01-08-2025
Destiny 2's Power Leveling And Loot System Is The Worst It's Ever Been
Accuse me of being overly negative about the state of Destiny 2 if you want, but there have been so many backward and baffling decisions in The Edge of Fate that it actively makes me upset, given how long I've played and loved this game.
Right now, the combination of how power level and loot farming interact in Destiny 2 is the worst I've ever seen. Sure, actual loot itself has been much worse (remember fixed roll days?), but how you power and get loot is simply inexcusable, and I have no idea how this system was designed.
The longer this expansion goes, the more clear it becomes. Destiny 2 is now nothing more than a slow crawl through 450 levels of power with loot being a side-effect of hitting those marks, rather than a true chase.
Right now, attempting to get high-tier gear does not have anything to do with beating challenging content. It has to do with these arbitrary power cut-offs. Get to 300+ rank, you will instantly start drowning in T3s. Get to 400, T4s. And now, the very few no-lifers that have reached 450 will see boatloads of Tier 5 loot, not for achieving some great in-game feat, but just…a Crucible game, as 450 hauler Diffizzle has demonstrated:
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Simply being these numbers and then playing any content at all near that level is what gets you the new Tier. And the entire game turning into an arduous light level slog, light level being something that most players were glad to see almost entirely left behind the last few years, is exhausting.
This has raised additional debates about the 'efficient' way to get this high, namely running ultra-fast Portal missions like Caldera in Solo Ops or Starcrossed in Pinnacle Ops to get random gear to upgrade your slots. Random gear you will not care about, since your goal is to get to higher and higher tiers.
There's the idea that 'well, you can play whatever you want and get there' rather than boring grinding the same few things. That's true! However, if your main goal is to reach these higher tiers, playing something that takes four times as long for the same amount of power upgrades for 'fun' is not 'fun' when it's severely delaying the actual gear farming you want to do.
The current system requires at least dozens upon dozens of grinding to reach even the start of the farm you want to pursue. And once you get there, it rains Tier 5s like you've won the lottery. So then that chase can be over practically as soon as it started given that T5 guns now have a million perks and it won't be hard to find what you want. You can say that you don't really even need anything more than T2, but I mean, this is a loot game. If five Tiers exist, the goal is to get those high Tiers, because of course it is.
This is all completely backward. This has resulted in things like the raid giving out bottom-tier loot, or Kepler public events giving out multiple Tier 5s instantly. The only thing that truly matters is your power number, which does not even make you powerful at all, given activity difficulty deltas that cap you. It does not take any remote amount of skill to clear these missions endlessly for these upgrades, it just takes way, way too much time, so much time that I cannot imagine 95% of players will believe it's worth the investment.
There are things that can be done. Bonus loot can be handed out to other activities at certain times to encourage diversity of play, for instance. But it's the entire system that's broken. Grinding to simply hit a cutoff threshold that is the single barrier between you and the loot you want feels awful. This concept needs a complete overhaul if it doesn't want to burn out the vast majority of the playerbase a month into launch. It's that urgent.
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