This wouldn't be so bad if they didn't put life counters on everything just to "make it fun," like starting with 1 only is dumb, and having it on every time just to make you have a challenge is poor game design. Your player pop is so low, I find it hard to find groups for PIn Ops, making most of the guns in there hard to get. You should move them to the fireteam finder. Turn off limited revives in Fireteam finder for all light levels. It makes it not fun, and you are forced into running more Meta builds because you don't want to die in two seconds to 3x void dmg and extra dmg in the air. Trails pop is so busted, you're playing top players every match with a group of randoms. People who say find a group first look around, there are only a few people in the big picture view playing this game still. Bungie will need to adjust to its new reality. To fix the portal, stop forcing 10 neg mods to 1 pos; that is a crap positive mod. When this came out, and the grapple mod was fun to use, you should have grown from that, not nerfed it. With player pops so low, Bungie needs to adjust the gameplay to fit it, or it is going to continue to drop. They will see a bump post Ren launch and not change anything, then a month later hard drop off after the Dung comes out, and then they will sit there scratching their heads going I don't know what happened, but we are listening.

I'm 550 and lately it seems I am doing a bit less damage. Pointless power grind to a number that means nothing. Power deltas. Limited revives. Locked loadouts. Constantly teleporting overpowered enemies with elemental shields, shield, then health. Constantly re-spawning enemies. No damage falloff from enemies so you get melted instantly from halfway across the map. None of these issues have or will be addressed. I went to do some of the Kepler post campaign missions on Mythic. Minus 40 power delta ?? .. Why, just why ??? .. This is stupid. But hey everyone. Light Sabres. And Star Wars. I give Renegades until January before everyone has moved on. I bet the campaign has power deltas on it. You know they can't help themselves.

Build issue

Even Bungie’s new d2 lead has said that the portal was poorly implemented and has failed. My guess is that if it doesn’t work out through renegades, there’s a non-zero chance they’ll just scrap it

I could not agree more, it felt like the portals where buffed this week, unable to get past games as a group that we could last week. Only benefit to grinding portal is to get higher ranking gear in hopes of getting to a level you can play and feel like you can survive and have some fun, but as soon as you get there they shift the game against you. It’s not like difficulties were notched up a little but notched up 10x. Right now I think Bungie’s end game is to make the game so unplayable, everyone leaves and the can drop destiny. I cannot image that the managing group is so inept that they think the current play is enjoyable for most, maybe for a select elite group of players who have games the nuance of the game, right settings, right armor, correct guns. I think most people don’t have the time to invest to figure all that crud out and just want to play. My foots out the door on this game, and I really enjoyed the early years.

Fireteam Ops have been in a bad state this whole season, I've barely touched them because it seems like, at every level, their difficulty is over-tuned. Now that I'm at Ultimate I'm really struggling to hold my own, and find myself preferring Solo Ops because even at Ultimate level they're just so much faster and easier to do. On paper Fireteam Ops should be harder than Solo Ops, if only for the fact that we've got three players instead of one, in practice it seems like they've more than tripled the difficulty. I don't know if it's a skill issue or not, I can do Ultimate Solo Ops pretty much just fine, but Fireteam Ops is, as OP said, punishing, I don't enjoy Ultimate Fireteam Ops very much.

[quote]Do you think anyone finds it fun to grind an extremely punishing playlist that basically rewards the same loot that they could go into anything else to get. Such as today at reset cabal's watch November 29th. For the match made ultimate you really want us to go into cabal watch with deadly void deadly solar and grounded. And the only buff you're giving us is the trash tier carousel of pain. This is why the portal system sucks. These are just bland rehashed missions and strikes just made to continuously grind through to try to get some gear this is not end game stuff You're not doing these activities for like a pinnacle sought after thing like the old grandmaster night falls used to be with adept weapons and everything it's like Yes you can get tier five gear but you could get this tier 5 gear in a much easier solo ops playlist. So why do you think anyone would find it enjoyable to want to submit themselves to that kind of pain for nothing this is a card that would have been ran for call to arms to try to get a peak score to earn special things for the event not something to get a smokejumper helmet. Do you really think anyone will enjoy playing this activity where the second they walk over a dip in the ground where they're slightly in the air they're going to get instantly melted between the deadly threats and the grounded. And then going in with matchmaking with limited amount of lives where if somebody's not capable of handling that high end difficulty they're just going to die and then sit there waiting because there's no revive tokens to bring them back and then if there is a good player in there that's trying to carry through it they get one mistake and get taken out and all the work they put in just gets reset to the beginning. I thought the point of the portal system is supposed to be if people want the difficult content they can set it up to make it punishing for them if they're that masochist they can give themselves the match game the grounded the ammo famine the Extinction revives they can do all that and they can make it miserable if that's what gets their rocks off. But when it comes to your matchmade activities where it's going to be the most broad appeal of people coming into it why on earth you make it that punishing You knew this even with nightfalls before you made the regular nightfalls fairly tame and then when you went into the harder difficulty grandmaster and master you didn't get matchmaking because you knew the modifiers were that much more difficult that the average people just coming in there would have a hard time doing. And why are you always so stingy on the player buffs where you're lucky to get anything to help you in most of the time they're crappy ones like oh stunning emote nobody wants stunning emote You could take that out of the portal and nobody would even notice it's gone carousel of pain worthless give us surges there should always be at least one surge on top of another buff say like arc surge and brawler solar surge and grenadier Good stuff to help us especially if you're going to use asinine negative modifiers like you do. It's mind-boggling looking back at the old nightfall system You gave so much more help to the players then for Pinnacle weekly events than you give for people doing mundane daily grind stuff now.[/quote] It's definitely overboard on the negative modifiers no doubt about it. And again the modifiers just make it down right unenjoyable

Word, especially revives and timers. Make pinnacles fun again.

I think the modifiers are definitely RNG for the playlists nowadays... Long ago I'm sure they were curated and with they're being more bad modifiers than good.... odds will never be in our favor....

Agree, went into core three time today and every single time the teams wiped are were returned to orbit. We absolutely obliterated everything in our path up until the last end boss.

This is one of the best examples of how the portal ruined the game. Very few things are matchmade, and with the tiers of the activities and the associated absurd modifiers, you’re forced to play the few predetermined matchmade activities they have even though the whole point of the portal was “play the way you want to play”

Much better to use the customize options.