I leveled an alt from 9 to 18 over a weekend, post expansion. I did all the story missions on normal, and supplemented the exp grind with bounties and patrols. Wasn’t too much of a problem. 18-20 was a bit more of a slog, but really, bounties are your friend here. The amount of exp you get from doing a full slate of bounties is pretty immense.
Personally, I find doing anything on hard when grinding lvls counter productive. Just breeze through the story missions the first go 'round on easy, just to get them done, and to unlock the planets for patrols/bounties. The game doesn’t really begin until you get to 20 anyway. At that point you’ll have plenty of time to do the challenging missions/strikes.
Try not to focus so much on what’s fun at this point, because really, grinding levels is what it is, a necessary evil. That said, if you can find a pal to do bounties/patrols with, you’ll enjoy the whole thing a lot more.
In other news, had my first crota kill last night. Got the Black Hammer, which is pretty badass. The perks on that sucker (landing three precision shots refills the clip) make for some fun encounters. I also nabbed the Four Horsemen from the first chest, which is kind of hilarious.
Then to finish off the night, I got a junk purp gun from the nightfall, and then later running roc strikes, my pal scored a Suros Regime. Ahhh destiny…
Reading this just kills me. Because it didn’t used to be this way. I never had to “grind levels” in pre-expansion Destiny. And now it’s a necessarily evil. Each mission on Hard was really well balanced as you made your way through the game.
Check out my comments from September and October in this thread:
I would definitely NOT be saying all those things about Destiny if I’d picked up the game now, post-expansion, like Murbella did.
I turned the mission down to normal, bringing it to level 8 instead of 12. This turned it pretty easy. As a level 10 doing it (or any mission) on hard, i’d normally take a couple shots and duck behind cover to recover my health which was now at 30% from massed enemy fire. On normal i just had to duck back to recharge twice during the whole level and otherwise could play super aggressively.
I wish there was something between normal and hard. +2 levels seems like it is too high but -2 seems like it is too low. Maybe that i’m over the level of the mission even though i haven’t done many patrol missions is due to playing previous missions on hard though. Still, that is a pretty large level range.
Beyond that, at least at my level, the rewards of upping the difficulty to hard do not seem worth it after seeing the difference in time/difficulty.
garin
1664
I don’t think the expansion changed anything in the pre-20 game. The balance seems the same to me.
I leveled my first alt by doing every story mission on Hard (pre-expansion). It’s definitely not worth it unless you’re interested in the challenge. A couple of things to bear in mind:
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Setting the mission to Hard doesn’t only increase the level, it also adds the Heroic modifier. This means you’ll see a lot more ‘yellow’ enemies and things are more difficult in general.
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The level of missions is fixed. You can tune your difficulty by doing other activities to increase your level. Heroic at 2 levels higher is usually pretty tough, and a lot of enemies do become bullet sponges.
Yeah, I’m still pretty fuzzy on the math, but if you’re the same level as an enemy, you’re doing 100% of your damage when you shoot them. If you’re one level below your target, you’re doing about 68% of that, if you’re two levels it drops to something like 55%, three levels below is 45%. Those are pretty big handicaps. I have no idea how the weapon “level” figures in, but that can work against you too.
So anyway, if you’re facing enemies two levels above you, it’s probably more frustrating than it’s worth in any situation except raids or team situations.
Moore
1666
It isnt quite right, but my approach to attack stats on guns is to drop the last digit and consider the remaining attack # the true ‘level’ of the gun. Seems to make sense, I have a 144 damage L10 handgun that suits me fine to level 15-16 when leveling alts (though it also has high impact, which affect crits I believe, which is the only way to use handcannons)
Timex
1667
I would definitely NOT be saying all those things about Destiny if I’d picked up the game now, post-expansion, like Murbella did.
What do you think changed? Because as far as I know, the expansion pack didn’t really change anything at all in terms of doing all the original content.
Honestly, for a new player, they will actually reach the same level as a long time player in a shorter amount of time that the long time player had to commit, since once they get to the point where they’re buying things like vendor gear, it’ll already be light level 33, instead of 30. Likewise, the legendary and exotic weapons you find are already gonna be 331 atk max, and not need to be upgraded.
Thongsy
1668
Yea, I don’t feel they changed anything in the pre-20 content at all. I think it’s just the grind of leveling up a second or third character. It was fun the first time through, figuring things out and exploring new areas and enemies. But the second, third time it just becomes a chore to play through.
Kadath
1669
First week where I finally feel ‘caught up’. Got drops in Crota so that now all 3 of my characters can hit 32 if I were to get enough radiant shards, and did 2 of 3 nightfalls so far and got loot that was immediately exotic sharded because I already have em. Gjallarhorn still eludes me but daaaaaaamn is Icebreaker fun to use. Even if I did have Gj I think I’d want IB/Hunger over BlackHammer/Gj combo most of the time, and I still don’t have any hammers. Doing Crota himself hopefully a few times tonight, fingers crossed on that.
Timex
1670
I have managed to get multiples of the same armor piece from the Crota raid, on multiple of my characters… which kind of conflicts with Bungie’s suggestion that they had made the loot system smarter based on what you had already found.
Hell, last night my Titan got a second pair of boots, which were identical to the boots he was wearing at the time he received them.
Teiman
1671
I have already two characters at 32.
What I did, was farm Eris reputation to 4. I saved all my armour whatisname and energy whatisname. As soon I dinged 4 with eris, I used all my armour whatisname. This got me one character to 32. Then I converted all weapon whatisname into armour whatisname, then levelup other character to 32. I still have some extra shards.
What I think the idea of this new system is that whatever you get, it will help you level to 32.
You can loot:
a - A raid weapon.
b - armour whatisname.
c - weapon whatisname.
With Eris rep level 4.
a - Break the weapon into energy. Turn the energy into armour. Levelup armour to 32.
b- Levelup armour to 32.
c- Turn the energy into armour. Levelup armour to 32.
All paths end with you dinging level 32. Maybe getting 3 armour whateverisname is better than a raid weapon (that you turn into 2 whatisname). But you still get to level 32.
Once you are 32. You may want to levelup your raid weapons.
You can loot:
a - A raid weapon.
b - armour whatisname.
c - weapon whatisname.
With Eris rep level 4.
a - Break the weapon into energy. Levelup weapon.
b - Turn the armour shard into energy. Levelup weapon
c - Levelup weapon.
So this intelligent system allow to always progress your armour/weapons no matter what you loot.
Yeah, now that I have IB my standard loadout is Fatebringer/IB/Hezen Vengeance. I just switch out to the Gjallarhorn (or damage-appropriate-primaries like VoC and AE) on bosses.
Ruin Wings (find more heavy ammo, and heavy ammo pickups hold more ammo) on my Titan might prompt me to use Gjallarhorn more often, but I haven’t done enough with the Titan yet to figure out if it’s worth it.
Kadath
1673
Check your postmaster folks, the holiday legendary gifts are arriving from Bungie. Redditors are reporting getting a single legendary gun with random rolled perks. Many of them seem to have Firefly so even if you don’t see it on the splash page of your weapon check ALL the perks before you disassemble it, it could have some really neat things you are missing.
I’m curious if I am going to get a package on both PS4 and XB1…
They did change it. The level difference between Normal and the Hard mission used to be 2 levels, now it’s 4 levels.
On the Nightfall last night I got Hawkmoon, and merryprankster got the Icebreaker. Pretty sweet loot. Except our third fireteam member Smorts, who got 10 Strange Coins.
Moore
1676
No bullshit, I’d say 75% of my drops are drops I’ve gotten before. Multiple engrams of the same type ALWAYS (for me) decode to just a batch of the same exact item. So 5 blue boot engrams? 5 of the same exact boots. This is everytime, but drops from mission completion etc… are easily at least 75% repeats.
I think it is because there just is not much loot, which is super dumb for a loot based game, especially if your game has this many similarities to borderlands, I mean, I get not having a million+ guns, but there seem to be like 100 items total if that.
Add in that after 20 gear = level, and many, many characters are going to be clones by 32.
Unique legend my ass.
Timex
1677
Well, bear in mind that with everything other than exotic weapons, there are actually stat differences on “the same” item.
With armor, there are differences in the bonuses they give to your abilities.
With legendary weapons, the weapon perks can be completely different, even if the weapon is the same. For instance, I have a shadowprice which has “grows more stable the longer it’s fired” as well as “radar stays up while aiming down the sights”, which makes it a good deal better than the one you could buy from the merchant.
I got the VoG raid boots twice in one drop. Not in one run of VoG, but literally both awarded at the same time after the Templar or something. The raid gear is my least favorite aspect of the equipment/advancement system, both pre and post-expansion.
Moore
1679
I know this, and my comments all still apply*, other than maybe my ‘amount of loot’ ones if you count those as new loot.
*(the boot example? All the boots are IDENTICAL in every way. This happens all the time to me - the only workaround is to decode, say, one boot engram, then put the other ones on alts, and then obviously they tend to decode to something that character can use.)
I felt a deep pain in my soul when I read this. Good for you guys! But boy, it hurts. It hurts so much.
; )
