‘Destiny 2’ Has Made All Its Raids Harder, Is That Good Or Bad?

While almost everyone agrees that opening a Destiny 2 raid with contest mode putting everyone at the same power disadvantage is a good thing for a first-time run, a new change Bungie has made with The Final Shape is attracting some measure of controversy.

Destiny 2 has now instituted a format where all raids, no matter how old, now put players at a -5 power disadvantage and they do not have the opportunity to level above that to get stronger and clear encounters and burn bosses faster. There is some makeup for this in the form of burns which empower certain elements or weapons in a given week, but overall, the end result is still reducing damage against bosses by somewhere in the region of 35%, it’s estimated.

The idea here appears to be the following:

• Players have complained that there isn’t enough challenging content in Destiny anymore outside of contest raids or Grandmasters, and raids are supposed to be pinnacle content. So now, they’re harder, and pushing back against power creep which has allowed them to be cleared faster and faster over the years.
• Then, Bungie wants to mix up the meta by forcing different loadouts through burns, meaning you can’t rely on the same things every run and have to use different strategies to achieve maximum damage.

This has split the community, including long-time, high-profile raiders, but the “average player” sentiment appears to agree that this on the whole is not good. It makes casual raiding and sherpa-ing far more exhausting than it’s been previously, and it’s harder to get new players into a raid as a result. On top of them being mechanically difficult to explain at times, there’s now this hard cap in power, and zero point in overleveling in a game where power already means fleetingly little.

There is also a middleground opinion, that making raids harder is okay but rotating surges themselves are bad.

I see all sides, but I lean more toward the “this is bad” position. If you’ve been running, or running people through, these raids for years now, bosses suddenly taking 35% less damage on the whole is not going to feel good and it’s the sort of artificial difficulty increase I don’t think is useful.

I think you can increase difficulty through…raid design itself. That’s very much on display with Salvation’s Edge where mechanics and smart play are the thing, rather than just “enemies too strong.” I won’t say it’s a direct line of raids getting harder in time (Root of Nightmares works against that) the past few years, but I think the main goal here should be “fun.” Is it fun to suddenly feel weaker in raids? To make new players even more frustrated past the normal difficulties of solving encounters? I don’t think so, and I think most of the people saying “raids are boring and too easy now” are ones that have already farmed them to death and have no real reason to keep doing so. Unlike infrequent raiders or new players.

Bungie is open to feedback and this point is coming up a lot. We’ll see if anything changes, but I’d guess not for this entire episode, at least, as they analyze data. If raid attempts and completions just drop hard, they may reconsider.

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