10 power a week sounds awful. especially considering me cores.
playing is fun but the time requirement is god awful and it especially fuxks you over if you skip a week. remember escalator protocol and not only the grouping nonsense that had gone on with it but the ridiculous difficulty that led to me only getting it done near the end of that expansion. and then having to do it every week for five weeks.
imagine doing the same for a bike over an even longer period of time but now you can't miss a week. it's piss.
10 power in a couple of hours a week. You can do more if you play more, but that's like one evening. I had a friend come back to the game this week because they were away at college, and the network there is bad for gaming. In just one evening of playing they went up by over 10 power in a couple of hours, and then we did a LW which boosted them even more.
Also, they way to save infusion cores is don't infuse every time you get a new powerful drop! just keep your most powerful drop around to boost your current max power, and only infuse every 20/25 power or so. There's no need to infuse every slot just because it went up by 5 power.
That is bad game design, but worse than that is they constantly have players raise their level but give them no new abilities. The player only levels up because Bungie thinks player won't stick around for their "content" if there's no busywork or chores to do. If they had any confidence in their end-game content, they wouldn't constantly be doing this, but they made it clear with Black Armory, they don't know what they're doing anymore.
No, they made power progression a thing because we asked for it. It wasn't a thing in D2Y1, and the game was the worse for it. Other games with progression raiding have power progression as part of it, and it can take over a month for a player to hit max power unlike in D2 where you can just grind it out in two weeks after the cap is lifted.
I personally would like Destiny to have a longer power progression grind, and true progression raiding with only a small handful of groups clearing new raids in the first week due to sheer mechanical difficulty. Unfortunately if they did that a huge chunk of players would never see that content, and be even more upset than they are now. The current system is a compromise between the demands of the hardcore who want to have reasons to log in every week, and concessions to the more casual players who, lets be honest, were never going to stick around anyway.
Even though this doesn't excuse the lack of matchmaking in Nightfalls, I would also say it's a design problem with the raids.
You have to design content for the majority of your player base to enjoy. I would love to see a breakdown of the % of players who completed Vault of Glass, King's Fall, Leviathan, and now Last Wish. I guarantee it drops off considerably as you move from D1 Y1 to D2 Y2, because the raid requirements and mechanics are getting more complex and harder.
Mechanics getting more complicated is good...to a degree. I maintain that every player should be able to beat the normal version of a raid without having to be carried or learn a complicated breakdown of mechanics on Youtube (Riven fight). Back in D1, you could explain the Oracle encounter or Warpriest to somebody and after a few wipes, they would "get it" and you could make progress and move on. Hard Mode/Prestige and now the Triumphs (they've done a great job of this with Petra's Run) should be reserved for the hardcore/streamers and offer tantalizing rewards because of it.
I think we'd all like two versions of the raids; Bungie has said it takes too much resources to do that though. I think someone data mined a prestige version of Last Wish that had curated load outs, like the Y1 raid lairs. I think most people hated those though, as it led to weeks where the load out was terrible and nobody wanted to do the prestige version.
LW is totally carryable - you can fairly easily carry two people through it - but I would be fine with a casual version of the raid with dumbed down mechanics, and then a harder version that requires 6 players on point.
As for completion percentages, I think Leviathan peaked at around 20% on PSN before they made it free on PS+, which given that half of players didn't finish the game is pretty good. Last Wish is currently sitting at around 2% I think, but only 10% of players have even unlocked the Dreaming City. I think that's based on who player count, not just owners of Forsaken, so maybe like 10% of Forsaken owners have finished Last Wish. It's not a crazy small percentage given it's only been out for 3 months. I think on average, you're probably only ever going to see roughly 1/6 of players finish the raids. Fundamentally, most people don't want to step outside their comfort zone and talk to strangers on the Internet. That's the barrier stopping most people from raiding.
Bungie have completely lost my faith in them and Destiny. They don't understand what they want the game to be. A RPGFPS or FPS with lite RPG mechanics. Forsaken dispite the hype is far behind anything TTK did the only reason Forsaken got so much praise was because the bar was set low following the DLC fiasco of CoO.
Adding to this they have flipped the grind from easy to max but hollowed it out and the only carrot is a PL increase not a Gjally or IceBreaker just very poor amour pieces with perks that offer little impact in the actual game. The curated rolls are Bungies reaction to the exotics been underwhelming.
Then the most frustrating thing with Destiny is the RNG it's terrible. I've had endless Transfigurations but no curated NoB or a good RL. Exotics won't drop. The RnG wall completely killed Destiny for me.
I know it looks like Im a hater but after 2700hrs on D1 and 1200 in D2 I guess I'm done with it's current form and want Destiny to change and evolve. But if D3 continues with D2's setup then only the super hardcore will get it.
But the Forsaken exotics aren't underwhelming though. Each class has at least two amazing armour pieces, and there are quite a few standout weapons with the rest being good or fun. Also, I don't see how you can have double the time in Destiny that I do, and not yourself be super hardcore.
