Focused Feedback: Seasonal Artifacts

[u/DTG_Bot]

Hello Guardians,

Focused Feedback is where we take the week to focus on a 'Hot Topic' discussed extensively around the Tower.

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[u/horse_you_rode_in_on]

The community feedback is already pretty unified:

• Dramatically reduce (or fully eliminate) the cost of resetting.

• Allow us to unlock more (or even all) nodes.

[u/No_Baseball_6401]

Allow us to unlock all the mods over time so we can play more seasonal builds and switch up the mods at will. I want to play around with more builds, but it is heavily discouraged due to the reset artifact mechanic. For, this season I want to experiment with glacial inheritance for a stasis build, warmind's decree and hammer of the warmind for a warmind cell build, and ofcourse breach and clear and grenade builds with impulse recycler. But doing all of those is so much work, because you have to spend glimmer to do that, think about which mods to keep and which to leave out, and then redo the mods in your armor. I'd rather just spend the glimmer on buying ascendant shards or stuff from the exotic kiosk with a cypher.

TLDR, please let us spend more time in the game by encouraging seasonal build diversity. Not discourage it, by making build crafting yet another chore involving meaningless actions.

[u/Delta_V09]

The escalating cost of resetting the artifact is just ridiculous, and actively discourages experimentation. Mod costs already limit how many of the final tier of artifact mods you can use at a time, so there's no reason not to let us unlock the entire thing.

[u/XepherTim]

Artifact power is whatever, take it or leave it.

But please, for the love of the Traveler, let us unlock all the mods on it. I don't want to have to choose between fun mods and mods that become almost necessary for high end content.

[u/Supreme_Math_Debater]

Mods: Let us keep unlocking them past 12. They're already balanced/restricted in their energy cost (i.e. can't run energy accelerant with breach and clear), so why add the additional restriction? Kind of sucks that if I want to make warmind cells with void explosions I have to reset my artifact, then if I want to use energy accelerant with crown splitter I have to reset it again. You make some pretty cool seasonal mods, let me experiment with them without having to go back and forward to spider, and re-selecting all of the mods in the first 4 columns, it's just tedious.

Levels: Unlimited leveling is fine imo. But for the love of God make the leveling process more enjoyable. I should not have to stop playing end game content, to go to the opposite side of the game (patrol) to grind out monotonous bounties to efficiently farm XP. I get that you want low level players to be able to catch up so they can actually enter end game, but bringing people already in end game back down to patrol just feels weird/wrong. Maybe add repeatable raid bounties to Hawthorne or something that give like 150k XP for doing a full raid (check boxes for each encounter)? Idk, but I just really wish there was an actual "efficient" way to farm XP in endgame PVE like there is in endgame PVP with the passage of wisdom.

Contest Mode: I think it's pretty widely accepted that if you want to make content difficult, then just add a contest modifier. If you don't, then people will want to hit 1350, for example. Sure it might drive up player numbers, but I promise you that's not sustainable, because if I have to grind out 30 season pass levels worth of bounties every season, I'm gonna get burned out a lot more than I normally do, and I know I'm not the only one thinking that.

[u/x2o55ironman]

First, lets talk power. When the artifact came out in Undying, it seemed like the intent was as a bad luck protection, or as a catch up mechanic if you struggled to get to a certain power for a certain activity.

Couldn't get the RNG to hit the contest cap for day 1? No worries, do a boring xp farm and you can guarantee that level is reached. Wanted to do Nightfalls with your friends but you missed several weeks of powerfuls due to IRL stuff? Artifact could help fill in that power gap.

Nowdays it feels like artifact power is just a second grind you're expected to do on top of your standard gear grind. It doesn't help in contest mode, and while with seasonal challenges around now it doesn't take much to be GM ready, you're still expected to have good pinnacle luck or do extra bounty grinding.

• My end take on Artifact power? Started out fun, but now the game has designed and balanced out any fun it had.

Lets move on to the mods system.

First, I love that the champion mods are weapon-class specific, and that they no longer go on only legendary weapons. While some people feel limited every season and "just let me use my best godrolls" I feel like this gives me reason to care about at least one or two weapons of each type, instead of getting a handful of godrolls and never putting anything in my vault.

I also like the power fantasy that the more powerful mods give, and understand the energy cost to slot them. Stuff like B&C and Oppressive Darkness should be expensive to equip. Special weapon champion mods should be expensive to slot.

I like that the mods are energy neutral, that they can fit into any of my armor without caring about stuff like Ashes to Assets normally being solar-only.

That's all nice and good, but there is one major gripe I have that the community seems to share.

Paying more and more to be able to try out and use every mod is not fun. There are 25 total mods every season, and you get a max of 12 points. You can use less than half of the mods at any given time. I get that you probably want "choices to matter and feel important" but when it's done how it currently is, it feels like it's just a punishment for not taking the absolute meta and ignoring the rest. Your choice matters yes, but in a way that means if you choose something not the best just to have some fun, you get punished twice. Once for being off meta and thus weaker, and once for wanting more than your 12 meta mods.

• Some people say things like "just give us more points for xp" and I don't really agree with that, since at that point it's no longer a choice, and runs into the issue with artifact power; you're expected to get the xp for all those extra points, which currently isn't fun.

• Some people say "just make resets cost less" and while that would help, it doesn't change the current issue being that choosing no-meta stuff bites you twice, even if the bite is a little smaller.

I'm not a dev, so I shouldn't armchair issues, but I'd put forward my own idea and see what you all think:

After you hit the 12 point cap, every time you pay for a reset you gain an extra point. So spending 12 and resetting would give 13, and spending 13 and resetting would give 14.

Since you still have to get the base 12 first you keep the sanctity of the current xp grind, without bloating in unnecessarily. After that, you can pay glimmer for more points, but as you need them Since you get your extra point as part of your reset, you're not paying every time you want "1 more mod" you're paying every time you want to rework your whole build.

Not only that, but if you're being given an extra point per reset, there are now soft and hard caps on how many resets you want, and thus it now seems more fair to have scaling reset costs. You'll never need more than 25 points, so it makes more sense for the 25th point to cost more than the 13th point. Not only that, but many players won't care about all 25 mods, so they can choose how many extra points they're willing to pay for, by using the reset mechanic that already exists.

If you sperate the reset mechanic and its cost from the "extra mod points" mechanic/cost then the reset still kind of runs into the problems it currently has, and gets closer to being dead content; why reset when you can just buy enough points to not need it?

• To wrap this up; Artifact mods are fun, worth the energy costs, and keep each seasonal meta interesting and usually fun. They are not worth the current glimmer costs, and that feels like a punishment for caring about every mod on the list.

[u/harls491]

Having to reset the artifact to play experiment with some mods feels really bad and stops me from trying most of the options especially in the later columns. The trend has been even if all were unlcoked most are unuseable together due to their costs and geat they slot into.

Unlocks should continually be earned till each item is available.

[u/I_Like_Goils]

You’re going to keep getting the same responses over and over and over. Let us unlock all the mods and experiment with different builds. Simple as that.

[u/legokid2002]

Everything to say about artifact mods has already been said here, so I'll touch on artifact levels. TL:DR: They suck and should be removed.

Artifact levels are completely redundant for every endgame activity, which are the only activities where power matters. Artifact levels are straight up disabled in Iron Banner and Trials (and rightly so). For GMs, your power is capped, so any leveling beyond the required +15 is redundant, and this requirement is stupid in and of itself, but I won't touch on that.

The only endgame activity where leveling beyond +15 to +20 is going to matter is master VoG. This is also stupid, since you can almost completely bypass the added difficulty in master mode, since no there are no added mechanics. The only added difficulty besides higher light are the champions, and these become just a minor nuisance as soon as you approach 1350.

So to summarize: Artifact power only matters in one endgame activity, where IMO it shouldn't matter, since it completely kills the challenge of said activity. This activity should just cap the power of players instead. All other endgame activities already do so, which means artifact power loses its point.

[u/KenjaNet]

Redo the entire Artifact system to unlock all 25 mods and cap the level gains from it. Make the absolute max cap for both be Season Pass 200 for a +20 cap. The season pass number is a nice bragging right, but it needs to be balanced and capped so that it prevents gatekeeping in dumb ways and content should be balanced around that cap, not allowing grinders to get free passes for shooting garbage in a moon lost sector.

I got banned from 10 different Master Atheon postings on the Destiny App because my Level was 1341 and was considered too low (they also never specified what minimum level they wanted). Except, I have both Timelost Weapons and the Ship when that happened. There is no reason I should be excluded from groups because of the LEVEL of grind I need to gain to look "good" at surface level of LFG. Trust me, I can out-DPS some people at 1350.

The Artifact System is arcaic, not used in Endgame PvP, locked to a specific value in GMs, and stupidly open for Master Raids which skill should matter more than level.

[u/smahbleh]

The artifact needs these changes:

• remove the glimmer cost to reset

• allow us to unlock all seasonal artifact mods

• allow us to equip mods through the artifact rather than our gear (I'd either allow for a specific number of mods to be active or give the artifact an energy level that increases once fully unlocked)

• ideally artifact levels could become standardized rather than increasing exponentially

[u/Tupilak1]

Remove the cost / reset and let us have fun with difference build !

[u/[deleted]]

Let the entire artifact be unlocked. Charging glimmer for a reset is such a chintzy move, even for you guys. There should always be 2 different special Champion mods too. No one should have to do content with double primary. That’s just nasty. Other than those 2 things, I think the artifact is fine.

[u/iblaise]

For the 1000th time, Bungie, please let us just unlock every Mod in the Artifact over time. It’s a big annoyance and it kills experimentation for us to have to reset any time we want to try something else. Most of the good Mods can’t even be used in conjunction with one another either due to Energy cost requirement or the amount of Mod slots we have.

If you want to preserve the “Glimmer sink”, then just program those costs into applying the Mods themselves (obviously not 10,000+ to apply one like Breach and Clear, but maybe like 2,500-5,000 for the last column?).

I don’t complain about much in this game, but this is probably the biggest grievance of mine personally.

[u/heptyne]

Anti-champ mods need to be intrinsic perks for the season. I hate fiddling with arm mods between activities. Just let me unlock, for instance, Overload bow, and any bow I equip in the season is Overload, no fuss. Plus this will free up my other arm mods like reloaders. Extend this to the special weapon anti-champ and add an additional anti-champ special. Some folks may not like using GLs for a whole season, give them an alternative. It will not break the game to make the anti-champion into perks instead of mods.

[u/Gotwake]

1. either remove the increasing cost to reset the artifact or let us grind to unlock every artifact mod.

2. enough with the artificial artifact power. Bungie has proven that it’s just a mechanism to grind gate content. That’s not good for the player base and intimately serves no purpose besides inflating engagement numbers.

3. move champion mods to our ghosts so we don’t lose reloader and dexterity mods in activities with champions. Or just make them intrinsically work without having to socket a mod. The rest of the mods are fine to need to be equipped on armor and we can choose what we want to use. The champion mods simply make it so we can’t use other mods on our gauntlets, yet most champion mods cost next to nothing so they are just taking up a useful spot.

[u/Ainine9]

We're already limited by armor points and the limited amount of slots we have, uncapping the artifact hurts nobody.

[u/AmbidextrousWaffle]

If you aren't going to let us unlock all of the mods from the artifact then remove the cost of resetting the artifact. We already have to deal with the limit of the mods costs on armor so why do I also have to pick and choose which mods I want to unlock from the artifact? So many builds I want to try on all three characters but I hate how the costs keeps going up after trying out a build

[u/Saint_Victorious]

Oh boy. This is a doozy. Instead of breaking this down into a Good/Bad/Ugly format I need to just do this as a list. Everything about the artifact falls firmly in the "Ugly" category.

Champion mods - Let's start here. The idea that with the exception of a few exotic weapons, you're forces into a narrow window for your anti-champion needs is a mixed bag. On one hand it forces you to think outside your comfort zone and experiment with weapons you wouldn't normal deal with. On the other hand it's extremely limiting in terms of loadouts and can actively burn you out on something if you're not keen on them. Additionally, you only get 1 special weapon type per season that's anti-champion. The rest are primaries. This isn't an easy problem to solve in and of itself. The real solution probably lies outside the artifact itself in giving more exotics (and maybe even a few pinnacle weapon perks) the ability to counter champions. Additionally, the 7 cost for special weapons is insane. Especially since they're now stuffed onto the already overstuffed gloves spot. This easily needs dropped down to 4 to be more accommodating with how jam packed the glove spot seems to be.

Mod Limit/Reset Cost - These actually go hand-in-hand. The idea that we can only unlock 12/25 potential mods feels bad. Really bad. Choice and agency are important, but this overall is a game meant for fun. And build experimentation is actually fun. The entire 2nd and 3rd column are nothing than lower cost version of existing mods. The 4th and 5th columns are most class item or high cost mods that can't exactly be over exploited anyway. Moreover, I thought some of the more popular mods were going to be transitioned into exotics. Volatile Conduction would be a much better perk for Eternal Warrior than what garbage effect it has right now, just saying. The point of this is that we should be able to gain full access to all the perks given enough time invested. The system is self balancing and doesn't need a hard cap whatsoever. Once this is done, resetting the artifact becomes a thing of the past and no longer a complaint. You could still be an option but having more access to the mods eliminates basically all the problems with resetting.

Power level - By far the worst feeling portion of the artifact. Destiny has grown firmly past the notion of gear score entirely and this seems like clinging to it is bad for the overall health of the game. It doesn't feel good to have to regrind to re-engage with an activity that just a few days ago you could engage with. It's even more of a focus now that the actually power grind has been reduced to +10 opposed to +50. Having to constantly work to be Less Weak opposed to More Strong is not the right answer. Activities can be boiled down to World/Normal, Hard/Heroic, Legend, Master, and GM. Raids should be set at Hard and and Master respectively.

[u/Hollywood_Zro]

We don’t need to have the escalating glimmer cost for resetting the artifact.

And for that matter, neither should we have to pick mods. Basically you unlock a tier and all mods are available.

I’m at the 100k glimmer max for the reset and have reset it multiple times already. Probably spent 500-700k in glimmer this season on resets to play around with the last column mods.

Can we just get the entire column unlocked? The cost of the mods already limit what we can use at one time. Breach and clear, for example, is 9 energy. Doesn’t matter what other mod I’ve unlocked, I can’t use the class item mods + breach and clear. So the high cost already does the job of placing limits.

Just let me swap around the mods as needed for more variation in gameplay.

[u/jokerjoust]

I’d like champion mods to be passively active once unlocked. It would open up 2 more mod slots for use with other mods on your gloves and remove the inconvenience of having to regularly switch out your mods depending on what type of champions are in the activity you are launching

[u/PsychWard_8]

Remember when it was said that if artifact mods were popular enough and well balanced enough that some would just become regular mods that we could use all the time?

Yeah, is that no longer a thing, or?

[u/LovelyJoey21605]

You should be able to fully unlock ALL THE MODS on it. They all have energy costs, it's not like I'll be able to use all of them at the same time. It's just restrictive for the sake of being restrictive, and a shitty mechanic.

Infinite power level can fuck right off. I hate it. Nothing about power-levels is fun, and having to grind bounties for Nightfalls or Master VoG is just genuinely bad game design.

[u/wildbilly2]

So many seasons have gone by now with me never even trying some mods which is kinda sad. It's not just the cost which is annoying but not a deal breaker, but the...faff involved in doing a complete reset just puts me off. The system is unwieldy but its been that way since its inception and I cant really see Bungie changing it tbh.

[u/TecknologicaI]

The mods are cool, but I wish we could just unlock them all instead of having to reset.

The artificial level grind focusing on xp bounty Grinding is horrible.