Starting from the simple cool stuff:
See what I have there? It’s the tutorial gun from Destiny 1, that is now part of the tutorial mission in Destiny 2.
What most people might not realize is that due to the current changes to the systems in the game, the tutorial gun is now close to the BEST GUN in the game.
All legacy content up to a week ago, including all story content, main game, Osiris, Warmind and Forsaken is content that was built for a power level well below 750. This means no upgrade counts against that content. So the tutorial gun becomes automatically a monster of a weapon to mow down enemies at an insane speed, for ALL content excluding endgame. The way damage is calculated now makes this gun counter intuitively great.
I always thought the Khvostov was the best gun in Destiny. It’s the only one that has that old school WW2 look in pitch black. The only gun that looks vaguely real. All other stuff is neon colored fancy sci-fi stuff that usually either looks like a toy, or really kitsch.
The Khvostov shoots, handles, sounds and looks BETTER than everything else.
And because of how the game works now, not only it becomes something you can actually use, but it’s actually ideal for all content, with zero mechanical reasons to upgrade.
There were only two problems to this. One is that you only obtain it by creating a brand new character, so that you can play the new tutorial. Turns out this is false: EVERYONE can grab the Khvostov from the weapon collections. So all characters can grab and use it as soon they want.
The other problem is that it’s a white weapon that cannot be upgraded. So I thought it was viable only for the content up to 750, so that for example for Shadowkeep and future content you still had to swap it for something newer. This is also false: the power level of the weapon in the collections grows with your character (it stays just 20 power behind). So you can re-acquire it every time you want to have it at higher power levels, making it ideal for ALL current AND future content (outside of raids, power level will cap at 941, but it can be pushed EVEN HIGHER with the artifact, so you could ideally use it even in raids if you really wanted).
The tutorial gun works efficiently for ALL the content in the game. I’m not joking. And this becomes my main gun from this point onward. I’m never going to replace it. Bungie breaks the game, I play it broken. Fight me.
Now something more complex…
I was ranting above because with the forced level up to 750 power level automatically makes all legacy content too easy, and so not fun to play.
…But then I noticed that I never cleared out the inventory on my main character. So I have some pieces of armor that have… zero power level.
This means that by equipping these underpowered pieces I can go BELOW 750 even in the current system. Essentially de-leveling my character under the requirement, potentially making all legacy story content challenging and fun to play again!
The problem with this is that I’m easily one of the very few that for whatever reason has these old pieces at zero power still in the inventory. And it’s probable that they can’t be acquired anymore.
But this is false:
I’m not sure, but this should work on every account/every class.
In the collections they left a SINGLE piece of armor, the only piece of equipment in the WHOLE game, that wasn’t upgraded to 750. It stays instead at 21.
This means that EVERYONE can use that single piece as a sort of “hack” to effectively de-level their character to do the legacy content.
It can be done!
If you have that piece at 21, and all other slots to 750 (the way every new character starts the game), then the total resulting power is 658. Since all content now scales to 750, this means being 92 levels UNDER requirement. Pretty much when enemies begin to scale.
Meaning that by then upgrading other slots above 750, while keeping the single slot at 21, you can cherry pick your power level precisely within that whole range. It’s fantastic because now there’s a practical way to manually tune the difficulty of the game to whatever you want. Just by nudging your power level up and down that scale as you see fit.
If for example you have all other slots to 850, the total becomes 746, that is essentially close to the default 750.
…Sadly all this doesn’t work equally well in practice, from my initial testing.
I tried to play the first mission in Warmind, loading up my brand new Khvostov at 750, and a total power level of 658, but all the enemies in the first room were invulnerable. So I tried to load up some better stuff, but since I didn’t progress very far I was only able to reach a power level of 662. That’s in theory 88 levels below content, but the enemies were still completely invulnerable. And this is weird. The new system should scale to a maximum of 100 levels.
Then I tried Forsaken, enemies still invulnerable.
But then I tried both Osiris and the public zone on the Earth, and even at the lower power level of 658 the enemies were not only now killable, but they were dying just as usual.
My suspicion is that the system isn’t so well designed, and that enemies go from downright invulnerable to easy to kill without any middle ground. So it’s possible that all this manual tweaking doesn’t offer much of a concrete mileage to fix the difficulty.
Tomorrow I’ll try to research this a bit better. I need paradoxically to have higher level items from Shadowkeep to see if I can find the exact point where enemies go from invulnerable to killable, in Warmind. And see if in Osiris I can find the point where they go from killable to unkillable. But to do this I instead go lower than 658, and I can only do this with the one character that has armor with zero power level. (it’s still not enough, the minimum I can go is 656)
The problem is that if the scaling is so horrid as how it appears, you have to be as close as possible to the lowest floor, and that means that you can play three rooms with enemies easy to kill, and then find another room where enemies suddenly become invulnerable to damage.
In any case… there might be at least a tiny bit of margin to make all that legacy content challenging and fun to play. Maybe.
