I finally just did something I don’t think I’ve ever done in Destiny, I hit three max power characters before the next expansion came out to raise the cap. I have a Warlock, Titan and Hunter all at 600.
I know many people did this ages ago, and some people do it all the time with every new content release, but the catch here is that I did this mainly as a solo player. I usually do the raid once and that’s it, and rarely do non-matchmade activities like Nightfalls, which are the most rewarding in the game. As such, my crawls to max power are slower, if not flat-out impossible sometimes.
But in the Forsaken era, that changed. It was still slow, sure, I have probably put in 200 hours to Forsaken since it launched. And yet this has been an enormously satisfying experience, and I think Bungie finally has its leveling and power curve almost perfect.
Why? Because throughout these 200 hours, I never stopped feeling like I was making at least some measure of progress, however small.
I have never been relying on RNG to advance. Rather, Bungie has inserted a boatload of powerful engrams into the game, most are just minor boosts after a certain point, bumping players up 1 power or so per slot, but others are higher, as much as 5 or even 10 for some activities.
This also lets you choose how you want to play. You can get the same kind of powerful engram from doing three heroic story missions as you can from doing five Crucible matches, or three strikes, or three Gambit matches, or 20 weekly bounties. If you have the time, you can do all of it, which is what I usually did, short of again, the raid and Nightfall most weeks. And even if you’ve done the weekly milestone for whatever your favorite weekly activity is, the capacity for Prime Engram drops, relatively large boosts to power, is still present in every activity, as are (much more rare) exotic drops. That aspect is somewhat RNG based, and yet if you play anything enough, the Prime Engrams will come, so you can grind effectively whatever you want and feel like you’re still making progress.
The other thing I like about the grind to max power is that hitting max power actually seems…worth it. At 600, you are a higher power level than any activity requirement in the game. And with the way Bungie has changed scaling, they have really tuned the power fantasy into something satisfying once you’re up that high. I am able to blaze through activities that once were absolutely destroying me, be they Plague of the Well boss takedowns, Spider’s weekly super boss bounty. And yet there are still challenges too. I was just rocked by the Malfeasance Corrupted strike, despite it being “under” my power level, and I still have barely touched the Wish Ender dungeon, which is a whole different kind of challenge. But the point is, hitting max power I feel stronger than I ever have in any era of Destiny, and that’s a satisfying experience.
I did say this was almost perfect, and there are a few issues that I experienced along the way that made this less than ideal.
The first was exotic drops, which have been a frustrating annoyance since Forsaken launched, but I can’t complain too much about that, as Bungie recently made a change to the system that weights exotics you don’t have, and surprisingly, it’s working. My last three out of five exotic drops have been Forsaken ones I didn’t have, as opposed to 2 out of maybe 20 before that.
My biggest problem with this process, however, has been infusion costs and the frustration of constantly swapping out armor in particular with whatever the new piece is that got you a slight power bump.
In a given week, this meant that you would be swapping out different armor pieces a half dozen times at least for power gains. Pre-Forsaken, you could pick your favorite piece of armor and just spend a few shards to infuse it with your new drop. But post-Forsaken, infusion costs are dramatically increased, penalizing players who don’t have that much time to spend with the game, while failing to slow rapid progression of those who play all the time with a lot of stockpiles. There’s really no point to it.
For me, I did have a lot of materials stockpiled, and yet the masterwork core requirement alone made me refuse to infuse any armor except for maybe my one favorite exotic until I hit 600. At 2-3 cores per infusion, I would have run dry rapidly if I kept infusing every new drop, so as a result, my characters were constantly ugly mish-mashes of armor with random perks and no mods because…why commit a mod to something you’re going to change out immediately? Why color it with the convoluted shader system when you may not be using it in 20 minutes? As such, my character’s armor was never what I wanted it to be until literally the moment I hit max power and I finally felt comfortable using cores to infuse the exact pieces I wanted.
What’s my endgame now? Getting a few more 600 pieces to infuse the last few weapons/armor pieces to get fully “god roll” sets that both function well and look how I want. I may actually start masterworking armor for the first time in 200 hours, which is its own can of worms as that system needs a rework. And I have about 12 more Forsaken exotics to find since Bungie just changed the drop system in the last week.
Good times for 200 hours so far, and perhaps for 200 more to come. Destiny is in a great spot right now. Bungie, don’t change anything about the current system except infusion.
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