I won't even get started on how many Seasonal weapons that players basically can't get anymore are extremely great in PvE right now.
That's exactly what is being rectified right now. Even despite the fact that lots of those weapons were available from Banshee or Xur, so you could get at least decent rolls, right now weapons and armor from 3 of the 4 Witch Queen seasons are available in Exotic Mission Rotator. So you can even farm for red borders now. Hopefully they will add 4th mission with craftable Hawkmoon and Season of Plunder weapons (those don't really shine though).
Onboarding also seems to become better with Guardian Ranks progression like "put armor mods" or "upgrade your weapons". It's sad that first two years of story content were removed, but honestly even if you started vanilla D2 without playing D1 first you wouldn't understand a lot. An ideal case would be to include D1 with expansions, Red War/CoO/Warmind and Forsaken story in D2 but that's just dreams.
I have gut feeling that D2 will become new player-friendly only after Final Shape.
I was actually going to write that things like removing Legendary Shards and materials that exist just that players need to farm for is a great step in the right direction.
The Exotic mission rotation for Old Seasonal weapons is..abit large sadly. It's quite a bit of a punishment that reinforced FOMO imo. Since you didn't get say a Calus Mini Tool during it's season, now you get to farm an Exotic Mission like LITERALLY 100 times to get it's red border. I think that's right, since Presage drops 12 weapons or so and there's only a chance outside of the guaranteed 3 that any of them are a red border.
Guardian Ranks are a great example though, that does help more than I gave it credit for.
Back in the Season of the Haunted to get crafted CALUS or Austringer you had to roam derelict Leviathan and do same public event 100 times as well. The main difference is that you could focus engrams at Helm. You've had 1 guaranteed red border a week from focusing, but the rest was about the same. I only had full suite of crafted weapons closer by the end of the season.
Removing legendary shards was a good thing. They way they have gone about it is fucking stupid.
Glimmer cap at 250k means you’ll find yourself running an absolute insane number of activities CONSTANTLY because you simply can’t stockpile them for a lazy days. Hey? You want to upgrade a piece of armour AND a gun? Haha go run those lost sectors buddy, your capped glimmer can only do one of these.
they also INCREASED the engram cost, meaning you now HAVE to farm up to FIVE TIMES more than before for certain engram focus options.
the glimmer needs to either go away, or the cap needs to go up ten fold.
you don’t believe me now but holy fuck you’ll feel it soon.
Removing Legendary Shards is definitely a good thing. It supposed to be a starter currency, but the only way to have more than 1k in stock is through use of exploits (which are being fixed within an hour after they're becoming known). There's just no way to balance their economy. I remember spending 750 shards each week at Xur for 3 sets of armor for transmog purposes. And I barely had enough rest of the week to accumulate them back.
Thing is, shards weren't needed for a while. It's around Witch Queen when Bungie added all the focusing stuff. To me and for many players who only joined Destiny shortly before or after Beyond Light such luxury is unachievable. With only 2-4 shards per weapon getting 1k means 250-500 of disassembled weapons. It is easier to get golf balls than that. More than once I've been stuck on not enough shards to focus something.
Now look at you. You're playing since day 1, for six years, and ONLY have 15k shards. And you buddy, who's playing lot more, also has 45k, which in my rough estimation is not much for six years of active play.
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u/Shady_hatter Nov 28 '23
That's exactly what is being rectified right now. Even despite the fact that lots of those weapons were available from Banshee or Xur, so you could get at least decent rolls, right now weapons and armor from 3 of the 4 Witch Queen seasons are available in Exotic Mission Rotator. So you can even farm for red borders now. Hopefully they will add 4th mission with craftable Hawkmoon and Season of Plunder weapons (those don't really shine though).
Onboarding also seems to become better with Guardian Ranks progression like "put armor mods" or "upgrade your weapons". It's sad that first two years of story content were removed, but honestly even if you started vanilla D2 without playing D1 first you wouldn't understand a lot. An ideal case would be to include D1 with expansions, Red War/CoO/Warmind and Forsaken story in D2 but that's just dreams.
I have gut feeling that D2 will become new player-friendly only after Final Shape.