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But what happens if Joe Q. Destiny decides to fire up the game again after not touching it since Dark Below dropped? What does he see?

 

A GIF of Peter Dinklage with a single tear slowly rolling down his face.

 

It's a good question though. With light levels going away I would assume each person out of the gate would have whatever their current light level is converted into XP so they start from the same level they were before the expansion hit. Then I would guess that regardless of whether or not you have the expansion, you would be able to run whatever strikes or story content is available to you until you reach the level 40 cap. But at that point maybe you would be limited to only the lower level content and year 1 gear?

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I would imagine that any "meta" stuff like levels and equipment are available to you, but gameplay content like story missions and strikes are locked out. That's how it works in HoW at least; You can go to the Reef and buy gear without the DLC, but you can't do Prison of Elders or Trials of Osiris.

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I agree that the weapon balance changes seem weird when they could have just "nerfed" several weapon classes by stats alone on entirely new weapons. Like, is nerfing shot package and rangefinder specifically really necessary when my Matador won't be viable in PvP after TTK? And couldn't they just remove high range archetype shotguns from the new offerings? Very strange.

 

Well, in standard Crucible the Matador would still be viable since damage is normalized, right? So nerfing those perks is still necessary.

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I'm the guy who sucks

 

Plus you got depression?

 

The shader and emblem consoles are an interesting addition. I get limiting storage space for weapons and armor, because then you force people to curate an arsenal for their play style. But shaders and emblems are things you rent, essentially. Stick 'em in a library and let people check them out.

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I'm looking forward to these changes, knowing that there will be new content in the early game, ie new voice and cutscenes etc has really softened the blow of having to start from scratch.

As I understand it, you can get exotics through drops, xur, and bounties. I assume the year two exotics will be mixed into this system, along with the drops for story missions. But would year one exotics he left as they are so you think? Or would they be upgradable as they are currently?

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As I understand it, you can get exotics through drops, xur, and bounties. I assume the year two exotics will be mixed into this system, along with the drops for story missions. But would year one exotics he left as they are so you think? Or would they be upgradable as they are currently?

 

So a lot of this is unanswered, which is kind of interesting! I imagine drops and bounties will stay the same. It would be ridiculous to rewrite entire loot tables to exclude exotics (especially the raids). Xur is gonna get *really interesting* now that he has four tables of content to work with. It sounds like a lot of the new exotics are acquired through quests and the like, so Xur could only offer the "older" gear to catch people up. We can really only speculate until a Big Huge Gamescom info dump happens alongside the GI issue, but we'll see. I hope we get another Agent of the Nine, to be honest. More Nine lore!

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My reading of the GI stuff is that they're really targeting the legendary gear rather than exotics. And my general impression is that exotics are supposed to be evergreen, so I'd venture to guess that they will continue to be ascend-able through exotic shards or some similar process. And one benefit to across-the-board nerfs of older perks is that they should, theoretically, continue to be viable but not quite overpowered.

 

I can't imagine they'd dedicate so much of their weapons patch to balancing exotics if exotics would suddenly lose value as compared to new exotics.

 

I don't know why TTK would really operate in any fundamentally different way than CE did, where exotics were added but appeared more regularly in new content loot tables. I would be surprised if you could get TTK exotics from POE chests, for instance, it would seemingly disrupt the economy of exotics if you could stockpile keys now and run 28 POE like 20 times on day 1 to get most of the new stuff.

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One thing I really wonder is if they are going to do anything with the existing raids/PoE to keep them relevant with the new level cap. It sounds like strikes are being re-worked and will probably all be available again in a new playlist at a higher level. It would be nice if they also added a new tier or two to the existing raids with maybe some updated loot tables because I would imagine running a level 30 raid at level 40 would be painfully boring and pointless unless you are looking for some old exotic drops that you were still missing.

 

If they do figure out some way to keep all of the current end game content relevant then I think this game will finally hit a point where there would be more content than people would know what to do with. With 13 strikes, 3 raids, new tiers of PoE, new story progression, new PvP modes and bounties, there would be a whole hell of a lot to do every week and it would be awesome.

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Considering the Awoken/Reef has a lot to do with the Taken storyline, I imagine that it'll change in a fairly significant way. At the very least, they'll probably make new queen's weapons to drop out of the big chest at the end. Maybe Variks will sell Taken-bonus gear instead of the Fallen-bonus weapons and POE-round-bonus gear.

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I think there's no way the raids don't get bumped for the level cap, especially with the announcement of the "Go Directly to 34, Do Not Pass Go" freebie. I'd expect a 40 for VoG, CE, and PoE, leaving King's Fall (I think the official name?) as the new "One Level Above" raid. With (at least) 12 new exotic guns, I'd expect those to be included in the new level 40 loot tables, alongside some newer legendaries. Since we're still fighting Hive and Fallen at the least, it doesn't make sense to nuke the abilities of legendaries like Word of Crota, Oversoul Edict, or any of the other guns with "do extra damage to <whatever>," and instead have them attached to new guns. Maybe even new guns that aren't just generic stock models with "throw some bones on it."

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If the level cap is going up to 40, and the Light system is getting tossed, or at least reworked. I'm curious if that means we are all going to be level 20 again and have 20 new levels of progression. Anyone have any insight on this?

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If the level cap is going up to 40, and the Light system is getting tossed, or at least reworked. I'm curious if that means we are all going to be level 20 again and have 20 new levels of progression. Anyone have any insight on this?

 

No insight, but speculation. I don't see them taking people who are level 30+ now and setting them back to 20, if only for political concerns. It seems relatively straightforward to take a character's light number (168 possible now, which of course maps to 34; 150 = 32 "and a half") and convert that to some quantity of XP.

 

But what happens if I have gear that gets me to 34 but I'm wearing different, lesser gear when the conversion happens? Do I get converted to 33 and miss out on a whole level's worth of XP?

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Honestly, I just want the little EXP bar at the bottom of the screen again. It bums me out that it goes away after you hit 20 and all traces of progress vanish. As I'm leveling up my Titan, I realize just how nice it is to see +170 after shooting a whole bunch of Vex at the bottom of the screen. It gives it weight and makes my kills mean something - even on patrol - as opposed to my Hunter and Warlock, where kills are just "ugh how many more"

 

EDIT: Watching the latest IGN interview with DeeJ and the EXP bar is back! There is a lot of important news in here, but answering the "how do I level" bit, it sounds like whatever the highest level you've acheived is what you start at.

 

Oh, and Year One legendaries are addressed. As expected, the answer is "use them in the old content and normalized crucible."

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That's pretty depressing. I guess I partially use the Grimoire as a means of metering progress through the game, but I'm getting pretty darn close to maxing out any stats that would be tracked with normal gameplay so I wonder if I'll feel a similar lack of meaning in my play. That said, I really just enjoy the mechanics of the game massively and I feel like I get sufficient satisfaction just from those. I started playing Payday 2 on my PS4 last night and couldn't get over just how crappy that game feels in the fit-and-finish sense and the "way the guns feel" sense as compared to Destiny. I'm actually afraid to go back to Black Ops 3 this holiday because I think it'll feel kinda garbage after Destiny.

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If there is one thing I think everyone can agree about it's that Destiny's core gameplay - the shooting - is best in class. I've never played another shooter that feels as good as Destiny does. Everything about it is magical; I remember waxing rhapsodic about how good *melee* felt for about five minutes in the first week of playing.

 

I've never paid enough attention to Grimoire score as a means of progression, I think because I didn't pick up all the ghosts. Maybe I'll do that tonight so that additional points are tied to other rank ups.

 

Also, I should be clear: it's not that the game as a whole ceases to have meaning - there's still a profound joy whenever I see "UPGRADE UNLOCKED" for armor/weapons, and whoops and shouts when Sweet Gear drops or we finish Skolas - it's that something as simple as an EXP bar on the HUD has a huge effect on me. It's a permanent carrot on a stick, one that continually stares at me, waiting to be filled before it resets. It only matters most when I'm grinding out bounties, since I'm not as focused on that sort of progression when I'm playing with a group, but running bare minimum 18 bounties a day by oneself can be two hours depending on what's been doled out, and that two hours feels a lot better with a dumb bar to fill than without.

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Two websites -

 

http://destinystatus.com/ - has various information about your guardian, but also a grimoire tab that is like 10x more accessible and quicker than Bungie's website.

 

http://destinychesthunter.net/ - great tool for hunting chests, plug in your PSN ID and it'll tell you which one's you're missing. Screenshots and videos for each ghost.

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So with all the changes coming with the taken king, is there any point to continuing to run all the weekly stuff anymore? I got back into destiny recently and have managed to get a bunch of cool gear, but from what I understand this will all get essentially set back to zero.

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So with all the changes coming with the taken king, is there any point to continuing to run all the weekly stuff anymore? I got back into destiny recently and have managed to get a bunch of cool gear, but from what I understand this will all get essentially set back to zero.

 

Exotics will still carry over, and legendaries will still work in regular Crucible. As for everything else, all that you really "need" to do is the stuff you haven't already done. If you want to beat Skolas, hard mode raids or Trials of Osiris, those are what you should go after.

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That's pretty depressing. I guess I partially use the Grimoire as a means of metering progress through the game, but I'm getting pretty darn close to maxing out any stats that would be tracked with normal gameplay so I wonder if I'll feel a similar lack of meaning in my play. That said, I really just enjoy the mechanics of the game massively and I feel like I get sufficient satisfaction just from those. I started playing Payday 2 on my PS4 last night and couldn't get over just how crappy that game feels in the fit-and-finish sense and the "way the guns feel" sense as compared to Destiny. I'm actually afraid to go back to Black Ops 3 this holiday because I think it'll feel kinda garbage after Destiny.

 

I've had a similar problem with Borderlands 2. Each time I play it just gets harder and harder to get past how janky it feels compared to Destiny. I'm constantly getting hit by enemies with almost no indication of where it's coming from, there is no clear indication of how to avoid getting hit by the many one hit kill AOE attacks that all of the stronger guys seem to have, and there's no fucking double jump. Seriously, the double jump is probably the number one thing that has ruined my enjoyment of other FPS's. It just feels so good and makes traversal so much more enjoyable than it typically is in an FPS.

 

I think the one thing this game nails better than any other FPS though is how clearly they communicate everything that is going on in any given battle. I feel like I always know what I'm getting shot by, where enemies are, and how each enemy is going to behave in any given situation. Borderlands, by comparison, just feels constantly messy and frantic. I still enjoy a lot about that game but the act of playing it is just starting to feel subpar.

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So with all the changes coming with the taken king, is there any point to continuing to run all the weekly stuff anymore? I got back into destiny recently and have managed to get a bunch of cool gear, but from what I understand this will all get essentially set back to zero.

 

The gear is going to be really important at the start of The Taken King. You'll definitely want some good armor out the gate, and running weeklies is still going to grant Strange Coins, Motes, potential exotics/shards, and Etheric Light, which will help max that gear.

 

The idea of "everything I have is worthless" is both true and not. There's no point in hoarding "generic" armor that doesn't serve a purpose (so long, Sanction Six!), but full kits of Raid Gear will still be useful, as will guns with raid-specific perks (the number of times DeeJ says "Vision of Confluence" in that IGN interview is nuts).

 

Also, consider that you may have friends who come into the game because they hear about how Taken King makes Destiny "Actually Fun," and assuming they don't use the "directly to TTK, do not pass go" item, you'll want that old gear to help them through old content.

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Also, consider that you may have friends who come into the game because they hear about how Taken King makes Destiny "Actually Fun," and assuming they don't use the "directly to TTK, do not pass go" item, you'll want that old gear to help them through old content.

This is the part that I'm not clear on. The updates mention the old content is going to be brought into the taken king mold, plus the additional cutscenes and voice acting they're adding. I played destiny a bit at launch, then took a break from it until about a month ago and have enjoyed the game much more as a result. My friends that play with me seem to be of the opinion that I had a better experience with the game having come in later once the progression was less frustrating. I wonder if it's worth doing the same thing again with TTK, or possibly even tossing all my exotics in the vault and starting over. Right now I've got a fatebringer and some other guns I'm levelling up, but with these changes it seems like I'm better off just waiting for a bit.

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Many people clearly hold the same ideas about whether or not it's "worth it" to get current gear in the run up to the next expansion, it's basically what Jeff Gerstmann has always complained about the game (why bust my ass to get level 32 now when it'll be easy to reach when the level cap is increased to 34?)

 

It's an attitude of someone who doesn't play the game regularly and I'm not really convinced ever will. I mean, if you're willing to dedicate at least a few hours a week to the game until TTK, it's probably still "worth it" to get current armor and weapons as they'll benefit you quite obviously right now and will probably help bridge the difficulty gap at the beginning of TTK. If you're playing now singularly as a means to prepare for TTK, then perhaps it's not in your best interest to make the investment of time as the value of current gear will go down.

 

I mean, half of the game is collecting loot. You should play it for the sake of getting that loot, even if it's devalued in the future. But this gets into the whole "you should play this game THIS way" thing that presumes I know the ideal method of enjoyment in this game, which I don't.

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