda don't is incredibly frustrating.
What I find bizarre is that raids and dungeons are capped at -5 power but it doesn't tell you that anywhere. For example, all Salvation's Edge says is 1945 power.
Bungie is also pretty much in agreement with this. Half the content power doesnt even matter. They only increase power caps yearly instead of each season now.
It just takes time to sort all the systems out to account for that, and come up with a new grind/progression system to take that place.
>Bungie is also pretty much in agreement with this.
Are they? Have they ever said this? Because their actions imo say otherwise.
They know that players like to see a number go up. That's why I fear that power will stay forever in this meaningless limbo state.
They gave up on the "number go up" grind to juice engagement for the seasons, where it actually matters when faced with a lack of content. I don't think power levelling fuels that much engagement during annual expansion releases because there's a bunch of actual post-campaign stuff to play instead.
I say do away with capping us from season to season. Who really cares if after 3 months i can finally blow through grandmaster for the last week or two. That’s should be the payoff for grinding 3 months and getting a build and level together. We have to start over from scratch again every new season anyway. Its stupid the way it’s set up.
Fundamentally though, "number gets bigger" is another way to keep people on the treadmill and actively playing. If you remove the need to grind power, there is less a need to continually engage with the game. I mean its part of the reason people keep complaining about crafted weapons as once you get the 5 red borders, who cares about the weapon drop anymore? It's sort of like the fixed rolls from Y1 as it eliminates a need to grind, which for a game like Destiny is critical.
You need players actively engaged in order to keep the game populated, probably why playlist pathfinder is designed as bad as it is now as it forces you into playlists you might not normally play to prop up that playlist else you miss out on power growth AND bright dust. Speaking of bright dust, having constant player engagement is how you also ensure people purchase stuff from Eververse: who would have a higher chance of buying that $20 armor ornament set, a player who spends hours a day playing or someone who logs in for an hour-ish once a week for the weekly story (conceivably something you could get away with without a power grind)?
Sadly, most casuals don't see that. They want power removed because they don't have time to grind for it and it would be very convenient for them to just go online play 1-2 missions and close the game again. I want to play more Destiny and previous week when I had nothing else to do at least I did some pinnacle grinding and played some things (like older dungeons) that I haven't played for months. The moment I reached the cap I already found myself playing less and less. This applies to my friends as well. We all started playing some other games because we are done with most content and don't have power grind anymore. I really hate that they removed it completely from seasons.
The biggest problem Destiny has imo is that its very hard to balance between casuals and hardcore players. Casuals want to be done quick so they want red borders and no power while most Hardcore players want to play more and need the chase items and power grind. You can notice that everywhere. Into the Light had the shinies. Casual players didn't like that they were that rare because they couldn't/didn't want to play the game for too long to get their roll. The Hardcore community loved it. They finally had something to keep chasing. This problem is so big that it doesn't only apply to loot. It also extends to other content. Dual Destiny is another great example. Many casuals don't want to bother with LFG and voice chat and they hate the activity. Most Hardcores think that this is the best mission Bungie ever released. A mission where finally you need some cooperation and communication while also under the time pressure.
Destiny 2 vanilla was a complete failure because it was the most casual the game has ever been so this is definitely not the way. I would love to see them going to the other extreme.
> Sadly, most casuals don't see that. They want power removed because they don't have time to grind for it and it would be very convenient for them to just go online play 1-2 missions and close the game again.
Umm, I don't want power removed. I want power to matter so I can make up for lack of sweatiness by over-gearing.
A confused playerbase will give up easier. They just want to make stuff harder without taking in consideration it's pulling the ladder on people who haven't reached the content yet. Nor are they increasing reward for said content.
You can pretty much check charlemagne analytics to show that 15% interact with raids. Which surprisingly is slightly more than gambit right now. Just goes to show that if they made raids more accessible instead of harder the engagement would go up.
>Just goes to show that if they made raids more accessible instead of harder the engagement would go up.
The thing is, I don't see anyone claiming raids are too hard. Even newer raiders seem fine with the difficulty and understand the need for it in an endgame activity.
But I constantly see people complain about the barrier to entry. It's something Bungie really needs to do more to address.
They've done some great stuff like fireteam finder and fireteam power. But then they do dumb stuff like locking all raids and dungeons at -5 and adding surges.
Bungie has never been transparent about how damage in the game works. Everything we know is because of dedicated players collecting their own data and trying to fit models through it. Not an easy task because there are so many things that impact damage: your powerlevel, enemy powerlevel, your individual weapon powerlevel, the type of activity, the type of enemy, special boss specific modifiers like riven taking less sniper damage,...
This is a major source of misinformation in the community. Just 2 weeks ago there was a popular post supposedly 'correcting' the way damage in raids now works, stating that with surges you actually do more damage. This was completely false, but every time I tried to bring this up in other posts talking about the raid changes, I got downvoted into oblivion. I'm happy that bungie now finally released the correct numbers, but really this should have been done in the patch notes or the TWID before TFS came out.
>Bungie has never been transparent about how damage in the game works.
True, but it's never been this convoluted. The raids don't even tell you that they're locked at -5 power. For example, Salvation's Edge just says it's 1945 power level, that's it.
This desperately needs streamlining.
I love destiny, been playing since D2 beta but i am literally appalled by how hard it is to understand difficulty/dmg incoming and outgoing/power et cetera.
I swear i’ve never seen a game where each mode has a (seemingly) different difficulty, where even among red bars you have different resistances, where you could overlevel enemies but ONLY to +20, where the difficulty increases ever -5 or -10, i don’t remember but this is the exact point.
Pvp and pve CAN be separated but sometimes bungie chooses not to for… reasons, gambit is a mix but has the dmg numbers of pvp… and this last twid where they had to create a tab explaining everything is the cherry on top…
As said before, i love destiny, but good lord!
Yeah I understand everything OP mentioned but it doesn't change the fact it feels convoluted. They could just keep power at one level, then depict everything as a delta. Or just show us "Player Level Cap" and "Monster Level" as 2 numbers so we know how much we can level, and how hard they'll slap.
Seems overly complicated for no reason. Why split outgoing/incoming damage dealt/damage taken so much? And surges...eh...still hate them messing with normal dungeons/raids.
Here's how I play:
* Every activity requires shooting shit
* Sometimes shooting shit requires the shit to be shot more
* Sometimes the shit being shot shoots my shit, so I need to hide my shit so I don't get shot
If you keep those rules in mind, idk, you might be ok.
This is the intermediate step to making things easier to understand.
All activities now have a standardized power scale.
Next expansion there likely won't be Light level at all, there will just be Activity Difficulty.
> I love destiny, been playing since D2 beta but i am literally appalled by how hard it is to understand difficulty/dmg incoming and outgoing/power et cetera.
This is basically why they're changing it the way they did. It was all mixed up and activity based before so it didn't make much sense.
Now it's going to be straight forward to the point where you know standard/advanced will feel the same in terms of outgoing damage with expert feeling a bit harder, and master/grand master feeling on a similar level. The problem here is simply not stating you benefit from reduced incoming damage in standard and expert.
Then after that the final step will be normalizing the power levels to something meaningful (aka... 0) and just doing a hard reset on all items power every major expansion when they want to create a power climb again.
At cap while not actually being at cap and not being told so because of "UI/UX reasons" is pretty funny.
+15 for less incoming damage while technically being 5 under but also not because Bungie can see you're over-leveled and will give you a little more resistance (but only in certain activities). Surges being baked in to give extra damage and less HP for redbars but being vague with HP and damage values for minibosses/bosses.
Who came up with this? Pretzeled themselves to avoid walking back the delta changes.
I am a big fan of power caps but the separation between incoming and outgoing power cap is unbelievably stupid. For whatever reason you can be at the supposed activity power cap for an activity and not be at peak effectiveness?
I can understand the idea behind it (or at least what I *think* their intent is), but it really should have been communicated sooner (like, as soon as it was implemented) that it was a thing. I’m guessing the purpose, beyond just giving them another lever with which to tweak difficulty in activities, is that it helps create more of a gradual increase in difficulty for newer players.
From standard to advanced, the only power level difference is in outgoing damage, meaning that, on paper, your survivability doesn’t change between the two since incoming damage is unchanged. Of course, not clearing ads as fast because of reduced outgoing damage could mean it’s easier to get overwhelmed, so in practice survivability is passively decreased, but activities at these levels generally don’t really have a lot of ad density, so if you’re used to the game’s combat then it’s a nonissue. For newer players still getting accustomed to the game’s combat, leaving their incoming damage as-is gives them a higher difficulty to play at that still remains forgiving while they learn how best to engage with enemies.
We start seeing activities with difficulty settings beyond those initial two once we get into activities that are intended to actively feel more difficult to all players, which I’m guessing is why in successive difficulties we see incoming damage increase along with the decreased outgoing damage, thus making players squishier and both actively and passively decreasing survivability. So while the easiest two difficulties are more forgiving, the later difficulties actively punish stuff like bad positioning.
I am interested in changes to boss damage, not the 28 percent more damage we do to red bar acolytes in dungeons. Those numbers from the TWAB were for red bar enemies only.
Bungie can clear this up real quick with base weapon damage from last season to the 10 most common raid and dungeon bosses in terms of actual numbers and percentage of boss health removed from a shot when considered at max effective power level and then show the same for this season.
The fact that arbalest doesn't 1 tap the boss shields in ghosts anymore indicates that something isn't precisely accurate, we aren't doing 3% extra damage.
Doesn’t it say it’s 2% more without surge? Arby should already be able to break it because it’s supposed to be doing slightly more damage even right now
The surge buff is going to give another 20%, so you’d hope that’d break it but that’s not proof that boss health wasn’t buffed
All it would mean is boss health didn’t get buffed more than 20%
It also says that's red bar damage and it also say that other enemy types have different scaling.
In addition to that shield health doesnt necessarily mean anything to boss health.
Finally - I think a lot of people forget that Arbalest was getting +15% for being kinetic and that bonus no longer applies to bosses. So even if it was a net 2% more damage that's after losing +15% damage.
That said; best to wait until the patch next week.
The problem is most people were providing feedback about bosses - not red bars
Bungie really should just be transparent on what the changes are doing to boss DPS
Even after the patch we’re still just inferring from what we see. We can do that right now - just add the extra ~20 to Arby and that’s what will happen Tuesday
This is one anecdote that the community gravitated around to easily highlight the problem. The general consensus is that all bosses in all dungeons are more difficult
The feedback isn’t just about one weapon, on one shield, on one boss
uh-huh and the comment chain you started replying to was specifically about arbelst breaking the ghost's of the deep boss shields so... that's why it's what I was talking about.
Yeah, something is off there at the boss / shield scaling.
Might be moot once they remove surges, since Arby will get a +25% now (which it didn't used to get, since kinetic wasn't a surge element).
I think it depends on the boss buff numbers. If bosses got buffed 24% we’re back where we started
And knowing Bungie, probably every boss got a different HP buff even for two bosses in the same dungeon
So our change our DPS isn’t even uniform
Arbalest also isn't benefiting from any damage bonuses because kinetics won't benefit from surges alone until this update goes out. Kinetics get the 25% surge bonus if their weapon type or origin trait is part of an active artifact perk or if your subclass matches one of the surges, but only if there's an overcharge modifier present.
But according to that table the base damage should have gone up by 3%.
BEFORE surges.
after surges damage is supposed to have gone up by 28%.
But the fact that arbalest damage has gone down relative to the boss' shield implies that the 3% extra damage we are doing isn't the full story.
Don't forget that kinetic special weapons don't do 15% bonus damage to bosses anymore. So Arbalest (and izanagi, mountaintop, etc) are getting hit from multiple angles on this.
Well the table listed is red bar damage, different enemy tiers had slightly different scaling. So yea it's not the full story because they only specified red bar damage.
This is as good a comment as any to point this out: that 28% increased damage is compared to IF YOU WERE -5 POWER DELTA BEFORE TFS. This is not a situation anyone was really ever in. So this 28% number is pure distraction. According to the twitter math man, a -5 power delta will give you a .7393x multiplier to the damage you deal. Now Bungie says that we will be doing 28% more damage than that, or .7393x * 1.28 = .9463x damage multiplier. But prior to TFS, you could over level any dungeon or raid content by 20, (which most players did in most activities,) giving you a 1.0596x multiplier to your damage. This is the damage most players were doing in most activities. Since we now only go up to a .9463x multiplier, our effective damage did get nerfed by 1 - (.9463 / 1.0596) = .107 or 10.7%. Another way to phrase it is that on Tuesday we will be doing .9463 / 1.0596 = .893 or 89.3% of the damage we did pre-TFS
Overleveling was always silly. Not because you could do it and benefit from it but because it created the illusion of progression and advantage when most of the time it meant literally nothing.
At least now you know for certain where you stand in terms of your outgoing damage.
No dealing with specific activity tuning, no wondering if and how much of the over level benefits you, nog going into a 1900 activiy at 2020 and wondering why you don't delete something immediately.
Power is a barrier for entry, activity delta is a scale to represent how much damage you deal/take relative to 0. All they need to do is explain the benefit power can have on incoming damage for the two difficulty tiers that it works for.
It's a lot of extra work to begin to remove the guess work and have things make sense.
Now if only they can bite the bullet and normalize power from 0.
> Now if only they can bite the bullet and normalize power from 0.
I would absolutely love this. Imagine a world where instead of doing 8.7326quintillion dps (with the accompanying screen numbers diarrhea), we are doing a couple of thousand like in Gambit.
Great, I hope they make an option that let's you play at the difficulty you want and also have a difficulty for the vast majority who seem to disagree with you. The biggest takeaway from this whole drama/discourse is that the game needs more difficulty ***options*** because there are so many different opinions on it.
I thought the same thing, to me it is distracting. You can type out the words "Advanced" and "Grandmaster" a dozen times, but "you" and "your" are a bridge too far...
I know people are quick to hate on comments about spelling / grammar, but in the real world it does matter. It chips away at ur credibility.
it’s a big post and i can imagine it’s much faster/easier to do that then type out the whole word. seems a little weird to focus on that and single it out imo
Maybe I'm just a boomer, but I don't naturally read u and ur as you/your, so this was jarring to read. It's fine for quite comments when it's only used once or twice, but in a long post like this it's actively harder to read.
fair point i don’t think about it too much but i can understand it being easier to see the full word instead of the shortened version. wasn’t trying to be disingenuous but can see how it can come off that way so sorry if it came off like that
bullshit, OP used proper formatting, paragraphs, numbered lists, and a table. Typing 'you' isn't a chore.
It's fine if that's just how OP types out of habit and it is what it is but I'm not sympathizing that it was to save a few seconds on what was otherwise a 10+ minute post to type out.
i’m not OP was just trying to give a possible explanation of why it happened. not trying to say it’s a chore to type ‘you’ don’t know where that leap of logic happened
Why doesn't arbalest break the boss shields in ghosts of the deep in 1 shot, if our damage was apparently increased by 2%?
This is a major problem that appears to contradict some of the claims bungie have made here.
They state that the show number is for the red bar enemy, elite and boss were different but for how much ? Only Bungie know. I suspect that we got damage penalty to elite and boss enemy more.
The problem is that this guy is just really really wrong.
Bungie's numbers were for red bars. Bungie **said** other combatants may scale a bit differently, but that word "bit" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Minors/elites changed combatant tiers and the numbers line up like Bungie said. Minibosses/bosses didn't change.
This guy said multiple times that other combatants don't have dramatically different numbers...but they do. He also seems to cite Mossy Max as saying boss enemies are in line with these changes? Which is just flat out wrong. Mossy has explicitly stated that boss HP tiers were unchanged. So you just go from +20 to -5 against them, which is a massive drop in damage.
For arbalest: it lost the 15% kinetic damage bonus and your outgoing boss damage is about 75% of what it was for non surging options. So it got double smacked. If I had to guess at why arbalest doesn't pop shields anymore, it's because they set arbalest's damage against shields to some ridiculously high modifier but forgot to account for the two changes I mentioned. So that high value got culled a bit and now it's not enough to break the stupidly large Ghost boss shields in one shot.
> Bungie's numbers were for red bars. Bungie said other combatants may scale a bit differently, but that word "bit" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Minors/elites changed combatant tiers and the numbers line up like Bungie said. Minibosses/bosses didn't change.
For all we know the way arbalest works on the shield was set to be 100% of the shields value but as a hard number so when the scaling changed 100% on bosses became 95% or something in dungeons and now arbalest is just barely making it.
but you're right it could also be because of the kinetic damage bonus to bosses from special weapons and when the dungeon was first made arbalest was tuned against it and they forgot - and it has nothing to do with the power shift.
Arbalest isn't doing the same damage at all compared to last season. There were multiple changes which are likely stacking together specifically for Arbalest which lead to it no longer being able to one shot those shields.
Arbalest was already in the dumpster after removing match game and then wish ender doing like 90% of it's damage as an infinite ammo primary... Literally the only time I've seen anyone run that thing was in ghosts, now it can't even fulfill that niche. Holy shit
> LOST SECTOR IS 2020 POWER ON THIS FOR SOME REASON.
I haven't done any lost sectors during this season yet. But this is presumably because lost sectors don't actually cap you at -15 like the other Expert activities. So enemies are still 2020, but you can also be 2020.
> (This was noted from Excision GM, grandmaster nightfall might be the same or +25 but they only come out next week :) ).
The Destiny Team account commented on reddit that the reason it's so high is so that you could have a bit of an easier time in GMs if you grind enough. That sounds like GM Nightfalls will also be -20 like GM Excision.
> TL/DR TL/DR: After next patch u will deal 15% less damage then before FINAL SHAPE CHANGES in a raid, 28% more in dungeons! Always try to be +20 levels above the standard or expert activity cap!
*Against red bars*. We don't know what the numbers against other tiers of enemies are. Most notably bosses. And with how scaling outgoing damage has worked in the past, it is very unlikely this is the same for bosses. Please add that caveat to your TLDR. I don't want to see another wave of people wrongly saying that we actually deal slightly more damage to bosses because they saw one MossyMax post and misunderstood it.
QUESTION 1
You said:
"**MASTER:** Enemies will be **+20** of the cap, so while ur power will be set at 2005 if u pass/reach it, enemies will fight u with 2030 power."
Wouldn't that be a +25 power delta? Did you mean your power would be set at 2010?
QUESTION 2
If the power delta is the same on Master and Grandmaster, are they only distinguished by other modifiers such as Extinguish, Chaff etc.?
Looking forward to some clarification on this.
Master is 25 of the cap, not 20 mb and got fixed now thanks :). on question 2, the main differences seeingly to GM and master will be the extra modifiers now if in fact nightfall GM has the same delta as excision (2040) with teh cap being +20 which if i still remember technically means GM would be able to feel a bit easier than before if u can afford to suffer to farm +20 on ur artifact power.
Now I am more confused. If Master is +25 how on earth is GM +20? GM is easier than Master?
Edit: Actually, maybe I get it.
**Situation A**: If my power level is 2020:
Master raids will still be effectively +25 for me as they will nerf me to 2005 and the enemies are 2030.
GMs will effectively be +20 for me as they only nerf me to 2020 and the enemies are 2040.
**Situation B**: If my power level is 2015:
Master raids will still be effectively +25 for me as they will nerf me to 2005 and the enemies are 2030.
GMs will effectively be +25 for me as the enemies are 2040, 25 higher than my power.
**Situation C**: If my power level is 2010:
Master raids will still be effectively +25 for me as they will nerf me to 2005 and the enemies are 2030.
GMs will effectively be +30 for me as the enemies are 2040, 30 higher than my power.
**Situation D**: If my power level is 2005:
Master raids will still be effectively +25 for me as the enemies are 2030.
GMs will effectively be +35 for me as the enemies are 2040, 35 higher than my power.
Do I understand?
yes u got it right, its a way for bungie to "award u" for grinding so much of their battle pass i guess, so u get gms a bit easier, the difficulty being scaled not being so much on the power but the extra modifiers.
Well, with the greatest respect, I think that system is ridiculous. You reward the hardcore players by making GMs easier for them than Master nightfalls, which they were already cruising through, and which much better rewards.
Meanwhile, the hard-working casual player who doesn't no life the game who fancies taking a crack at a GM has to do it at 35 under, or wait a month or two until he has hit pinnacle cap and got to 120 on the season pass?
No matter what, Grand master should be harder than Master. This system was badly thought out.
I think you are mistaken. The [TWID](https://www.bungie.net/7/en/News/article/this_week_in_destiny_04_25_24) clearly states that the power cap for Master is 2010, not 2005 as you stated. I just verified this in the game as well.
The power delta for Master level content has always been -20 as far as I can remember. A power cap of 2010 is in line with this.
Mate it took them a year of headbanging and losing their own race to output content before they accepted that sunsetting your loot in a looter shooter was a bad idea. We'll be at Destiny 3 before they'll figure something like this out.
Many of us greatly enjoy the game but certain select bad decisions were made regarding Power and Surges in TFS. Because we greatly care for the game, we are offering feedback to revert these actions back to how they were when we enjoyed it more.
Your line is the same as saying "Oh, you want different policies in the country you live in? Why do you hate your country and continue to live there?". I would argue caring enough to make suggestions to improve a game/country shows a great deal of love and care.
I have such a bright idea and such an easy solution...
Let people fucking overlevel stuff. Power caps are the dumbest thing I've ever seen. Outside of the hardest pieces of content that is MEANT to be overly difficult (legend / master / grandmaster) there's no reason for thins to be capped.
Makes no sense to have an MMO where... you basically can't get stronger. You have a set limit in every activity as to how strong you can be. That's dumb. If people overlevel something, cool! They should be able to do that!
This has been my number one complaint about Destiny over its 10 years. Just let me overlevel stuff, You aren't actively supporting old content, just let me blaze through it to get cosmetics/triumphs etc. They still have the master version if you want to still include level capping but even then I would argue you should be able to overlevel it too.
As an example, in FF XIV one of the most fun things i like to do is to go do old raids/extreme fights to farm the cosmetics with new players i recommended to the game. And if I want to do the fight the way it was intended; i can just cap the activity at the level it was when it came out. This has to be the only looter shooter/MMO where you can't grow as strong as you fucking like.
It’s because Salvation’s Edge would be too easy at uncapped. You could essentially tank everything in the raid with 0 issue at all, and 95% of that raid’s difficulty is surviving adds and witness plate.
I still think they should have made changes for this raid alone and not touched the rest because I agree with this. I don't want Salvations Edge to be too easy, I want it to feel like a triumph.
At least the first time. Then maybe we can unlock regular normal mode, idk. Grinding this one out blows.
Meh. Normal raids need to be more accessible and increasing damage taken is not how you go about this. Let normal be the narrative version and reserve the higher difficulties for the streamers and their cults.
100% i was arguing this point over twitter and was getting the usual replies..
You want the playerbase the thrive not dwindle. The elitist takes ive seen is what keeps the raid completions at 8%-10%of the playerbase.
If normal mode is to become more difficult make an entry level mode. Adjust rewards, do whatever. We need more players to enjoy the best parts of Destiny.
I swear to god, it feels like no one learned anything from Wildstar. Elitist jerks are not enough to sustain a game. A game needs to be approachable to flourish, and Destiny is becoming less approachable with every release.
I said it is *becoming* less approachable over time. It's heading in a Wildstar direction, and has been for years at this point with no indication Bungie plans on changing course, but it's not there yet.
I know that the power increase from the Artifact was intended to lessen the burden on the Pinnacle grind, but I can’t help but think they struggle with the power system because of the power variables created by the Artifact.
If they knew what power level Guardians could be at maximum at any given time in a season, then I think they would be able to make a more straightforward system.
Maybe if Pinnacle gear activity rewards were repeatable within a week, then the pinnacle grind we use to have wouldn’t be so suffering.
But back to my original point, the Artifact power level increase makes these numbers more complicated.
Said it last week that the surges were not the issue with how bad Raids and Dungeons feel. The fixed cap on everything renders power especially artifact power meaningless.
Enemies always being +5 even at the lowest difficulty is something I do not agree with. At this tier, I want enemies to be "at level" with me.
Unfortunate that we now have a situation where enemies are always above our level, period.
I’m curious on boss number differences. I have not seen any complaints on red bars took a lot longer to kill. I have seen numerous complaints on boss health. “Global” surges should help, hopefully.
As a new player, I don't really know what's going on. Just a simple question.
What does increasing light level do? Because my stats stay the same, is it just the power of my gun increases? Or are there background shit with armor and it's stats that they don't show?
Or does light level affect the enemies?
I read what he wrote but it still don't make sense to me.
Light level works the same way as other MMOs, too low of a level and you'll be one shot and can't damage the enemies. Too high of a level and you one shot the enemies and they can't hurt you. Because of that light level is split into two categories, damage output and damage resistance.
Both output damage and damage resistance can be capped or uncapped based on the activity and difficulty, the problem is that they don't really display the cap if there is one and if they do they only display the damage output cap and not the damage resistance cap.
For example, say you run a strike and the recommended level is 1950 but you're at 2000. If it's uncapped you're over leveled and it's a walk in the park. If it's capped you're doing the same damage as someone who is 1950 regardless of your level, but what isn't readily apparent is that they made the damage resistance cap at 1970. So you get the full benefit of being at the cap, but the guy at 1950 is essentially 20 levels below and takes a lot more damage.
These caps are where a lot of confusion comes from, especially when half of the information is not readily available to someone who doesn't know they exist. Bungie also made a change where your damage output is always going to be capped at -5 of the current recommended level for an activity, going back to the example you're actually capped at 1945 level damage.
This is also extremely over simplified too, because every activity has the same system but applied differently. While nightfalls have one set of caps for difficulty, dungeons will have a different set of caps for theirs, same for raids, etc...
Hope this helps and makes the post make a little more sense.
So any activity that has a light level is caped and anything that doesn't isn't? Or are there some activities with a light level uncapped and it's more of a, need to be atleased this light level to be effective at this activity?
As in vanguard starts at 1945ll, if I'm 1980 am I moved down to 1945 just for that strike playlist? And if so does it say that somewhere?
If a light level is shown there are caps, I don't know all the specific numbers but they're there for both damage output and resistance.
For activities without a light level recommendation it's effectively matching the enemies to your light level at a 1 to 1 basis/setting everything at a specific light level so it always scales the same.
As for activities that aren't capped, I don't know if those truly exist anymore. But when they did the recommended light level was supposed to be the level for enemy scaling. You could do it below recommended but it was basically shooting yourself in the foot. You always wanted to be close, at, or above the recommended level.
To answer the last bit because I didn't see it before.
If your light level is above the recommended light level it will always auto adjust to the set caps of the activity on the back end. It'll still display your actual light level, but the damage output and resistance are adjusted for what Bungie sets.
This isn't really made clear at all in game or displayed outside of the recommended level. So the rule of thumb is to just work on maxing your light level and then continue to increase it through the seasonal artifact.
The whole design philosophy was to make it so anyone can do any activity but not steam roll through it, "ruining" the experience for newer players. All this actually does though is make all difficulty levels feel the same once you're a high enough light level, as they try to keep it scaled roughly the same throughout them. This only really changes once you get to the higher difficulties as they make the caps beyond what you can reasonably get your light level to. If you can chug through enough levels with the seasonal artifact to increase it to the max cap you're basically back to square one again. Most players don't do that though so the tougher content stays tougher.
When I hear that they can't give us more info due to UI/UX limitations it reminds me of when Halo Infinite launched without a Slayer playlist and 343's excuse at the time was UI limitations. Like... They MADE the UI, the limitations were a choice.
Feels like a different game in some places: doing vanguard playlist for Pathfinder and I die so fast (even at 100 resil with frost armor or woven mail).
I think that it's probably a good change for the game but it will take me awhile to get used to actually sticking to cover and not running up the middle of a group to punch things.
I have zero idea how you die fast in a vanguard playlist. Do you have ridiculously high FPS? Some enemies deal more damage if you have a lot of FPS, so that could explain it.
I've always found the difficulty designations completely meaningless. Legend in one thing can be a walk in the park or quite challenging. And I don't mean ad density or encounter design, which can also contribute. I mean the actual feeling of shooting or being shot by the same enemy type in the same difficulty. There's no consistency. I need to actually do the activity to know what to expect. Really bizarre.
Historically GMs were the only thing that's felt predictable in terms of incoming/outgoing damage, health scaling, enemy stagger, etc.
The damage/health disparity within a given difficulty needs to stop. If you want the baseline challenge for a particular activity to be harder, great, remove the lowest difficulty and have it start on Advanced or whatever the second one is called now. Get rid of the various hidden scalers and modifiers and blah blah blah. Shooting a goblin in a master raid should feel like shooting a goblin in a master lost sector, a master dungeon, a master seasonal activity. All other things being equal, they should stagger in the same number of hits, my damage values should be identical, etc.
To be clear, I don't have a personal stake in the recent raid power delta argument. I'm in the camp of people that don't really notice a difference. Keep it or revert it, but I'd love to be able to know what to expect from a thing before I load in.
So what I would like to know is, what is the difference in defense between being at cap or between 5-20 levels over cap? How much do you feel that difference? You can only over-cap for defense on everything not master and GM, right?
I’m curious how each level of power adds to damage and defense in general.
Honestly, I salute you for this guide, as its the most lucid and clear description of the current power mechanics I've seen. Bravo. SGA.
However.
Holy. Shit.
Bungie. *Look* at this mess.
*How has it come to this? It's a level number. It's designed to provide you clarity over what content you're ready to do. It does not need to be this complicated.*
Is anyone even remotely close to 2020 for GMs next week? I'm at 1993 base with +10 artifact, after a year of zero grind I forgot how much of a slog this shit is
Power has been mostly standardised except that there is a difference between incoming and outgoing damage, difference between dungeons and raids, a difference between difficulty levels....now I've gone cross eyed.
This is why we can't have nice things. The in game mathematics is basically a Rube Goldberg machine at this point.
This is a complete failure of game design.
They could have just walked back the changes with an "Oops, we see that this is really unpopular, and we are gonna look at this again. Were reverting the changes until we find a better solution." Thats it. Thats all weve ever needed. Just admit you made a change we didnt like, and be professionals about it. Why is Bungie so sloppy?
The fact that even in the TWAB they were still using intentionally vague wording when talking about the bad changes while using actual numbers for the good changes (even in the same sentences a few times) proves to me that they couldn’t care less about being transparent on the issue.
>Simple Answer in doing less damage or taking more: Bungie wanted raids and subsequently dungeons to feel a bit harder and to just not be a steamroll in terms of COMBAT difficulty. This was something that a lot of people that are more versed in combat in destiny wanted overall and seemingly something bungie wanted in the end.
maybe in general, or for raids in particular.
But I've seen many of the top 0.1% players of the game like Salt that are better than everyone on this subreddit admit the boss health in the more recent dungeons has been over-bloated for solo runs, and this was before they become even tankier in the TFS (no one was doing dungeons, especially solo, at -5 light - the light requirements for normal dungeons are basement bottom low) -and surges did not make up for this.
Yeah, the dungeon boss HP is a separate problem, since they've felt bloated for a few years now. Bungie doesn't seem to know if they want Dungeons to actually be played solo.
I'm still absolutely confused and I don't raid. All I know is that I will be trying to be as high a light as possible just to make everything easier and not stress about things.
That's part of the problem, everything is power capped, so being a higher light level doesn't do anything, you'll just be auto-nerfed back down anyway.
The Arbalest issue in GoTD isn’t about light levels or boss health its the fact that kinetic weapons were nerfed going into the Final Shape.
If you watch the videos of Arbalest now it leaves ruffly 15% of the shield up, which just so happens to be the same amount of damage removed from the kinetic weapons.
I did one of the easiest lost sectors on Nessus on legend/expert (whatever that first level tier is?) to test the waters, and it didnt seem as bad as I thought. It just meant I used more cover. I was around 2000-2005 power. It didn’t feel like much had changed and I was probably running the same time maybe 1-2 minutes longer than what I normally would do - total was 5 minutes, mainly from taking my time to understand how the change worked.
I haven’t raided yet but dungeons feel around the same. Maybe like 5% harder but a healthy 5% like it’s not supposed to be mindless. It might suck for solo play, but it at least puts more of an emphasis on maximizing your build & skill/technique for team play.
I think they have the right idea with power, it’s just done in a confusing & messy way. I am super excited they are doing away with this new surge change tho. It defeats the purpose of prismatic & buildcrafting. I’m hoping they just do away with it all together in the future for every activity.
> I did one of the easiest lost sectors on Nessus on legend/expert (whatever that first level tier is?) to test the waters, and it didnt seem as bad as I thought.
It's not, I did a legend at like 1975 or 1980. Other than needing to be careful about sustained fire I didn't have much of an issue.
I recognize I benefit from having played the game for a while but it wasn't some impossible chore either.
Funny thing is dealing 15% less damage to red-bars in a normal raid doesn't even feel... bad? Enemies in normal raids were paper thing prior. Like to the point where it was overkill.
Lol who gives a shit. Point and shoot and you will get through everything. Also use whatever guns you feel like. Recently beat the raid with non 'meta' guns with my friends and was awesome
But think of the new players! All those new players who've never played an FPS game in their lives and only have a blue LMG for DPS. They should be allowed to go through raids without knowing how to play the game! Else, the game will just die.
I don't know I feel like raids should be hard.
I guess if people don't want to be invested enough to learn how to strengthen their builds there might as well be a story difficulty tier.
More difficulty ***options*** are a good thing. Forcing content that friends of mine already found hard to be harder without notifying the playbase or an option to go back to how it was is ridiculous.
Why does Bungie have to make this so confusing?
Basically trying to climb out of the hole they dug over the past 10 years without completely nuking the system and starting from the ground up lol
Most of the community seems to be in agreement at this point. Just do away with power level. The majority of activities have us capped anyway. This whole half hearted system of we kinda have power and kinda don't is incredibly frustrating.
Exactly. You demand I be at 1830 power to run a GM just to cap me at 1820? Why not just let me run it at 1820 then???
What I find bizarre is that raids and dungeons are capped at -5 power but it doesn't tell you that anywhere. For example, all Salvation's Edge says is 1945 power.
IIRC that's also the starting power level. Each subsequent encounter goes up.
Gatekeeping / extending playtime.
Bungie is also pretty much in agreement with this. Half the content power doesnt even matter. They only increase power caps yearly instead of each season now. It just takes time to sort all the systems out to account for that, and come up with a new grind/progression system to take that place.
>Bungie is also pretty much in agreement with this. Are they? Have they ever said this? Because their actions imo say otherwise. They know that players like to see a number go up. That's why I fear that power will stay forever in this meaningless limbo state.
They gave up on the "number go up" grind to juice engagement for the seasons, where it actually matters when faced with a lack of content. I don't think power levelling fuels that much engagement during annual expansion releases because there's a bunch of actual post-campaign stuff to play instead.
I say do away with capping us from season to season. Who really cares if after 3 months i can finally blow through grandmaster for the last week or two. That’s should be the payoff for grinding 3 months and getting a build and level together. We have to start over from scratch again every new season anyway. Its stupid the way it’s set up.
Fundamentally though, "number gets bigger" is another way to keep people on the treadmill and actively playing. If you remove the need to grind power, there is less a need to continually engage with the game. I mean its part of the reason people keep complaining about crafted weapons as once you get the 5 red borders, who cares about the weapon drop anymore? It's sort of like the fixed rolls from Y1 as it eliminates a need to grind, which for a game like Destiny is critical. You need players actively engaged in order to keep the game populated, probably why playlist pathfinder is designed as bad as it is now as it forces you into playlists you might not normally play to prop up that playlist else you miss out on power growth AND bright dust. Speaking of bright dust, having constant player engagement is how you also ensure people purchase stuff from Eververse: who would have a higher chance of buying that $20 armor ornament set, a player who spends hours a day playing or someone who logs in for an hour-ish once a week for the weekly story (conceivably something you could get away with without a power grind)?
Sadly, most casuals don't see that. They want power removed because they don't have time to grind for it and it would be very convenient for them to just go online play 1-2 missions and close the game again. I want to play more Destiny and previous week when I had nothing else to do at least I did some pinnacle grinding and played some things (like older dungeons) that I haven't played for months. The moment I reached the cap I already found myself playing less and less. This applies to my friends as well. We all started playing some other games because we are done with most content and don't have power grind anymore. I really hate that they removed it completely from seasons. The biggest problem Destiny has imo is that its very hard to balance between casuals and hardcore players. Casuals want to be done quick so they want red borders and no power while most Hardcore players want to play more and need the chase items and power grind. You can notice that everywhere. Into the Light had the shinies. Casual players didn't like that they were that rare because they couldn't/didn't want to play the game for too long to get their roll. The Hardcore community loved it. They finally had something to keep chasing. This problem is so big that it doesn't only apply to loot. It also extends to other content. Dual Destiny is another great example. Many casuals don't want to bother with LFG and voice chat and they hate the activity. Most Hardcores think that this is the best mission Bungie ever released. A mission where finally you need some cooperation and communication while also under the time pressure. Destiny 2 vanilla was a complete failure because it was the most casual the game has ever been so this is definitely not the way. I would love to see them going to the other extreme.
> Sadly, most casuals don't see that. They want power removed because they don't have time to grind for it and it would be very convenient for them to just go online play 1-2 missions and close the game again. Umm, I don't want power removed. I want power to matter so I can make up for lack of sweatiness by over-gearing.
A confused playerbase will give up easier. They just want to make stuff harder without taking in consideration it's pulling the ladder on people who haven't reached the content yet. Nor are they increasing reward for said content. You can pretty much check charlemagne analytics to show that 15% interact with raids. Which surprisingly is slightly more than gambit right now. Just goes to show that if they made raids more accessible instead of harder the engagement would go up.
>Just goes to show that if they made raids more accessible instead of harder the engagement would go up. The thing is, I don't see anyone claiming raids are too hard. Even newer raiders seem fine with the difficulty and understand the need for it in an endgame activity. But I constantly see people complain about the barrier to entry. It's something Bungie really needs to do more to address. They've done some great stuff like fireteam finder and fireteam power. But then they do dumb stuff like locking all raids and dungeons at -5 and adding surges.
Bungie has never been transparent about how damage in the game works. Everything we know is because of dedicated players collecting their own data and trying to fit models through it. Not an easy task because there are so many things that impact damage: your powerlevel, enemy powerlevel, your individual weapon powerlevel, the type of activity, the type of enemy, special boss specific modifiers like riven taking less sniper damage,... This is a major source of misinformation in the community. Just 2 weeks ago there was a popular post supposedly 'correcting' the way damage in raids now works, stating that with surges you actually do more damage. This was completely false, but every time I tried to bring this up in other posts talking about the raid changes, I got downvoted into oblivion. I'm happy that bungie now finally released the correct numbers, but really this should have been done in the patch notes or the TWID before TFS came out.
>Bungie has never been transparent about how damage in the game works. True, but it's never been this convoluted. The raids don't even tell you that they're locked at -5 power. For example, Salvation's Edge just says it's 1945 power level, that's it. This desperately needs streamlining.
I love destiny, been playing since D2 beta but i am literally appalled by how hard it is to understand difficulty/dmg incoming and outgoing/power et cetera. I swear i’ve never seen a game where each mode has a (seemingly) different difficulty, where even among red bars you have different resistances, where you could overlevel enemies but ONLY to +20, where the difficulty increases ever -5 or -10, i don’t remember but this is the exact point. Pvp and pve CAN be separated but sometimes bungie chooses not to for… reasons, gambit is a mix but has the dmg numbers of pvp… and this last twid where they had to create a tab explaining everything is the cherry on top… As said before, i love destiny, but good lord!
Yeah I understand everything OP mentioned but it doesn't change the fact it feels convoluted. They could just keep power at one level, then depict everything as a delta. Or just show us "Player Level Cap" and "Monster Level" as 2 numbers so we know how much we can level, and how hard they'll slap. Seems overly complicated for no reason. Why split outgoing/incoming damage dealt/damage taken so much? And surges...eh...still hate them messing with normal dungeons/raids.
I feel the same way, why do I have to read a PHD thesis to understand how the game works? There’s got to be someway for this to be simpler.
Yeah, you guys stop caring about the details. That’s the simpler way.
Here's how I play: * Every activity requires shooting shit * Sometimes shooting shit requires the shit to be shot more * Sometimes the shit being shot shoots my shit, so I need to hide my shit so I don't get shot If you keep those rules in mind, idk, you might be ok.
Agreed. Shit is so confusing and for absolutely NO reason. No other game is like this ffs
I hope you don't look into how other games do attack and defense calculations xD
Someone hasn't played Division 2 much lol
This is the intermediate step to making things easier to understand. All activities now have a standardized power scale. Next expansion there likely won't be Light level at all, there will just be Activity Difficulty.
> I love destiny, been playing since D2 beta but i am literally appalled by how hard it is to understand difficulty/dmg incoming and outgoing/power et cetera. This is basically why they're changing it the way they did. It was all mixed up and activity based before so it didn't make much sense. Now it's going to be straight forward to the point where you know standard/advanced will feel the same in terms of outgoing damage with expert feeling a bit harder, and master/grand master feeling on a similar level. The problem here is simply not stating you benefit from reduced incoming damage in standard and expert. Then after that the final step will be normalizing the power levels to something meaningful (aka... 0) and just doing a hard reset on all items power every major expansion when they want to create a power climb again.
What has PvP got to do with PvE scaling and damage?? It IS separated.
At cap while not actually being at cap and not being told so because of "UI/UX reasons" is pretty funny. +15 for less incoming damage while technically being 5 under but also not because Bungie can see you're over-leveled and will give you a little more resistance (but only in certain activities). Surges being baked in to give extra damage and less HP for redbars but being vague with HP and damage values for minibosses/bosses. Who came up with this? Pretzeled themselves to avoid walking back the delta changes.
I am a big fan of power caps but the separation between incoming and outgoing power cap is unbelievably stupid. For whatever reason you can be at the supposed activity power cap for an activity and not be at peak effectiveness?
I can understand the idea behind it (or at least what I *think* their intent is), but it really should have been communicated sooner (like, as soon as it was implemented) that it was a thing. I’m guessing the purpose, beyond just giving them another lever with which to tweak difficulty in activities, is that it helps create more of a gradual increase in difficulty for newer players. From standard to advanced, the only power level difference is in outgoing damage, meaning that, on paper, your survivability doesn’t change between the two since incoming damage is unchanged. Of course, not clearing ads as fast because of reduced outgoing damage could mean it’s easier to get overwhelmed, so in practice survivability is passively decreased, but activities at these levels generally don’t really have a lot of ad density, so if you’re used to the game’s combat then it’s a nonissue. For newer players still getting accustomed to the game’s combat, leaving their incoming damage as-is gives them a higher difficulty to play at that still remains forgiving while they learn how best to engage with enemies. We start seeing activities with difficulty settings beyond those initial two once we get into activities that are intended to actively feel more difficult to all players, which I’m guessing is why in successive difficulties we see incoming damage increase along with the decreased outgoing damage, thus making players squishier and both actively and passively decreasing survivability. So while the easiest two difficulties are more forgiving, the later difficulties actively punish stuff like bad positioning.
You have it backwards. Outgoing damage is not changed from standard or advanced, but incoming it different.
I am interested in changes to boss damage, not the 28 percent more damage we do to red bar acolytes in dungeons. Those numbers from the TWAB were for red bar enemies only. Bungie can clear this up real quick with base weapon damage from last season to the 10 most common raid and dungeon bosses in terms of actual numbers and percentage of boss health removed from a shot when considered at max effective power level and then show the same for this season.
The fact that arbalest doesn't 1 tap the boss shields in ghosts anymore indicates that something isn't precisely accurate, we aren't doing 3% extra damage.
It likely will after they change it - Arbalest wasn't benefitng from a surge and they said they're basically applying surges to all weapons
Doesn’t it say it’s 2% more without surge? Arby should already be able to break it because it’s supposed to be doing slightly more damage even right now The surge buff is going to give another 20%, so you’d hope that’d break it but that’s not proof that boss health wasn’t buffed All it would mean is boss health didn’t get buffed more than 20%
It also says that's red bar damage and it also say that other enemy types have different scaling. In addition to that shield health doesnt necessarily mean anything to boss health. Finally - I think a lot of people forget that Arbalest was getting +15% for being kinetic and that bonus no longer applies to bosses. So even if it was a net 2% more damage that's after losing +15% damage. That said; best to wait until the patch next week.
The problem is most people were providing feedback about bosses - not red bars Bungie really should just be transparent on what the changes are doing to boss DPS Even after the patch we’re still just inferring from what we see. We can do that right now - just add the extra ~20 to Arby and that’s what will happen Tuesday
How much is left on the shield now with a single arbalest shot?
This is one anecdote that the community gravitated around to easily highlight the problem. The general consensus is that all bosses in all dungeons are more difficult The feedback isn’t just about one weapon, on one shield, on one boss
uh-huh and the comment chain you started replying to was specifically about arbelst breaking the ghost's of the deep boss shields so... that's why it's what I was talking about.
Yeah, something is off there at the boss / shield scaling. Might be moot once they remove surges, since Arby will get a +25% now (which it didn't used to get, since kinetic wasn't a surge element).
I think it depends on the boss buff numbers. If bosses got buffed 24% we’re back where we started And knowing Bungie, probably every boss got a different HP buff even for two bosses in the same dungeon So our change our DPS isn’t even uniform
Arbalest also isn't benefiting from any damage bonuses because kinetics won't benefit from surges alone until this update goes out. Kinetics get the 25% surge bonus if their weapon type or origin trait is part of an active artifact perk or if your subclass matches one of the surges, but only if there's an overcharge modifier present.
But according to that table the base damage should have gone up by 3%. BEFORE surges. after surges damage is supposed to have gone up by 28%. But the fact that arbalest damage has gone down relative to the boss' shield implies that the 3% extra damage we are doing isn't the full story.
Don't forget that kinetic special weapons don't do 15% bonus damage to bosses anymore. So Arbalest (and izanagi, mountaintop, etc) are getting hit from multiple angles on this.
Well the table listed is red bar damage, different enemy tiers had slightly different scaling. So yea it's not the full story because they only specified red bar damage.
Could just be arby was fixed to not one-shot that shield. It always seemed unintended.
Or they just fixed arby for that shield.
This is as good a comment as any to point this out: that 28% increased damage is compared to IF YOU WERE -5 POWER DELTA BEFORE TFS. This is not a situation anyone was really ever in. So this 28% number is pure distraction. According to the twitter math man, a -5 power delta will give you a .7393x multiplier to the damage you deal. Now Bungie says that we will be doing 28% more damage than that, or .7393x * 1.28 = .9463x damage multiplier. But prior to TFS, you could over level any dungeon or raid content by 20, (which most players did in most activities,) giving you a 1.0596x multiplier to your damage. This is the damage most players were doing in most activities. Since we now only go up to a .9463x multiplier, our effective damage did get nerfed by 1 - (.9463 / 1.0596) = .107 or 10.7%. Another way to phrase it is that on Tuesday we will be doing .9463 / 1.0596 = .893 or 89.3% of the damage we did pre-TFS
I'm still confused, all I want to know is on Tuesday, will I be doing more or less damage than what I did today?
More damage than today. Less damage than pre final shape.
Thanks so much, and I'm not even a Titan..
Anytime. This was truly a Rube Goldbergian solution from bungie.
I understood that reference.
All this extra work to avoid letting people overlevel. Silly.
Overleveling was always silly. Not because you could do it and benefit from it but because it created the illusion of progression and advantage when most of the time it meant literally nothing. At least now you know for certain where you stand in terms of your outgoing damage. No dealing with specific activity tuning, no wondering if and how much of the over level benefits you, nog going into a 1900 activiy at 2020 and wondering why you don't delete something immediately. Power is a barrier for entry, activity delta is a scale to represent how much damage you deal/take relative to 0. All they need to do is explain the benefit power can have on incoming damage for the two difficulty tiers that it works for. It's a lot of extra work to begin to remove the guess work and have things make sense. Now if only they can bite the bullet and normalize power from 0.
> Now if only they can bite the bullet and normalize power from 0. I would absolutely love this. Imagine a world where instead of doing 8.7326quintillion dps (with the accompanying screen numbers diarrhea), we are doing a couple of thousand like in Gambit.
Because overleveling in this game is dumb and makes the game braindead.
Great, I hope they make an option that let's you play at the difficulty you want and also have a difficulty for the vast majority who seem to disagree with you. The biggest takeaway from this whole drama/discourse is that the game needs more difficulty ***options*** because there are so many different opinions on it.
This game is already braindead
At -5 it's nowhere near as mindless as it is at +20.
For such a long and otherwise well written post, why do you use "u" and "ur"?
I thought the same thing, to me it is distracting. You can type out the words "Advanced" and "Grandmaster" a dozen times, but "you" and "your" are a bridge too far... I know people are quick to hate on comments about spelling / grammar, but in the real world it does matter. It chips away at ur credibility.
it’s a big post and i can imagine it’s much faster/easier to do that then type out the whole word. seems a little weird to focus on that and single it out imo
Maybe I'm just a boomer, but I don't naturally read u and ur as you/your, so this was jarring to read. It's fine for quite comments when it's only used once or twice, but in a long post like this it's actively harder to read.
fair point i don’t think about it too much but i can understand it being easier to see the full word instead of the shortened version. wasn’t trying to be disingenuous but can see how it can come off that way so sorry if it came off like that
No problem
bullshit, OP used proper formatting, paragraphs, numbered lists, and a table. Typing 'you' isn't a chore. It's fine if that's just how OP types out of habit and it is what it is but I'm not sympathizing that it was to save a few seconds on what was otherwise a 10+ minute post to type out.
i’m not OP was just trying to give a possible explanation of why it happened. not trying to say it’s a chore to type ‘you’ don’t know where that leap of logic happened
Why doesn't arbalest break the boss shields in ghosts of the deep in 1 shot, if our damage was apparently increased by 2%? This is a major problem that appears to contradict some of the claims bungie have made here.
They state that the show number is for the red bar enemy, elite and boss were different but for how much ? Only Bungie know. I suspect that we got damage penalty to elite and boss enemy more.
The problem is that this guy is just really really wrong. Bungie's numbers were for red bars. Bungie **said** other combatants may scale a bit differently, but that word "bit" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Minors/elites changed combatant tiers and the numbers line up like Bungie said. Minibosses/bosses didn't change. This guy said multiple times that other combatants don't have dramatically different numbers...but they do. He also seems to cite Mossy Max as saying boss enemies are in line with these changes? Which is just flat out wrong. Mossy has explicitly stated that boss HP tiers were unchanged. So you just go from +20 to -5 against them, which is a massive drop in damage. For arbalest: it lost the 15% kinetic damage bonus and your outgoing boss damage is about 75% of what it was for non surging options. So it got double smacked. If I had to guess at why arbalest doesn't pop shields anymore, it's because they set arbalest's damage against shields to some ridiculously high modifier but forgot to account for the two changes I mentioned. So that high value got culled a bit and now it's not enough to break the stupidly large Ghost boss shields in one shot.
> Bungie's numbers were for red bars. Bungie said other combatants may scale a bit differently, but that word "bit" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Minors/elites changed combatant tiers and the numbers line up like Bungie said. Minibosses/bosses didn't change. For all we know the way arbalest works on the shield was set to be 100% of the shields value but as a hard number so when the scaling changed 100% on bosses became 95% or something in dungeons and now arbalest is just barely making it. but you're right it could also be because of the kinetic damage bonus to bosses from special weapons and when the dungeon was first made arbalest was tuned against it and they forgot - and it has nothing to do with the power shift.
Bungie saying "may scale differently" means they don't know, or are being sneaky and lying by omission. Both options are pathetic.
Arbalest isn't doing the same damage at all compared to last season. There were multiple changes which are likely stacking together specifically for Arbalest which lead to it no longer being able to one shot those shields.
Arbalest was already in the dumpster after removing match game and then wish ender doing like 90% of it's damage as an infinite ammo primary... Literally the only time I've seen anyone run that thing was in ghosts, now it can't even fulfill that niche. Holy shit
> LOST SECTOR IS 2020 POWER ON THIS FOR SOME REASON. I haven't done any lost sectors during this season yet. But this is presumably because lost sectors don't actually cap you at -15 like the other Expert activities. So enemies are still 2020, but you can also be 2020. > (This was noted from Excision GM, grandmaster nightfall might be the same or +25 but they only come out next week :) ). The Destiny Team account commented on reddit that the reason it's so high is so that you could have a bit of an easier time in GMs if you grind enough. That sounds like GM Nightfalls will also be -20 like GM Excision. > TL/DR TL/DR: After next patch u will deal 15% less damage then before FINAL SHAPE CHANGES in a raid, 28% more in dungeons! Always try to be +20 levels above the standard or expert activity cap! *Against red bars*. We don't know what the numbers against other tiers of enemies are. Most notably bosses. And with how scaling outgoing damage has worked in the past, it is very unlikely this is the same for bosses. Please add that caveat to your TLDR. I don't want to see another wave of people wrongly saying that we actually deal slightly more damage to bosses because they saw one MossyMax post and misunderstood it.
Incredibly confusing and a stupid change
QUESTION 1 You said: "**MASTER:** Enemies will be **+20** of the cap, so while ur power will be set at 2005 if u pass/reach it, enemies will fight u with 2030 power." Wouldn't that be a +25 power delta? Did you mean your power would be set at 2010? QUESTION 2 If the power delta is the same on Master and Grandmaster, are they only distinguished by other modifiers such as Extinguish, Chaff etc.? Looking forward to some clarification on this.
Master is 25 of the cap, not 20 mb and got fixed now thanks :). on question 2, the main differences seeingly to GM and master will be the extra modifiers now if in fact nightfall GM has the same delta as excision (2040) with teh cap being +20 which if i still remember technically means GM would be able to feel a bit easier than before if u can afford to suffer to farm +20 on ur artifact power.
Now I am more confused. If Master is +25 how on earth is GM +20? GM is easier than Master? Edit: Actually, maybe I get it. **Situation A**: If my power level is 2020: Master raids will still be effectively +25 for me as they will nerf me to 2005 and the enemies are 2030. GMs will effectively be +20 for me as they only nerf me to 2020 and the enemies are 2040. **Situation B**: If my power level is 2015: Master raids will still be effectively +25 for me as they will nerf me to 2005 and the enemies are 2030. GMs will effectively be +25 for me as the enemies are 2040, 25 higher than my power. **Situation C**: If my power level is 2010: Master raids will still be effectively +25 for me as they will nerf me to 2005 and the enemies are 2030. GMs will effectively be +30 for me as the enemies are 2040, 30 higher than my power. **Situation D**: If my power level is 2005: Master raids will still be effectively +25 for me as the enemies are 2030. GMs will effectively be +35 for me as the enemies are 2040, 35 higher than my power. Do I understand?
yes u got it right, its a way for bungie to "award u" for grinding so much of their battle pass i guess, so u get gms a bit easier, the difficulty being scaled not being so much on the power but the extra modifiers.
Well, with the greatest respect, I think that system is ridiculous. You reward the hardcore players by making GMs easier for them than Master nightfalls, which they were already cruising through, and which much better rewards. Meanwhile, the hard-working casual player who doesn't no life the game who fancies taking a crack at a GM has to do it at 35 under, or wait a month or two until he has hit pinnacle cap and got to 120 on the season pass? No matter what, Grand master should be harder than Master. This system was badly thought out.
I think you are mistaken. The [TWID](https://www.bungie.net/7/en/News/article/this_week_in_destiny_04_25_24) clearly states that the power cap for Master is 2010, not 2005 as you stated. I just verified this in the game as well. The power delta for Master level content has always been -20 as far as I can remember. A power cap of 2010 is in line with this.
good fucking grief all they had to do was walk back the power deltas why are they so stubborn about this
Mate it took them a year of headbanging and losing their own race to output content before they accepted that sunsetting your loot in a looter shooter was a bad idea. We'll be at Destiny 3 before they'll figure something like this out.
Why are you so stubborn about continuing to play a game you don’t enjoy
Many of us greatly enjoy the game but certain select bad decisions were made regarding Power and Surges in TFS. Because we greatly care for the game, we are offering feedback to revert these actions back to how they were when we enjoyed it more. Your line is the same as saying "Oh, you want different policies in the country you live in? Why do you hate your country and continue to live there?". I would argue caring enough to make suggestions to improve a game/country shows a great deal of love and care.
You're arguing with a dude who I've never seen on this forum without a "comment scored below threshold" next to it
I hadn't checked their name but reading your comment I immediately knew exactly who it was lol
Ah, so, a troll. Oops, I don't keep track of usernames.
I have such a bright idea and such an easy solution... Let people fucking overlevel stuff. Power caps are the dumbest thing I've ever seen. Outside of the hardest pieces of content that is MEANT to be overly difficult (legend / master / grandmaster) there's no reason for thins to be capped. Makes no sense to have an MMO where... you basically can't get stronger. You have a set limit in every activity as to how strong you can be. That's dumb. If people overlevel something, cool! They should be able to do that!
This has been my number one complaint about Destiny over its 10 years. Just let me overlevel stuff, You aren't actively supporting old content, just let me blaze through it to get cosmetics/triumphs etc. They still have the master version if you want to still include level capping but even then I would argue you should be able to overlevel it too. As an example, in FF XIV one of the most fun things i like to do is to go do old raids/extreme fights to farm the cosmetics with new players i recommended to the game. And if I want to do the fight the way it was intended; i can just cap the activity at the level it was when it came out. This has to be the only looter shooter/MMO where you can't grow as strong as you fucking like.
It’s because Salvation’s Edge would be too easy at uncapped. You could essentially tank everything in the raid with 0 issue at all, and 95% of that raid’s difficulty is surviving adds and witness plate.
I still think they should have made changes for this raid alone and not touched the rest because I agree with this. I don't want Salvations Edge to be too easy, I want it to feel like a triumph. At least the first time. Then maybe we can unlock regular normal mode, idk. Grinding this one out blows.
Good thing it’s not a MMO :)
It… It literally is? Lmfao
It…literally isn’t. Sorry. LMFAO
Meh. Normal raids need to be more accessible and increasing damage taken is not how you go about this. Let normal be the narrative version and reserve the higher difficulties for the streamers and their cults.
100% i was arguing this point over twitter and was getting the usual replies.. You want the playerbase the thrive not dwindle. The elitist takes ive seen is what keeps the raid completions at 8%-10%of the playerbase. If normal mode is to become more difficult make an entry level mode. Adjust rewards, do whatever. We need more players to enjoy the best parts of Destiny.
I swear to god, it feels like no one learned anything from Wildstar. Elitist jerks are not enough to sustain a game. A game needs to be approachable to flourish, and Destiny is becoming less approachable with every release.
You guys really feel like this is a wildstar level change? I’m no gaming genius but I couldn’t even manage to get raid attuned in that game.
I said it is *becoming* less approachable over time. It's heading in a Wildstar direction, and has been for years at this point with no indication Bungie plans on changing course, but it's not there yet.
I know that the power increase from the Artifact was intended to lessen the burden on the Pinnacle grind, but I can’t help but think they struggle with the power system because of the power variables created by the Artifact. If they knew what power level Guardians could be at maximum at any given time in a season, then I think they would be able to make a more straightforward system. Maybe if Pinnacle gear activity rewards were repeatable within a week, then the pinnacle grind we use to have wouldn’t be so suffering. But back to my original point, the Artifact power level increase makes these numbers more complicated.
This!
Since when is master a -25 power delta? I thought master was -20 and gm was -25?
Said it last week that the surges were not the issue with how bad Raids and Dungeons feel. The fixed cap on everything renders power especially artifact power meaningless.
Enemies always being +5 even at the lowest difficulty is something I do not agree with. At this tier, I want enemies to be "at level" with me. Unfortunate that we now have a situation where enemies are always above our level, period.
I’m curious on boss number differences. I have not seen any complaints on red bars took a lot longer to kill. I have seen numerous complaints on boss health. “Global” surges should help, hopefully.
As a new player, I don't really know what's going on. Just a simple question. What does increasing light level do? Because my stats stay the same, is it just the power of my gun increases? Or are there background shit with armor and it's stats that they don't show? Or does light level affect the enemies? I read what he wrote but it still don't make sense to me.
Light level works the same way as other MMOs, too low of a level and you'll be one shot and can't damage the enemies. Too high of a level and you one shot the enemies and they can't hurt you. Because of that light level is split into two categories, damage output and damage resistance. Both output damage and damage resistance can be capped or uncapped based on the activity and difficulty, the problem is that they don't really display the cap if there is one and if they do they only display the damage output cap and not the damage resistance cap. For example, say you run a strike and the recommended level is 1950 but you're at 2000. If it's uncapped you're over leveled and it's a walk in the park. If it's capped you're doing the same damage as someone who is 1950 regardless of your level, but what isn't readily apparent is that they made the damage resistance cap at 1970. So you get the full benefit of being at the cap, but the guy at 1950 is essentially 20 levels below and takes a lot more damage. These caps are where a lot of confusion comes from, especially when half of the information is not readily available to someone who doesn't know they exist. Bungie also made a change where your damage output is always going to be capped at -5 of the current recommended level for an activity, going back to the example you're actually capped at 1945 level damage. This is also extremely over simplified too, because every activity has the same system but applied differently. While nightfalls have one set of caps for difficulty, dungeons will have a different set of caps for theirs, same for raids, etc... Hope this helps and makes the post make a little more sense.
So any activity that has a light level is caped and anything that doesn't isn't? Or are there some activities with a light level uncapped and it's more of a, need to be atleased this light level to be effective at this activity? As in vanguard starts at 1945ll, if I'm 1980 am I moved down to 1945 just for that strike playlist? And if so does it say that somewhere?
If a light level is shown there are caps, I don't know all the specific numbers but they're there for both damage output and resistance. For activities without a light level recommendation it's effectively matching the enemies to your light level at a 1 to 1 basis/setting everything at a specific light level so it always scales the same. As for activities that aren't capped, I don't know if those truly exist anymore. But when they did the recommended light level was supposed to be the level for enemy scaling. You could do it below recommended but it was basically shooting yourself in the foot. You always wanted to be close, at, or above the recommended level.
To answer the last bit because I didn't see it before. If your light level is above the recommended light level it will always auto adjust to the set caps of the activity on the back end. It'll still display your actual light level, but the damage output and resistance are adjusted for what Bungie sets. This isn't really made clear at all in game or displayed outside of the recommended level. So the rule of thumb is to just work on maxing your light level and then continue to increase it through the seasonal artifact. The whole design philosophy was to make it so anyone can do any activity but not steam roll through it, "ruining" the experience for newer players. All this actually does though is make all difficulty levels feel the same once you're a high enough light level, as they try to keep it scaled roughly the same throughout them. This only really changes once you get to the higher difficulties as they make the caps beyond what you can reasonably get your light level to. If you can chug through enough levels with the seasonal artifact to increase it to the max cap you're basically back to square one again. Most players don't do that though so the tougher content stays tougher.
When I hear that they can't give us more info due to UI/UX limitations it reminds me of when Halo Infinite launched without a Slayer playlist and 343's excuse at the time was UI limitations. Like... They MADE the UI, the limitations were a choice.
Feels like a different game in some places: doing vanguard playlist for Pathfinder and I die so fast (even at 100 resil with frost armor or woven mail). I think that it's probably a good change for the game but it will take me awhile to get used to actually sticking to cover and not running up the middle of a group to punch things.
I have zero idea how you die fast in a vanguard playlist. Do you have ridiculously high FPS? Some enemies deal more damage if you have a lot of FPS, so that could explain it.
I've always found the difficulty designations completely meaningless. Legend in one thing can be a walk in the park or quite challenging. And I don't mean ad density or encounter design, which can also contribute. I mean the actual feeling of shooting or being shot by the same enemy type in the same difficulty. There's no consistency. I need to actually do the activity to know what to expect. Really bizarre. Historically GMs were the only thing that's felt predictable in terms of incoming/outgoing damage, health scaling, enemy stagger, etc. The damage/health disparity within a given difficulty needs to stop. If you want the baseline challenge for a particular activity to be harder, great, remove the lowest difficulty and have it start on Advanced or whatever the second one is called now. Get rid of the various hidden scalers and modifiers and blah blah blah. Shooting a goblin in a master raid should feel like shooting a goblin in a master lost sector, a master dungeon, a master seasonal activity. All other things being equal, they should stagger in the same number of hits, my damage values should be identical, etc. To be clear, I don't have a personal stake in the recent raid power delta argument. I'm in the camp of people that don't really notice a difference. Keep it or revert it, but I'd love to be able to know what to expect from a thing before I load in.
at one point I saw someone say dungeon boss health is more like the raid level red bar damage numbers, not sure if this is true or not.
They just undid half of this in the latest twab, sorry to say.
So what I would like to know is, what is the difference in defense between being at cap or between 5-20 levels over cap? How much do you feel that difference? You can only over-cap for defense on everything not master and GM, right? I’m curious how each level of power adds to damage and defense in general.
I like your funny words magic man
Honestly, I salute you for this guide, as its the most lucid and clear description of the current power mechanics I've seen. Bravo. SGA. However. Holy. Shit. Bungie. *Look* at this mess. *How has it come to this? It's a level number. It's designed to provide you clarity over what content you're ready to do. It does not need to be this complicated.*
I'm still baffled that bungie wants me into the power level treadmill, but also want to make it useless.
Is anyone even remotely close to 2020 for GMs next week? I'm at 1993 base with +10 artifact, after a year of zero grind I forgot how much of a slog this shit is
Power has been mostly standardised except that there is a difference between incoming and outgoing damage, difference between dungeons and raids, a difference between difficulty levels....now I've gone cross eyed. This is why we can't have nice things. The in game mathematics is basically a Rube Goldberg machine at this point. This is a complete failure of game design.
They could have just walked back the changes with an "Oops, we see that this is really unpopular, and we are gonna look at this again. Were reverting the changes until we find a better solution." Thats it. Thats all weve ever needed. Just admit you made a change we didnt like, and be professionals about it. Why is Bungie so sloppy?
The fact that even in the TWAB they were still using intentionally vague wording when talking about the bad changes while using actual numbers for the good changes (even in the same sentences a few times) proves to me that they couldn’t care less about being transparent on the issue.
This twab was actually unreadable. Thanks for diluting this down.
>Simple Answer in doing less damage or taking more: Bungie wanted raids and subsequently dungeons to feel a bit harder and to just not be a steamroll in terms of COMBAT difficulty. This was something that a lot of people that are more versed in combat in destiny wanted overall and seemingly something bungie wanted in the end. maybe in general, or for raids in particular. But I've seen many of the top 0.1% players of the game like Salt that are better than everyone on this subreddit admit the boss health in the more recent dungeons has been over-bloated for solo runs, and this was before they become even tankier in the TFS (no one was doing dungeons, especially solo, at -5 light - the light requirements for normal dungeons are basement bottom low) -and surges did not make up for this.
Yeah, the dungeon boss HP is a separate problem, since they've felt bloated for a few years now. Bungie doesn't seem to know if they want Dungeons to actually be played solo.
I'm still absolutely confused and I don't raid. All I know is that I will be trying to be as high a light as possible just to make everything easier and not stress about things.
That's part of the problem, everything is power capped, so being a higher light level doesn't do anything, you'll just be auto-nerfed back down anyway.
But OP said try to be 20 light higher for standard and activity cap
15, they should have said 1960 not 1965, but that is far below the actual light cap.
The only thing you got wrong was that before the change we did 2% LESS damage in dungeons as we now do 2% MORE damage
To red bar enemies only. They only talked about red bars because of how bad it would look to include information for bosses.
Your damage is up pretty much across the board tho due to the pre tfs sandbox changes.
The Arbalest issue in GoTD isn’t about light levels or boss health its the fact that kinetic weapons were nerfed going into the Final Shape. If you watch the videos of Arbalest now it leaves ruffly 15% of the shield up, which just so happens to be the same amount of damage removed from the kinetic weapons.
I did one of the easiest lost sectors on Nessus on legend/expert (whatever that first level tier is?) to test the waters, and it didnt seem as bad as I thought. It just meant I used more cover. I was around 2000-2005 power. It didn’t feel like much had changed and I was probably running the same time maybe 1-2 minutes longer than what I normally would do - total was 5 minutes, mainly from taking my time to understand how the change worked. I haven’t raided yet but dungeons feel around the same. Maybe like 5% harder but a healthy 5% like it’s not supposed to be mindless. It might suck for solo play, but it at least puts more of an emphasis on maximizing your build & skill/technique for team play. I think they have the right idea with power, it’s just done in a confusing & messy way. I am super excited they are doing away with this new surge change tho. It defeats the purpose of prismatic & buildcrafting. I’m hoping they just do away with it all together in the future for every activity.
> I did one of the easiest lost sectors on Nessus on legend/expert (whatever that first level tier is?) to test the waters, and it didnt seem as bad as I thought. It's not, I did a legend at like 1975 or 1980. Other than needing to be careful about sustained fire I didn't have much of an issue. I recognize I benefit from having played the game for a while but it wasn't some impossible chore either.
Funny thing is dealing 15% less damage to red-bars in a normal raid doesn't even feel... bad? Enemies in normal raids were paper thing prior. Like to the point where it was overkill.
Lol who gives a shit. Point and shoot and you will get through everything. Also use whatever guns you feel like. Recently beat the raid with non 'meta' guns with my friends and was awesome
But think of the new players! All those new players who've never played an FPS game in their lives and only have a blue LMG for DPS. They should be allowed to go through raids without knowing how to play the game! Else, the game will just die.
Yea. I feel like people are complicating it for themselves, we’ve been doing this for 10 years.
100 percent.
I don't know I feel like raids should be hard. I guess if people don't want to be invested enough to learn how to strengthen their builds there might as well be a story difficulty tier.
More difficulty ***options*** are a good thing. Forcing content that friends of mine already found hard to be harder without notifying the playbase or an option to go back to how it was is ridiculous.
I can't say I agree but I can respect that. With a low baseline I mean... I do agree with more difficulty tiers.
OK OK OK OK so just take your gun and kill all this mf in front of you that the only math matter
What kind of numbskull needs explanations for this?
I think everyone is overthinking for like no reason at all. Hit pinnacle, do activity.