Howdy, longtime destiny and MMO player here. After sitting with Edge of Fate, I wanted to come and provide feedback on various aspects of the game. This may be late for upcoming expansions, but I felt it was dishonest to do so until Bungie provided the bulk of their expansion content with such drastic changes. I can only speak for myself, and I’m no developer, but I do hope some of this resonates with players. More importantly I hope the D2 Team sees this and may consider some of it in the future. In this post I want to discuss the portal, the power grind, and thoughts on the tiered loot system. I will make another post about some other aspects I think are worth talking about. The Portal. In concept I really like the portal, and with current implementation I think the core system is fine. Having different categories of content based on the kind of player you are is clearly shown, and have variety within each one. Notable the Solo Ops playlist does feel “newer” despite it largely being repurposed patrol zones and lost sectors. However we are missing raids within this portal, which deeply should be here, dungeons being added showed a way it could be implemented here and should be a priority. But this is “more destiny”, and while destiny is still a good game this has not changed how I interact with the game. It’s the same strikes, the same battlegrounds, the same exotic missions, and it has fatigued me. My hope with the portal was that because it wasn’t attached to any planet destination that we would see the return of content that has been vaulted. A Garden World, Infested Core, Menagerie Wings, could have been just a few of some of the old content that could have been brought forward with some more enemies and spawns. This for me is the biggest letdown of this system and seems like an obvious choice, I’m less interested in running episodic content we just had last year than I am content that has been vaulted. Of course, brand new content would be better, but for free updates this could add a refreshing splash of variety. Bungie could even set a rotation per season to keep less desired content out. Running Hypernet Current for the 200th times doesn’t really inspire me. I’ll touch on the tiers and power later, but let’s address the gear within the portal. At base having gear specific to the portal is not bad. I like that Pinnacle Ops has its own weapons and armor, and that Crucible has its gear, and solo/fireteam its gear. But already this is far too little and already reskins. It reminds me heavily of when we began to only get paint jobs on the vanguard/crucible/gambit which felt dishonest with how talented the design team can be with gear. With the portal being front and center the gear needs to be enticing to chase. I think each section of the portal needs its own dedicated drops that are unique from one another. Solo Ops, Fireteam Ops, Crucible, Pinnacle and eventual Dungeon/Raid drops all need a couple armor sets and weapons to get people excited. They need to be unique from one another so that when you see someone in a red winged set of armor you know they enjoy pvp, or when then bushido set shows up they like pinnacle, the gear right now is so similar and has so much overlap that once you apply a shader, its hard to even tell where it came from. The weapons we have gotten definitely have found a place within loadouts but because of the tier system it feels incredibly limited even if in reality it isn’t. it simply “feels bad” to not use the new gear and not have new substitutes for old weapons. This can be remedied in time, but we need a much healthier flow of gear to keep people in the portal. This brings me to the power grind. I want to contextualize this section from an MMO perspective. “Power Level” to me has always just been “Item Level” from something like FF14 or WOW. In these MMOs upon an expansion launching a certain Item Level is the maximum you can obtain, usually surpassing what the minimum level to do the hardest content is. As more patches and content is released this number goes up, as the new content requires a higher level to enter, and rewards higher level gear. Then when a new expansion comes out, even if you were the maximum level at the end of the prior, your gear becomes completely obsolete a few levels in, in favor of the new gear. Typically speaking, there is a weekly lockout on certain activities in these games that sets a hard cap on how much gear/power you can obtain in a given week. This leads to the routine of doing weeklies until you’re out of them and you must wait till next week to gain more item level. It also takes a couple weeks to a month or two to reach this maximum item level. I bring this up because this IS how bungie has structured the game in the past. We had weekly rituals/challenges/pathfinders that gave us powerful drops and had a finite amount of them per week. This led to a maximum power level you could gain in a single week. It took myself around 3-6 weeks to reach the new max level when the level was raised. Bungie has changed this! Now power is NOT capped per week. You can grind it out as much or little as you like, doing exactly what it is you want to do. I do not play pvp much if at all, so jumping into pvp with the old system felt like a chore, now I no longer have to do that. To compensate the power you gain per engram is much lower usually being +1 to +3. I did NOT do the EoF campaign before starting this grind. I grinded from LV10 to LV350 before starting the EoF campaign. It took about 2.5 weeks of playing a few hours a night focusing on doing just the power grind. Given that time frame it would take about the same amount of time to get to 400 as it did with the previous system, the only difference is now you are in charge of setting that pace you want. The grind from 400 to 450 is MUCH longer and much less communicated as to how you are supposed to go about it, and is the one area I would like to see more steady progression from this system. It teaches you to run within a certain reward range (usually B+) to get to 400 then after that its a lot less clear how to progress. This does need to change as I think it should also be steady like the former. So in reality the “power grind” is the same as it was in the past, the only difference is that now you are in control of the time it takes. When players spend 18hrs a day grinding it feels exhausting because Bungie is not limiting them to a weekly cadence. This is self-inflicted, and is not, in my opinion, a fault of the system but a fault of miscommunication and community perception. The other aspect to this is what power does for the players. Something that launched with EoF was power actually feeling impactful. When you started interacting with the portal, you were at a higher delta -40 -30 -20 etc. Eventually you would catch up to the delta you had set and then surpass it before needing to reset the delta again. This felt impactful to me because content that started out tough became easier and made me feel powerful giving purpose to leveling. The goal being that I could eventually become “on level” with the hardest content through determination and time investment. Bungie has recently announced that portal will be set with a delta permanently. I think this is a bad change, because then leveling doesn’t have as much of an impact to the player. If I play enough I should be able to run Ultimate level content with ease because that is the fruits of my labor. Hopefully this helps the dev team plan a path forward, hoping to have more feedback soon