Bungie seems to have gotten at least part of the message that the game needs to start buffing things quickly as its Destiny 2 playerbase evaporates, but either through bad decisions or technical issues, they’re only doing a few things now, and no, it’s not enough.
Bungie took the rare step of doing an emergency buff live patch last night after announcing it in the TWAB to try to fix/improve The Portal and loot systems. Here’s what changed:
Platinum (450-500 power)
- A+ grades now grant +2 power
- A grades now grant +2 power
- B+ grades now grant +1 power
- B grades now grant +1 power
- C+ grades now grant gear at your power level
Gold (400-450 power)
- B grades now grant +1 power
- C+ grades now grant gear at your power level
Silver (300- 400 power)
- C+ will now grant +1 power
There are now fewer modifiers needed to reach score forecasts, albeit this depends where you are in the power climb.
- Everyone is getting the Featured Gear bonus by default without juggling featured armor and weapons.
- They also announced next Tuesday that more changes are coming in an actual patch, which include:
- All rewards have a chance to be a Prime engram in all power ranges.
- From 450 to 500, Primes now give +3 power instead of +2.
- There are 17 Fireteam Ops that are either getting their completion rewards doubled from 1 to 2, or increased by one for the longer ones. Both of those have a chance to be primes, so the “pity timer” on primes should be 10 runs now, not 20, for those activities (in theory).
- Two timers are increasing, Avalon to 35 minutes and Presage to 20 minutes. There are more timer issues in other places that are going on, and all of this leads to a conclusion that in the end, I fully believe they’re just going to delete timers.
Is this enough? No, certainly not. Is this mildly better than before, between last night’s update and next Tuesday’s patch? Yes. But fundamentally the question remains: do you want to grind The Portal at all? For many, the answer remains no.
The Portal is here to stay and it’s going to be key to the future of the game for Bungie to find a way to motivate players to stick with it. Another main issue is that the power grind itself now being the endgame is no longer a good motivator to play, nor is the Tier system with 3s not much different than 4s or 5s, and all past weapons being somewhat lame now outside of that system entirely. There’s a lot more work to do.
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