 Hey everyone, so I'm still working on my video about the Bloody Baron quest in The Witcher 3 and some of the best little deals I got during the Steam Summer sale, but today let's get back to Destiny. So Destiny 2 is in a weird place. In true Bungie fashion, the last couple of months have seen several really great changes counterbalanced by several fucking incomprehensibly ridiculously infuriatingly terrible changes. As anyone who's watched my videos knows, I have a long list of problems with Destiny 2. So many that I literally sigh deeply every five minutes or so while playing. Like this, watch. Today though, we're gonna focus on one problem. In my opinion, Destiny 2's biggest problem. Well, actually, it's kind of one big problem that's resulted from the piling up of many many little problems, but whatever let's just get right to it. Okay, the problem is this. Heroic strikes in Destiny 2 are fucking terrible. Absolutely unplayably awfully fucking terrible. So terrible, it makes me turn off my console. So how did we go from heroic strikes being my go-to activity in Destiny 1 to being so bad it causes friction in my marriage? Well, the way old plenty sees it, we got here from the confluence of five issues. The new heroic strike modifiers, the lack of special weapons, the lack of progression in these strikes, the still far too slow stupor and abilities cool down, and the second games apparently much more aggressive power scaling. Now I'm not gonna waste time going into the history of all these asinine changes. We're just gonna explain how each one sucks and then explain how together they produce a clusterfuck of unfun. Before we get to the atrocity that our D2 heroic strikes, let's take a moment to remember just how great heroic strikes were in the first game. Destiny 1 heroic strikes were challenging, but still allowed for varied style to play. The truth is they were actually just as difficult as these new D2 heroic strikes, but they were difficult and fun. It was viable to use a scout rifle and a sniper rifle to pick off enemies from afar, and it was just as viable to use a hand cannon, shotgun, and the first game's faster movement speed to play aggressively of close range. These strikes were harder than the normal strikes, not because the enemies were all that much more spongy, but rather because they included more shielded enemies and the modifiers and the strikes made certain enemies more dangerous. They weren't hard. They were challenging. They required you to adjust your play style or at least know the strikes very well to succeed. I want you to watch this clip here. I promise this is representative of what playing D1 heroic strikes is like. You'll notice a lot of movement, a bunch of different ranges in the combat. You'll notice that there are grenades and melee attacks being used constantly. You'll notice that supers are charging significantly faster. Let's go to the video. Okay, that was the Destiny 1 heroic strike experience. Now let's take a minute to watch a Destiny 2 heroic strike in action. You'll notice that grenades are very rarely used. You'll notice that the vast majority of the gunfights take place at medium to long range. You'll notice that the super is charging amazingly slowly. You might also notice that it looks much less fun. So what happened here? Why is it so much more fun to play the first game than the second one? Here we go. Destiny 1 had a bunch of heroic strike modifiers. Let's list them here. Look at this. Almost all the modifiers have benefited guardians, significantly benefited guardians. When we had, for instance, let's say Solar Burn, Specialist, and Catapult, choosing a solar subclass with a solar shotgun that reduced grenade cooldown on kill and the sunbracers exotic gloves that gave two solar grenades would push the player to constant close engagements. You'd be rewarded with grenades every five seconds or so. To counterbalance this, the burn increased damage from solar sources by 200%, meaning both you and the enemy would absolutely melt anything you damaged with solar. This made the player a wrecking crew while also making certain enemies instant death. Added on top of the still much faster movement speed would completely change the way you played the game. There were, as you can see, a ton of modifiers, and they mixed up to create fun and interesting combinations that changed how you played. The heroic modifier was always active, meaning that there were more enemies, more yellow bar enemies, and they were far more aggressive and had better aim. Destiny 2 has these heroic strike modifiers. Not only are there far, far less of them, they all basically impact the game in the same way. The burn has become a singe, so the player does almost no extra damage. It's so insignificant that it's not really even worth it to change your loadout. I honestly can't tell the difference between the different elements. The positive modifiers for Guardians are so weak, it will never change your style of play. But the negative modifiers are all terrible and have the exact same effect, to make you play passively. Grounded means, every time you were in the air, you die, whether that's a jump or just stepping off a 6 inch ledge. Blackout means, if something melees you, you die, which is particularly crazy because Destiny 2 has boss rooms with much less cover and verticality than the first game. The original game had light switch, which greatly increased melee damage for you and the enemy, but that didn't mean instant death from every melee attack. And what's worse is that Blackout is a more powerful light switch, with the modifier Chaff rolled in. With swarms of enemies, all of whom can one hit kill you, taking away the radar is just too much. The modifier Glass means almost any enemy can kill you with only a second or two. I am simply not convinced that Destiny 2's versions of Brawler and Grenadier, mods that are meant to greatly increase your grenade and melee effectiveness and decrease their cooldowns are having any effect at all. Destiny's burns were an interesting modifier. You could easily be killed quickly in one shot by an enemy with a matching element, but it also is an interesting risk and reward game. You could take down enemies before they killed you, and if you were careful and observant, you could take down the enemies using that element first. Destiny 2's singe seems to have no effect because it's mainly useful for your secondary weapon. And that weapon carries a damage penalty at all times, so what you end up with is singe giving that weapon an extra 15% of damage, not enough to notice. But for some reason, it seems to be having much more effect on the enemy attacks than it does on yours. It seems like it's burned for the enemies and singe for you. The problem is, there simply aren't enough modifiers, and the modifiers that are there are either extremely annoying or almost completely unnoticeable. I challenge anyone who likes them to convince me that any of these modifiers require you to change your loadout or alter how you play the game at all. Every single modifier produces the exact same result. The most efficient way to play is to engage enemies from as far away as possible while standing near cover. Destiny 1's modifiers pushed you into completely different play styles on loadouts. Specialist and brawler meant an entirely different gameplay experience than catapults and small arms, and the only way to really feel that is to go back and play those strikes again. Destiny 2 heroic strikes are certainly harder than the normal strikes, but the entire purpose of the modifier system is to produce different loadouts and play styles to add replayability back to strikes you've run hundreds of times. The current modifiers accomplish precisely the opposite. They make every strike exactly the same. If you don't believe me, go play Destiny 1 for two hours. I promise you, the change is stark. Lack of Special Weapons I know they plan on fixing this in the Forsaken, but I'm talking about what's going on now. So here we go. Destiny 1 made heroic strikes harder by adding more enemies, more shielded enemies, and more aggressive enemies. But it didn't make enemies all that much more spongy, unless the spongy enemy modifier was in effect. Destiny 2 heroic strikes, even after getting over the level hump, gives enemies a ridiculous amount of extra health. Once you get to level, you can still one-shot thralls and low-level mobs with headshots. But acolytes will take several shots, and knights can take as many as seven to ten shots with a scout rifle to kill. Shielded enemies are almost mini bosses that require staying in cover as you slowly chip through their shield and then pump a million fucking headshots into them until they die. People panned the first game for having bullet sponge bosses. The division was panned for every single enemy, even dudes with hoodies holding baseball bats taking entire clips of an assault rifle to kill. So somehow, Bungie thought what was missing in Destiny 2 were launch version of division levels of sponginess on every single enemy. This might have been a reasonable change if Destiny 2 had won crucial system that Destiny 1 had. See, Destiny 1 had this really amazing thing called special weapons. They were special because they had more ammo than heavy weapons, but less than primary weapons, and they could kill most enemies with a single shot. So when you ran into a knight or a captain, you could quickly switch to a shotgun and take him down efficiently before moving back to the groups of lesser enemies. This allowed the game to keep its frenetic, fast-paced flow. It also meant that in heroic strikes, players were switching to their secondary weapon several times a minute. But without those weapons, Destiny 2 was already more of a conventional shooter slog. Upping the health on enemies simply slows the strikes to a crawl. I find myself dying in Destiny 2 Heroics because I get so pissed off I just can't fucking take it anymore and I try to play it like Destiny 1 to ring at least a few seconds of fun out of this piece of shit before I get obliterated by a minotaur who I normally would have killed with a fusion rifle, but now I have to slowly whittle him down with a scout rifle. This level of enemy health is just the final, crowning example of how fucking terrible the current weapon system is. It is so perfectly terrible that if I was conspiracy-minded, I could be led to believe that Bungie purposely did this to make the forsaken launch feel as good as possible. Playing D1 Heroics again felt so good. I died when I overextended myself, but the deaths felt fair, like punishment for being stupid. The current weapon system, combined with stupid amounts of health, make players all play exactly the same. It is so unfun I'm forced to choose between three possibilities. 1. Literally nobody at Bungie played these abominations before launching them. 2. They played them, but are so incompetent they didn't realize how much they sucked until it was too late and they'd moved everyone over to the next content drop. Or 3. They purposely made them huge piles of shit so that the forsaken will feel that much better at launch. I vacillate between those options on an hourly basis. Lack of progression in strikes. Okay. Heroic strikes are boring fucking slogs through hundreds of bullet sponge enemies with literally the least variety of gameplay styles of anywhere else in this game. They take longer than normal strikes and if you're paired with bad players can easily lead to multiple wipes in boss rooms. So obviously they have rewards that make playing them worthwhile, right? No. No they do not. For some strange reason, the loot was locked at Softcap when these strikes launched. They eventually patched it so things could drop up to 360, but I'm 377. What reason do I have to play these pieces of shit after I hit level 361? Is there a strike specific loot like in Destiny 1? Nope. Can you at least ring very very slow progression out of them like you did in D1? Nope. Do you level up factions like you did in Destiny 1? No. Do you have to level up armor and guns and therefore running these were experiences useful? No. Is there a strike scoring system or a streak system or fire teams that get kept together across multiple strikes or at least fun gameplay variety like in Destiny 1? No. No. No. And no. No. Once you reach 360 there is quite literally zero fucking reason to play more than three heroic strikes a week in Destiny 2. Why not cap the rewards at 380? Power level means literally nothing in gameplay terms in Destiny 2 and we will get to that in a second by the way. So why would the reward cap be this low? I am perfectly fine as I've said before with making max level only attained in the end game but why leave 25 levels of end game? Destiny 1 had this figured out perfectly. You could level up to just below the max level from everything but to finally get to the very very max level you had to do end game activities. Why make what used to be the backbone of your content utterly meaningless in progression? It is comically inept. Again. There apparently are strike exotic catalysts and heroic strikes but I don't know anybody who has gotten one and I have played a bunch of heroic strikes. The harder and or less fun you make a piece of content the less people will be compelled to play it unless they get some kind of reward from it. This is basic stuff. I've got everything Zabala can fucking give me now. My 23rd Uriel's gift doesn't mean jack shit to me anymore and even though the power level number is actually fucking meaningless it at least gives the illusion of progression. Why take that away? Does anyone benefit from that? I'm willing to bet everything I own including my house that Bungie's internal metrics show a cratering of people running these strikes and this should have been an obvious result for anyone who thought about it for several seconds. Longer strikes that are less fun and also harder with no rewards will lead to people not playing the strikes. Moving on. It's still too slow. The much ballyhooed go fast update was wrongly named in my opinion. It should have been called the go maybe 15% faster but nowhere near as fast as Destiny 1 because we're not ready to admit that Destiny 1 was a better game in literally every single way update. Movement speed is still too slow. Jumping is still slower and shittier than the first game and grenade melee and super cooldowns are still no fucking where near the speed they were in Destiny 1. A guardian wearing the right armor with the right build and weapons could use grenades every few seconds. You could get the base normal cooldown to as low as 25 seconds before even accounting for perks and exotics. Melee's were significantly more powerful and had cooldowns half as fast as the current go fast cooldowns. On top of that, a guardian could get their super back every minute or two when Destiny 1 Heroic strikes with a good team. Orbs and monster kills charge far more super bar than they do now. Even with every player having three weapons that produce orbs on multi kill by the way these also exist in Destiny 1, you get your super far less often in this. How much less often? I don't know right now. I'll have to go watch and see. I'm guessing half as often. I will put it up in a little screen right here. Ready? Here. This less often. So we've got shitty, annoying modifiers, infuriatingly spongy enemies, no special weapons, and getting grenades, melees, and supers half as often. And what is the predictable result of this? Yes, you will use your space magic abilities. You know, the abilities the entire game is based upon. Far less often, and you'll be using your scout rifle the vast majority of time you are playing these strikes. In short, the cooldowns make the game not Destiny. They make it a regular shooter. But there are a whole bunch of great shooters and only one Destiny. Lots of things combined to make Destiny what it is. Sound design, art, graphics, movement, etc. But the space magic stuff is what the game is all about. The grenades, melees, and supers are the core of the combat system. In Destiny 1, you are shooting enemies only in between those things, and playing well and making the best possible build meant keeping those abilities in use as often as possible. With certain gear, builds, and modifiers, that meant literally almost constant uptime on grenades. Or, with a really good team, entire strike-long super chaining. Not only is this more fun, it allows for more difficulty. I am fine with huge groups of spongy enemies if I have the tools Destiny 1 gave me to deal with those things. The entire design is now out of balance. What makes carving through those crazy difficult rooms teaming with enemies both fun and possible was correct usage of the Guardian abilities. It is the central PvE balance mechanic. I'm not sure if anybody in the world wanted less of these things in PvE. I do know that PvP players were tired of spamming, but this shows that if they continue to insist on uniform balancing, PvE will never be as good as it was again. Because Bungie had always balanced its difficulty around players having grenades and melees every 30 seconds and supers every 2 minutes. Take those things away, and the exact same level of difficulty goes from fun and challenging to a boring slog. The cooldowns, movement, and jumping are still broken. Please, Bungie, just go back to the first game completely. Everything will suck until you do. POWER SCALING Okay, we're gonna wrap up after this. I intended this to be one of my fast and easy 5 minute videos, but that didn't happen. The final piece of the puzzle, making these strikes a crime against humanity, is the second game's far more aggressive enemy power scaling. Destiny, like many other RPGs, used some degree of power scaling. Back at the beginning of World of Warcraft, there was no enemy scaling, which meant that progression could really be felt by the player. If you return to the starting areas at level 60s, enemies that had once required careful, difficult play could now be obliterated. You could run through huge groups of enemies and pull them all together before melting them all. Hell, one of my favorite things was soloing older 25 man raids, farming for armor and mounts. On one hand, this could be very fun, but on the other hand, it renders all of your previous content completely irrelevant and unplayable. Too easy isn't fun, as Destiny 2's campaign taught us. Destiny 1 launched with like, 5% of the content of World of Warcraft, and Bungie could not afford to render all of that meaningless through player leveling. But at the same time, the power fantasy is central to RPGs, and it almost demands that players can actually feel their increased power and combat. Destiny ended up arriving at an excellent compromise. Enemies do scale with the player in the first game, but only to a certain degree. So if you go back to Earth Patrol zones, at 400 light, enemies could conceivably kill the player, but you could also tear through them without too much effort. It was nearly perfectly balanced in my opinion. The leveling power fantasy remained, but the enemy scaled just enough that none of the content was completely pointless. It was just about perfect. Destiny 2 seems to have turned a power scaling advantage completely off. Once you hit the recommended level for an area or activity, you will never again get even the slightest bit more powerful relative to those enemies. Destiny 2's system is basically a player debuff that turns off once you hit a number. As such, the actual power level part of leveling up is meaningless. Once you hit level 350, you are as powerful as you will ever get outside of three activities. And once you hit the level for those, the same thing happens. I understand the reasoning behind enemy power scaling, but Bungie's implementation sucks in Destiny 2. Heroic strikes. Once you hit level 351, will never feel even a smidge different again. If the game scaled enemies along with you, but still conferred small benefits as you leveled up, then there would be a purpose for chasing that power level number. As it stands now, there simply isn't, which means that unless you're interested in playing high-vescalation protocol with only four of the people, there's really no reason to bother leveling past 370. How about instead Destiny 1's system? Or a different system, even better system? How about when the player gets to level 355, they gain a 5% damage advantage, and then 365, another 5%, 375, and 385, another and another. Now there's an actual reason to shoot for power levels, because they will offer a tangible gameplay benefit to the player. Nothing outrageous, but small, incremental, but noticeable benefits for leveling is precisely what the game is missing. Every time I get a smidgen of joy when a high level item drops, it lasts only a second, because I immediately remember that actually this number means jack shit. Nothing in the game will change as a result of that number. Allowing max level to confer a 20% damage increase isn't huge enough to make the strikes completely pointless, but it is enough to make leveling feel good again. And of course, Bungie could then put a final max light difficulty in heroic strikes so that players who wanted to have the more difficult versions could still have them. These final heroic strikes should offer their own tier of really great looking cosmetic armor skins as a reward for doing them. As it stands, Destiny 2's aggressive enemy scaling is the worst of all worlds. It's just a debuff that turns off, and this scaling makes leveling actually factually pointless. Once this realization dawns on you, it is like a cancer sucking the fun out of every loot drop in the game. Bungie needs to rework and reimagine the game's enemy scaling if they ever want leveling to feel like it means something again. Wrapping this shit up. Okay, I know I do a lot of Destiny 2 videos, but that's only because I really loved Destiny 1 by the end. Right from the beta, I thought the potential for a great game was there, and by the end it felt rewarding to have stuck with the game and see it in such a great place in its final form. And the thing I enjoyed most in Destiny 1 was playing the heroic strike playlist. And somehow, for some reason, I am still playing Destiny 2 for reasons I can't even explain. But Destiny 2 heroic strikes are like a shitty knockoff of Destiny 1s, with entire systems ripped out and the ones that were replaced being poorly thought out and disastrously implemented. It's been perhaps my main gripe with the game. I think I might be the only person who made a Reddit post complaining about not being kept in fire teams through multiple strikes, but that has always bothered me too. I miss that. All of these changes have conspired to make the strike playlist worse. I miss strike scoring. I miss skeleton keys. I miss strike specific loot. I miss good modifiers. Special weapons. Fast movement. Better jumps. Supers. Grenades. Disintegrating enemies with space magic punches to the face. I miss leveling, making me stronger. If only a little bit. When you add it all up, Destiny 2 heroic strikes are just awful. They feel shitty to play. They have zero meaningful reasons to play them, and overall are almost the perfect illustration of everything that was and still is wrong with the game. Alright, see you next time. Thanks for coming.