Destiny’s first expansion, The Dark Below, raises the game’s level cap and introduces a whole new tier of more powerful armour and weapons. It also introduces a difficult new six-player raid. The problem is those new additions have undermined the best thing the game had going up to now: the original Vault of Glass raid.
For the past couple of months, the Vault of Glass hasn’t just been the best thing about Destiny — it’s also been one of the best ways to obtain high light-level raid armour, which would allow you to gain the 120 light points needed ascend to level 30. For weeks, my raid team and I would plunge into the Vault every Tuesday night, chatting and battling Vex, rejoicing when we got armour we wanted and cursing the game when it gave us us crap we didn’t.
This week, that become largely pointless. Thanks to the new expansion, vanguard vendors in the tower are all selling armour with 33 light points, enough to take you past level 30 pretty easily, and up to level 31 should you obtain a full set. In an instant, all of the raid armour we’ve spent months obtaining in the Vault of Glass was rendered worthless. I had spent three months slaving away in the Vault hoping for raid boots, but this week I had enough marks saved up that I replaced everything but my helmet and got halfway to level 31 in about a day.
My team has of course shifted our focus to the new raid, which takes place on the Moon and is called “Crota’s End.” We haven’t completed it yet, but so far it’s been good fun, and a challenge worthy of its predecessor. It’s also easily the best thing about the expansion. (I’ll have more thoughts on The Dark Below in general on Kotaku soon, though for now I’m taking my time and want to be sure I have a complete sense of how the game has changed.) All the same, old habits die hard, and my team has gotten so good at the Vault of Glass that it’d be a bummer if we simply stopped doing it entirely.
This sort of thing often happens when an MMO-like game releases an expansion and raises its level cap. The new gear replaces the old gear, and the world keeps on turning. Destiny‘s problem, though, is that after the expansion, the Vault of Glass itself has become almost meaningless for the very high-level players for which it was designed. You can still play it, of course, but even on its higher level-30 difficulty, the gear you’ll get won’t be as good as the basic gear you can buy from vendors or earn by playing the rest of the game.
The legendary guns in the Vault of Glass top out at 300 damage, putting them behind the new, more powerful legendary guns in the expansion. The exotic guns can be upgraded, but will require a weekend visit to Xur to unlock their full potential. And most disappointing of all, the legendary raid armour that we used to covet is now worse than the stuff we can buy in the store back home. Why bother?
Obviously, this could be easily addressed with a patch. It probably will be, too — when I spoke with Bungie’s Luke Smith about the Vault of Glass back in October, he told me that it was their plan to make the Vault into something that would stand the test of time. “I think that long term,” he said, “we have a piece of great content, so [we’re asking], how can we make that timeless? How can we capture what’s good about it, put it in a bottle, and let players always come back to it and have a great time there? I don’t want to say that’s something we’re gonna solve in the next couple months, but it’s certainly something that we’re going to be looking at going forward.”
That’s promising. The possible solutions seem easy, too: Let anyone with the expansion earn higher-level legendary weapons, 33-light vanguard armour, and higher-level exotics from the Vault of Glass. Save the new 36-light armour and the new exotics for Crota’s End. Without that kind of change, we’ll all stop doing the raid, because it’s just not worth it anymore.
I asked Bungie if they’re planning a patch, but they declined to comment. Here’s hoping they patch the Vault sooner, rather than later. It would be a shame to see the game’s coolest dungeon fall by the wayside.
Comments
30 responses to “Destiny’s Vault Of Glass Needs A Patch ASAP”
The main problem with Destiny right now (imo) is the lack of content. Bringing out new content is obviously more than welcome but not if it makes older content not worth playing any more. Yes MMOs do exactly that, but Destiny isn’t a traditional MMO. Until it has hundreds of missions, strikes and more than a dozen raids, they need to keep people playing as much as possible otherwise it’ll just get stale quickly like it did (for me) after a couple of weeks of playing the vanilla game
Do you need to do the old content to survive the new content? Most MMOs keep their older content relevant through out an expansion by having players need the old contents gear to survive the new content.
Kirk mentions that in the article. You can actually just buy gear that’s better than what you can get in the Vault of Glass.
There really is no reason to do it anymore.
EDIT: I suppose it’s a decent way to get ascendant shards to level up the gear.
My thought on Video games like Destiny that live and die on the amount of players playing and creating their own community is that it’s a fine line between having not enough to do and too much.
MMO’s rely on a critical mass of players to be playing to ensure a smooth running game, how many times have you logged on to your favourite game and been despondent when less and less people are in multiplayer lobbies. Destiny could be anything, but it is much more fun when you are doing a ‘public event’ when there are other people joining in and walking around in the tower is more interesting when there’s other people there too and not just a bunch of NPC’s. My fear of creating a lot of choice will mean players are really spread thin and might not bump into each other, thus making it feel lonely. I felt like this when I came to the party late for Star Wars the Old Republic when I started playing, I didn’t feel like I was seeing many people when I was playing.
Agreed on your point about making old content unusable, VoG I found really fun and it’s a shame less and less folks will do it now because it is a lot of fun to do with other people.
That’s a fair point, but if there’s lots of missions in the same areas you’d still get people around you running off to do their own thing or combining with you for a public event but when they go into a no respawn zone they disappear like what happens now.
I think if they add in lots of planets or different maps on the existing worlds then there might be a danger of spreading too many people too wide but I think for now there’s a good balance of map size and people running around. They just need to flesh out each map with more to do I think
That’s an awesome idea, more missions/public events in places that exist already would be good like in the Jovian complex near the loot cave *tear*.
Sigh…. Me and my mates spent 2 months trying to get to level 30 to no avail. We did it every week and would give us nothing but shards. I have got VoC and the chest Armour and about 10 white shaders, that is what i have to show for 8 weeks of raiding. No, with this news i might just leave destiny for a year or 2 till it has some fucking content and a full story. A real shame.
Yeah, it seems to send the message that we shouldn’t bother with the new raid. Just save all your marks/commendations for the next expansion, and you’ll be able to buy gear that goes up to 40 light (or whatever).
Yeah, that’s how i read it.
Man I hear you… after a hell of a lot of grinding in both the strikes and VoC, I still didn’t have an armour set that got me to level 30. I do have 58 shards though 🙁
So for a pitiful level 25 player (thanks to some quick leveling up, that seems to have occurred because of the DLC’s release and getting unexpected packages sent) the Vault of Glass should still help me level up by the time I get around to being able to do it? 300 Damage weapons seem exciting to me, since I’ve had the best weapons I can find topping out at 240 damage.
Basically, is this only a concern for the high level players? Or does it apply to more “casual” players(LoL, I’ve still put shitloads of hours into this game) like myself as well? Cause I’ve certainly found that every time I check vendors I’m still miles away from being able to buy anything interesting cause I don’t have enough vanguard/crucible/crotas bane/whatever else special currency is required to buy anything decent.
You can get 100 vangaurd/crucible marks each week (and it’s not that hard to max them if you play a lot), and everything from the vendors cost 75 marks, except the helmets, which are 120.
Some of the items also require a commendation now, but it’s still much easier to buy the gear than to hope you get something from the raid (I don’t know if the gear drop rates are better now, but they were pretty terrible before).
I guess I’ll have to have another look to see if I’ve finally got enough stuff to get anything. Me and my partner often play a few times a week (although the weeks before the DLC came out she was away) but usually it’s strike playlists or doing bounties. Maybe we should try some more heroic strikes? Don’t do them that often because I’m not too fond of getting slaughtered over and over again and often it’s just the 2 of us.
@karachiking is right, getting marks is the best way to do it I think, the Weekly Heroic is great to save up for an Exotic piece of armor which can assist your play-style and help level up your light as well.
I would suggest getting both Vanguard and Crucible Marks, so you can buy two pieces of armor pretty much straight up once you get to 100 marks each (maybe even three pieces if you have enough Strange coins!).
Fair enough, we should probably do more of the weekly heroic strikes. We have been playing a fair bit of crucible (and getting slaughtered a bit, but it does make the kills all the sweeter, heheh) so will have to check in at the tower and see if we can get anything.
Pretty much, I got a legendary pair of boots from a Vangaurd package after the new patch/DLC (didnt buy the content but still can get the armour etc.) for a 22 Warlock I have. Just equipping those boots jumped it to 24, and they were just low level legendaries with just defence upgrades and no other modifiers.
Dang I only got rare items. The light levels on them were still higher than anything I had, and with a bit of playing and upgrading the armour I jumped about 2 levels in a night of playing, which was quite nice.
Well VoG can still be used as a way to obtain shards and energies which you may or may not need. Also im sure theres still a few people wanting to get the vex mythoclas as its max damage was raised from 300 in recent patches.
Every time a patch come out in Destiny I feel all my time spent playing it has been a waste.
Got this wicked powerful weapon? Pfftt… not anymore, we nerf it. Save up all the ascendant shards and energy? Pfftt… sorry, they no longer can be used to upgrad exotic weapon. Spent hours and hours on raid to obtain the best gear? Pfftt… they no longer are the best gear.
The whole experience just feels like a waste of time.
Well… that’s probably because it is a ‘waste of time’. But that’s sort of the norm. (And it’s worth arguing that if you enjoy the time you spend, it’s only spent – not wasted.)
Take things like WoW, with new content drops always putting out something better, shifting the goal-posts. They’ve been doing that for ten years, now. New expansions equals obsolesence of everything you spent the last year or two doing. New factions to grind rep for, new raid-treadmills to get on. People still do it, though.
In some cases it’s for the socialization. ‘Playing alone, together’ is actually quite an attractive benefit to larger shared worlds (which Destiny isn’t, but maybe aspires to), and with a compelling story, a game can draw you along through the new content without the end-goal as the ONLY motivation (also, something Destiny doesn’t do, but hopefully aspires to).
And then there’s some people repeating the process because they enjoy the mechanics. Destiny’s gunplay and mobility mechanics are so good, so intuitive and weighty, feeling so ‘right’ that for a LOT of people (I’d wager most still playing before the DLC landed), that is actually all they need. No smoke and mirrors required. For everyone else… Maybe a couple hours of the new story content per expansion, then waiting on Bungie to correct the ‘mistake that cost millions of dollars in bonuses‘ for Destiny 2.
Do you still get gear from the Vault of Glass if youve completed Crota’s End? Or is it a one raid per week sort of deal?
They’re separate. Getting drops in VoG doesn’t stop you from getting drops in Crota’s. However, if you’ve completed Crota’s, I’m not sure what you’d do with any raid gear you got in VoG, given you’re probably already 29 or above. Shard it and use it to upgrade 33 light vendor gear, I guess.
Yeah that makes sense. I guess the point I was going to make is thay VoG will probably turn into a place to farm shards (well once per week).
Dismantle it all for Ascendant stuffs
The actual problem with Destiny as I have watched events fall over since its release:
– Getting to level 20 isnt that difficult if you are willing to play for a few hours.
– The Game then changes the levelling structure after 20 from what was a balanced curve now turns to a reliance on gear for levels.
– No body wants the gear that only gets you to a certain point before its maxed out and redundant
– If you stop playing destiny and only play the game as soon as content is released you go straight from level 20 to whatever level gear you are raiding.*
*This is where there are serious concerns about how the games mechanics work
Why: Because if people come in say 2 years down the track and all they have done is gotten to level 20 – say they expanded the level cap to 40 in 2 years – level 20 heroes will join a level 40 firesquad in a level 40 Raid, do nothing to help the team and pick up loot.
By the end of a single run they may have just skipped levels 20-30 from 2 drops and another 10 levels from a second run where as the rest of the team gets shards and is pissed that the newby who did nothing just skipped 2 years worth of grinding and in PVP has maybe a 10% dis advantage to someone who has been competitively playing since the games release. 2years just to be only so little stronger must be infuriating.
Theres your answer and is why I barely have played the game in recent weeks especially with a full time job – Yet I can straight up jump into the highest difficulty because getting to level 28 took no effort because I joined in friends raids.
The game caters way too heavily on casuals – And I for one take advantage of that.
you have to be of a certian LVL to be able to joint the raid….you would need to be LVL 38 to play in the LVL 40 raid if it still follows current trends.
Yes and no.
Yes for Raids in particular they do have a level requirement – Vog’s was 26 I believe which I was at after purchasing a set of legendaries from the NPC in town and purchasing an exotic from Xur.
Ran with a Friend in VOG a few times – Got to level 28 – I still barely play this game
No as in there’s always going to be a way for people to jump from level 20 to 1-2 levels below the absolute max level because its only the Raids that have the level requirement and you can purchase legendaries so cheaply which don’t have to be good – they just have to get to the level requirement.
Not really you still need vanguard marks to purchase the items etc….you still need to grind to get there, you just dont need to go through VOG anymore but in my opinion Raids are the best part of Destiny.
I raided every week since it came out and still was unlucky enough not to get enough gear to hit LVL 30 I was glad I could catch up with the rest of my clan otherwise I would miss out on doing the Dark below raid….to hard to do with lvl29 IMO across the bridge the blue knights one hit me where the lvl 30’s can take two.
Oh yeah its definitely useful if you want to continue with the raiding side of things – in terms of pvp the differences are negligible.
I am so filthy about this. The vanguard should only sell gear getting you to 26 – so you can do the VoG to get that raid gear, so you can use that gear in Crota’s End. Such bullshit that my old raid gear will be dismantles to be replaced with something I can just buy from the tower
Fuck you bungie
I disagree. if you patch it now it takes away the point that Raids are “levelled” to match progress.
For example, level 28 etc can go do VoG before progressing in skill and level until they are ready for Crota. After that it will be the House of Winter raid which will be another level above Crota and require a higher light level and skill set.
If they go back and start upping the levels on VoG it doesnt make sense. What would make sense is if they introduced a new difficulty level for each raid while maintaining the normal and hard. So have an Ultra level which makes VoG only accessible to say 32’s.
Another levelling related problem.. why I am not surprised. There has to be a better carrot and mindset for the players out there somewhere.