Continuing the tradition of dumping more Destiny 2 news on me than I can handle these past two weeks, something interesting has come up as of yesterday that fans have been wondering about regarding Shadowkeep.
First, Bungie has revealed in a new Shadowkeep landing page that the power cap for the new Destiny 2 expansion is not 1000, like I previously was guessing, but instead 960.
So what that means is that you can level up with powerful sources and prime engrams from 900 to 950, but after that, those final ten power levels will be from “pinnacle sources.” I think the only two confirmed sources are raids and Iron Banner, but the Nightfall could be in there, and I am willing to bet that the recently revealed 950 legend difficulty Nightmare Hunts, a new activity, may be considered pinnacle as well.
But this news comes in tandem with another reveal, one that I’m finding more confusing. In a Gamescom interview, Bungie says that the season-long, temporary, bonus power level you get from Artifact grinding does not have a cap…at all.
This has led to all sorts of speculation and confusion about how this is going to work, and I saw a rather hilarious Rick Kackis thumbnail with “9999” power written on it. Love it.
But as Bungie says in the same interview, there are not going to be enough hours in the season to grind it an unlimited amount, and I am wondering how this is going to work in practice.
My guess is that this could work like a temporary version of Diablo’s paragon levels, where you grind out XP to get new power levels that give slight bonuses. In Destiny’s case, one artifact level is 1 power level across your entire account. But with each level, the XP required increases. So while the first few may be breezy, the higher you go, the requirement increases by thousands and thousands of XP each time, so it takes longer. So maybe once you get to 20 bonus power or whatever, ticking over to 21 might take you literally a few days of non-stop play or something.
What I still do not understand is how this works with the power cap. The ability to add unlimited bonus power would seem to indicate that you can level past the 960 cap. That would make sense, considering we rarely have activities or difficulties that are only 10 under the final cap of the content season. So I am wondering if we can level up to say, 1000 with enough grinding, though again, with diminishing returns, a bonus 40 power levels could take something absurd like hundreds of hours of XP alone.
I wouldn’t really understand if you couldn’t go past the 960 cap, because what would be the point of the artifact not having a cap, if that was the case? We know that you can get from 900 to 950 through powerful sources and primes. And from 950 to 960 with pinnacle drops. So the artifact has to be layered on top of that, and then it goes away at the end of the season, and your new power level is just whatever your gear ended the season at.
This seems like something we may not fully understand until we see how it works in practice, but maybe tomorrow Bungie will unload even more information because that’s how this week has gone. See you then.
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