Latest news with #EdgeOfFate
Forbes
04-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Destiny 2's Power Grind Is Now Just Two 3-Minute Missions
Things continue to be weird in this new era of Destiny 2 which kicked off with its Edge of Fate expansion a few weeks back. The entire game was overhauled including, importantly, the loot and leveling systems. Now, the ultimate goal of Destiny 2 is to power up through 450 levels, with milestones of 200, 300, 400 and 450 giving you access to Tiers 2-5 loot respectively. So, how do you power up? This is a looter shooter, and you can guess what's happened: players have figured out the most efficient way to do this, and it's playing essentially two missions hundreds and hundreds of times. The missions are both Solo Ops, solo-only Portal missions that run you through various old zones with new objectives and a boss. Some are faster than others, and the two fastest are K1 Logistics on the Moon and Caldera on new planet Kepler. The idea here is you pick your favorite on one day or another when enemies rotate, and fly through these missions as fast as possible, hitting mini objectives along the way to land a top score and a +3 power upgrade in one slot. FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder The problem is nothing is even close to this efficient. Depending on how much you've gotten this down to a science these are 2-5 minute runs. Get your drop, infuse it, do it again. You can check your roll to see if you want it as a replacement, but that's going to be rare. That's the process. Plus, on top of that, every 10 to a max of 20 runs you will get a drop that's one Tier above your current one, the big prize. After 400 that pinnacle drop is the only thing to level you up, and after six months, everyone is getting knocked back down to 200 to do it all over again. There is a debate in the community about whether this is stupid or not, and if so, if that's just players' fault for choosing to do this to themselves. I am in the 'well, what's the alternative then?' camp. This is a looter shooter. You give me five tiers of loot, I am not going to be satisfied with Tier 2 with less perks and worse stats. I want to climb. I also do not want to waste time climbing. It is a tough sell to be asked to run a 30 minute Pinnacle mission for two powerful drops when that would have just been 5-7 easy Solo Ops runs for double or triple the upgrades. Did I have more fun? I mean, did I really? Hell, if anything Solo Ops are technically new content while everything else isn't. Farming now feels like whatever you get is just going to be replaced at higher tiers if you get there. Only in select circumstances, say when Pinnacle Ops lets you target farm the best gun of the expansion (the rocket pulse) does it feel worth mixing things up (I'm still using my Tier 2 one as I cannot take it off). This is the split now. Do you go for 'diversity' in playing whatever random mission you feel like at any given time, which will slow your power gains to a crawl, or do you run the same two missions dozens if not hundreds of times to race toward better loot, while also feeling like you're losing your mind? As you can see, some things need to change. Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
Forbes
02-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
A Breakdown Of How ‘Destiny 2' Tier 1-5 Loot Farming Works, Or Doesn't
Fans are getting used to massive overhauls to power, loot, gameplay, activities and really all corners of Destiny 2 with the launch of its new Edge of Fate expansion, taking the game into an entirely new, expressly slimmed-down era. One of the biggest system changes is that all new Destiny 2 loot (and zero old loot) now operates on a Tier system. Tier 1 to Tier 5. Tier one weapons are normal, unenchantable legendaries. As you move up you get enhancement and more perks and then flashy colors and bonuses at Tier 5. For armor, it's higher and higher stat totals, with some extra perks at the top. The goal, obviously, is Tier 5 as the ultimate pursuit. But this entire system is very strange right now, heavily linked to power and Guardian Rank in a way that it hasn't been previously. I just talked about how I think this is bad, but to really understand what's going on here, and what you can or cannot farm and how, is needed. Credit to Gigz here, who compiled this all in one place that I think is useful for discussion. It's a wide, wide range of what exactly is going on, and I would be surprised if any one player understood all of it. I've been attempting to since launch, and some of it is still going over my head. I will correct any of this if need be, as lord knows there may still be some things that are mission. So: FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder The headlines here are: The most difficult activities in the game like raids and Trials are not guaranteed to give you high Tier loot and in fact, they'll often give you outright bad loot. Conversely, Tier loot is almost 100% determined by milestones of 200, 300, 400 and 450 power, and usually their associated ranks which will require any number of random feats. If you do get a rare wild drop that's a better Tier, you almost certainly just hit a timer after burning through almost two dozen activities. The system is confusing, ill-explained and illogical. Substantive changes are needed, but through all of this, we've really only heard that Bungie realized that maybe the Contest Raid Tier 1 thing was bad. Hopefully we hear a lot more soon about coming changes to how all this works. Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
Forbes
01-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
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: FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder 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. Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
Forbes
21-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
‘Destiny 2' Boss Health And Player Damage Is Bugged Or Bad In ‘Edge Of Fate'
Destiny 2 After a wild weekend of punishment in the Contest Mode of Desert Perpetual, Destiny 2's new Edge of Fate raid, players have now begun to suspect that something is wrong in this new era of the game. It may be on purpose, it may be a bug, but either way, it raises questions about what's going on. The bosses in the contest mode of the raid had easily the most health we've seen in a Destiny 2 run like this, even with content tuned to be its hardest. While many top players enjoyed the experience, even they admitted that doing perfect damage to these bosses required an absurd amount of 'loadout swapping' between different gear sets to stack damage, something Bungie has previously said they don't like. Here? It was almost mandatory. This sparked a theory that boss health is simply broken in Edge of Fate, and it's not that far-fetched of an idea. Bungie overhauled more or less every system in Destiny 2 for the Edge of Fate launch, including damage scaling and a 'crunch' of damage numbers, which is why you're hitting for dozens and hundreds of damage instead of millions now. But this doesn't just appear to be Desert Perpetual. Players are reporting that other raid and dungeon bosses, even on normal modes, are now taking far more damage phases to kill than before, as in, double or triple or sometimes quadruple. The same content just…absurd amounts of health. Destiny 2 FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder Things may also be broken on the player damage side. Damage numbers are sometimes not reflecting actual values. Crit scalars sometimes appear not active. One of the strangest bugs, seemingly uncovered during the raid, was the 'reinstancing' an encounter could actually increase your damage if it was feeling too low in a previous attempt. It's all over the place. This may be a combination of things. Bungie did want to increase boss health so one-phases were far less common. But too much is happening here that it feels outright bugged, and it seems silly to go back and beef up a ton of old dungeon bosses in mostly irrelevant content with 3x the health as before. This doesn't feel great. I've never seen so many people frustrated with a contest mode run, but even though that's now over, these issues are extending into the rest of the game, and players are going to need some clarity from Bungie. If things were in fact bugged during the Contest Mode run, a limited-time offering, that's going to be something if a disaster to admit. But the main question is what it means for the game going forward and if things are actually feeling like they're supposed to. And if they are, if that's actually a good idea (I'm not even getting into what also appear to be bugged ability cooldowns). Yes, it's not shocking that giant overhauls of systems result in bugs and things breaking, but this one seems very, very important, and if it didn't damage Contest Mode, it still might be pervasive in the rest of the game. Either way, we need to know, and I've asked Bungie for clarification. Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
Forbes
18-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
‘Destiny 2' Deletes Easy Encore Power Farm That Will Now Split The Community
Destiny 2 Well, it turns out when you change essentially everything about every system in Destiny 2, some things are going to slip through the cracks. And that's what's happened with the launch of The Edge of Fate, and it's actually Bungie not reacting fast enough that's created a big problem with the game. As of yesterday, Bungie disabled the exotic mission Encore (after which they briefly disabled the entire Pinnacle Ops playlist), as it had turned into a speed farm for huge power gains and some of the best gear in the game. Here's what they said: 'We have identified an issue where the Encore mission is substantially easier to complete, and dropping higher quantities of rewards, than intended within Pinnacle Ops.' 'As such, we have disabled the Encore mission within Pinnacle Ops and the "Grappler" modifier within the Portal. These will be reenabled at a future date.' The idea here was that you could speed through the mission with the triple grapple modifier and net tons of great rewards with little effort, boosting your power level immediately, skipping potentially weeks of grinding for some players. FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder Should this have been disabled? I mean, probably. It's pretty dumb to not have tested a triple grapple modifier that the literal dev team was showing off on stream if it was an issue in a mission like this, but yes, I understand why Encore probably couldn't exist like this indefinitely. However, the problem is how long it did last. It took three full days for Bungie to disable the Encore farm. That means while some players were busy actually playing the campaign, those that figured this out were just grinding Encore endlessly in these short intervals, rocketing up their power and getting high tier loot almost instantly. So now with this disabled, half the community (well, probably more) isn't anywhere close to the power level of that group, while the other group has destroyed most of the power leveling goals of the entire season in 72 hours (I am not blaming them for that). Destiny 2 Edge of Fate It's a mess. It's unclear how you would even roll this back. You can't just reactivate the farm and let everyone do it from here on out. You can't…what, delete all the high power high tier these players got. So Bungie is sort of stuck here, and this highlights some problems with a system where the main goal is getting power to get high tier loot, because if you skip that power grind, whoops, you're sort of done. And if you think this is the only 'efficient' grind that the community is going to dig up, you're wrong. These new systems and the way they interact feels like it's going to be a problem, and this is just the first example of it. But now, this has dramatically split the community between those who did this farm and those who didn't, and there does not seem to be any way to close that gap at all. Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram. Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy
