Destiny 2’s Shadowkeep expansion has been out for a little while now, and everyone has more or less gotten to play around with the new armor 2.0 system. Bungie is aiming to make the game more RPG-like, and the idea was that including more customization in armor was a stepping stone in that direction. But how does it work in practice? I’d say the results have been…mixed.
There are a few aspects of armor 2.0 that I absolutely love. So much so that I might be inclined to say they outweigh the negatives which I’ll get into later.
I love the customization. There is no greater feeling than swapping out mods in an instant for essentially free (well, 500 glimmer) without having to change a full piece or keep a whole bunch of sets on you. The obvious exception is for gun-specific perks that require elemental affinity (more on that later), but usually, I’m just swapping around generic mods or artifact mods which are free of that. It’s just so nice to be able to put in the artifact loaders or Nightmare mods or whatever I need depending on the situation without some massive gear shuffle. I never want to go back to a system that doesn’t have this kind of customization in place.
Similarly, the changes to ornamentation have been great for the fashion game, which I put a lot of weight into when choosing my loadout. Finally, my Eververse armor sets feel worth it, and while yes, that’s a microtransaction, the vast majority of Eververse sets can indeed be purchased with dust over time, so you can “earn” them, and now we’re seeing new, truly wicked ornaments like the battle pass set this season, which I do not consider “paid” given that you get the pass when you buy the season content, and you have to earn a few million XP to unlock it. But the point is, now on every piece of armor you have about 10+ options for how it looks, and that’s only going to grow in time. This is great.
But the further you get into armor 2.0, the weirder things get. I thought that we were going to get some really crazy, powerful builds, but the ones I’ve seen are almost only possible through the temporary artifact mods.
The problem is that you are in general, getting a lot less bang for your buck than in armor 1.0. Yes, you have customization and perma-unlock mods, and yet what you can actually build with those in the endgame is questionable. I’ve used this example before, but say I had a Menagerie helmet with Enhanced Sniper Targeting, Special Ammo Finder and a slot for a generic mod and a Menagerie mod. In the end that’s four “perks” without having to invest in the armor at all.
But compare that to say, a Dreambane helmet. You have ten energy total. Enhanced Sniper Targeting costs 6. A single recovery mod costs 4. That is all ten slots. You are missing two other perks, a Dreambane mod in this case and an ammo finder, which now goes on helmets, if you pick those two. Not only that, but to even get ten energy in the first place, you need to get endgame pinnacle materials, Enhancement Prisms and the ultra-rare Ascendant Shards which quite literally only drop from 980 Nightfalls.
It’s way, way, way more investment for what is often, worse gear than you could have gotten, or may even still have, in armor 1.0. While I understand that Bungie wants us to make “choices,” the end result feels like we actually have more restrictions instead of less, and less power instead of more, outside of some of the more powerful or low cost artifact mods.
A lot of the systems just don’t really seem like they’re fully working yet.
I’ve talked about elemental affinity before, but I think most of the community can agree that it just doesn’t feel like something that needs to exist, an extra layer of grind in a system that doesn’t need it, and it feeds into armor 2.0 feeling more restrictive than it needs to. It also doesn’t really work logically, with fire-based exotics rolling arc or bow-based exotics unable to use them because of affinity. It’s just too messy and unnecessary.
The Ascendant Shard grind is just pretty baffling right now, as you only get a few free ones from the battle pass, have to spend hundreds of cores on them for Banshee, or have to farm nothing but brutal nightfalls to get them. I guess you have “earned” those ten power slots by the end, but again, that often barely gets you armor that is just as powerful as it used to be.
Finally, the whole stat roll system still feels like it needs refining. It’s weird to have so few activities that offer higher rolls on gear. It’s really just raids, which can’t be re-run more than once per character per week, and Iron Banner, which is a limited time activity that only appears in a few instances a season. Those activities might give you gear somewhat regularly that’s 60+ in stats, but everything else is usually between 48-55, with highs more like 58-59 once in a blue moon outside of random exotics. That seems kind of weird and restrictive in its own way. Why should literally only two sets in the game have better stat rolls than everything gelse?
Fundamentally, I agree with the core concept of armor 2.0. More flexibility, more fashion options. But in practice, a lot of it seems too convoluted and overly grindy, even for Destiny, and the high cost of mods makes most gear worse than good rolls from armor 1.0, which no one really thought was the intent of this new system. Things will change in time, but this is where I see things being at the moment.
Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Read my new sci-fi thriller novel Herokiller, available now in print and online. I also wrote The Earthborn Trilogy.
