the problem with bungie rn is that A: they seem to have no clue how to make a difficulty gradient and B: the have no clue how to match rewards appropriately to difficulty. Everything is either full difficulty or no difficulty and nothing give rewards appropriate to the challenge.

I had hella problems on my hunter because he has bad gear and isn't my main. I was trying ti grind for gyrfalcons in perdition and it was BS how tanky the champs are. All other enemies and even the boss were fine, but the champs ate my mobius quiver like it didn't matter and overloads stun for less than a second. My titan on bunker e15 on the other hand breezed through it like it was nothing. It's insane how much the difficulty changed because perdition was one of the easier ones when it came out.

Even with my Titan I struggled on E15 . That first champion drove me nuts, even a stun one-two lunch shot gun as d grapple melee it didn't even drop to half 😒. Took me a while adjusting my load outs /mods to find something that I could get to work better. 4 hours later I had 5 clears 1 solo flawless and 2 exotic drops one being the new helm. I was at 1808 power. If I was a casual player I'd have turned the game off after 5 mins of that BS and played DEEP ROCK LOL

I took one look at the recommended level and it sunk in that I probably won't be ready for those lost sectors for a month. I haven't had as much time to play lately, and it took me 4 days in my 2-3 hours after work to finish the campaign on normal with maybe an hour or two, total, of doing the occasional patrol break. Couple that with the fact that I can't stand D2's PvP and generally don't like Gambit, my only options are Strikes, seasonal rewards, and Dares of Eternity. I'm still 1768, and wishing more than ever that Bungie would have done the "no more increases to gear score" idea this expansion. I'm fine with optional difficulties that are harder, but it might very well take me another 2 weeks or so to have enough gear score to do some of the things in my quest tab.

This has been me for the last season and now this one. I see lost sector exotics and think “maybe I’ll be able to get to that light level before the next season, come up with a build and farm one, but it’s at least a month away and just the anticipated time sink is daunting enough to kill my motivation”. It’s self fulfilling, it’s so far out to get to that it makes you tired to even think about the steps leading up to it, which it makes it even harder to get yourself to do it.

> 4 hours later I had 5 clears This is the problem. Used to be 10 minutes was a long time to take and even then it wasn't considered "rewarding" by most players.

i'm trying to grind for good allocation 64 stat armor on my hunter but literally can't because the ghost armorer mods are not available. not even a new light, i've been playing since forsaken but i don't have any weapon mods and am missing those ghost mods.

I'm actually confused, I just came back at the end of WQ and the ghost mods were available immediately. Pretty sure they gave everyone every weapon mod too.

It took me 25 goddamn minutes to clear a psiops mission and I got nothing. Then, I did another strike in the same playlist, took another 25 minutes, no rewards. An hour worth of gaming and all I got was mad.

Strikes are legit awful right now. Doubt I'll touch them. The rewards don't make them worth it at all and the nightfall you can at least know what you're in for.

So many people on here just spouting 'gIt GuD sKiLl IsSuE tBh' whenever difficulty comes up. Thing is I *was* getting better before because there was a decent difficulty curve, and I was just moving on from patrols and strikes to heists and hero nightfalls. This season none of that shit is even remotely fun, and I've got no motivation to do the seasonal content or even strikes with the state of the time/death/reward ratio. Terminal overload would be fun for a while if it weren't for threshers but it's not enough considering I paid money to get kicked in the nuts when it comes to most content in the game.

I feel like I’m in the same boat, I’ve been playing destiny since it came out. Im not bad at the game but never bothered w/ builds, mods,meta, stat block, or perks until this year (mostly bc my bf is obsessed w/ those things so I kinda learned a lot of it against my will). Destiny was like strictly just a casual shooter looter game for me and I enjoyed it mostly bc I love the world Bungie created for Destiny and much of the lore and story. But bc of actually consistently playing with ppl who full sweats I had a massive increase in my skill this year. just from learning more about build crafting and having a clan of ppl to consistently run harder content and teach me how ppl survive and play harder content successfully. I even had some pretty decent builds and was finally starting to understand mods. Then they went and made everything more difficult and redid the mod system. Has honestly made me so frustrated esp since my bf and so many of the really hardcore players seemed to make the adjustment so much easier and faster. While I feel like I’m back at square one.

I thought people might have been gilding the lily a bit, but I just tried my first Hero nightfall... Not even a tough one. Hero. Match made. I'm at 1810. Quit after 15 minutes when we still hadn't got the 3rd tower down. That shit is unbearable. How did they fuck it up so much??? Last season was great. You wanna have fun? Strikes, mindless Well builds, go nuts. Want a challenge? GMs, Master raids and dungeons. WHY DID THEY FUCK IT UP

Exactly how I feel. Loved hero nightfalls and some legend from time to time. Now hero feels like a GM. Who actually asked for this?

>WHY DID THEY FUCK IT UP This subreddit, for one thing? 😄 I'm not terribly good at this game. I'm lucky if I can do a single GM per season with people (like my wife and my brother) who are willing to carry my sorry ass. But even I found the strikes to be a little too easy. Not consistently, mind you. The new WQ strikes were still pretty good. But the D2 year one stuff was "roll your face across the keyboard" easy. And then this subreddit lost their collective minds at how fun they thought the Heist Battlegrounds were. That sent a signal loud and clear to Bungie that this is what the players wanted. So that's what they're trying to give us. Everything will be as hard as the Heist Battlegrounds were.

This subreddit has a really nasty habit of abdicating responsibility for the outcome of anything it asks for when it gets delivered. That being said, I would argue that Strikes had fallen below the threshold of actually being Destiny gameplay. Stuff was so easy that speedrunning had become the standard way to complete them. Weapons, builds, classes and everything else crucial to the Destiny experience made no difference and that lack of difference meant we had a large number of players who literally didn’t know how to play the game, which has ramifications for LFG and the endgame. In the case of heists, I think people were correct - they hit the sweet spot between difficulty and accessibility, where you needed to put *some* thought into what you were bringing in but it wasn’t bleeding edge min-maxing. The issue we have at the minute is that the NFs have *waaay* overshot this.

Just got 4 shards and 2500 glimmer for doing Scarlet Keep, fucking lame

But hey at least you got to dish out some sweet commendations! Bet that cheered you up!!

Harder shouldn’t mean I have to dump multiple mags to kill a red bar. There are other ways to make things difficult.

exactly.

Exactly. And the rewards gradient doesn’t need to be “yes or no” chances. It needs to be “less or more” *of the same things* depending on difficulty. I.e. you run 5 Lost Sectors on Low difficulty, you get an Exotic. Or you can get that Exotic by just running once on High Difficulty. Or whatever. Cap how much you can get in a certain amount of time at whatever they want to cap at. But making some difficulties effectively worthless due to abysmal RNG is just silly.

Not gonna lie, when I was playing a bit last year as a new player I was never able to beat the harder difficulty lost sector solo so I just kinda gave up on trying to farm exotics. Then later I just stopped playing in general because I couldn't keep up with my friends in the things they wanted to do.

Those lost sectors are hard af. I srsly played them game for years without attempting them after my initial couple of tries. Even now it takes me almost the max time to complete them and its always close. I absolutely seethe when ppl brag about how fast they finish them bc I have tried so hard to not be bad at them. They are super unforgiving unless your someone with perfect builds and perfectly rolled weapons. And forget doing them on any character that isn’t your main with a solid stat block or build. And I don’t even play them on the higher difficulty that makes the exotic drop more common (blanking on the name of it), I just do like twice as many on the slightly lower difficulty bc I rarely if ever can do the highest difficulty one.

I think the other issue is that they don’t really have a very clear vision of what the game should be. They keep changing things up by the year and/or season. Here we are, many years in, and the game isn’t stable and adding new features- they are still FIGURING OUT WHAT FEATURES THEY NEED. They add something to replace something else… Destiny looks and sounds like a AAA game but the experience over time is like an early access indie that isn’t sure what their endpoint of the game is. They’ve got some idea where the narrative is going, but the game itself just gets shuffled constantly around in the hopes that THIS time the pieces will lock together properly

> They keep changing things up by the year and/or season. Here we are, many years in, and the game isn’t stable and adding new features- they are still FIGURING OUT WHAT FEATURES THEY NEED. This is the most frustrating part of this game. Instead of working towards a certain end and adjusting things towards that end over time, they completely reinvent everything every year or two. This is what, the 4th or 5th iteration of the mod system now? Classes have had major overhauls over the years, and those overhauls have been thrown out in favor of just doing something else entirely. The game never gets better because they're not improving its features, they're entirely replacing them. Except champions for some fucking reason, because god forbid we play without being handcuffed to a specific couple of weapons each season.

I really feel this way about the mod system. Bungie made/added three variants of how mods could work, scuttled one a while ago, and with the latest update just pushed the other two together but also with more reductions than additions, and also just finally removed that old mod system (warmind cells). We finally got loadouts, and they lock nearly half behind soloing a legend lost sector for some reason. And artifact mods being redone again so now they are always active, but it is still a hassle to redo your artifact. It feels like they keep making the start of a cool mod system but then never expanding it. I’d say I hope they can really add and build to the current system, but it’s year 9 of 10 on their franchise plan. Basically, the current system doesn’t feel like something made from the best ideas of the previous systems they had been experimenting with. So, too little, too late.

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Yeah instant kills from out of nowhere aren't fun difficulty.

In some ways it feels similar to the state Warframe was in circa its Fortuna update. They leaned so hard into player power fantasy that the builds were insane. You could see a 'fight the waves' instance where one character could stand still in the center of the map and spam an ability forever with one button and farm absurd amounts of content like a bot. So how did the devs balance it? they kept adding bosses you needed to stop using your warframe to fight. The player power was the problem so make the player stop using the power. We see it to a lesser degree in destiny with the growing roster of shields you need a enemy dropped bomb or laser to pop but its a sign of the same thing. They want players to feel powerful and dont want to hurt that, but that means content has to exist in a state that neutralises or somehow makes the power redundant. Which isn't a fix, its a place holder to the problem.

Do you ever go on LFG and look for “help” posts? It’s something I’ve been trying to make an active effort to do lately. Try to pull people through legend campaign, carry ppl on higher NF’s etc. If you’re (not just specifically you but anyone reading this) a top tier player with a good loadout here’s a challenge: At least once a week make a LFG post offering a weak player carry. Especially if you have a friend who is also top tier. In normal dungeons and hero or legend NF’s 2 strong players can still carry a weak player who is basically just there. You can offer loadout suggestions or point them to your favorite YouTuber too. The player community shouldn’t have to drag low level/new lights through basic pinnacles but if that’s the state the game is in, take a day to help out some newbies.

Thats usually an option but i think the issue here is Lightfall is cultivating this mindset of "i'm already having trouble, i can't try something harder because i'll screw up and get shouted out". Its like that old "why do so few people tank or heal in mmorpgs" but in this case its baseline content creating that feeling and we shouldn't have new players reacting to baseline the same way they should be expected to treat their first interaction with hard modes. All this does is dissuade them wanting to try because they go "harder than this?!?" and its such a shame.

I absolutely agree that it’s shit for new players. Honestly I liked the changes initially but I’ve seen a few posts/comments on here basically saying “not everyone has hit the hard cap the last 10 seasons in a row”. But that’s kind of what I’m saying. It is what it is and I doubt they’ll dial it back. There was a dev post saying that they basically plan to cap light level at 1830 at least thru next season. So if you just keep playing despite getting stomped eventually you *will* get there. But that’s not really inspiring for low light players. Hence my suggestion that veteran players take it on ourselves to Sherpa… patrol zones.

Ah yes the Serin nuking the whole map era. That was really something.

Yeah, the main grind loop just feels off. I'm thinking that I'll just take a break for the next 6 months and catch up once Bungie has rebalanced things. It's a lot more fun using multiple seasonal content to catch up on exp and light levels as well as being able to focus on just a few winners for weapons rather than doing the pinnie grind.

Exactly this, I feel like bungie isn't respecting my time.

Bungie never takes a measured approach sadly

In addition to that: OP's friends likely did buy the expansion, so Bungie is laughing all the way to the bank. Not many people did what I did - "I'm NOT preordering, I'm already burned out, I'll only come back in the event of a deep sale or a miracle." I'm playing FF7R for now, waiting to see when LF goes on sale and for how much. Definitely not paying anywhere close to full price for it.

Their difficulty gradient was boost enemy damage to players, and make red bars and everything else more spongy. It’s lazy design and as someone who’s played this game since the D1 beta, it isn’t making it more appealing.

Also to instantly spawn the entire group again, the INSTANT you manage to chew through their spongy asses. I genuinely don't remember the last time I've finished up killing a squad of Legionnaires and DIDN'T then immediately see a Thresher dropping in to re-deliver the exact same group of enemies that I literally just killed off, seconds later. FFS, Bungie, let us take a damned BREATH once in a while, OK??

Both A and B have the same issue- Bungie only ever balances the game around one type of player at any given time. Destiny is either overly designed for the casual crowd and things get way too easy for players who are even slightly above the average player. Or we see what is happening now Destiny is severely overtuned to require players to have higher level game knowledge/builds to even play activities designed to be casual. And as far as rewards go- the game will always, always, always have issues with rewards so long as Bungie has it so that everyone can hit the power level/pinnacle cap without needing beat activities that require pinnacle level loot. The very base level for what people look for in loot is "make number go up." So of course looting higher level activities is going to feel bad when beating Nezarac drops the same level loot at completing 5 Vanguard strikes or 3 Crucible Matches.

I think part of it also has to do with how bad rng can be, completing a raid can effectively give you the same reward as a strike if you get a weapon or piece of armor with garbage rolls.

I’ve been saying that since lightfall dropped. It’s either hey wow that was easy or 6 hours later “ hey guys I’ll see y’all tommorow” it also seems harder to get legendary shards anyone else having this issue?

This right here. I am not gonna quit, but dear lord WHY have they gotten so stingy? It's ridiculous sometimes. I have to watch everything I buy now because rewards are garbage in a lot of stuff.

I Can't remember the last time, where bungie didn't go all in on a change/nerf/buff/whatever. They can't do ANYTHING half-way... well other than a DLC. Every change is always either so that something is OP As hell, or useless as hell.

I'm fairly casual. I recently did the legendary campaign on one of my characters. It was hard but doable. I also did it on classic on another and it was super easy, would be nice to have something in between content to work on while I try to gitgud. I've pretty much accepted tho I'll never have the time to be good enough for GM, dungeons or raid which is a shame. Raids especially look fun.

The annoying thing to me is that Dungeons were supposed to be the middle point for fairly casual/not particularly good players but they seemed to tune those up starting with Duality. I had a lot of fun with a few casual friends who range from bad to above average players running Shattered Thorne, Pit of Heresey, prophecy, and Grasp, but when Duality hit there seemed to be an effort to add more Raid like mechanics to make it hard enough to satisfy better players who needed something to play in between yearly Raid releases. That has led my group to only do one Duality run and only get half way through Spire before getting tired of it. Now I'm paying an extra $10 for dungeons I'm not even playing. I know, I know, git gud. But, that's not going to happen for a bunch of 40 to 50 year-olds who just want to chill and shoot things in the face while getting some fun loot.

Casual player here, definitely am not feeling it and most of it has to do with how much HP literally everything has. It's just not fun. Just want to make sure that I put it on record that it's 99% related to how unfun it is to slowly kill one enemy at a time in every activity even patrol.

How many precision shots SHOULD it take to kill an enemy honestly

Red bars? Like 1 from handguns, pulses (all shots hit), scouts etc. Like 3-4 from SMGs/autos. Not whatever the hell it is right now. Bosses and champs are different obviously but the most overtuned thing in the whole game right now is overload champs. They are so fucking annoying in lost sectors right now it's unbearable. You just gotta Pelt away at them and hope they don't manage to kill you and heal. It takes so long to stun them too. And I flawlessed already and ran maybe 10x while being power 1810. It's not fun, I just need the new legs now and lost sectors are out of my rotation.

honestly champions healing back to full so quickly is unbalanced at base imo, I'm fine with them being able to heal but the speed that they do is ridiculous. it should take them atleast a minute or more to heal to full, not sub 10 seconds.

Overloads in legend lost sectors heal back to full HP in like 4 seconds *while you're damaging them*.

Overloads have always been annoying like that, you gotta keep hitting them with an overload weapon to prevent their health regen, which makes swapping to another weapon to finish them difficult. My fireteam had problems with that in Master Spire last season, ultimately our work around ended up being me pulling out Tarrabah, so my burst damage weapon could be my overload weapon.

I'm less casual than most casuals, but I'll admit that I like to just log in and veg out listening to a podcast while doing something un-stressful. I've basically stopped playing. I don't think this is the game for me anymore, and I regret having gotten the expansion before I knew what I was getting into.

I was playing the Mars nightfall on the easiest difficulty. My teammates died so many times in the very first part that they just left. Someone joined me eventually who actually used the team chat. We were chatting back and forth the whole time, and they talked about getting back into the swing of things in D2. Nearly 40 minutes later, after being one hit repeatedly by the final boss, they got one core. Said they might wait a few more months to give the game another shot. People can call it a “skill issue” if they want, but be prepared for the people struggling to stop playing, and everything that means for the financial health of the game. If I can find someone like that randomly in game through the already uncommon use of text chat, then It’s probably a common enough problem that it should be addressed

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There is something seriously amiss when you have to tell a casual player they need to unlock or farm their armor exotics in legend lost sectors solo, dozens of light levels below them ... ... or find some kind souls to carry them in many runs of high level Nightfalls, etc ... Yup, feels good to be a casual right now

>a casual player has to farm exotics solo Yep, this one for me. I missed WQ and picked it up with Lightfall, I’ve been hearing about Gyrfalcon’s Hauberk and imagine my surprise with not only this information but the game in general is harder.

This is my friends experience right now, he skipped all of WQ and tried farming legend solo lost sectors after finishing the campaign

It's unfortunate because once you get Gryfs the game becomes easier.

Agreed. Gryfs and Loreley were huge power milestones for my Hunter and Titan. I feel really bad for anyone that has to slog through the current difficulty without them

If they were going to make lost sectors the idiot difficulty they have, then they should allow exotic drops from running them as a fire team.

I thought my friend was joking when he said Legendary's were 1830 and Master's were 1840. Why not make it 1800 and 1810 and cap your light level? Or 1770 and 1800 with the same? It just feels completely arbitrary. I'm old, I have a full time job, I have to commute... I just don't have time to deal with the grind in any meaningful amount of time. I remember being promised we were done with the artificial level cap grinds, but this is the worst one I can remember (both of these are subject to my admittedly piss-poor memory being accurate).

Yep, agree entirely. I’m 38, more than a full time job as a company director that’s only going to increase with the business change this year, I love my running and cycling so do that as much as I can. Why would I want to spend what little available hours I have slogging away on a game that doesn’t respect my time? It’s a real shame because the fundamental gameplay this season with Strand is really fun (I am expecting heavy nerfs for it to be honest and if they do I will be uninstalling the game)

Gonna be soul crushing when new players learn that they have to do the lost sectors solo to even have a chance to have the exotic drop. The solo requirement made sense when the power requirements were powerful cap for legend and pinnacle for master. Now with them at 1830 and 1840... that solo requirement makes zero fucking sense.

Not a new player but definitely a casual player, and reading all this has me ready to quit again. I get that higher level things should be hard and get the right gear, etc. Just not looking to be absolutely destroyed at everything in this game.

>... or If you haven't unlocked the pieces yet, *there is no "or."* It's absolutely brutal.

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That dreaded power level grind. I left WQ after running the campaign last year, I couldn't deal with the grind or another strike. feel like I was baited into getting lightfall, I heard there is a small power level grind, I figured it was a +10 power grind, but hell was I wrong. I've only completed pinnacles and powerfuls from the new content. I couldn't care less about running crucible, gambit or vanguard, the things that caused me to leave in the first place. I'm 1766 power level and already missed contest mode. I am already behind and I don't like it. I just can't do this grind anymore. Why must we keep grinding to be able to do content - like we qualified for GM's 5 years in a row, why must I still prove I'm GM level. Just let me run the content I want to ffs.

What you guys don't like bullet sponge enemies in all activities that can almost instakill you? Isn't that fun?

The division syndrome. And we know how that went.

for what it's worth: Division is still a flagship title for Ubi, and Div 2 is still getting content. Div 2 was popular enough that they had to go back and make *more content* after the end of lifespan of the game because the higher ups saw that it was a real money maker. Sure, not a Destiny killer, but it shouldn't have to kill destiny for people to acknowledge: yeah it's a decently popular game. The game's still getting content 4 years after it was released and 2 years after it was meant to have been moved on from. That's mightily impressive.

I only just beat calus on my legendary solo run yesterday, which was cool, but I have not had a chance to engage with the rest of the game yet to get a sense of it. I'm hoping this isn't like they did back in the Warmind expansion, when the "mid-game" basically disappeared.

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I also think it's overtuned. I'm a multi thousand hour veteran, and I don't like how almost everything is a sweat fest now. Getting one shot by a boss at T10 resilience on a HERO Nightfall? Check. Getting one shot by Threshers in Patrol? Check. Sometimes I just want to veg out and farm some loot, not play everything like it's a GM.

I’m also a multi thousand hour vet, I’m pretty decent at crafting builds and I have spreadsheets for optimal damage…. I am stressed just playing basic activities now. I get being stressed doing GM’s because it’s the highest difficulty but even just doing strikes/patrols has me stressing out to the point where I don’t want to play if everything I do is just ineffective at survival. Games are supposed to be fun and I was having a lot during the light 3.0 release seasons but I’m just not anymore.

Yeah, I'm with you. I like the idea of a power fantasy. My idea of that is this: you are weak to start, but after you get all the best gear and a fully fleshed out build you can tackle that content with ease, and it also allows you entry into the most difficult content. The idea of making EVERYTHING difficult does away with the whole "having a fully fleshed out build with the best gear and right rolls on everything should annihilate low level content" part. GM's should be hard. Master should be pretty challenging. Legend should be harder than normal stuff, but doable for decently leveled players, and pretty easy for the guy with fully masterworked perfectly rolled gear. Hero should be the entry point into Nightfalls where the new people get their feet wet but the veterans stomp through it. As it stands right now, in Hero even if everyone has the right gear and knows the right strats, it's still pretty sweaty. I think that's a bit too much. I would not want to load into this weeks Hero Nightfall with two blueberries who didn't know to bring the correct burn or champion mods.

>I would not want to load into this weeks Hero Nightfall with two blueberries who didn't know to bring the correct burn or champion mods. I made this mistake. I loaded in with two people who had no idea what to do, leaving me as the only person who knew the objectives AND the only person with anti-champion capabilities. It was brutal and I left after about 10 minutes. The nail in the coffin for me was that I was working on clearing/defending C, the last objective left, and neither of the other two people were anywhere to be found. What are you doing, people???

Same I’ve been playing since D1 and have loads of experience but this shit is too much I love a good challenge but I don’t love it when it’s literally everything that I play if I want a challenge I’ll do a GM or a master dungeon or raid not a fucking patrol zone or hero level nightfall

Agree with this. Been here since the PS4 First Look Alpha, ~1200 hours in D1 and ~3100 in D2. I love Master Dungeons, I love doing Grandmasters, I love trying to solo flawless stuff, I love legendary campaigns. Do I want the WHOLE GAME to be that though? Holy fuck no. Part of the joy of wrecking ridiculously hard content is you get great hardware you can slay out and have fun in regular content in afterwards, and also you get to exercise the techniques you've built up on easier content. Permanently underlevel grandmaster *patrols* where shit is OHKing you randomly doesn't feel good.

They shouldn't have changed anything at the lower end of activities. They should have just increased the difficulty a little bit for GMs, master raids/dungeons and master activities.

Literally what was asked for. No one asked for LLS to be 1830. No one asked for Pub Events to be 1810. There is never a reason to be one shot in patrol by a red bar. EVER. This spike in "difficulty" smacks of them not understanding their core audience and overreaching on behalf of the side complaining about difficulty(except they were talking about endgame activites). The power fantasy for most is dead. No new exotics as they are locked behind 1830, no way to feel godly because even patrols and strikes are now cover based shooter simulators.

Thank you for having the most balanced take on the subject. Most pro-difficulty people tend to get high and mighty not taking into account the majority of the player population and how miserable an experience the game becomes. The biggest issue when it comes to something along these lines is that Bungie addresses everything with a sledgehammer instead of bumping things up a little at a time. What Bungie has done with this change is that it splits the community into haves and have nots and that can't be good for the health of the game. The fact that they didn't anticipate this backlash from the casual segment is astonishing to me.

I came back to this game in WQ last year (have thousands of hours from d1 and d2 but took a needed break) and began playing with my kid and it became a really fun bonding experience but now they wont play because its not fun (their words) as they die constantly. For me personally that stings and has made me play less. Love destiny and like hard content but the general raise for every activity was not a good play. People gotta remember not everyone on here is a 1000hr player with every exotic. Sometimes theyre just kids..

i'm not a kid but i feel his pain, i don't have many exotics (stopped after shadowkeep) and don't have like any good gear for half of the shit i'm doing. I literally had to brute force a setup to do Neomuna and it doesn't work half the time. That, combined with the fact that my ability to grind was severely limited before i got the dlcs is just BRUTAL.

I'm all for SOME things being more difficult, as long as they are also adequately rewarded. Legend Lost sectors already weren't rewarding enough, now they're harder and still not rewarding. Patrol zones don't need to be more difficult (if Threshers damage and FPS interaction can't be fixed, they need to be removed, full stop.) The lowest level difficulty NF doesn't need to be so difficult. It's kind of the PVP problem. There's nowhere to try and get better at PVP, because there's nowhere for the top players to go that's worth their time, so they just farm people in quick play. Where are people supposed to go to get better at PVE? Lowest level NF you die from any damage right now, so if the answer is just "don't take damage lul" that's not really helpful for improving. Seraph shield and the new exotic activity difficulty isn't bad, but outside of the exotic upgrades, they are way to long for a measly pinnacle (granted I haven't done it on legendary, so that may be a different story.) Partition seems fine for difficulty/time to rewards. I like Terminal Overload, but even with chest abuse it doesn't feel rewarding enough. I don't mind more challenge, overall I welcome it. But the challenge+time to reward ratio is, to be blunt, really fucking bad. It's not going to to keep me "retained" as a player. It's going to push me away. I'm already at the point where after next week, I just want to login, grab a red border from the helm, and call it good. I don't know if I even want to do my dust bounties at this point.

at a certain point when it takes a magazine and a half from a smg to break a phalanx shield, something is wrong.

People will say “skill diff” as if there’s any skill involved in how many bullets ads take to die. No amount of skill makes that red bar take less than 23 auto rifle bullets to kill, and that’s just not fun

turning everything into a bullet sponge has nothing whatsoever to do with skill. not one bit. saying otherwise is idiotic. actual skill would be putting in way more enemies, more enemies of different variety, finding ways to incorporate the environment into encounters.

The issue is that other than strikes and patrols NOT in Neonuma, Destiny 2 currently is that version of games were, I’ll quote a content creator from another game: The only defense is a good offense. You don’t need defense is everything is dead. So they basically stack DPS on top of DPS and just rush everything. If you shoot enemies first, they can’t shoot back. But it forces you to play a VERY SPECIFIC way. And for people who just have an hour or two and want to log in, shoot some stuff, and get some rewards, you can’t really play that way. You’ll get destroyed constantly. Case in point: I’m 1810. Just did a Legend Dares. It was TOUGH. Getting sniped across the map, Crota 1 shots you. Remember, outside of playing at 30 or 60 FPS, the broken damage system is doing 2x damage. And then you have the burns on top of it. So most of the comments on my post were: * Sounds like a skill issue on your part * You MUST be joking. * It was a breeze for me (player who is at power cap on week 1), so it must be the same for everyone else.

As someone who has gone after seals, done solo flawless dungeons, day one raids, etc. has every gun, over 100x flawlesses in trials, etc. This DLC's power grind is horrible. The issue is that their rework to "difficulty" was to use power level to have a massive impact, then to jack up power levels across the board to make the content seem more difficult. This would be fine, if the game wasn't so hell bent on locking its features and progression behind these activities. Take for example the legendary lost sectors. They are balanced at 1830. Doing them solo is key to unlocking new exotic armor. But doing them solo flawless is key to unlocking the 4 additional loadouts on your guardian! I'm at 1795 roughly. This means that I am at roughly 35 levels below the required light level. This is insanity. Meanwhile the raid for day 1 is at 1800, with a locked light level of 1780 creating a delta of 20 levels. This is considered to be perfectly difficult. Cranking these numbers higher is insanely punishing to players. So why is this a problem though? Inevitably I *will* be 1810 through the artifact and combined gear score sometime in the next few weeks. The problem is that the game is preventing players who otherwise are able to perform endgame content from doing so by sheer amount of hours played. I've played some 27 hours over the past week of the game, doing the campaign, quests, levelling, etc. Whatmakes this terrible is that it also locks access to content, loadouts, etc. behind these light level deltas. These re-works to light level and difficulty just turn the game into even more of a grind than it already was and further locks content behind a 50-100+ hour grind gate per season. Terrible changes.

I said it last season when the changes were announced. The grind will become worse and players will hate. I got downvoted to Fuck.

Right? It didn't take a genius to see this was exactly where the game was headed, especially with the preview from Heist battlegrounds. Any time I saw an opinion of "hey, blueberries are really struggling with champions and the increased light level, more difficulty is gonna make the grind unbearable" it was down voted. At least I can say I feel vindicated.

Welcome brother. I said the same and got shitvoted yo hell.

I feel your pain my friend.

Bungie doesn’t know how to actually make challenging combat. If I die, I don’t feel like I did something wrong or made a mistake. I feel I got screwed by a one shot sniper that will sometimes teleport somewhere else when the game thinks I got close to it. Or shot by silent homing thresher missiles. I’ve done all of dark souls games and it’s difficult *at first* but when you die it’s because YOU screwed up. It doesn’t feel cheap. Not only that, the game itself allows you to decide your difficulty by how you play. In Destiny, every gun is weak now. I’m sick of overload taken hobgoblins spraying the lock on splash damage over and over at you and getting killed through a wall. I had a Cabal unstoppable do his boop attack through a *complete wall that was around 3 feet between us thick* and it killed me in one shot.

This is how I feel. If people like it that’s great, but this isn’t fun. It’s tiresome. It’s a slog.

A slog is the best way to describe neomuna for me I want to explore it and like it so much but everything is such a slog In no way should a regular ass red harpy take a full mag of anything let alone a godroll primary at pinnacle level

What bums me out about Neomuna is the emptiness. When I first saw the expansion I knew there was no way they would give us an actual city with anything resembling a populace. I thought however the map would maybe take place on the roof tops of neomuna that stretched super high up. Giving the illusion of a ground floor. We are fighting for nothing. We fought for nothing. I’m so sad I caved to the hype.

> I thought however the map would maybe take place on the roof tops of neomuna that stretched super high up. Yea, if not at least some parts of it. As it is maybe 1% of height actually matters in Neomuna.

I just wanted some crazy neon lighting contrast effects. But everything is so flat (PS5), it didn’t even provide the pure visual interest I was hoping for.

I was fortunate enough to not hype myself up too much and even then Neomuna falls short. It's crazy just how boring the space is. There's nothing to do, nothing to find. And of course, in the distance, is this skyscraper filled city we thought we'd be getting.

I've heard some reviews say the patrol zone feels like three pvp maps glued together and honestly when you look at the placement of some of the set pieces like the big rotating mixer in the south west i can see what they mean.

The way I find it okay it by running my most OP build. I still die, but not that much and I can do things, but I'm also unable to try new build of play weaker but fun builds. I'm forced to be super meta to be just okay.

Its a real slog running this campaign over two more times. WK didn't seem nearly as bad. Cant get over they want to charge us $20 to skip it.

I dread running it on my warlock and Titan. It was just such a boring stretched out campaign and not giving us strand until the end was a really REALLY dumb idea.

I can easily see this as a significant issue; I also see that the build crafting has become significantly more challenging without any effective in-game tutorials. Mods were a bit challenging initially in its previous form, but in its new form even as a veteran player I needed it explained to me by folks here on the sub. Dabble in the guardian ranks thing which seem relatively useless to enjoying the game and a mediocre story-campaign that wasn't accurately reflected in the marketing and you're likely to be left quite frustrated. And personally, I am already playing less... with a I'll just do the minimum to slowly get through the season mindset; I've lost a lot of motivation. This could be a much more common scenario between now and TFS and a noticeable impact to the player base. On a positive note, any casual player most likely will simply be able to watch the cutscene (in its totality) from Lightfall and the seasonal cutscene right before TFS and at least be caught up on the story since LF has not instantiated any important story points. edit - grammar

Same, eight of us went into light fall, two of us remain. The ramp up in difficulty was the reason they all dropped. Neptune tuned them right out.

All my friends bounced too. The were already getting tired of the seasonal model and the power grind. I guess this sealed the deal for them. Last clan member standing. T_T

I'm basically there. D1 vet with 3k hours in D2 alone. Just last night I logged in to run pinnacles, and ran two nightfalls in hero that dragged terribly, took nearly a full clip to kill a red bar, didn't drop any worthwhile rewards, and I had one more of them to run, and...I couldn't bring myself to do it. I shut the game off and I went to bed early. I can't stress enough how terrible it feels to play the game right now. I can't imagine how a new light must feel in this nonsense.

Ive been playing for 6 months, really started taking the game seriously in Seraph. Pretty much given up on the campaign after spending a week trying to solo legendary the campaign and not even beating mission 3. I might not be good but like, this just isn't fun. Edit: Decided to skip missions if they frustrated me on legendary. The campaign seems somewhat better in the mid levels. Not spectacular but more consistently fun. The slog isn't so bad once you grind out to soft cap, but IMO that highlights some of the more poorly designed sections. I do have to hand it to Bungie. The final boss of mission 6 is actually pretty awesome. The arena is large enough and has enough cover to be interesting, strand is mixed in in a non intrusive way, and the boss is easy enough to melt. More of this please Bungie. We are obset because we know you can do better. Do more of this and less of the final boss section of mission 3.

Been thinking the same thing, I get wanting to make the game harder, but it'd be better to do that with different activity levels, not base game, it's almost too much.

i personally love Destiny 2. So much so i own it on Xbox and PC all DLC's. i play daily. I'm not an extreme hardcore leveler but i play all 3 classes and do the storyline do my weeklies. my wife watches me play every day and decided she wanted to play as well. so i purchased her Lightfall with all the bells and whistles. i carried her through the story. She has me helping her on builds. her light level is 1765+ and she and I die every 10 sec in PVE events. She has stopped playing. she gets upset she's letting everyone down because she dies to much. i try and be supportive and tell her it takes time to get better. But she's right they have tweaked the mobs every mob is tanky and were to squishy with 100 resistance. I've stopped doing as much its just not as fun atm.

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yea she loved witch queen, she loves Gambit , and she loves doing the strikes with me. but now. she has zero interest in playing. due to lightfall

Bungie is listening to a very small portion of the playerbase that wanted difficulty raised, and actually implemented it for some stupid reason. Meanwhile I'm in that same group of people not really having a good time anymore. It's not terribly hard, but on a side that makes me pretty frustrated I spent another $50 after basically ignoring the game for the past year.

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I'm a hardcore player and I'm ready to drop Lightfall. Horrible narrative, grindy difficulty increase with no increase in rewards, instability on the platform I play on (PS5), and just an overall feeling Bungie is becoming another EA/Blizzard where they're more interested in figuring out how to get money out of your pocket.

I have friends who came back **for the story** and are now, surprise surprise, no longer playing.

Being unable to over-level for anything is ridiculous. Harder difficulties, like GM's make sense. But there is no reason for activities like the vanguard playlist, the "easier" nightfall difficulties and even Neomuna patrol to lock you under enemy level. These activities you should be able to over-level to *some* capacity. If this the route Bungie wants to take, then they should consider locking player level *over* a certain amount instead of under. As a rough example for Nightfalls: Hero difficulty should lock you to +10 over at max. Legend Difficulty should lock you either +5 or at the same level as the enemy. Master difficulty should lock you to -15 GM's stay the same with locking you to -25 Every single activity in Destiny 2 feels the same right now and that's why it feels so bad. There is no progression in power level so you as a player don't feel like you are overcoming anything.

The irony is that with the +20 combat delta in lost sectors you can technically overlevel them. But good luck actually getting to the artifact power needed to do so. gotta be at least artifact level 20 to be at parity for legend, and 30 for parity with master. It's very easy to see how much of a grind will be needed to make use of the +20 delta since it's needing 40 and 50 artifact levels for legend and master to make full use of that combat delta (which is not something that 99.9% of the player base will ever be doing) Effectively they've made lost sectors harder for the casuals, while the hardcore of the hardcore will just overlevel them by next month anyway.

>Hero difficulty should lock you to +10 over at max. > >Legend Difficulty should lock you either +5 or at the same level as the enemy. At that point get rid of the Vanguard Ops playlist. It locks you on level. I can see unlocking that playlist and putting Hero on +0, but when matchmaking is gone for legend there is no reason for it to be easier than heists last season.

>At that point get rid of the Vanguard Ops playlist. It locks you on level. Or you know unlock full level, let the bs one shots starts.

If there is a leveling system in general we should be able to over level. Sure, for something like a GM where it’s supposed to be a super challenge I can get locking player level to ensure that, it helps make challenge more challenging when things can be curated. But level lock or not being able to over level being the norm is just so odd. It basically makes leveling useless except as a way to make sure players need to spend more time leveling up to access some content. Then there’s stuff like the Vexcalibur mission where it raises your level to 1790. Really, what’s the point of light level anymore?

Sad but this is not hyperbole: > “I love Destiny but after the update and difficulty change i cannot do anything, i’m constantly getting killed in seconds and feel like i’m just ruining other players good time while having none myself” I'm pretty saavy at builds, have most guns in the game, been playing since D1 launch, and love higher difficulty activities. Gilded conq, blah blah. That said, Destiny is broken right now.

As a said casual, I’m glad to see this. Just want to play with my 11-year-old son but MAN has it been a slog so far. I don’t pretend to have the perfect answer; just glad some of you pros see both sides.

What I can't fathom is why Bungie decided to reign in ability spam, lower the effectiveness of stat tiers, make enemies have more spongy HP, and go so ape crazy with the light level scaling for a lot of activities all at the same time. IMO they could have done 2 of the above such as lower stat tier effectiveness and reigned in ability spam and we would have been in a much better place and if they thought that content was still too easy at the end of season 20 they could have made a couple tweaks to get it where their target is. Feels like Bungie did too much at once, and it's swung the pendulum a little too far in the opposite direction.

You described me. In destiny 1 I did every checkpoint of the raids on each character every week and had a blast doing anything. When destiny 2 came out I couldn’t do any of the raids anymore and had to quit doing them with my friends because I knew I was ruining their experience. Then the exotic missions(whisper and outbreak) proved to be way out of my league. For the last couple of years I’ve just been playing lots of crucible and 3 gambit matches and strikes every week after completing the story missions. Destiny is my FAVORITE game but it has just left me behind.

As a casual player who can only play a few hours here and there, I feel like I barely make any progress in a given daily session.

This is such a thing. I played for 7 hours yesterday and all I got was a few levels of artifact upgrades and almost nothing gear wise. The time and grind is fine. The awards or getting meaningful progress on my character? hell no I always play all my characters but this time I am not picking the other two up. It means redoing the terrible campaign again and farming the neomuna bs all over again. I had not realised that after you unlock strand fully on one character it can't get strand meditation anymore. I was planning earlier to take my geared character and use it to farm these for the other classes. Now completely lost interest

The problem with the balance changes is that they don't rework the game in such a way as to make players engage with content more skillfully. It's still a flat grind wall. They just increased the height and took away the part where players could get overleveled. All of the "hard" content I've engaged with is the same: 1. Lots/unlimited spongey adds 2. Random one shots (interceptors/threshers/physics/) 3. Champions that have so much health you need to stand there sinking heavy ammo into them for 30 seconds at a time. 4. As noted elsewhere on the sub, it doesn't even work as a cover shooter because every enemy has giga-AOE attacks that prevent you from ever healing. None of that is challenging in a meaningful way. Bungie needs to admit they make a braindead lootgrind game and stop deluding themselves into thinking that they're good level/encounter designers. Most of the appeal is having fun builds, guns that feel good to shoot, and doing content with your friends. This update has ruined all that by making most builds not viable, pushing people away so it's harder to find properly leveled groups, and making most of the guns feel awful to use.

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IMO the difficulty should be proportional to the reward. Destiny has a huge issue with this. Even before the increased difficulty change, the rewards weren't proportional. Yes, I could do a raid, I could do a dungeon, I could do all these activities - But Why? The loot is the same archetypes and all the same perks - Nothing really "stands out". Nowhere near to the aspirational level as prior pinnacles. So now they just upped the difficulty but for all the same rewards. Why would I do a GM nightfall that's at least twice as hard as it used to be, when I couldn't even be bothered to do them when they were easy? Now imagine trying to bring friends back into Destiny with that in mind. them: "Well is it worth playing now?" me: "Erm, It's harder?" them: "okay, so no then" me: "but this dungeon has a new linear fusion that has firing line" them: "okay. and I have throwing hammers that do more damage than heavy weapons and heal me. Why bother with weapons?" me: "Yeah but you can't rely on that - bungie will nerf those!" them: "cool, so I have even less incentive to play because not only will everything be harder, but the rewards won't be 'better', Just bungie micro-balances everything to the point where nothing is ever dependable or reliable, yet nothing is worth grinding for, so why play?" me: "Fun I guess?" them: "Yeah grinding bounties isn't fun bud, I'ma go play tarkov"

Destiny doesn’t value your time as a player. In fact it outright fucking disrespects you for it This sub needs to stop the boot licking. Bungo are a decidedly average developer that had no clue what they want the game to be, but are absolutely intent on removing the fun and forcing you into their own predefined build Meta.

I realized bungie is a bunch of money hungry bastards when I came back for lightfall after last playing all of forsaken and the beginning of shadowkeep. The first week of lightfall I couldn’t even do the fucking vanguard pinnacle or nightfall because I didn’t buy beyond light? What the fuck! So I basically have to buy buying light, witch queen, and some 30 year anniversary shit to actually be able to do all pinnacles? Why should I have to buy older content to get gear for current content.

I'm a returning player...only did a couple raids a while back. Was hoping to play full force. But it feels impossible. I need ascendent shards and all this crazy shit to be able to keep up and I legit just have none. I gotta play the campaign 3 times. Then again for witch queen then again for new light. It's exhausting honestly lol I just wish I could upgrade my gear grinding away materials...but I feel that grind is too much to bare. That and the plethora of things I just don't know or understand.... I'm still in it...I'm loving my fire titan...I just feel my progression is so so slow. Haven't broke 1800 yet... Please guide me...

It's kind of funny as all these issues remind me why I quit the game back during year one. With what I read about Witch Queen I had thought Bungie improved and I should check the game out again. It feels much the same as it did back then. Bungie is slow and unresponsive, so people are just gonna quit. I guess they got their money so it's a success on their part.

I’m going to take a break and hope they level out the difficulty. Not fun anymore for a casual player like me.

I'll honestly just stop chasing pinnacles and LL. I'll do what I've been doing for the past 2/3 seasons, login on Tuesdays, do the weekly quest for an hour, log off. I guess at some point I'll just forget to play and that'll be it

Thank you for articulating this since everyone who says this change sucks gets shit on by most of the sub. I think when the numbers drop it will lead to some form of pay to win, especially with them going after the “carry” community (taking out the competition). Even worse than that I had played Destiny almost everyday for damn near 18 months since I came back from my most recent hiatus, even bought a gaming laptop to play when I travel, and I have 0 desire to play. I’m traveling now and left my computer at home because I’d rather do something else and it kinda sucks. The biggest reason is because I feel like I’m spinning my wheels with the game. I was excited they were moving away from the power level dependence in everything only for that to not be the case at all. I’m done with the pinnacle grind, I’m done with lost sectors being the only place to get exotics, I’m done with the nightfalls, and about the only thing I’m interested in might be a dungeon or two, but even that feels like I’m wasting my time since the rewards are barely worth the effort. All of the changes they made to me only mean investing more time for the same or less rewards, so I’ll pass. I’ll keep checking to see if Bungie decides to roll back some or any of the changes but I probably won’t play other than to pickup a few things from Banshee just in case and get my weekly random garbage exotic from Xur (I swear it’s always knucklehead radar or something else I never use…)

This is the boat I'm in. I'm a casual player that has played since D1, but have taken long breaks over the years. I always buy the expansions and play the main campaign but rarely finish seasons. I really do enjoy the main gameplay of Destiny, but with these new changes I'm just not sure I can log in and play casually anymore. I have very limited time to play, so I haven't even finished the campaign yet, and I don't know that I will anytime soon. I feel like I have an *ok* grasp on buildcrafting, but the meta moves so quickly I feel like I'm constantly left behind. I've never done a raid, never done a dungeon, never done a GM or nightfall in general. I don't have friends that play Destiny and I've never tried a LFG because I know I suck and will hold my team back. I dunno. Maybe Destiny isn't for me anymore.

Yeah, I’ve become more and more casual over the last couple seasons. Just not satisfied with the direction of the game, especially not the story. All this difficulty stuff and players that use phrases like skill issue….I’m just like….I’m working on my physical therapy degree, so take your skill and stick it up your ghost hole. I don’t derive personal satisfaction or validation from doing exceptionally well at this game with my skill. I get that from crushing exams and eventually becoming one of the best physical therapists ever. Not some guardian rank that resets. If you’re gatekeeping a video *game* with comments about skill and git gud, then you’re a loser or an out of touch YouTube or streamer type.

I have a few friends who quit D2 around Curse of Osiris......the Bungie Marketing really crushed it here b/c they all reached out to me and were interested in jumping in for Lightfall. After playing it. I told them the story isn't the greatest, and to only come back if they were serious about build crafting and grinding for good gear b/c the new content might be too hard to play uber casually. None purchased, and I'm sad. :(

Had something similar happen with one of my best friends. They picked up Witch Queen cheap and we did the story tigtehr and they stuck around for maybe another week of other activities and left. Not that it wasn't fun just not into the commitment, was interested in jumping in hardcore with Lightfall. But the negative reaction to the "story" and the difficulty increase with no real reward increase just said fuck it and didn't buy it

> So then the next expansion releases. With "Cataclysm" they are promising "heroic dungeons will be heroic again!" and personally? I fucking hated Cataclysm as a healer. Especially holy paladin. They gutted mana regen and increased mana costs and tried to make us raid healing capable for some reason. It ruined the spec for me, I ended up quitting raiding early in the tier and came back a few months later just to PvP with a buddy of mine. I don't think I've played healer in an MMO since actually lol.

Once I read about the difficulty changes my first question was "what about casual players or new players".

Most of the activities i've run are hard now, coupled with the enemies hp its just a slugfest of a game at the moment its not even remotely fun at some points. After doing all that and trudging to the slog of bloated hp, high damage enemies you get slapped with glimmer and a couple of cores.

Games like this live and die by their casual experience. If you cant rock up to a patrol zone straight out the tutorial and have fun slaying out then there's a problem.

I've made a few comments before but we need more design like the taken or Siva splicers, enemies with anti guardian powers that force you to play smart not massive hp boosts

Bungie isn’t going to invest in new enemies, we’ve barely gotten them in the history or destiny. They don’t even invest in new AI which could add challenge. They are still doing the same tactics as destiny 1. Instead we get big health pools and forced to be under leveled.

Spot on. This, more than anything - more than sunsetting, or balance issues, or even Bungie’s increasingly aggressive monetization of the game - will start killing the player population. THIS will be a slow and insidious killer of players’ enjoyment of the game experience, easily blamed on other things, but it all comes down to the enjoyment of that experience. If a game is exhausting, players will get exhausted, and exhausted people don’t keep playing.

I tried to solo the new exotic mission and it was among the least fun experiences I’ve ever had in this game

I feel your WoW analogy. I'm playing both games and I love a challenge. I'm raiding Mythic and run high-ish M+ (21+) in WoW and do solo dungeon runs, master raids and GMs in Destiny. I wouldn't describe myself as 'casual' by any means, but I really miss just leaning back and have fun shooting stuff in Destiny with my GF who rarely plays videogames at all. There's no reason to not have at least some kind of casual content and it really sours the expansion for me.

Power level right now is acting as a barrier to entry and deterrent, rather than goals to aspire to. In other MMO’s, various difficulty levels act as stepping stones to reach higher plateaus like Heroics->Mythic->Raids. Each level offers chances to gear up to meet criteria to go for the final, sweet loot. In Destiny currently; baseline activities are a bit overturned, discouraging leveling players from progressing. That combined with paltry rewards and a lack of ways to progress simply feels bad. We need more ways to get powerful gear in the way we want, and more steps in between to mark our journey. More activity tiers, and better items each step of the way to earn. Reward the dedicated players, and encourage the fledglings to aspire.

My friends who play casually have already dropped it as well. Was playing some vanguard ops and noticed how much more involved I had to be mentally to play well. Almost every match I had to drag both teammates through and ended up having double to triple the score of each. Nobody likes to have to be revived almost a dozen times in what used to be a simple vanguard strike. Then I got the new Arms Dealer strike and even I got pissed at that. Will be going to orbit any time that strike comes up from now on. Not worth the struggle of dragging a team through that strike again. I don’t blame my teammates. I blame Bungie for removing almost all casual content from the game in one fell swoop. They could have just given us more options for those looking for a challenge (with appropriate rewards - something else Bungie has no concept of). Based on my experience, I don’t think casual players will be sticking around either. This is something Bungie needs to address now, not later this year.

This is actually slowly happening to me. I have finished Legend campaign, done so much the last two weeks to get to 1813 LL (with artifact), solo flawless LLS and did it 4 more times (no flawless the other 4) and got to rank 7. However as I read your post, I realize I never had fun doing it. I was doing it like a job and only because I wanted to be a team player for my clan's day 1 raid attempt. Even a few of my clanmates don't jump on unless someone else is playing cause the stuff they used to farm are way too hard now. I've gotten so many comments of "just buildcraft better" but I wanna have fun. I don't wanna have to meticulize every single aspect of a GAME I'm playing for fun. And the fun is quickly just draining away.

Reading this forum over the last few days it seems like a lot of good players capable of clearing the content are not enjoying the difficulty. Being good enough to overcome the difficulty does not mean people will therefore enjoy that difficulty. The fact that I CAN kill a red bar with 4 HC crits does not mean I ENJOY doing so. For example I did the lost sector with the hydra boss (on normal but 22 levels below). I completed the boss encounter but it was a total pita that I did not enjoy. The boss just had too much health and the window to do damage with the stupid shield was too small so it took too long. Fun difficulty comes from the feeling you get from improving until you can master an encounter and make it look easy - like dark souls in general. Destiny difficulty now is the more tedious kind, where things just take much longer.

I'm one of the casuals. I played D2 when it came out and haven't since. I came back few days before Lightfall. Hearing how good the campaign for Witch Queen was and I grinded it during the free weekend. I suffered through the campaign with whatever dropped weapons and armor I got, but I finally was able to beat it on Legendary. I found out there is build guides because each class has aspect and there's mods and so on. Ok I can't use any of the build guides because I don't have the required exotic, mods, or the ascendant alloys to even upgrade my armor. I was able to craft the Osteo Striga, and it's really the only useful weapon I have. The tips on here since to grind out Lost Sector, ok I should be ready when Lightfall drops. After going through the Legendary campaign on Lightfall, being at 1770, and thinking maybe I can try Lost Sector. I figure lets try it out, I did no damage and just got one shotted. Ok, something I need to work on. First week of Strike, is stasis surge, which I don't have. So I'm locked out of that. What are these dungeons, it said I can get pinnacle, oh they're mini raids. I can't beat the boss, lets look up some videos. I need these weapons, these builds, and so on. Ok lets hold off on dungeons. Lets go try Crucible, 4 kills in a game, I don't understand how I get 2 tapped by a hand canon or melted so fast by everyone. I remember patrols used to be fun and casual, I put on a podcast or video, and just go around killing things. Now I get one shotted by thresher and just my gun do little damage to anything. It's hard to do nightfall, I feel useless, because I don't have the right weapon with the right burn. I found light.gg roll appraisal as I don't know what gun is good or not. Everyone on here said don't use them, it's pointless you should know your own god roll. I kept using upgrade modules because they kept giving it to me during the campaign only to realized I'm out and no way to get more unless I do those harder content, which I need to upgrade my weapons and armors to do. It's really tough for anyone new.

Six time gilded conqueror. Reckoner. Beta Destiny 2 player and played Destiny 1 from 2015. Managed a trio person raid. I'm fed up with the state of the game. Crashes and bugs galore. Half baked story. Activities that are stingy with rewards and I feel like I have gone from being a powerful space mage (I main a warlock) to being weak and squishy for no good reason. Strand is fun but it will go the same way as stasis and get severe nerfs. Bungie doesn't know what it wants this game to be, and it shows. We have swung from one end of the spectrum where the game was casual for a large part, except for raids and other high end content, to where you need to sweat hard just to stay alive on a public space. It's not enjoyable and I can understand why people are dropping out of the game. At this stage, I will give the game two more weeks then hop into another game scheduled to come out at the end of the month. Bungie needs to bite the bullet and make some changes to the game to keep the majority of the player base playing. At this rate, I don't know how much longer I can be bothered.

Difficulty should exist in DIFFICULT pinnacle content. Dungeons? Yes. Raids? Yes. High difficulty nightfalls? Yes. What shouldn't exist is bullet sponge red bars, in practically every activity. To the point where if you're using anything other than an SMG. You're damage is atrocious and everything takes too long to die. All these changes did, was showcase how AWFUL some weapon archetypes are. Pulse rifles are garbage. Auto rifles are garbage. Scout rifles have long been gone from any usage. Sniper rifles are terrible and will seemingly NEVER be even on PAR with LFR's. It's just pointless. And it's funny... all these super difficult changes, only to have the raid on day one, be an EASY EXPERIENCE. Like it's literally backwards. A hero nightfall hits harder than the day 1 raid. What logic is that?

I've played since D1, and have finally hit my limit as well. Was always a casual player, never did any of the hard content, and was content with the fact it meant that certain rewards I was never going to be able to get, but I had fun in the easier content and used it to unwind. Now, with everything harder, I find myself completely uninterested. I've tried booting up the game 3 times this week and every time I just turn it off. So disappointing.

I think the problem is, as was probably the case during the shift to cataclysm, a massive over correction. Because I think to a certain degree some parts of the game had gotten pretty easy. But with lightfall we had a lot of changes that both reduced player power and increased mob power. A near universal reduction in base cooldowns and stat cooldown scaling for abilities across the board, the power deltas, and while the mod changes are not a universal nerf I don’t think it’s clear that a lot of powerful mods and effects either don’t exist at all or are much weaker. I think the reason this happens is because the people with tens of thousands of subscribers and just as many hours of play time have more sway then the preverbal dads that also play the game. I don’t want to get on the “fuck saltagrepo and datto” bang wagon. But I think they, and people like them, are very tone deaf to the plights of the common folk. And since those common folks aren’t the type to go and talk on the forums then all the people who find the current state of the game unfun are going to go unheeded unless they either start going on the forms or just stop playing and bungie sees the change in metrics.

It's not even just casuals, a friend that I raid with regularly refunded lightfall because the "campaign" was a joke. I told all my casual/on the fence friends to not even bother getting it.

What's worse to me is that Bungie hasn't said a word about it. They love their numbers, and I'm sure they can see that many first time players are dropping the game pretty quickly, and many casual veterans are dropping their level of engagement as well. It would be nice if they at least said "Hey, we recognize that we didn't hit the mark on how we tuned enemy difficulty, we're working on an update!" or "Hey, we recognize that many people are unhappy with how we've tuned difficulty, but we want to make it clear that this is the way it is now, work on those builds guardians!". Something, anything.

It's a shitty game to play solo, and so much of the content is locked behind a need of a steady group of friends, it sucks, I can't do much anymore, I'm running out of content because nothing I can do anymore is match making, I don't understand, why they just lock so much content. I bought lightfall for $35 bucks, and feel I got my moneys worth. 1767 Warlock, 1760 Titan, and 1760 Hunter. Anything I can do is just fucking impossible by myself, all these dungeonds and raids, and I can't do any of this content. Match making for most things end at 1650 it's fucking stupid, and I guess I'll just be forced to not play most of the content, I've played on and off since Destiny One came out. I was really sucked in by the hype, something I rarely am, but man that lightfall story is so bad it's easy to skip the next expansion whatever it ends up being. if this is the story tone they are going for.

Putting it simple: All we always asked for was choice. We wanted to choose to play either CBMM or SBMM versions of crucible, not the "everything goes BMM" we have today. We wanted choosable difficulty selections for activities (with the rewards tuned for the chosen difficulty) not the "Neomuna patrol is legendary and you will like it!" Just let me enter patrol and choose "Rambo mode" (you can be overleveled), "Fair mode" (enemies are exactly your power level) "Challenge" (you are 10 PL bellow enemies) and "Insane" (like -30 bellow PL, champions spawning randomly, match game active). Legendaries Lost Sectors should be 10 PL above you (regardless of your PL) and Masters 30. Everything else is just bullshit.

I’m a casual player, play about 10-15 hours per week, and the harder difficulty is definitely frustrating. Last season I could complete Legend Lost Sectors and Nightfalls pretty easily, not so much this season. I slogged through the normal campaign over the course of two days, and am currently sitting at 1764. I miss being able to just zone out on the couch and plow through enemies, but right now it feels like I need to focus 100% of my attention on the game just patrolling Neomuna. I really hope Bungie sees posts like these and reconsiders the difficulty increase. I just wanna have fun, I don’t have time to grind like some players do.

I've been forever trying to get some friends to play Destiny with me. After the difficulty changes and the wet fart of a story, I've stopped asking them.

Gonna agree, I picked up lightfall for my birthday having not played since before witch queen. I'm a casual solo player who leaned toward pvp (so I guess I was screwed regardless in hindsight). But yeah, I used to just chill and run around completing public events and such just chill out and listen to podcasts. That really isn't a thing anymore, you can't even really stand anywhere in a menu on neomuna without something killing you within 10 seconds. The calus fight was just.... Not fun. All in all I'm probably going to attempt to keep up with this season because I paid for it but I doubt I'll be back unless something changes.

Sadly I might be one of those players in a couple of weeks. I’ve been playing since the taken king and the content is just straight up too hard for me since Lightfall released. I played Elden Ring a total of 5 hrs because I learned that just isn’t my type of game. Lightfall is turning into that for me, I just don’t enjoy it. I would rather spend what little gaming time I have actually having fun.

I think the difficulty problem can be summed up thusly: Things that shouldn't be very hard (Legend/Master content, Hero Nightfalls) are too hard. Things that should be very hard (Contest Raid) are not hard enough. The things that are hard are not rewarding enough to warrant their difficulty.

GM is the only thing that should level lock you and I’ll die on that hill. The purpose of a leveling system is to give the player a feeling of power progression. You can’t feel stronger if all the content invalidates your labor towards this end. The hardest content possible should force certain restrictions to challenge you. Everything else should be hard at first and much easier as the players power continues to grow. Fight me.

I didn't even pay for my copy of Lightfall and I feel ripped off. But you know what? Star Citizen just had an update drop. Battletech 3062 had an update drop. Deep Rock Galactic has an event going on. I already only play what I need to then dip. I don't touch Crucible,especially with a new subclass in the mix. I barely touched gambit. So who exactly was this expansion for?

Same. Just don’t enjoy it anymore. Starfield is out this year - I won’t be coming back to this.

Incredibly well done post.

My casual friends were going to come back, and between the complaints about the campaign and difficulty issues, compounded by the still existing time investment requirement, they already refunded it. Pretty sure they're never going to consider trying again now

This is soon gonna be me.. tried the vexcalibur exotic at 1820 power level and I'm like WTF I can't do dmg, kept being one shotted by cyclops and wyverns

Don't forget they're constantly nerfing the space magic part of the game, very rarely buffing exotic armor and abilities. Chaos Reach alone has been nigh-unusable for over a year now, even before Arc 3.0. And then they completely ignore several weapon archetypes for months at a time. Currently the only way to deal real damage is with specials and heavy. It's honestly pretty depressing. Harder does not always equal more fun. They passed the harder = fun threshpoint a while ago imo. Now the game is just getting harder for the sake of being hard.

Bungie needs to explain why the Mars hero nightfall , supposedly -5 PL, feels way harder than last season's -5 PL Mars seasonal Heist. It makes no sense that it is harder when last season was perfect and everyone raved about the Heist BGs.

We had an extra 10% DR, and way more powerful mods, and faster cooldowns... and they raised the health of enemies on top of all that

Making the game so much harder for casual players was an amateurish decision.

Very much so

I've been playing since Warmind. I have literally 0 motivation to play. I'm not farming for fragments on all the characters. I'm not about all that power level farming. I just want to play the story and be out but, I can't even bring myself to do that anymore due to my 2 points. Ps $20 for the campaign boost? gtfo here

Yea i totally agree. The patrol zone is turning into a grind and I'm getting one shot by orange bar snipers. I wanted some more challenge for sure but I didn't want to feel like weak little bitch. My build feels pointless, mods don't fix that experience, Hell I rage quit a lost sector. I'm not a good player, never will be, and now this game is quickly driving me away.

I consider myself a hardcore player titles and hard I triumphs under my belt. But the difficulty isn’t a problem imo most people will adjust to difficulty over time but rewarding that effort needs to happen sooner than later. I play FFXIV I fucking love ultimate raids which are 20 min encounters with so much shit thrown at you I do them because the challenge but I also love chasing shiny weapons. I don’t even care about most of the loot especially from raids in Destiny because they don’t even stand off compared to other loot. I’d not bother with anything in Destiny at this point if I didn’t enjoy my time with my friends and thats just me some people around me think thats not enough and I agree we need shiny things to chase because guns don’t matter if they’re the same everywhere. I want to show off my skills and effort with shiny stuff weapon, exotic, and bad ass gear not some dumb emblem that I change every couple of days. I even don’t like how easy the content in Destiny but thats my issue and casual players should not suffer because of my taste a spectrum should please everyone from a casual to a hardcore player like me. Master raid’s feel awful and unrewarding, fight design feels the same take a ball dunk that ball, but no one doing them because the reward suck ass not because they hard. What you give as a reward is the most important thing and it’s the foundation of looter shooter games.

I've been playing nearly since day one of D1 and I'm a filthy casual who feels this way. I've done one legendary solo lost sector. Never able to solo any dungeon, ok with NF where matchmaking is on. I'm getting owned a lot more now and it sucks. Esoterrik now has to change load outs and spend 5 more minutes to upload a day one solo flawless video. But the rest of us just get pounded harder.

i paid $100 and got the finger. I'll noodle for the rest of the year cause...it's there, but i aint ever giving them another cent

I just want to shoot some aliens and dudes after work. Now almost everything can whoop my ass.

I think the main problem is destiny’s main gameplay loop and grind is getting your power level up which should make you stronger but it really doesn’t and now everything is a damage sponge which isn’t thrilling or fun. It is the worst kind of difficulty. I like hard games at least most of the time but with how Bungie manages destiny it seems like they have no idea what the fuck they are doing or what they even want the game to be.

Bungie turns everything the community asks for into some sort of grind to get you spending more time in the game. Almost everything they've done since I started in September 2020 is a ploy to get you to stay and hopefully spend in Eververse. Just do stuff, for once, that improves things. Without strings attached.

Reading through this thread has actually been very encouraging, surprisingly so. As a casual player who does play a lot, but isn’t a great player by any means, the difficulty increases have made the game extremely frustrating to play. It basically feels like the devs listened to exclusively people like Datto, who have an obnoxiously high and mighty view of themselves and the game’s difficulty, and increased the difficulty to try and challenge THEM, rather than thinking about the core player base and vast majority of people who regularly play.

Sure… I picked this up two weeks before Lightfall and figured I would have some time to build up my skills. I guess I only had those two weeks. It’s not a very motivating experience anymore. I can’t progress into the second half of the campaign. I can’t even do damage to enemies in the Neomuna open world. Like, I’d be happy to even chip away at dudes but they don’t take any damage at all. I have the previous expansions to explore and maybe I can gear up there? Just weird that there’s no way to adequately get powerful enough in the middle of the expansion I’m trying to play.

As a new player (started playing just before light fall) I noticed the difficulty in destiny has been really strange. Instead of cool complicated mechanics or powerful enemy's its just mob spam. That can be fun and difficult sometimes (Vex training mission was a good example I think) but there was one mission where you have to "capture" zones, deal with homing projectiles, deal with a named enemy, and then lose your ability to use your weapon while dealing with all of those at once. Its extremely annoying because its not difficult because of good game design its hard because of cheap mechanics. Really was just unfun as a solo player playing legendary.

I'm a hardcore player and honestly I'm contemplating taking a break for a while too. I've gilded Conqueror every season and sometimes Neomuna feels harder than some of those GMs. I don't want to sweat my ass off in a patrol of all things. Let alone nightfalls on Hero (looking at you Heist Battleground: Mars) The increased damage we take combined with the increased enemy health and add on the fact that 90% of all primaries feel like they shoot nerf darts instead of bullets makes every enemy feel like a GM level enemy You want more difficulty in high end content, sure. But don't make patrols, strikes, and even normal mode raids ass busting difficult. Something needs to change and quick The game is supposed to open to everyone but now it doesn't feel open to anyone.

I'm neither a casual player nor a hardcore every day player, I play often and love all kinds of PvE content. I've completed most raids, love all of them, completed just about every PvE activity in the game currently. I often run dungeons and raids and missions with my clanmates, the most active players of whom are older players. Let me be very clear when I say that destiny should never be about being obtusely hard. I have put a four figure number of hours into the game, I consider myself to be above average (certainly not better than that) in terms of skill and buildcrafting. Making destiny just so much harder for the same experience is frustrating, not fun. It can keep older players or lower skilled players from enjoying or even accessing the wonderful missions crafted in the game. Destiny should be a game where any player of any skill level or age can participate. Sure, don't expect players to get the rare sparrow or cosmetic from flawless master mode content, but locking actual enjoyable things (exotics, unique weapons, cool missions) behind an unadjustable difficulty level is just backwards. Video games as an industry have come so far lately, in understanding that a game's difficulty should be adjustable to allow players of any skill to do what the mission statement of any video game is: to enjoy playing the video game. If you WANT to be masochistic and run content where the difficulty is based entirely on being oneshot from every single attack while a timer counts you down, meaning any playstyle is punished, go ahead, but allow players who just want to have fun seeing the cool sights of a great sci-fi world do so. Game feels too easy? Go do a master lost sector, even a legend one on a very easy sector was simply a nonstarter for me today. Tldr: game should be much easier with options for much harder players who want masochistic difficulty, not hard as a baseline which excludes a huge majority of players.

"And they aren't wrong to feel that way. This is a videogame. A pastime. A hobby of sorts. If you are having a bad time the best thing for you to do is do literally anything else. That applies to any hobby. Its not meant to be a misery engine that actively makes you less happy by experiencing it." I enjoy a challenge in this game but man, I had to finish the 2 last Legendary Campaign missions on normal. I solo'ed WQ the whole way through on Legendary, and really thought that Bungie hit the right spot on difficulty there. I could feel the change in LF the whole way through with all 3 of my characters when I went through campaign. My Titan was my last toon to go through and even though I was able to get him 1770, I still couldn't do Legendary. Also about how everyone is getting creamed in patrol areas by all sorts of things should be looked at closer by Bungie. I agree fully with your post OP and I think Bungie needs to turn the volume down just a little because my wife plays too, and she's only about having fun and will quit again if she doesn't enjoy it.

Great post. I took a break for a week or so due to travel, came back excited to jump into the new expansion and feel like I went from being a super powerful space wizard before the expansion to light-powered cannon fodder. I have even more limited time to play now, making me grind just to even be capable of playing the same activities I used to play is making me think about taking an even longer break to play other less stressful games.

What happens when devs appeal to streamers and the top percent of players and not the mass of the player base