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9/19/2025 1:56:54 PM
17
The "Power Climb" needs to end.
Originally, the power climb was just part of the game. If you wanted to do content at the "highest level" in a season, you would have to play and get XP for the season to level your artifact, and at the same time you had ~10 light levels to grind through pinnacle activities. XP could supplant grinding those levels, because the artifact would boost your power.
This was okay for the time, but it eventually got boring.The MOST IMPORTANT thing about it, however: was that the "best gear that you could get" was not locked behind the power grind. As long as you were at a power level where YOU could run a master-level dungeon (with a group), you could get artifice armor. As long as you were at a power level where YOU can run a master raid, you could get adept weapons.
Today the power system completely supplants the "skill" factor of the loot grind. I'm a player who earned Guardian Rank 11 for 8 seasons straight (if I'm remembering correctly the season they came out... I earned GR from release up until I took a break at Edge of Fate). That's not to say I'm more qualified than anyone to speak on this, but the point is that I did endgame content. I routinely ran GMs, Master Dungeons, Master Raids, Lowman raids, etc. Yet when I come back and see how the portal works, I'm forced to go through almost 200 light level of "adept" or even "novice"-equivalent activities before I'm even ALLOWED to run difficult content to get the good gear. The "Grading" system and reward levels is an absolutely worthless system that forces me to run braindead content that is leagues below me for HOURS UPON HOURS UPON HOURS of playtime before I can run what I want to run and get good rewards.
AND ON TOP OF IT ALL: Light level basically doesn't even matter anymore. You can't get over-light for an activity anymore. Most if not all activities are hard-set -5/-10/-20 light.
My conclusion: There's no point to the light level grind anymore. Remove it entirely, or at least separate it from reward tiers. I want to be able to jump straight back in to GMs without getting hard reset by 300 light "points" every season that force me to play the game on easy mode and only get tier-3 drops when I'm well equipped and able to play the game at master difficulty and go straight to my tier-4/tier-5 drops.
Please make game content drop rewards equivalent to the level they are worth, and let players get straight to the difficulty they desire. Reward drops should be based on DIFFICULTY OF CONTENT, not on TIME SPENT GRINDING LIGHT LEVEL. It shouldn't take me 45+ hours in one season just to get to my first tier-5 drop. Stop "making the light grind better", and just scrap it if you want to use this tiered armor system.
You can't have both.
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2 RepliesThat's because bungie made all of the existing content pointless, added minimal new content and then made the PL grind the content. It just highlights how little there is in the game now more than ever.
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You can’t have it both ways either. If the design is that bad, stop playing. Complaining while playing doesn’t mean anything to them, all they care about are metrics. Stop playing and then they’ll listen. That’s really been the only times they’ve made major changes we want, when engagement goes down. Find something else to play for a month.
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3 RepliesAfter 10 weeks, I'm at a 423 light level. My brain hurts from playing K1 and Creation for hundreds of hours, and if Bungie lowers it back to 200, I will probably quit this idiotic game or shoot my TV. This is a beyond ridiculous level up activity. By this time in all the other seasons, I had all 3 characters at max power levels. I haven't had a chance leveling or playing the other 2. Right now, it takes me 5 runs at 10 minutes a run to advance 1 lousy light point. So doing the math, for me to get to 550 at playing 4 hours a day, it's going to take another 32 days. And that's if the grind doesn't get any harder. Wow, I shouldn't have done the math, now I am really, really depressed.
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1 ReplyIts easier to just stop caring about the game
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Making content is so hard. We just recycle -blam!-.
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We are a bunch of lazy woke people who can’t think of a new idea unless it for the pay shop.
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I ain’t reading all that, but yes.
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1 ReplyI had hit 400 last night did the strike with the vex eyeball whole fight felt ten times harder than a grandmaster. This level of difficulty don’t even need in strikes when the loot not even worth grandmaster worthy lvl.
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5 RepliesThis also makes getting matched with people using terrible builds basically impossible to carry. Literally just got stuck with two people that had 400+ Power, decked out full Tier 5 gear, unironically running double primary + machine gun with garbage exotic armors and zero synergy. Perks on all the guns were awful, too. Actual definition of getting carried by their clan and they both eat up all the limited revives and can't do DPS for beans. I hate basically everything this "revamped Power Grind" has done to this game.
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3 RepliesSleazy but now it's perfect for them to offer 550 boosts for $10. Nobody would admit but they would boost profits overnight
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6 RepliesI agree in part. Please hear me out. I was always against the PL grind for the simple reason I might accept levelling once in order to run endgame content. I rather preferred to have access to everything and skill decides what I can accomplish and what not. However the artificial seasonal, half yearly, yearly resets always felt bad as they were/are implemented for no other reason than forcing players into spending more time in the game. Today I run a GM and tomorrow after reset I can grind for weeks again just to gain access for the 500th time I had access to in the past multiple times. What I believe the new system does better is providing access to top level gear to all players willing to spend the levelling time. In the past artifice Armour and master weapons were behind a skill wall for me, now I can get access. I understand that not everyone condones "weaker" players getting access to gear they do not "deserve" in the eyes of some top players, but I certainly like this single aspect. PL in general is as useless as it was in the past 10 years. Resets are a waste of time.
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Since the new DLC power grind was the only activity.
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2 RepliesThe reward balance during Solstice is where the game needs to be now if Bungie hope to retain / rebuild ans semblance of a player base. I'm around 412 atm and it's still a painful slog even if there are up to 3 plus one drops in a B+ completion. When those 3 bloody drops are all the same category is is a gut punch. The Drang glitch gives that old powerful feeling we used to have long ago, we need more of that feeling.
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I agree with all of this. And I'll add to it that for average players (Which you are not, but I definitely am) the "reward" for leveling up is to do the same content we've been doing for fifty or a hundred hours, but doing it at a higher difficulty level, which is not exactly what I'd call "rewarding." Further, the carrot on the stick is supposed to be Tiered gear, which sounds great on paper! But it's only actually great if players stick around long enough to hit LL400 and get that Tier 4 and Tier 5 gear. The carrot on the stick should be an inch away from your nose, not on the other side of the planet. Light Level just isn't intrinsically rewarding, if anything, in its current state, it feels like a slow-down mechanism, a retention mechanism, a way to keep players from reaching the end game sooner than the developers would like, a way to keep us on the treadmill and chasing those carrots. For players like you, who are good at the game, it's stopping you from doing the hardest content; for players like me, who are average to middling at the game, it's tedious, frustrating, and not rewarding. You're talking about how you want to jump into hard mode content, and others are talking about how they should have stopped leveling at LL330.
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Agree… far too extreme… actual new content would be so much better
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25 RepliesDisagree. No matter how much people might not like it, it gives people incentive to play. A feeling of accomplishment when they see their number go up. If you doubt it, just go look at when Bungie took it away for like 3 seasons in a row. People complained they felt they had nothing to do since they weren't chasing levels, so Bungie brought it back.
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6 Replies[quote]. AND ON TOP OF IT ALL: Light level basically doesn't even matter anymore. You can't get over-light for an activity anymore. Most if not all activities are hard-set -5/-10/-20 light. My conclusion: There's no point to the light level grind anymore. Remove it entirely, or at least separate it from reward tiers. I want to be able to jump straight back in to GMs without getting hard reset by 300 light "points" every season that force me to play the game on easy mode and only get tier-3 drops when I'm well equipped and able to play the game at master difficulty and go straight to my tier-4/tier-5 drops. .[/quote] Agree with everything you said bar this - you can out level activities now to make things easier. Pre portal for example the strike playlist was locked at -5 and you couldn’t over level it making it difficult to play and have fun in for some. Now you can over level the PL100 content and obliterate things.
