Destiny 2 Game Director Luke Smith is back with another multi-thousand-word “Director’s Cut” blog providing insights into Bungie’s decisions and plans. He briefly touched on the new Armor 2.0 systems, though those were explained in yesterday’s live stream, and the main focus was on the game’s Power system and the feeling of progression. Most importantly, he announced that all weapons and armor will receive a boost to Power 750 in an attempt to get everyone up to speed.
Want to swap to your Hunter? Maybe use that exotic that you never bothered infusing? Shadowkeep will be the time for that.
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Power Boost Plans
As we mentioned, the idea is to power up all gear in the game to 750. Destiny 2 originally suffered from the tremendous grind needed to get strong enough to play with friends. Both Season of the Drifter and Season of Opulence made attempts to speed up this process through bounties. With Shadowkeep Bungie is making it instant.
We’re setting the Power this Fall to 750 for both returning and new players. We want you to all be together when Shadowkeep opens. Here’s what this means:
- Every single item in the game is being raised to a Power floor of 750 when Shadowkeep and New Light launch. Every item in your inventory (and vault) is going to automatically jump to 750.
- It’s like a free global burst of infusion for all players.
As a result, Smith recommends players stop spending in-game resources to infuse their weapons and armor. There’s no point in grinding them to the max Power level know only to have them automatically raised in a month or so.
Power Level Progress Changes
As we mentioned, Bungie added a ton of Powerful Engram sources throughout the last year in an attempt to help players level up without raiding. This was on top of the Power level boost that the bounties provided. It sounds like Bungie hasn’t been incredibly happy with that process and will tone down the number of Powerful Engrams available each week.
“We’re curating down the sources in Shadowkeep,” Smith says, “Our target is to get the number of powerful sources closer to Forsaken-launch levels.”
And rather than having some Powerful Engrams be better than others, they’ll all be equally as good. There will be fewer of them, however.
Smith also says that reaching max Power is something the team thinks should take several weeks for progression-focused players.
Prime Engrams are being moved entirely to the late game. While you can still earn charges for them from Power 750 to 900, they can’t actually drop until you hit 900. You can also earn more each week though they’ve been toned down slightly to account for the increased availability.
Here’s an example: A player has an overall Power level of 912. Gloves are their lowest slot at 906. A player might open a Legendary engram and receive 912 gloves (an increase of 6 Power).
Tomorrow Smith will return with the final part of his Director’s Cut blogs. It’ll focus on combat, the PVP experience, and some details on Destiny’s evolving world.
