Destiny 2 difficulty changes will arrive on the Destiny 2 Lightfall release date, according to several updates from the Bungie team included in a recent article titled “Bringing Challenge Back to Destiny.” While Destiny 2 Game Director Joe Blackburn outlined some difficulty changes in a previous “Lightfall and the Year Ahead” blog post, the most recent post offers an in-depth look at some of those difficulty changes. , as they involve Vanguard Ops, Destiny 2 Nightfalls, raids and dungeons.
Some major changes include the decision to remove Adept tier difficulty, leaving Hero difficulty available at the game’s post-Lightfall Soft Power cap of 1750, and Legend and Master difficulties available after reaching the 1800 cap. power for Hero, Legend and Master will be 1770, 1830 and 1840 respectively).
The game will also feature power level debuffs: -5 for hero, -15 for legend, -20 for master, and -25 for grandmaster. Eat Lightfall, Bungie will remove Match Game and shields that don’t match the player’s item type will take 50% less damage. Surges and Threats now replace burns in high-level activities. Waves increase outgoing elemental damage by 25%, with a featured seasonal elemental wave and one of two rotating elemental waves. With Destiny 2 Season 20, the featured Surge is the Destiny 2 Strand subclass and rotating Surges like Void and Solar. On the other hand, threats will increase damage taken by enemies by 25%.
Lightfall will also drop supercharged weapons from various sources, which deal 25% more damage and have increased damage (25%) if an increasing subclass is used. The post also features Nightfall unranked attacks, energy activities disabled in the Vanguard Ops playlist, Vanguard Challenges reflecting currently up-graded subclasses, and increased difficulty for Lost Sectors, Dares of Eternity, and The Wellspring.
However, the changes quickly raised concerns among players. For starters, while the post says that Bungie plans to make Lost Sectors more rewarding, it makes no mention of Lost Sector reward increases, giving you a better chance of getting better rewards upon completion. Currently, due to RNG, players often need to run Legendary Lost Sectors multiple times before they can get a substantial reward.
Others comment that the Surge feature amounts to a general nerf to the Elemental classes currently in rotation. Because the game won’t feature Arc and Stasis as power-ups throughout the season, some players have pointed out that Bungie has effectively nerfed those elemental subclasses. The same goes for Overcharged Weapons, which grant buffs to specific weapons and discourage any weapon not in those classes.
Players are also speculating that Bungie designed the increased difficulty to encourage players to invest even more time in the game, which worries them given the game’s attempt to leverage the extra playtime to push more. the monetization of Destiny 2. encouraging them to spend money on microtransactions.
It’s too early to tell if such concerns are premature before Lightfall in the popular multiplayer game, now days away from launch. However, with Destiny 2’s new loadout system and mod updates, it looks like Bungie is giving players more options to choose how they want to play, and then unnecessarily limiting them to high-level activities.