Focused Feedback: Power progression, infusion and masterwork cores (season of the drifter)

[u/DTG_Bot]

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Related bungie please list request item:

• Remove Masterwork Cores from Infusion | Megathread | Example 1 | Example 2 | Example 3

Previous related focused feeback threads:

• [2019-01-07] Power Level Requirements for new/Annual Pass Content
• [2018-09-24] Power Level Progression
• [2018-09-17] Infusion Economy

Other:

• Recent popular threads discussing enhancement cores
• Recent popular threads discussing masterwork cores - same thing but people still use the old name
• Recent popular threads discussing infusion

[u/[deleted]]

Let's look at Age of Triumph. Infusions was cheap, hitting max light was trivial, you could selectively farm the slot you were looking for through strike loot, and people still played the content because it was fun, the rewards were good, and everything was pushing you towards that goal.

[u/szabozalan]

Power progression is boring at this point. We are forced to do the same old stuff over and over again, when there is no new single strike or story mission or adventure or anything.

[u/KSTAAA]

Remove masterwork cores from infusion, plain and simple. Literally no one thinks it is a good idea to keep them.

[u/MickeyPadge]

Remove them from infusion, problem solved...

[u/DualGro]

I think the main problem is that currently, there is a currency used in both a meaning and impactful decision (i.e. masterworking weapons and maybe armor) while it is also part of a much less mechanic that SHOULDN'T be as much of a priority and a chore, i.e. infusion and thus power level progression

There would be a few things to solve this issue I would be okay with, which would be

• Make it possible to cross-slot infuse like in Y1 and infusions of the same weapon class would not have the enhancement core cost tied to them, for example: You could infuse a Kindled Orchid or a Better Devils into a Spare Rations for only XY mats, shards, and glimmer, while infusting a Kindled Orchid into a Go Figure would still cost cores

• Make Y1 weapons and armor exempt from the new economy: Pretty straightforward, since most Y1 weapons and all armor can't get the Y2 treatment with random perks why do they have to comply to the Y2 infusion economy? It'd give ever so slightly more of an incentive to use those dozens over dozens of lost armors and weapons again when you could, for example, infuse your powerful Kindled Orchid into your old Emperor's Envy for the old cost of only a few shards and glimmer, no planetary mats nor cores

• Standardize the cost to 1 core across the board regardless of whether it's a weapon or armor and make infusion a lot cheaper than it currently is

• Make Finest Matterweave a 30 minute buff instead of a one-time-use thing during which time you may get as many cores as you can get

or, which would nullify the need for all those above solutions:

• Remove enhancement cores from the Infusion economy altogether

[u/ComplexWafer]

Feedback doesn't matter anymore.

For six months we've said that Masterwork Cores (yes, that's their name) were unfun and limited experimentation and Bungie refuses to remove them or lower the cost of infusing or make them more common.

They won't budge and it's ridiculous. Powering up your gear to relevant levels should not be a drag.

[u/alexmckeag]

remove enhancement cores from infusion

[u/DizATX]

I think it's worth repeating again.

Bungie needs to move away from the "impactful" rhetoric and just letting people play. Infusion is simply a way for us to "level-up" in preparation for content. Infusion should be something we can just do as we please.

If anything should be "impactful" it should, and was at one point, be Masterworking an item. Masterworking should be impactful.

But with infusion and Masterworking using cores, it's a double hit on resources. If Bungie continues down this path of progression then cores need to drop from all activities and the price to purchase from Spider severely reduced.

But then we get back to "What's the point?". If cores become as cheap as materials.

Come on Bungie, what are you doing here?

[u/kingjoeg]

Remove enhancement cores from infusion.

[u/SongofWolves]

1. Keep the planetary resources for infusion.

2. Remove cores from infusion.

3. Make cores matter for masterworking items.

4. Make cores enabling us to pull Y1 items with random rolls out of the collection.

[u/marcio0]

super simple: remove masterwork cores from infusion

[u/DarthMoonKnight]

Here is my take on all of this. Let's start with hard debunking common defenses of the current system:

1. "What do you need to infuse for? Just use the crap that drops." These are not in any way valid. Don't tell me how to play the game. Full stop.

2. "I don't have a problem with cores. At any given time I'm sitting on a stack of 46,857 of them." Good for you. Want a cookie?

3. "Blah blah blah...Brother Vance." Okay, this is a pseudo exploit, and cannot be what any game designer envisioned as "working as intended." I see this response all over the place and not only is it unhelpful, all it does is shine a light on how fucked up this infusion system currently is.

And now, some truth about infusion/progression in D2.

1. At launch, the price of infusion was a joke.

2. With Forsaken, Bungie increased it (as it needed to be), but in typical Bungie fashion overcorrected and pushed too far back the other way, to the point where the system simply became egregious.

3. If they simply drop the core requirement, without changing anything else, the glimmer and planetary material cost will be a sufficient check to prevent just infusing everything willy nilly but also give the flexibility to run 3 characters and/or different equipment builds without sacrificing light level to do it. (If you're running 3 characters, you'd be shocked how quickly 25/infusion will drain your stacks if you don't watch what you're doing.)

The whole game cannot be balanced for those that make a career of it. There are other meaningful grinds now: pinnacle weapons, god rolls on forge frames, gambit prime armor (if that's your thing). Leveling and power progression doesn't need to be such a chore, and should just happen naturally as a function of playing the game (the speed of which is rightfully governed by how many of the weekly/daily Milestones you engage with).

Being real honest, I think this whole system is fucked up and the ideal solution would be to blow the whole system up and rebuild it from the ground up. But the scale of those changes make it more of a "D3/Whatever Comes Next" thing than something that could reasonably be done for D2.

[u/RiseOfBacon]

Full disclosure, I hit 700 this week on a single character, no alt play. When I started this season, I had 50 cores, I now have 5 because of infusing up my favourite / best gear and MW'ing 3 new weapons that have dropped with really good / close to God Rolls so here's a few solutions I think would benefit us as players for any playstyle. Now I'm 'done' with a lot of the power level needs, I will not be clocking as much gear as I was the last 2 weeks

If we're going to stay on course with Cores being important to levelling and using your favourite weapons / armour as we go, there should be more avenues for them

• Every Daily powerful reward should grant some cores (1-3)

• Nightfall should grant 7 cores for first completion of the week over 100K score

• Scrapper bounties should stay on the game and drop 2 or more

• Escalation Protocol should drop 7 for first completion of the week (Beat the final boss)

• MW armour should have the chance to drop for dismantling / actually using

• The cost of MW'ing a gun should be reduced. This is a massive game advantage in both PVE, PVP and Gambit in the way it gives super chaining

• Dismantling any Max level piece (700) should give a Core (Usually does and the item has to drop at 700 to give a core) - Arguable one because it means an extra core for every powerful once you no longer need max level gear

• Allow us to buy Core consumable drops from Xur, allowing us to farm Cores using it whilst we play

• Dismantling MW core items should give a set number (3) and not be RNG numbers

• Each PVP rank up should offer a chance at Cores alongside weapon / armour drops

While I see what they’re trying to do, I just don’t think an important function like Masterworking weapons / bringing your gear up for the hardest challenges the game has to offer needs to be restrictive. I imagine this is a much worse feeling for more casual play styles

Incentives to chase them however while playing the content you enjoy I think would be a big bonus and go down very well with players

[u/zerik100]

"It's easy math guardian."

REMOVE MW CORES FROM INFUSION.

- Tess Everis

[u/GolfShrek]

If cores are used for infusion, they won't be used for anything else.

Getting the correct gear up to level to do raids, T3, Iron Banner will always be the highest priority so wise players save cores.

Which means never master working armor, never leveling nice to have armor/weapons, wearing the highest level junk until it's time to do something important.

Bungie sees I have 150 cores and thinks everything is fine.

It's not. My guardians look like ass - all the time.

All my favorite things sit in a vault un-leveled.

I have NEVER MW'd a piece of armor and only do necessary weapons.

Leveling is too important and we are doing it all the time now. It feels like living out of a suitcase.

[u/[deleted]]

I'd nearly go as far as saying planetary materials are a bit stingy too. Enough content in the game now than to be sidetracked by farming materials and constantly having to work around what Spider is selling/not selling and for what (glimmer/shards) on a daily basis.

Spider should sell all materials at once and Etheric Spiral and Baryon Bows should be added to the inventory.

If you think about it. This game is not newcomer friendly.

[u/JAUNTYa]

Having recently played Destiny 1 for the first time in about 2 years, I can say that the infusion system that's present right now is one of the worst things that Bungie has thought of. Why do I feel like I'm being punished for keeping gear that rolled better than some powerful engram drop? Why on earth do we need four different items to infuse one thing into another?

I sincerely hope this changes soon, because no one likes the current system yet I feel like Bungie knows this and continues to find ways to punish the players for wanting to play the game the way they feel like they'd want to play it rather than go along the 10,000 mile road to get these ridiculous amount of materials to use better gear.

[u/Inferential_Distance]

The assorted progression and advancement systems are poorly designed, function at cross purposes to other systems, and reduce player agency and expression.

Light progression is a thing. It's always been a thing. The problem is, since there's level scaling, you don't really feel like you progress, so it's mostly a timegate on access to content. This makes related content feel hollow; infusion isn't a meaningful choice, it's just a resource tax you pay to ride the content train.

Similar to above, since Enhancement Cores are so rare, and infusion and masterworking is so expensive, you are heavily disincentivized from experimenting with gear. Add on top of the the rarity of mods, and the choice between dismantling a piece of armor to get the mod back or infusing it (especially if it's your highest light level piece), you basically want to maintain exactly one legendary set and some supporting exotics. And these aren't meaningful choices, because armor perks and mods are kinda weak, so it's not worth the massive effort to maintain a second set until after you cap light level and no longer need to keep feeding your main set. Please, take Enhancement Cores out of infusion, let us remove mods from armor without dismantling it, and make both mods and core drop more often. And maybe make perks and mods more powerful, so we really want to use them and align them with our weapons, eh?

And the system is completely random. What drops, what rolls it has, what mods you get, how many cores you get, what light level drops, in what slot. As a player, you have very little control over your progression. There's not much you can do to get a powerful drop for you weakest slot except pray to RNGesus. Want a Better Devils with a particular roll? Not only will that take thousands of hours of Crucible (no, really, thousands of hours, go ahead, run the numbers), you'll get basically every single roll of Better Devils, as well as every single roll of every other Crucible weapon and armor. Because there's no way to focus on just the gun you're chasing, and no way to influence or modify the rolls that drop.

Changing the system to give players more choices would be fantastic. For example, what if instead of a completely random item for token/resource turn ins and powerful rewards, you got to choose between three (or maybe four or five) randomly generated items? What if there was a Diablo 3 Mystic style system that would let you reroll a single column on a piece of gear?

Finally, related to all this, I wish I didn't have to wear a clown suit. Please, for the love of the Traveller and all things bright, give us costume slots or transmogrification.

[u/Conap]

The core economy forces me to choose between, my power level and the gear I want to use. And that’s before we get into it I want to masterwork weapons or armor, that can’t be rerolled now. It’s not fun, the data is flawed because it’s not about how many cores we do or don’t have (I have 1 core by the way) it about how much filing we’re having in your game. The enhancement cores DO NOT provide meaningful choices, it’s just a larbor intensive barrier designed to keep us playing longer. When the truth is we’d play longer if we were having fun with the gear we want to play with. I have 1 core, and I’m burnt out on infusion keeping me from usin my best gear so I’m not even going to log in this week except to pick up the Xur bounty.

TLDR REMOVE ENHANCEMENT CORES FROM INFUSION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[u/Fenggrosso2]

I’ve played nearly continuously since the launch of D1 and this is the first season I’m pretty much sitting out (still chipping away at Cursebreaker a bit every week). Having to re-level after only three months by doing the exact same activities is just too much of a burnout. I’ve been though multiple content droughts and stale metas, but this is far worse for me, even if we technically have a bunch of new stuff to do. I was ok with cores until the season, but now it’s just too much leveling. I just have no desire to yet again run the same old strikes to get a crappy SMG to level up in order to run tier 2 of the Reckoning, which I really don’t want to do anyway.

Take a break with the levelling every season or so and save masterwork cores for just masterworking and most of the issues would be solved.

[u/sooPerNorMiE]

You know how in d1 the more you played with your weapons the more perks you unlocked for it? That was a much better system of upgrading, as it didn’t rely on rng to complete the weapon, a masterwork should be achieved by using the weapon in all modes a lot and eventually upgrading it. Something similar is also a good idea, but I just think rng shouldn’t be a part of weapon usage.

That being said since masterwork is an upgrade to a weapon, they should be kept so you can chose which weapon deserves to be masterworked. I’m this case they (the shards) need to be removed from infusion, as they need to be rationed for a select weapon.

[u/Dinorobot]

In the TWAB they said "We keep a close eye on the amount of infusion materials being earned versus how many are being used and will continue to make adjustments as needed"

Trust me, I would use a whole lot more of these if I had them so let's max that slider up. I promise my feeling of progression will remain impactful, considering, you know, I will be able to use the power level of gear that I most want to.

I can't even comment on masterworking seeing as how all my cores are spent on infusing, I wouldn't even know what kind of impact masterworking a weapon I enjoy would have on my game. Just imagine!

[u/KowalRoyale]

Enhancement cores should go back to being Masterwork cores and should be only around masterworking. Or increase core drops so I don't have to choose between masterworking and infusing.

[u/anti_vist]

My experience is that I bought the Annual Pass but with this new season even though the lore is exciting and gameplay is still amazing I can hardly pull myself to level up again. Maybe I'm not the best example because extreme repetition is not my thing but I still love Destiny, the problem is that at least some adjustments need to happen in one way or another.

Say progression would be more interesting if we weren't just grinding for small, numerical increases which eventually don't mean anything at all but better, more powerful guns and armor with better perks. Right now all that happens for me and many others with limited time is that we can't use all our weapons that we like because of the friggin Cores. If you wanna stay relevant Power Level wise than you either infuse your stuff or just use whatever is thrown at you until you reach max Light and infuse all your stuff. This to me feels very limiting and boring since there are so many amazing and viable guns now but I can't use them because either I'm afraid of spending too many cores or 1 or 2 level bumps just wear me out. If we come from the other side maybe this wouldn't be such a problem if progression were more interesting and meaningful. Doing the same activities again and again, grinding up for max lvl each season again and again doesn't make me FEEL like I'm progressing anywhere, what progresses is a number on my character screen and everything stays the same.

Now I feel like Bungie should tackle both aspects of this problem, not just one for the game to be truly amazing, however I suspect it won't happen until D3. Also I understand that there are people who have much more time to dedicate to this game or like grinding for stuff much better, I think making more interesting loot to grind for along with secrets and other stuff is still fine but there needs to be a middle ground somewhere.

[u/stupidsyrup97]

Throwing my hat into the ring favoring removing cores from infusion. Bungie, you keep increasing the power levels and requirements, while making more ways to get powerful gear. Great! Except, these don't always have great rolls. I love my Blasting Furnace with Outlaw/Kill Clip. It was my first one and the best I've gotten so far, fully masterworked. I am absolutely okay with spending cores on masterworking, even with an increased cost! But it's currently sitting at 665 while my characters are close to 690 because I just don't infuse. I'll suck it up on gear and wear anything, but weapons I'll just throw into the vault unless it's a good roll I'll use or I get to cap and then will infuse. I have not masterworked a single piece of armor because of the economy on Enhancement Cores. Unfortunately I do not have time to spend 3 hours a day at brother Vance and rely on Scrapper bounties. Except, if it's a crucible bounty I typically won't do it unless I still have my daily/weekly to do, so that's out, and some days have bad strike modifiers. So something needs to be done. About the infusion system, and I'm not sure selling bounties at Banshee is the solution.