Last night I played Destiny for the first time in a while. It started out amazing, then got noticeably less amazing.
I’d joined a group of my old raid buddies to try the first of the new challenge modes that are being introduced to the King’s Fall raid. This week, if you beat the Warpriest boss in a certain way, you get some cool guaranteed loot. I won’t blow the secret here in case you want to figure it out, but it’s not very complicated.
I’ve been taking some time away from Destiny, as had several of the people in our group — we hadn’t played together in more than a month. It was nice hearing everyone’s voices in party chat again.
Part One: Yay
One of my teammates had a Warpriest checkpoint, so we started right at the boss. We were playing on Hard Mode, so I was expecting it to be a tough fight, but we actually hashed out a strategy and pulled it off on our first try. It was pretty fun, a little stressful, and generally exciting. I had a clutch hero move at the end, grabbing the aura and keeping it active for just long enough for the surviving players to take down the boss.
When the Warpriest went down, jackpot! I got a ton of awesome shit.
I got a neat new emblem and a new calcified fragment. The Warpriest himself dropped three pieces of gear: a 310 normal mode Defiance of Yasmin sniper with the hot swap perk (probably the best possible drop of that gun!) and a 320 (!!) harrowed Qullim’s Terminus LMG with the Life Leech perk. Hot damn!
Lastly, I got a 320 artifact, 10 higher than the 310 artifact I’d earned ages ago. I equipped all my gear, feeling pretty good about everything. My light went up two whole points, from 312 to 314. Nice!
20 minutes in, I was already feeling more rewarded by Destiny than I’d felt in a while. Feeling good, my team said, fuck it, we’ve all gotten together, let’s keep going.
Part Two: Hmm
We hurried forward to the next boss, Golgoroth, who we also beat on our first try. No challenge mode there, just the normal Hard Mode boss.
Golgoroth dropped… a kinda shitty 302 set of Normal Mode gauntlets, and some moldering shards. No Hard Mode drop. Hmm. OK, kinda disappointing, but I guess it’s never bad to have 300+ gauntlets.
Part Three: Boo
After that came the jumping puzzle (I didn’t get an exotic from the exotic chest), after which we fought Oryx’s daughters. Another pretty easy fight that we beat on our first try.
I approached the chest at the end of the fight and pulled… some moldering shards, and nothing else. No drop. Weak.
Part Four: I’m Out
I’d been pretty ambivalent about attempting to beat Oryx (the final boss) on Hard Mode again. The last time I tried it we spent hours banging our heads against the fight before giving up. But, I thought, what the hell. This is a good group. Almost everyone here’s beaten Hard Mode Oryx by now. Might as well give it a shot.
We worked out a decent strategy, but there were still so many moving parts that something would always go wrong. Twenty minutes passed, then thirty, and we still hadn’t made it past Oryx’s first damage phase. Abruptly (and heroically), my colleague Jason Schreier said, “OK, I’m out.” I was right there with him, as were several of our other teammates. We gave up, leaving the fight unfinished.
The whole endeavour took about an hour and a half. In that time I went from feeling extremely excited and rewarded, to vaguely disappointed, to fully disappointed, to frustrated enough to stop. I’m sure they will come up with a reason for me to come back at some point soon, but for now, those 90 minutes were sufficient. My Destiny break continues.
Comments
21 responses to “Destiny, As Told By The Drops I Got Last Night”
Totally agree with you Kirk — I’m off to play more immediately rewarding games!
Why do MMO’s have to hand feed everything these days? Some things should be hard and some things should be left to aspire to.
I hear you, I play ESO and know that I’m going to need to spend a lot of time to get that one thing I’m after but the difference here is that there is a tiny fraction of the content. It uses it’s content like a uni student uses underwear, forwards then backwards.
There needs to be a balance. Repeating the same raids over and over without anything at all to show for it is soul destroying and becomes pretty pointless. Thing with Destiny is your progress relies solely on drops, so you can go a long time without levelling up at all.
I haven’t played destiny but from what i’ve heard from friends who do it lacks content so maybe you are right. My point of view comes from other mmos and the trend there has been to make everything have super easy modes which for me kills the illusion that it’s a big world with content that exists but you only hear about which builds up the anticipation for when you are actually good enough to go there and defeat it.
Yeah, Destiny just doesn’t work like that, well it does for a little while before you run out of content, then becomes more about luck.
I wouldn’t call Destiny an MMO to be honest. Not enough content as MMO, short ass story even with Taken King.
Destiny in a nutshell : Raid, Strike, PvP.
Was considering jumping on and having a go tonight but honestly I just dont care anymore. These last few months have been great without running the same stagnant content 3 times each week then wondering why. That whole gotta collect it all mentality is vicious but I just cant anymore.
Listening to friends and streamers desperately try to justify 1000s of hours of what amounts to stockholm syndrome is just sad. Every week its all about whats coming soon but the whole gated exotics thing was just a bs move made to extend the life of an already bare bones expansion. It seems by all accounts this was yet another pathetically lack luster way to extend the game that hasnt paid off for them.
It was fun but good riddance.
complains that content doesn’t last long enough and about time gating in the same post. this guy…
Your right. Tell you what. Im gonna abuse you one word a week until the sentence is complete. It will still be the same amount of abuse found in a single sentence but you will have to wait 6 months to get the complete package. If you still miss my point then theres nothing anyone could really do.
Your…
mum
Yah I’m glad I got the destiny monkey off my back…imo u really have to be all in to feel any sort of progression and it just eats too much time.
Had so much trouble finding people to reliably run the raid with, in the end I could never get a chill enough group to get my brother thru to the end, even though I beat normal mode a few times myself.
Then I realized the raid weapons are average and all of a sudden it dawned on me that for me there was little point in trying to get my light up for hard mode, unlike previous raids it wasn’t going to be dropping anything better or different than normal. No mythoclast or fatebringer to strive for etc.
Kinda glad I didn’t have a regular party for it, otherwise i may still be playing. Played halo 5 multi last night with a few ppl, custom games and all and it was a blast. The multi is leaps and bounds above destiny in terms of a smooth reliable experience.
wow guess you didnt use to play raids in old school MMO’s then. You might be lucky if you walk away with just one thing per week. The fun in playing was hanging with mates and trying to beat the bosses.
An hour and a half? gosh that is nothing. The more loot you get in a sitting the more worthless and meaningless it becomes.
Apparently the loot have a range of light level and people are trying to get the highest light ones. So they do raids everyday trying to get the highest roll so they can show off to the others they have it.
you can’t do raid everyday. once per week per char.
Doesn’t make a difference. I have a friend with multiple psn with full chars literally doing raid everyday.
so by they you mean your one friend?
If my friend can do it. I doubt other hardcore destiny player doesn’t do it. Why are you trying so hard to defend destiny anyway?
Generally, I do a minimum of 3 hard raids per week on my own and the rest of the time are spent on either doing exotic bounties or helping out my clan mates/ sherpaing randoms on lfg. Sure, i won’t get the loot if I were to redo the raid again but hey, at least I’m having fun with my clan buddies or making new friends 🙂
As for the challenge mode, I do agree that it is a good addition to the game as I believe it would get progressively harder as the challenge rotates. The guaranteed drop serves as incentives for casuals too as the 320 light from it would give immense level boosts ( Guaranteed 320 Helmet or Primary on oryx challenge )
Seeing the pattern on how challenge mode is done, the next challenge mode ( Golgoroth ) would likely make players chain golgoroth’s stare non-stop without breaking it ( Progressively harder for casual raiders as they are used to the 1-stare meta )
Hot tip, to get rewarded you need to be actually good enough to beat the encounter.
I put over 1100 hours into Destiny. I finally walked away from it a couple of weeks ago. It was a fun ride. I loved doing raids with my friends.
But I now see how pointless it all is. I spent hundreds and hundreds of hours getting to max level. Then I realised that a new expansion comes out and someone who is brand new to the game can reach the same level I’m at in a few days. Why bother? The whole process simply repeats again. When The next expansion or Destiny 2 comes out, there will be a matter of days separating newbies and hardcore veterans.
Each time I think about hopping back on for a bit, I get an inner groan. It just doesn’t seem fun to me anymore. Not when all of the hours you put in are rendered irrelevant each DLC. It feels good to be free of it all