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6/5/2025 12:22:18 AM
55
The Elephant In The Room: Difficulty
The game is becoming more difficult year after year and I think Bungie is losing players because of it. We don't hear from them, because they are gone, they just leave.
I think things have steered to much towards movement, making it so that players must zip around everywhere to survive. Which is a little harder to do on controller(console) than mouse and keyboard.
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I just deleted my other thoughts on this because I don't feel like listening to elitist comments. I was merely expressing my opinion that this game is leaning towards being too sweaty for casual gaming. I think a lot of us don't really care about raids, dungeons, and exotic missions. They are not worth the time and effort.
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Hope the next expansion with its different difficulty tiers alleviates this issue.
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Edited by Kenny: 6/9/2025 5:03:57 PMI think the core issue is not the diffculty itself, but bungie's tendency to favor more and more mechanics in hope that it will make the game more interesting or challenging. Meanwhile it's just annoying. Timers or elaborate mechanics to remove immunity shields from bosses - is the opposite of fun for me. I had fun doing Haunted Sectors (even on legend with randoms and matchmaking) , but I didnt have any fun playing the Guardian Games boss rush. Now for RoTN Prophecy they added timers on the rainbow road ... LOL why?
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2 RepliesRaiding used to be fun because you could grab a few buds and they didn't all have to be top tier to run it with you. In their mission to make "casuals feel like they participated" with forced revive tokens only ostracized the casuals even more. Every death could be a run killer instead of a momentary frustration. The animosity towards each other in endgame has never been higher. Dungeons used to be fun because they were fun and relatively simple as a trio, and had some challenge as a solo. Boss health wasn't anywhere near what it is now. Exotic missions used to be fun because they were spontaneous, came out of nowhere, lit a fire under the community for a week or two, and then you were satisfied and moved on. You didn't have to spend week after week running the same seasonally expected mission for little upgrades. You could experience it as it was meant to be, a one off, for one amazing piece of gear.
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6 RepliesEveryone can see the game is plainly more difficult. Yet, some fan boys drink the koolaid "we've never been more powerful" Whereas- Quantitatively, guardian power has been on a long slide downwards. Most pvp matches have [b]zero[/b] grenade kills across all 12 players. [b]zero[/b]. They've nerfed primary weapons so much that some influencers are complaining about sidearms. Yes. That's how far we've fallen.
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Removing overleveling was such a huge mistake and could be fixed so easily. That they don’t really makes you wonder if they wanted the game to survive or just die quietly. Now that marathon is going to fail miserably they better get it together. I’m not buying eof, all the changes are free to engage with. So why pay for a downgrade?
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4 RepliesOP: your edited POV ✅ This old tortoise wants Destiny the game to not die…at the hands of the (latest) bunch of MisManagement duffers. I’m not interested in Neomuna Overtuna difficulty gameplay. Not ever. I like vanilla builds and pootling about doing vanilla quests / bounties / triumphs / etc. I’d like a ‘Best Build’ (optimisation) button, which, when pressed, automatically optimises my build from what I’m carrying and whatever is in my vault, to best build the mission I’m about to do. Once done, I can tweak it as desired before proceeding to play. Apparently, this is a common feature in many online games!? Sony / BHQ need to raise the ceiling - for those that pine for such…and, not the floor - for the many ‘Casuals’ that just want a bit of relaxation and uncomplicated space wizardry easy shooter fun. 🤔 It’s not rocket science! 👈 That is all. Ease Springs! 🫡
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1 ReplyI consider myself a casual veteran of the game. I'm not afraid to delve into the hardest content if there's a shiny enough prize for me to chase, but I tend to not do the high difficulty stuff most of the time. It's not because I don't feel confident in myself and hate losing or anything. I'm just simply a gamer that has learned that fun is more important to me than difficulty, and Destiny's difficulty is often just simply frustrating rather than challenging. Why would I ever want to willingly subject myself to unnecessary frustration when I could choose to do something enjoyable instead? For a gun that will be 2% more effective than the one I'm using now? For a piece of gear that has 2 more base stats? For more resources that I've probably hit the cap on?
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There is some stuff that isn’t exactly “too difficult “ but do a have checkpoints a long way apart. This is a real challenge when you are solo so I can get very frustrated. The Vexcalibur mission was one example. I just happened to have a day free and battled through it. Shame it’s such a dreadful exotic. I did the same to get Choir of One and found that a challenge but enjoyable. The idea of repeating those missions just to get updated or better rolls is horrible though. Maybe for solo players have different checkpoints and have a mode that’s a little more forgiving in that regard. The Explorer solo mode for the dungeons is a good move. It’s nice to be able to work through dungeon mechanics without being insta killed by powerful enemies.
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15 RepliesIt doesn't help that the only feedback Bungie values are from a bunch of yesmen who crave challenging content.
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Edited by Muka Gatals: 6/5/2025 4:10:49 PMBasic Business principal. Make product that your customer like. If it Video Game, "Make product that your customer like to play" But bungie motto is "Make product that WE like to play" Well, If you make the product, you know how to use it. We don't I WILL NOT BUY PRODUCT THAT I CAN'T USE. I WILL NOT BUY VIDEO GAME THAT I CAN'T PLAY. Go ahead mocking me as git gut, It will not make me to buy the game. Less customer will kill the game entirely. For majority of players, Video game is for entertainment only. It's not a job. Bungie seems cater to the Streamers. Which most of them are high skilled players. They have fire teams too. Just like Health Insurance that don't want Healthcare cost to be low. Other wise we don't need to have insurance. Those streamers don't want the game easy and friendly to play. Other wise we don't need to watch their content to know how to survive the game. They spend 24/7 with the game because it's their job, income, revenue. This make the game is not playable with most of the potential customers. They just left. Not in this forum either. The ones that left here are the high skilled players which is not too many. It makes Bungie only get input from this kind of players, Them self , Streamers, high skilled players. Anyway, I played Dungeon with EXPLORER mode for the last few days. Solo! It was a FUN!! Of course with a lot of deaths, misadventures etc. I am a low skilled player. But I had smile all the time and enjoying the content, sceneries. No worries that I have to do the same thing over and over again if I die. No Timer, No Equipment Lock. So no need to rush, I can try different weapons and armors in different stage. Love it. Of course Noob mistake, I took the quest on my Titan and played the warlock (was leveling up warlock). After finished the dungeon for hours, Just realized the quest was not there. So I am going to do it again on my Titan and Hunter! I really will buy more contents if they have this mode on the contents. This kind of of content I like to play in my game day weekend. Your customer want to play the game for entertainment. I don't want to get rushed to play it (NO TIMER). Love to wondering around enjoying the views. As a low skilled player, I need to be able to use different weapons/armors (NO EQUIPTS. LOCK)
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It is all games, not just D2, devs go to streamers and content saps whonplay games all day, looking for ideas and wayscto improve, and all they endvup doingvis making gaming stupidly difficult for a tiny percentage of players, its why PVP was wrecked years ago, why Trials exists and why I haven't bought any dlc for a year,
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2 RepliesYeah. Im concerned with these gear changes. Currently, artifice is not super difficult to acquire and is marginally better than regular gear. With the new system, it's going to make a massive difference in stats from t3 to t5. This won't affect me, but objectively will alienate more casuals or those with less time. And they get reset to be less useful each expansion. Kind of a yikes.
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The problem is that they keep drip feeding content, they don't listen to players as often as they should, they invalidate so much of our progress, and keep making "challenges" that consist of complete and utter BS. And now they're effectively resetting us multiple times over next season and just screwing over balancing big time.
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4 RepliesI just jumped into RotN Prophecy solo explorer mode thinking the enemies have been "dialled down". Got to Phalanx Echo and cleansed the pillars for the first damage phase and what a joke. Amongst all of the ads spawning where some that kept giving the boss immunity, so even during the damage phase there was no let up and even when you cleared all the immunity givers, the boss would raise his own shield also to block damage! Needless to say I returned to orbit and went back with matchmaking.
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Unfortunately this game is now mostly elites. Small playerbase, 11 year old franchise, not new player friendly or welcoming, everyone left is really good or really bad, the average guys all moved on because difficulty & fatigue & neglect. All you'll find here is elitism & trolls, wasn't always like this. I was looking at numbers a few days ago & most of the playerbase was in ultimatum dungeons, GM nightfalls, or trials, the rest of the game was barren. The new saga feeds into this population & thats fine but it won't cover costs to keep the game going - 200k pre orders won't keep the lights on
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4 RepliesI have to agree with op, many of the exotic quests are not worth the time and effort. Exotics used to feel exotic and when you got one, you had gold in your hands.. Now.. dime a dozen. Constantly getting them and many sit in the vault never touched unless to unlock the catalyst and then.. back to the vault. The game has changed significantly and the hamster wheel didn't help, rebranding seasons to episodes was a complete failure.. we saw through that like a single pane window. i miss what is lost and likely will never be found again with this game. There was a spark of excitement and players were invested in running content feels like both bungie and the community have been mailing it in for years and its not going to change.
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That's what happens when Bungie only give credit to what youtubers and streamers tell them. They play this game for a living, they have nothing else to do all day.
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Exactly this. Check myself out… after a full involvement from the start as a mainly solo average guy I’ve just about given up. Difficulty and convoluted is why.
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The floor has raised. I haven’t gone for any endgame title this year
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Edited by BackdoorBacon: 6/5/2025 7:49:09 PMI haven’t seen anybody talking about the effect of losing the damage reduction tied to resilience will have on difficulty. at max (200) the new heath stat gives only +20 shield health and no damage reduction at any tier level. It is entirely possible they retuned incoming damage to be less than what a minimum resilience guardian will receive in the current system, but we have no information on that. I’m sure other side effects of the new system will surface as well, such as how will it effect ward of dawn health, which scales off resilience Edit: today’s TWAB stated that resilience is set to 100 for all guardians in the new system. So DR should be the same values in the new system
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As long as streamers keep getting views from people trying to keep up with the Joneses on the latest gimmick that will be nerfed next go 'round ...
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2 RepliesIt is certainly not difficulty. It’s tedium. Lazy artificial difficulty modifiers.
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You said it best ! Shame that Destiny balance team is unable to balance weapons for fun. It seems like they chase some kind of Dark Souls unicorn making all enemies struggle sponges, which might look good in sheets, but not fun in gameplay itself.
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With the increase of power of our guardians, the devs have tried to increase difficulty overall to scale with it. However, this difficulty increase actively hurts players who are not using the most powerful builds and weapons. I think that is where a lot of this is felt, players who want to go against the grain with builds which are not utilizing the strengths of the artifact, or running weapons and abilities which do not match surges or are not overpowered in the activities which take advantage of it. In activities with surges and overpowered modifiers, if you are not matching them, you need to think of it as losing 25% of your damage rather than gaining while matching the surge. The activities were built around those modifiers being active, and scaled accordingly. So that is NORMAL damage, and anything not matching is reduced. I personally enjoy difficult activities to a certain extent. I have been working on solo GM's. I am not a top tier gamer, so its a struggle. For me, I feel that there is minimal difference in playing a GM or a solo Expert NF in difficulty, other than the increase in champions... Even the standard Prophecy to the RotN Explore, I feel like it plays the same. But that could just be that my builds have been getting more refined and the damage checks are being removed with mid to higher tier enemies. Where when I was playing mostly lower tier content, I could feel the difference in scale between difficulty levels more abruptly.
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This ....
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Totally agree
