Destiny 2
Destiny 2 has grown and evolved in various ways over the years, and improved for the better in many aspects. However, in an effort to do that in terms of loot acquisition, we have gotten to a point where the game has shed so many aspects of being a traditional looter, something like Diablo or Borderlands, focused on rare drops and frequent farming, outside of an increasingly small pool of hunting specific guns and rolls. Here’s what I mean:
Crafting – Yes, you knew this one was coming, but it’s the biggest factor, albeit I do have a lot more to talk about besides this, trust me. Crafting is now only a loot chase in that you need five red borders to then make the exactly 5/5 roll you want. Then, you can now instantly level it for those exact perks if you have the currency.
This creates bizarre situations where an activity like The Coil can positively drown you in loot, but it’s almost all pointless as you’re purely looking for red borders. You do not even have to look at the rolls at all, even if it is the very weapon you’re trying to get. Given that we now have something like ten seasonal weapons and six or so raid weapons that are craftable depending on the season, that erases any actual chase for all of those also because crafting is close to the only way to get enhanced perks which by default, are better than even a 5/5 roll you might get while farming.
Destiny 2
Engram Turn-Ins – This has also gotten increasingly irritating. It is not enjoyable to get engrams from ritual activities and rank ups and simply stand there at Zavala or Shaxx or Drifter or spend them for copies and copies of rolls.
You may end up getting what you want, especially with multiple column perks racking up, but again, this is not actual looting. This is standing at a guy and pressing a button with currency you’ve farmed. The act of getting something you actually want in a strike or Gambit match is close to zero because of terrible end-of-activity drop rates and the fact that a simple concept like…strike weapons dropping as loot during a strike has not been implemented. Why do we not get Dawning weapon world drops when The Dawning is active? Why is the game so allergic to putting any amount of loot besides maybe six world drop weapons in the wild?
Exotics – Again, this is barely farming now. We have one exotic a season that is simply handed to us through the battle pass, which is deeply boring, even if it’s good. Others will be the result of a longer questline, though again, that’s not farming. The only true exotic farm for weapons in the game is RNG for dungeons or raids, though without better protections (which we have seen more of lately) that has been a bad system.
And for armor, it’s literally just “do a Lost Sector at the start of a season” until you get a copy. Farming after that simply becomes attempting to get a stat distribution you want, which is not terribly exciting and often not worth doing at all.
Destiny 2
Legendary Rarity – This has been going on essentially forever, but there is just…one real rarity in the game outside of exotics, Legendary. Not that I’m calling to bring back Blues in their old form, but it does seem like something has gone wrong when you’re a looter with one real effective rarity that can drop in the wild, where even exotics simply drop as engrams now.
Greens do not exist and the last time we had Blues they were nothing but trash, but there has to be a way to format a looter than has more than a single rarity where progression makes that useful, or lesser gear can somehow be useful to players besides occasionally being lower level infusion fuel. But that simply doesn’t exist.
World Drop Armor – It’s just impossible to get anything remotely like a good roll on World Drop Armor. It might as well not exist at all being capped at 61 or whatever it is, but mostly dropping in the 50s. If Blues were useless enough to be erased, then World Drop Armor is as well, and I would rather have World Drop Weapons or Ritual Weapons in their place given how infrequently we see those.
Destiny 2
Armor in General – Bungie has still not figured out how to make armor farming interesting. They have gotten rid of systems that were pretty bad, but once you get a full set or two with the right distribution, there is effectively no reason to ever farm armor again besides getting one copy for transmog.
With the new (recently changed to be worse) mod system, armor is just a pile of stats, stats that will probably not outpace armor you get three years ago, so it’s all pointless. Tiny bonuses like increased seasonal rep or the occasional raid mod have done nothing to move the needle. Only Artifice armor has been a meaningful change, and that’s just better stats, it’s not especially interesting.
Is Anything Going Right? - Dungeon weapons are still traditionally farmed, but again, I’d argue occasionally they should drop during the activity, and the encounter pools are polluted by being 60% armor. World drop weapons are randomly found but they are incredibly sparse and again, hampered by useless world drop armor showing up instead. Occasionally something like reprised Dreaming City weapons will show up and not be craftable, but those drop rates are terrible across both The Coil and Blind Well. So even where this is “working” there are still problems.
Destiny 2 is simply moving away from becoming a true looter in so many ways. I understand that a certain among of RNG farming can be frustrating, but so much of that can be fixed with better drop rates, multiple perks or other options that the game only rarely employs. Otherwise, we have stopped being a looter and started being something else far less interesting.
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