The community asked, and Bungie has spoken. The Destiny 2 developer just announced a sweeping overhaul to Armor 2.0, addressing most of the community’s major concerns with the byzantine system and bringing things back down to Earth. So far, there’s much rejoicing.
To start with, the much-hated elemental affinity system is being nerfed into nonexistence: you’ll now be able to change a piece of armor’s elemental affinity for the cost of one upgrade module. If your armor is already at a high energy level, you’ll need to also cash in the necessary upgrade modules required to reach that level. It’s not quite the same as removing elemental affinity entirely, but my guess is that this is a whole lot easier from a technical perspective. It essentially sidesteps the whole affinity question, albeit with classic Destiny-style currency complication.
And after that would be the community’s next most-requested change: the seasonal mod slot will no longer be limited to the season in which it was acquired. So that means you’ll be able to equip any given seasonal mod on any piece of armor, and you won’t need to keep Undying armor around to do Garden of Salvation or somesuch.
It’s basically everything people had asked for, save the idea of removing affinity entirely. Now, you could theoretically just get one solid set of armor that you could switch around as needed, rather than having to hunt down three full sets of high stat armor every season.
Even if I find a loot system frustrating, I try to think about whether or not it’s working in the game. If the frustration propels me to keep grinding for it, that means it’s working, as is the case with certain rare catalysts or raid exotics—even with my least favorite crucible pinnacles. If the frustration just makes me give up entirely, that means it’s not working. That was the case with Armor 2.0: rather than getting me to obsess over getting perfect sets of armor each season, it just convinced me that success was impossible, and so I just kind of stopped caring about anything regarding armor except total stats. Even there, I just got the high-roll stuff from the season pass and called it a day.
That’s basically what’s going to happen now: if you find a solid piece of armor, it can equip any seasonal mod and any armor affinity. The difference now is that I will feel successful rather than hopeless as I search for new armor.
My guess? The pendulum is going to swing on this thing. It’s good, and it’s easy, and it’s what I want out of this game. But it does dramatically simplify the armor grind to the point where it might get a little boring, not unlike where we were in year one. I suppose I could now grind for specific stats rather than just paying attention to the total, but that’s stretching it a bit.
We might be due for another complicating factor around the time of next year’s fall expansion, but that’s just a guess. There is no such thing as contentment in games as service.
