The subject of power creep and challenge has been an intense one in conversations surrounding Destiny 2 over the past year. The 3.0 rework for the Light subclasses, new buildcrafting options, and powerful weapon perks have made our Guardians feel stronger than they ever have before. But the game hasn’t been able to keep up with this incremental increase in strength.
That’s changing in Lightfall. Bungie previously announced that it would be “bringing challenge back” to Destiny 2 in the upcoming expansion, and a new blog post released today went into in-depth detail about just how the developer plans to do that.
Strikes were the first activity on the agenda. Despite Grandmaster Nightfalls continuing to provide some of the most challenging combat experiences in Destiny right now, lower difficulties and the general Vanguard playlist have been lackluster when it comes to providing an engaging challenge.
“Philosophically, we are attempting to bring the difficulty levels of Legend closer to the popular Legendary Campaign experience, and the Master experience closer to day-one raids,” the team explained at the top of the post. Parity in the difficulty levels has long been a requested feature, with many players citing a lack of activities that can serve as proper preparation for the contest mode modifiers placed on day-one raids.
Everything changing with Nightfalls (and everything not)
Strikes will get a wholesale update to Power caps and rotating modifiers so that these activities are able to provide a more natural path of skill growth for all types of players. As a part of this overhaul, difficulty options for Nightfalls will look a little different.
- Adept difficulty is being removed.
- Hero difficulty now becomes available when players reach the soft Power cap.
- Legend and Master difficulty now becomes available at the hard Power cap.
The enemy combatants in every available difficulty will also be tougher, thanks to the introduction of Power level disadvantages that provide a “better challenge curve” through each successive tier of challenge.
- Hero difficulty: -5 Power levels
- Legend difficulty: -15 Power levels
- Master difficulty: -20 Power levels
- Grandmaster difficulty: -25 Power levels
With the current suite of modifiers present in these activities, however, this dramatic shift in how powerful a Guardian can be could make them inaccessibly challenging to some players. To compensate, Bungie is bringing a variety of changes to strike modifiers in Lightfall as well. Some of these changes—such as the removal of Match Game—were mentioned when the difficulty updates were first teased, but the developers went into far more extensive detail.
Most notable is the transformation of Burns into two distinct categories: Surges and Threats.
Surges are an empowering modifier, increasing a player’s elemental damage by 25 percent if it matches the current Surge. The damage of Kinetic weapons can also be increased by the same amount if the player uses a matching subclass to the current Surge available. By comparison, Threats will increase the elemental damage received from enemies by 25 percent and the type of Threat will change based on the current Nightfall.
On top of that, Bungie is introducing a new mechanic to the activity called Overcharge. Overcharged weapons deal 25 percent more damage, and what weapons get this bonus is decided through two means. Weapons currently featured as Champion counters in the Seasonal Artifact, as well as certain weapons “set per activity” will get the Overcharge bonus to promote their use.
These new methods of dramatically improving your damage output as a player mean that enemies have also been toughened up across the board. Everything from the rank-and-file combatants to more powerful foes is becoming harder to stagger and get an increase to their health, although the severity of the effects is weaker or stronger based on their categorization.
What isn’t changing is that equipment locks will remain in place for all difficulties above Hero. Modifiers that affect enemy types or fireteam coordination, such as Fire Pit and Togetherness, will also remain part of the experience. Some players theorized that Champions could be on the way out with difficulty getting a more universal rework, but Bungie says that the enemy type’s availability remains the same for now.
Vanguard Ops are getting love (and scoring) too
“Ritual activities are at the core of the Destiny 2 experience,” the blog reads. “That’s why we have plans to improve on these familiar playlists that we all cherish so much.”
Gambit and the Crucible avoid the spotlight this time around, but Bungie lists a plethora of changes coming to the Vanguard playlist in Lightfall. Whether it’s the previously announced updates to old strikes or the reintroduction of strike scoring, there’s an update here to everyone’s taste to make the Vanguard playlist feel a little less stagnant.
- Lake of Shadows and Arms Dealer are being updated with new enemies, new encounters, new mechanics, and new objectives.
- Exodus Crash and The Inverted Spire, two other classic strikes, are getting their presence in the playlist dramatically reduced until they receive a similar update.
- PsiOps Battlegrounds and Heist Battlegrounds will become part of the Vanguard Ops playlist.
- The playlist is now Power Disabled, so players will no longer be able to have a Power advantage over enemies.
- Scoring is being added to the Vanguard Ops playlist, just like Nightfalls, and a better final score means a better multiplier for your earned Vanguard reputation.
- Weekly Vanguard challenges are being updated to reflect the introduction of Surges and Threats.
Every PvE activity is getting an update
Strikes are getting the most love with this set of updates, but they aren’t the only activity affected by the changes to difficulty getting introduced. Lost Sectors, Empire Hunts, Campaign weekly missions, Dares of Eternity, and Wellspring are all going to use Overcharge, Surges, and Threats as well to varying degrees. The seasonal Battlegrounds playlist coming with Season of Defiance will also feature the same -5 Power level disadvantage that Heist Battlegrounds did in Season of the Seraph.
Most exciting of all on the topic of the Lost Sectors is that Bungie is also going to be analyzing Exotic drop rates during the next season. Through monitoring both completions and drops, they hope to build a better picture of the current state of higher-difficulty Lost Sectors and deduce if Exotic Engrams should drop at a higher rate. They also teased that new pathways to unlocking Lightfall’s Exotic gear will be available next season, but avoided spilling any of the details.
“As we said in the Lightfall and the Year Ahead article, all the variety in the world would not matter if the content itself was not engaging and interesting,” the team admitted. “In other words, there’s no substitute for a good challenge. With all these changes coming to activities, we hope we’re able to reignite the excitement for some of our favorite content in the game.”
Destiny 2’s Lightfall expansion and its associated improvements to difficulty are now only a week away, arriving on Feb. 28.
