Destiny 2 - I don't have time to explain Bungie's MMO shooter 2.0

Agreed. I like nightfalls being hard, but the no regen health thing is mostly just a hassle. I think part of the fun of Destiny is gauging just how far you can stretch your red bar, and no health regen just messes up all that tension of how long you can dps.

Goodbye Glimmer.

First I need to figure out what I’m actually trying to accomplish.

I had enough rare mods to convert to purples that I could fill in the two slots where I didn’t have any mods at all now, but before I start burning glimmer in the hopes of RNGing my way to specific mods, I guess I need to learn what the effective combinations are.

My problem with the nightfalls isn’t that they are too hard, but the time limit spectrum is not the type of difficulty I enjoy.

I’m not interested in speed runs. Like, at all.

Making the enemies more deadly, like in destiny 1? That’s totally cool. But I want to fight through at my own pace.

Seems likely the lesson they took from Destiny 1 is that given enough time, players will find a way to cheese through any Nightfall. Which is a pretty reasonable lesson. I don’t like the time limits either, but I’m not sure where the middle ground is.

Maybe a more generous time limit with a time penalty for dying, promoting more cautious play?

Which then leads to the question:
Who gives a fuck if players find a way to cheese through pve content?

Don’t you want the players to eventually succeed? I suppose it could make it mean more if the possibility of failure is much higher.

All good questions that I don’t have answers for, but historically, the most charitable stance I could imagine from Bungie to both questions would be “Well, it’s complicated…”

I’m not supporting it, I’m just saying I see exactly how we got to this point. Bungie is pretty aggressive about protecting the way they want you to play in certain regards, whether it’s PvE or not.

How else will they sell you timer boosts and other gewgaws later?

Do you remember the Strike in Destiny 1 where you could hide underneath the platform? At first I didn’t want to do it, because who wants to cheese their way through a fight like that, right? But then you realize just how many god damn hit points that guy has, and how long you would have to dodge around and kill stupid minions, and you go: Ok, what was the option to cheese my way through this again?

I shudder to think of how ridiculous that fight would be without cheesing.

I don’t think I knew that trick. Which strike was this?

The thing that appeals to me about the time limit is that there is a failure condition. I could take or leave the speedrun aspect in itself, but I like having to work out a strategy over several runs. It’s fun to discuss what went wrong after a failed run - what part did we blow too much time on, which parts can we try to just run through, how do we most effectively extend the time limit without wasting too much of it? Without that hard fail state, you miss out on that stuff by being able to just bang your head against the wall on the hard parts over and over until you succeed. The fact that a run won’t take more than 15 minutes means it’s not a big deal to fail a few times.

Most of them. No seriously, off the top of my head I know of at least two. Eventually the strikes were no big deal even without the cheese as you leveled up, but it absolutely shifted the requirements for the strikes down the power spectrum. I remember soloing the nightfalls for a long stretch of the game between getting my character up to a high enough level, finding an Icebreaker, and before they took out some of the cheesiest hiding spots.

I didn’t know it was possible on any of the others like Wholly Shmidt implies, but the one that was pretty obvious was one against a Fallen enemy. It was like a God or something that we were resurrecting, it looked like a many-armed Shiva or something. It was fun to fight for a while, but the minions kept respawning and the boss ran around attacking you, and even with 3 of us shooting headshots for a long time, it just lasted forever and ever and ever. But the fight took place next to like a helicopter landing pad thingie, and you could climb underneath it, and the boss couldn’t get to you down there, since his melee attacks couldn’t get to you, and his ranged attacks mostly got blocked by the railing underneath the helipad.

Think I know the one you mean. I didn’t know you could get underneath that platform, or any other strikes.

You could cheese most strikes in original Destiny. There was the one where you snipe the Hydra from above where it can’t hit you. It spawned a Minotaur every minute up there but it was easy to deal with. The big ogre could be cheesed from the room before his chamber, just pop out and fire away then walk back, the minions never entered that room.

I’ve done every nightfall so far and honestly I think the time limit works way better than the old hit point sponge/cheese system from Destiny one. The strike design definitely took it into account as well and they work well. This weeks no health thing is annoying, but outside that I like the new nightfalls.

Even the no health thing is fine as long as you know it’s there, and spec for it.

The dodgy part is the boss that seems to disappear for seemingly random amounts of time. That + a time limit is a frustrating combo. (But time limits in general seem like the right solution. This isn’t really what one would think of as speedrunning, it’s more of a “slow is smooth, smooth is fast” kind of thing).

Destiny 1 had a failure condition too. It was called wiping. If everyone died, you lost.

And really, the only thing that broke that was the ability of warlocks to self Rez. But since that’s gone, I think it’d be ok in destiny 2.