2 pieces of armor required commendations and 2 did not. Commendations could not be obtained before the expansion. You needed to level the Vanguard after the expansion hit to get a Commendation, no matter your then current Vanguard level. Also, you still needed the marks to purchase any armor, all of which normally meant at least two weeks before you could have better armor than the full raid gear. The people who did it faster had more than one of the same character, and traded commendations and armor between them.
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Rumor: Destiny DLC Plans leak. Major addon "Comet: Plague of Darkness" coming sep. 15
- Thread starter ekim
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2 pieces of armor required commendations and 2 did not. Commendations could not be obtained before the expansion. You needed to level the Vanguard after the expansion hit to get a Commendation, no matter your then current Vanguard level. Also, you still needed the marks to purchase any armor, all of which normally meant at least two weeks before you could have better armor than the full raid gear. The people who did it faster had more than one of the same character, and traded commendations and armor between them.
Ok, I have somewhat of a technical background in electrical engineering, but I only understand some of these programming techniques on the surface.
So you don't think the FPS factor is limiting compared to other MMO (please don't debate this point - you know what I mean) type games. It seems an FPS would require less lag and higher rate calculations than something like WoW.
Or do you think the 256 MB of RAM on previous generation consoles is the limiting factor?
What is the reason for the small numbers? It had to be a design choice for a reason
You can trade commendations and marks between characters?
Commendations yes, not marks. Sorry, edited my post. But if you have two of the same character type, one can simply buy the armor they need using their marks, and then put the armor piece in the vault to be picked up and used by the other character.
Id imagine its down purely to cost/server stability. The kit needed to host 12 person zones is probably a LOT less expensive server side than what's requires to host more (as DICE evidenced by having to buy "better" servers mid BF4 to remove rubber banding).
More player = more calculations for sure, but that's going to be server side, and I'm really not sure that ADS is any harder to crunch than hundreds of different spells and such in WoW for example (or even a 64 player conquest match in BF4)
So yeah, id imagine cost vs server performance issues and perhaps a degree of redundancy as if a server dies, you're inconveniencing 12 people, not everyone on Mars.
Nope, many did it on one character, myself included. People had maxed both their Vanguard and Crucible marks on their main character weeks before, since they had nothing to spend them on, and thanks to Bungies forewarning, you had people levelling up their Vanguard and Crucible reputation near to the next rep level, but they didn't fully level it up until the DLC hit so that when they got the Vanguard/Crucible packages, the commendations would be inside.
You had some people in the OT doing this on all three characters, because they assumed at the time, that everything you buy would need a commendation, so many people had 6 commendations within minutes of the DLC hitting, when you only needed 2, or 1 in my case, since a refurbished exotic helm dropped for me in the nightfall that morning.
If House of Wolves does what the Dark Below did with Exotic gear and weapons, I am out.
I am 600+ hours player, with all exotic weapons and 95% of exotic gear leveled to 36 and I have invested crapload of playtime on that.
BUT.
Problem is not XP, glimmer or Exotic shards, I do not care, it is playing for that and whatever
BUT main issue are specific class materials - Plastel, Hadronic and Sapphire - which I have used in full during this Dark Below upgrade for my Exotic gear.
I used 300+ Plastels yesterday just in upgrading few Exotic pieces for my Titan. I have no more. I used the same amount in upgrading my prrvious 30 collection.
I can take any kind of grind, but not this one.
If I will not be able to somehow transfer and use my Exotic gear items without wasting 6-months of playtime for plastel hadronic sapphire, I am out.
They would probably be better off releasing a new installment. That's the only way I see them getting a decent amount of players back. I bought Dark Below hoping that would make the game fun to play again for at least a little while but I shut it off after the first few missions were bland as shit with recycled environments.
Destiny 2 has the potential to be much better but I've basically written this one off (after 120 hrs of grind of course lol) no matter how much DLC they add..
Destiny 2 has the potential to be much better but I've basically written this one off (after 120 hrs of grind of course lol) no matter how much DLC they add..
sturgboski
Member
Its funny how this is a thing. It kind of penalizes you for having one if each class as you will always be playing catch up for class materials on your secondary or tertiary characters. The problem is exacerbated due to the shitty RNG loot system. I had an exotic helm and all legendary armor (including the cosmetic piece) for a titan before I even created one just from random vanguard reward packages and engrams rolling the gear. My titan was light lvl 26 the second he hit character level 20 (now he's 28 as I am already getting Dark Below gear drops for him). Essentially, I will never have enough materials for him as I don't need to run strikes for gear on him in order to get crap loot to shard. Yet my main who is a warlock is swimmubf in class materials. They should just combine the material pool. I mean the classes barely matter (being a bit facetious here), why should they have distinct upgrade materials?
Of course it does. Its going to contain more of the content that should have been in Destiny 1 but was removed AND that is not being repackaged as DLC for Destiny 1. I fully expect we might approach what was promised for the first game
and I am fully prepared for disappointment when Bungie under delivers again
Nope, he was talking about the Vanguard armor. No way could you get all 4 pieces on one day with only one character. If you mixed and matched Vanguard and Crucible armor, then perhaps, but that wasn't what I was responding to. In any event, if you're one of those that planned ahead to get everything on one day, I don't think you're bothered much by grinding on the first day of an expansion.
Same character types? Yeah but not sure why I would do that. Thanks for the info though.
Ironically that would mean you play the DLC missions normally, since those are mission areas ran backwards, already.
The Shogun
Banned
Thats my point. On day 1 you could buy 2 out of 4 slots that were better than the raid gear. On day 1 randoms could have better gear than the people raging the game for months.
How on earth is that solid game design?
Did you mean to post in the dlc rumor thread?
No. No i did not lol.
Moon_frogger
Member
I will bide my time with destiny. I'll wait for the superior game of the year pc version on steam sale. Until then I have about 3000 other games vying for my attention. I may never buy a console again.
"Making sure your hardcore players feel like they have a big ePenis" is really not a big element of game design. You have to bring the majority of casual players up to speed with new content otherwise they'll just give up. The hardcore people will continue to play anyway.
I would have preferred to see the new 33 Light gear awarded through quest chains rather than just a vendor.
BreezyLimbo
Banned
I just..I just want to use all my exotics to their full potential without having to use shards to level them up and re-level it all..
I'm curious if they'll skip that whole thing this time since wolves isn't coming out during a holiday so they won't be so focused on using it as a means to get new players who bought/got Xmas consoles. At this point they need to focus on rewarding longtime players and not holding them back so newcomers don't feel weak.
BreezyLimbo
Banned
Mhm. The thing I'm most worried about is that you'll have to upgrade them twice, one to TBD, and then to Wolves, and they won't like you just skip to Wolves.
Which with their weekly 12-pick they have from Xur for upgrading is already one block...it's like...uuuuggh.
Diablohead
Member
Also no point playing if in march the vendors will be selling 32+ gear anyway.
big mistake was making vendors sell 31 gear, it completely killed vault of glass armor which was 30 limited the moment that DLC was released.
big mistake was making vendors sell 31 gear, it completely killed vault of glass armor which was 30 limited the moment that DLC was released.
I feel like VoG armor shouldn't get you to 32, but it should get you to 31 now. Vendor armor should only get you to 30 as well. Just my opinion anyway.
Stealth_Cobra
Member
I'm also out if they make you relevel your gear again.
I mean, who though it was a good idea to force player to grind for 7000+ Glimmer, acquire an Exotic Shard by dismantling an exotic or spending rare strange coins, then resetting every single one of your exotics, forcing you to spend like 10000 Glimmer and tons of mats to get it back to full potential.
I also hate the whole "let's render old Raid Gear stuff obsolete" mindset. If I spend weeks gather a very cool looking set of raid gear, I should at least be able to upgrade it to be relevant in the new expansion. I mean, just make it so that you can dismantle New Raid Gear for special mats used to unlock new light nodes on old equipment.... Like dismantle a couple of new chest pieces to get a mats to upgraded the old chest if you like the old one better.
I mean, who though it was a good idea to force player to grind for 7000+ Glimmer, acquire an Exotic Shard by dismantling an exotic or spending rare strange coins, then resetting every single one of your exotics, forcing you to spend like 10000 Glimmer and tons of mats to get it back to full potential.
I also hate the whole "let's render old Raid Gear stuff obsolete" mindset. If I spend weeks gather a very cool looking set of raid gear, I should at least be able to upgrade it to be relevant in the new expansion. I mean, just make it so that you can dismantle New Raid Gear for special mats used to unlock new light nodes on old equipment.... Like dismantle a couple of new chest pieces to get a mats to upgraded the old chest if you like the old one better.
Stealth_Cobra
Member
It was pretty insulting to reward your dedicated fanbase that got to level 30 by making their gear immediately obsolete and needing to be replaced by easy to get vanguard stuff on day one. At the very least the vendor stuff should have had the same level as VOG stuff.
StUnNeR H2K
Member
I love Destiny, the gameplay is fun. Just don't see myself investing in it for the long term. It's to repetitive and after the last expansion it seems to hurt players who play more often. I just hit 32 after raiding every week since release, and some new guy is 31 who bought the game two weeks ago? They made the old content obsolete and pointless. Why not add a higher level version of VoG? Why are random strikes level 26 and stupid easy to steam roll? I can complete the raid three times, nightfall on all three characters in my Tuesday evening after work... Not much left to do after that and I don't PvP.
Hopefully before Sept something changes.
Hopefully before Sept something changes.
Diablohead
Member
From the very beginning it should have been 30 vendor, 31VoG, 32crota, 33+ for the next set of raids which in turn should become a lot harder to beat without the gear level before it.
Random legendary engram drops could have a chance to be 31 so you can slowly drop store bought gear, maybe.
But then bungie seem to have changed all their plans 6 months before release and still calling out changes even with the game released, so I have no idea what they are going to do next.
.....
Of course it's going to seem repetitive if you literally repeat exactly the same strike 3 times in a row and then exactly the same raid 3 times in a row.
Mix it up, and only play when there's a chance for meaningful progression. Play something else if there isn't much to do. I think the trap people fall into with these MMO-styled games is that they expect the endgame to provide as many hours of engagement as the leveling process. But mostly due to raid lockouts, there's just not a lot to do at times.
Bungie needs to do a better job of keeping VoG relevant. Maybe turn off the loot lockout so people can farm it if they want to.
The bounties are repetitive, they only started getting inventive with Eris' bounties and there aren't that many.
It doesn't help when you hop into a strike playlist and you get the same fucking strike 3 times in a row, or you do the same 2 strikes in a solid row of 8 runs.
That shit should NEVER happen.
There needs to be more in general.
If they picked 3 level 30 story missions every week and put some modifiers on it and made you play through them sequentially and had them pay out radiant materials and/or purple engrams as a reward - kind of like a nightfall lite, that would go a long way to keeping the game fresh and keeping players feeling like they're getting worthwhile rewards.
Or add quests to the game like the ONE Eris Urn quest. That paid out purple or exotic engrams or radiant materials.
Just fucking something.
Or they could have given TDB DLC owners a separate strike playlist with more rewards instead of withdrawing content from the base game.
firehawk12
Subete no aware
But how else will you convince people to spend 20 bucks?
Makes sense. Hell, even bump up the difficulty of VoG to 31 or 32 even.
This is unfortunately true. At the end of the day Bungie and Activision are corporations that function for the main purpose of making themselves big profits.
The fact is they didn't withdraw content they only withdrew end screen rewards for playing certain content. Everyone can still play all the missions that they paid for... It's an experimental pricing model and the game is constantly being updated and worked on so that costs money. People who want to keep playing the game over and over are expected to buy the expansions in order to continue to access 100% of the end game rewards.
I have to admit, the loot cave made sure this was never a problem for my Warlock. I'd dismantled so many greens and blues that I was swimming in hadronic essence. I still am. OTOH, sapphire wire and plasteel were harder to come by. I still have a lot of them sitting around due to many fruitless raids and strikes, but I imagine hitting your problem if I had bough the DLC.
There are multiple points of grinding in this game that wore on me too. The class mats, like you pointed out. If I'd never done the loot cave, I probably would've bitched about this a lot more. There's the different currencies, particularly the commendations. There were the ass mats, which apparently don't mean squat anymore. There are the damn motes, which is totally RNG. There's also the vendor and faction ranks, not to mention the xp needed for the weapons and armor. It can really get to be much. You're always waiting on something to hit a quota before you can move on to your next big task.
I always thought it was funny that the last outpost for mankind on Earth somehow managed to splinter into multiple factions, and used way too many different currencies. Like, if the last of humanity hate each other that much, then maybe we don't need to save the traveler. LOL. I doubt the Cabal use that many different currencies. PEACE.
We both know that isn't minor though. Destiny is very unrewarding as it is, and Destiny decides the best way to encourage people to buy the new DLC is to reduce the rewards people originally got from playing the base game instead of incentivizing them with more rewards to continue playing the game? That sounds ridiculous. Paying for new content shouldn't be to pay more to continue playing the same game over. There aren't even enough rewards given in Destiny as it is. What use to be a guarantee reward in the base game after completing a certain strike is now locked away for DLC owners only. The fact you're downplaying that is troublesome. I quote
What's the point of playing those missions when you don't get the same rewards before the DLC came out? The engram drop frequency is the same as playing the old 24 strike (Vanguard Tiger) and the new 26 strike (Vanguard ROC). I might as well complete a story mission bounty and get the same chances. Just because it costs money to make changes in this game doesn't mean people have to support such monetary decisions if it's not within their interest to seeing such changes happen. I should support them because it costs them money? No thanks if this is what they think is admirable changes for the game.
Is this actually a problem? Is getting a couple blue engrams after a Tiger Strike such a life or death matter for anyone who actually exists? Or are we just imagining some hypothetical person whose life is ruined by this? I have a hard time imagining a person who is so devoted to the game that they need all these rewards, but at the same time is not devoted enough to purchase an expansion.
Blue engrams are basically just vendor trash for anyone who plays the game with even a minor level of devotion.
firehawk12
Subete no aware
The problem is new players who buy a game and basically can't access any of the worthwhile content.
Of course, maybe the game is starting to bomb and hopefully people aren't paying 60 dollars for the privilege of buying a 20 dollar piece of DLC.
Destiny increased the chances of getting purple engrams from the strike playlist. The more chances you have at getting Cryptograph engrams - Cryptograph, not blue engrams, which includes blue and purple engrams - the more chances you have at getting purple engrams. More chances at blue engrams also means more rare chances at legendary items decrypting from blue engrams. Moreover, the more blue engrams you get, the more chances of them decrypting into strange coins, which has risen a whole lot in value. The fact you're also downplaying the diminished rewards from what was originally in the base game is ridiculous. What's the incentive for people to continue playing the game if the rewards are lesser now compared to 3 months ago? There's not much left anymore to do because Destiny has taken those incentives away. It's not an imaginary concern. What else can you do in the game? It's a general overlooked problem that's missed by those who already bought the DLC. We're talking about incentives to continue playing the game and new reasons to continue playing Destiny, not reasons to pay more money for the same thing.
That's kinda just a straight up terrible way to play the game though. You get 2 engrams for doing a high-level strike playlist. They CAN be legendary/purple, but like 90-95% of the time they are rare/blue. Doing random strikes that take 20-30 minutes (assuming nobody quits) and hoping you get lucky enough to receive a useful item at the end is the absolute pits. It's that awful loot cave mentality taken to another extreme -- people rely on absolutely nothing but RNG for progression, and then get upset when RNG doesn't reward them.
The game sets pretty clear paths for guaranteed progression - those strike playlists are a pull of the slot machine at best. I wouldn't advise them except for someone that's bored and has already done all the quests, the daily heroic, and the weekly/nightfall. The chances of a good reward is exceedingly low, and the chances of having to run a dull-ass strike with strangers is exceedingly high. You can get Strange Coins from them yes, but I don't run them unless I'm absolutely desperate for Strange Coins. As in "Xur is leaving in 12 hours and I need 5 more coins to buy the thing I want!" level of desperation.
What? There's like 1 strike playlist that new users are locked out of. All the "worthwhile content" is still accessible. New users have access to better gear than any of us could get at launch, in fact.
Completely disagree. Firstly, what is there to do in Destiny? Daily Heroic Stories, Weekly Heroic Strikes, Weekly Nightfall Strikes, Vanguard Strike Playlist, Vanguard and Crucible bounties, patrol missions, material farming, the Vault of Glass, and various deathmatch PvP modes. The Daily Heroic Story and Weekly Nightfall Strikes are level 30 activities which require players to be within 3 levels to participate in them. So for level 26 and below players, they cannot participate in the Weekly Nightfall Strike for this week's weekly reward if they don't have the TDB DLC so that's one thing less for them to do. They're also unable to participate in the Daily Heroic Story twice now since last Tuesday's reset because The Wakening and Siege of the Warmind have been the daily story mission and inaccessible to those who don't have the TDB DLC. So what can level 26 and below players do in Destiny? The Vault of Glass has similar level restrictions for level 23 and above players, and we all know how tedious and even futile it can be to do any story missions 2 levels below the difficulty level - player level relative to enemy level because of how the damaging scaling works. So what else can players do in this game? The Weekly Heroic Strike is available to players level 21 and above, but that's inaccessible to those who also don't have the TDB DLC this week too. What remains are the Vanguard Strike Playlist, Vanguard and/or Crucible bounties, patrol missions, and various PvP modes. Bounties in general are mainly worthwhile to do for experience points to level up weapons and armor, and it has the additional effect of leveling up reputation ranks. Bounties are one of the very few things anybody (almost everyone - level 4 and above) can do in this game. Patrol missions for increasing Vanguard reputation is also another activity people can do in Destiny, but it's even less rewarding as participating in a Vanguard Strike Playlist. So unless persons were interested in playing the PvP, there are very few things to constantly do in Destiny and that's my main point. A lot of the very rewarding content is either locked behind the DLC, near the endgame, and/or restricted to being a weekly activity. Diminishing the incentive to play an already unrewarding activity gives less reason to continue playing this game because there's less to do. You say it's unworthwhile to play the Vanguard Strike Playlist, but that's not my argument at all. It's something to do in Destiny that has become less rewarding. There's barely a handful of things to do in Destiny while all Destiny players wait until the Tuesday reset, and your argument is the Vanguard Strike Playlist is such a petty activity that people shouldn't be bothered by the fact there's less reason to play it? Ridiculous. This is a loot game and you find it strange that people want to play for loot?
The Vanguard Strike Playlist is something else to do in Destiny, a game where there is barely a handful of things to do in this game on a daily basis. Moreover, stop looking at the Vanguard Strike Playlist for levels 30s and above. Consider what level 27s and below can do in this game to advance. The Vanguard Strike Playlist is something to do for levels 16 and above once the weekly mark cap has been reach. Efficiency to level 31? Sure that matters, but what can you do with your newfound level? Complete that story mission bounty? Do some patrol missions for how much minuscule reputation for a rewards package that may give you something besides a commendation? The upcoming Iron Banner? The VoG or End of Crota raid for fun after the umpteenth time with zero rewards or gains? Instead of trivializing the entertainment value and valuableness of the Vanguard Strike Playlist, look at what activities can be done in Destiny and then tell me if it's trivial to remove one of the very few things you can do in Destiny that's best chances at rewards are limited to being weekly occurrences. That's a huge lull between each reset week after week, and there remains only one new raid to help placate that lull. There's not enough to do in Destiny, and Bungie is giving more reason for players not to continue playing Destiny because there's less to do instead of more to do. One extra raid isn't a whole lot especially when hard mode is locked out.
firehawk12
Subete no aware
Beyond the strike, anyone new playing the game in December without the DLC missed out on 2 out of 4 nightfalls and probably around 10 dailies. It's not insignificant if you actually need the materials to upgrade your armor to get to 31 in the first place.
th4tguy
Member
Can you hit 31 without the dlc. I thought it was required.
firehawk12
Subete no aware
I'm actually not sure. Can you buy the gear with the "1" icon over it? If not, then the only hope that non-DLC players have is VoG stuff and engrams.