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1/9/2026 8:05:23 PM
11
Portal Still Invalidates Lower Difficulties
I still can't play at the difficulty I want to in the portal.
There have been a lot of good changes to the portal in the last few months, namely power delta changes and bonus focus reward sharing. My main issue with it though still persists - I no longer get rewarded for playing mid-level content once I hit a certain power level.
I made [url=https://www.bungie.net/en/Forums/Post/265006392]a post[/url] about this back in late Edge of Fate, highlighting that I could only get tier 1 loot for difficulties that used to net me tier 3 loot due to my power level. My hope was that Bungie would introduce static power deltas and fix this, and would you look at that they did! I still can't get tier 3 loot though... This made sense when playing lower difficulty content meant you were dramatically over-levelled, but now that we have static deltas only being netted tier 1 rewards seems arbitrary.
The root of the issue is that the friends I play with play a lot more casually than I do, they aren't beginners but they aren't 550 power no-lifers like I am, and I feel like there isn't a piece of content in the portal that we can play together where we're all having fun (now that some of us have hit 400 power). We're either playing a normal difficulty vanguard alert that's braindead easy for all of us, or an ultimate / grandmaster activity where we run out of revive tokens a frustratingly long way into it, which almost always ends in "let's call it a night". Because these are the experiences available they've either already left or are in the process of leaving for other games.
I would love to get back to a place where I can run a nightfall-level ritual activity with my friends where we're all having fun and getting rewarded, and I think allowing us to get loot that corresponds to the difficulty of the activity we're playing would be a great start, i.e. tier 3 for master, tier 4 from grandmaster. Even better, since now we're getting tier 5's from normal difficulty content through vanguard alerts, I don't see why I shouldn't get tier 5s (capped at a certain power level) for whatever content I play in the portal.
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If you want lower tier gear and want to play lower levels you simply lower your power level with low gear. Obviously if your 550 they wont let you do lower levels to farm for t5 gear that would defeat any point in ranking up to get better rewards
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Only ‘the few’ enjoy (using) the portaloo…💩 Bring your own bog roll...👈 Go figure?! 🙄 That is all. Ease Slings! 🖖👻 MTFBWY
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The portal was a mistake. It was a design feature to mask the fact that they no longer make content or destinations. Those being all gone meant they needed to get rid of the director
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Also weirdly isolates certain modes, making a much more stark divide in playlist population, which is something they were actively trying to fix at one point.
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Nah the biggest issue with portal is once you hit 550, took 2 weeks, it becomes entirely irrelevant like the rest of the game & there's no real incentive to play. Awful design
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I'm hate how it automatically puts me on the highest difficulty every time I select an activity(at 550) when I just want to do normal difficulty.
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Tier absolutely needs to be the thing that's influenced by the difficulty/grade, not the gear itself. That way you can STILL feel like you're being rewarded but there's still a reason to do higher difficulties so then you're not locked out of rewards if you don't want to do the hardest stuff every second, or that you now have absolutely no reason to do anything lower because you'll get nothing special out of it, arguably the ONLY reason to do specific activities in it. Rewarding for both the high end and the general "I'm just here to play" is what's killing the Portal because it's just not there at all.
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6 RepliesYou're absolutely right. Makes leveling up punishing. Considering the fixed power deltas, it should be a no brainer. You get tier 5s in grandmaster, then you keep leveling up. Suddenly, it stops giving tier 5s and is just as difficult. The portal was a good idea, making old content relevant. But they screwed it up so bad, they probably should just scrap it now. So many have such a disdain for it that they'll never touch it, regardless of changes. I don't really touch the portal this season, just the Alerts and lawless frontiers.
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Portal was a huge mistake. I 100% believe it was implemented to support the new content structure, where In old content becomes obsolete shortly after its "episode" so you must continually buy and grind new content that is pushed front and center. It was an extremely nearsighted plan, considering the backlash they received for removing content previously. Im shocked, considering humankind's well adapted pattern recognition i can't believe theyve managed to hire an entire company full of people that probably couldn't put together a 40 piece puzzle. No, Dave, That's an edge piece. The portal contributes nothing to the player experience and could have easily had all its mechanic integrated into the destinations tab. If bungie had any level of forethought they could have also made patrols relevant again by creating world tiers where we could patrol higher level variants of old destinations with updated loot pools. Im gonna make a topic about this, but at this point the weapon system should be damn near plug and play, updating old loot should be fairly simple. If their system is so convoluted and poorly designed that it takes months or even years to add old gear to the new system. frankly they just didnt want to because that's for the free player
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A lot of us have been making the same point since the inception of the portal system. It segregates new players from veterans because of the imbalance in rewards. Scaling difficulty to obtain B or > rewards is making Ultimate content a chore to run. When I was at master level I could easily complete pinnacle ops, now that I'm 550 trying to solo with all of the negative modifiers needed for a B score makes the content miserable to run. There is nothing good about the power ranking system that came in with the portal.
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I get at least 2 to 3 power levels every time I do a lawless frontier activity. My main wasn't even 300 a week ago, she's over 480 now, with maybe 5 runs a day. Not too bad, but I'm not trying to speed-run leveling either so maybe that's why it doesn't feel like a slog.
