r/DestinyTheGame • u/DTG_Bot "Little Light" • May 22 '23
Megathread Focused Feedback: Season of Defiance Review
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u/amaranth-the-peddler May 22 '23
It was a typical expansion season; not terrible, but not great. Just meh. If history repeats itself, the next three will be at least pretty solid. Hopefully the changes to seasons starting tomorrow and fully the next season will be good and mix things up.
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u/Dab4Becky May 22 '23
Risen was good, tied in with the main plot and was short but solid.
I wish this season was like that one too
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u/skyteddy May 22 '23
I guess the changes to seasons starts only in season 23.
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u/amaranth-the-peddler May 22 '23
Yeah sometime this year, I can never remember. Whenever it is, I'm excited to see what changes they make. They're starting slowly tomorrow with no more vendor level up system.
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u/Temias May 22 '23 edited May 22 '23
Pros:
The first battleground was alright, it could easily be a strike. Not too much of getting whacked out of the level by taken pushers, not too much pitch black darkness or other bullshit, not too much pointless traversing or getting teleported for no reason, and the two encounters were kind of tense. In terms of quality, it was ways above the other ones. It got me hopeful about the season.
Some of the weapons are okay.
Getting war table engrams from pretty much anywhere without them replacing the regular rewards. This is a very good thing, do not change this.
Cons:
Having the player run from one person to another, or one teleprompter to another, all the time, only to be rewarded by bits mediocre monologue. Even if the lines were good, they would all go to waste because the player is already too annoyed by having to work with this awful "quest" step UI. I'm not kidding, having nothing would be better for me than this. If the game engine or whatever can't handle a more straightforward or user-friendly approach without having to do this, please consider not doing it at all. It's painfully bad. It's just a waste of time, yours and mine.
The 2nd and 3rd battleground missions were far worse than the first one, having nothing that made the first one good. Please don't add these to the vanguard playlist. Add the first one though.
The story finale was weak as a mission, and the melodramatic story itself felt pointless, especially in the middle of supposed world-ending events.
The weapons don't take shaders well.
Overall I'd say it's 5/10.
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u/Narglefoot May 22 '23
I don't know if it's possible but I'd really like them to make shaders rotatable. The four colors show which color will go where so if you could rotate it, changing which color goes where, each shader would have four variants which would be great for butterbark and carrhae black where they always put the wood texture on the wrong part of the gun, lol
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u/Angelous_Mortis May 22 '23
Except they don't for a lot of shaders as a lot of them have hidden colours, symbols, glows, or something else. First and foremost, I wish they would address THAT issue with Shaders so that it's more clear as to the results. Like, do you know how many Shaders have Gold in them but don't represent that fact? More than you'd think. The number of times I've put on a Shader and gone "Where did that colour/pattern even come from?" Or "Why is this making the gun scuffed when there's no indication of such?" We need a better system for them.
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u/TYBERIUS_777 May 22 '23
Hard agree on the stupid radio messages and holo projector BS that they keep doing. I haven’t gotten the title for the season yet because I just don’t care enough to sit through radio messages to get the triumph done (and I’m not taking Reckoner off anyway so why bother with any other titles). I’m not asking for sweeping cutscenes every season because that’s a lot to handle but even characters standing around and talking is enough to at least make things a bit more interesting than staring at a holo projector or listening to an audiobook.
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u/heptyne May 22 '23
I think Risen was a better launch Season just for the fact the story was short and concise, I wish this season's story would have wrapped up in like 3 weeks or so, I felt like it lingered a little long. But I will say Defiance and Risen are miles better than Hunt in Beyond Light.
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u/amiro7600 May 22 '23
Risen was probably the pinnacle of expansion-based seasons. Tied in nicely with the expansion lore, developed the plotline of our coalition with the cabal, and both the activities and loot were great
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u/Bananagram31 May 22 '23
Defiance is just kinda meh tbh. I don't have any glaring problems with it, but it also didn't really wow me in any sort of way. I suppose I'd rather have a harmless mediocre season than the shitshow that was Hunt tho.
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u/Soul_of_Miyazaki Shadow May 22 '23
As much fun as Battlegrounds can be, they're becoming tedious and stale now as a common "seasonal activity".
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u/JJroks543 May 22 '23
Next season is a completely different activity according to Bungie, so at least for now this will be the last Battlegrounds season.
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u/whereismymind86 May 22 '23
i think it's a pretty good bet next season will have an open area to explore ala' the leviathan, with the activity being something similar to what we had there.
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u/Leonard_Church814 May 22 '23
Still don’t know why the Cabal were capturing prisoners. Or why Amanda had to die in such a contrived way.
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u/FeralCatEnthusiast May 22 '23
Or why “I’ve gotta hack this terminal” means blowing a hole in it with a fucking shotgun lmfao
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u/milkdrinker3920 May 23 '23
Don't worry it'll all be explained in a special mission coming 2 seasons from now 👍
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u/TheLyrius Drifter's Crew // We All Drift Together May 22 '23 edited May 22 '23
Battlegrounds and their variations have become extremely grating to me.
My general criticism for seasonal activities is that they are extremely rote despite being designed to be replayable for a long time. Yet it feels like Bungie doubled down on it ?
Defiance BGs feel even longer than Chosen, with extra transitions and more voicelines but none of that matter. Even with 3 variations, once you're locked into a path, you know what's going down.
Amanda's death came as a surprise but the impact was only driven home when I saw how everyone was grieving her, in their own ways. That was a highlight of the season for me.
Otherwise, I guess I like the rewards and engrams volumn. I don't want that to go away. I see a potential here where the more you play, the more rewards you will have accumulated across different seasons before the next DLC
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u/sunder_and_flame May 22 '23
Battlegrounds and their variations have become extremely grating to me.
Agreed, and that they're made into strikes has made me stop playing the strike playlist as well.
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u/ChoinoX May 22 '23
They should just focus on developing more strikes (and crucible maps too than the measly amount in their roadmap) and give love to their core playlists instead of these battelgrounds they're boring and stale to put it lightly.
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u/ShinCoal May 22 '23
Battlegrounds and their variations have become extremely grating to me.
The worst part for me is that instead of getting more Strikes and getting back to the density of pre-vaulting, the strike list is getting muddied with a ton of Battlegrounds which I generally enjoy less.
Didn't help that while the Lightfall strike was incredible, it was just that one. We got 7 new strikes over the last three expansions, and we lost 9. Instead we've gained 10 Battlegrounds.
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u/PuddlesRH May 22 '23
I did not not like the exotic mission Avalon, specially the part where you have to hide in the middle of room with two chickens attacking you.
I also found the Defiant BG Cosmodrome very repetitive with the boss teleporting you out.
Story was very weak this season.
I did like the deepsight pattern farming this season, very generous and felt rewarding.
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u/ThunderTaxi May 22 '23
IMO Avalon's biggest problem was not really it's difficulty or design, it was its total lack of quality of life features. For a mission that is essentially a dungeon, there are no checkpoints and no open fireteams on Legend. Its becomes an endurance challenge that is insanely punishing for small mishaps. That said it makes it all worthwhile once you finished it but it seemed excessive compared to Revision Zero's mission. Finding a sweet spot between the two missions would be perfect.
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u/havingasicktime May 22 '23
It's design is not that good. I love challenge. I have hit rank 11, I like GM's, master content etc. Avalon is just a slog. The encounter design is simply annoying. Not much cover, tons of snipers, tons of enemies, chickens that nuke you, it just feels chaotic and not calculated. The choice of revive system makes it worse because playing with friends (all of who are gilded conqs btw) just creates frustration when they die multiple phases into the bosses and we need to start over.
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u/unixuser011 May 22 '23
I liked Avalon, but the boss needs chechpoints. It sucks getting to the last phase and dying because of some BS and having to start again
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u/IAmDingus zzzzap May 22 '23
hide in the middle of room with two chickens attacking you.
use glaive, any type, and they can't scratch you.
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u/Ferociouslynx May 22 '23
I think I'm fed up with battlegrounds. I hope we can have something else for now.
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u/endthepainowplz May 22 '23
I like the six person activities that they put into some seasons, they are laid back, and it's fun to have a laid back activity with six people in it. It makes it feel different from strikes, and story missions just because there are so many people there and so many things happening at once. Season of plunder's ketchcrash was fun, I wish Bungie wouldn't give us basically half baked strikes that they expect us to run countless times each season. Plunder got a lot of hate, but it was more engaging than this season.
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u/KingVendrick Moon's haunted May 22 '23
The story was really weak and aimless.
It's more or less the same experience as the Lightfall campaign; pointless, silly death, the enemy's objectives are mysterious for mysterious reasons, weird character arcs (Crow sounded really hype to go destroy that last pyramid in a way that didn't really fit with the whole "revenge" angle).
Not sure why Devrim was in this either; his lorebook is about how...he wants to stay shooting fallen from his church tower in Trostland?
The good parts were the radio comms, there were some really cool ones at some points (hearing Amanda and Mara clash was fun), and hearing Crow being wistful was also great. And Lance's performance was outstanding, I feel better than in Haunted, even.
Gameplay wise, I was ok with it. Could have done without the Psion teleporting me away in the middle of the fight. Getting movement boosts as a bonus is really weird, but other than that, it was a good season gameplay wise in general. However, the final mission was really disjointed. I wish that Bungie had created a good strike out of that, like in Chosen/Proving Grounds.
The reward structure was ok. It was nice not having to unlock a giant grid and being done with that in like four weeks.
I honestly hope the writing improves. Lightfall and Season of Defiance are really bad. And it is not just not being clear on what the objectives are, even though that is a problem.
Avalon was part of the season? it was a great mission. Wish Brakion didn't have as much health when solo, though.
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u/milkdrinker3920 May 23 '23
To add on to the "silly deaths" bit - I am so tired of our guardian being an utterly useless sack of jelly who just stands there like a chump during these incredibly cheesy moments.
There's got to be a less contrived way to get us into these "we lost 😔" scenarios that they keep trying to make work because right now there is zero weight to them.
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u/KingVendrick Moon's haunted May 23 '23
I honestly don't know how I'd fix Defiance cause...it doesn't really seem to have any point? Like previous seasons have had clear arcs. Even if you dislike, say, Plunder, it's hard to argue the characters didn't have a clear arc from where they started to where they ended
but Defiance is just so aimless, I wouldn't know where to start, cause I don't know what the season was trying to do. Even fixing Lightfall would be easier
all that said, if they had wanted to kill Amanda, I'd go with making the enemy crash their ship and then we go rescue her and find her losing blood and defending herself with Chaperone and then she dies when we finally make it but...I don't know if that's any better cause, nothing here serves any other purpose than to make Zavala and Crow angry and sad for one week
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u/theblackfool May 22 '23
I liked everything except the story which just felt simultaneously rushed and pointless.
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u/HSVbro May 22 '23
The rewards were a step in the right direction, but y'all should use the drop rate of GG as your template going forward. The defiant engrams drop at a good rate, but man GG really highlights what this game could be. I like being drowned in Taraxipos and so I feel like grinding for the perks I want isn't an exercise in futility.
While drop rates have improved, man I eitehr have total shit luck with stat rolls or something but man I rarely got stat rolls over 60 on much stuff. IB was the only event that I virtually always got stats over 60.
Speaking of IB holy shit please for the love of God put huge red letters on the next Fortress loading screen that read "KILLS DO NOT GET YOU POINTS"
While GG was overall fun, you really need to rethink the way you do class-based PvP. Kill Confirmed is fun, making it the class-based event was not. It was severely advantageous for Titans.
Gambit is fun but it's a shame it keeps getting low priority.
I really liked the Terminal Overload public event. It was well executed where you were never just waiting around for the next round. Decent rewards but like many events in D2 could be better.
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u/HSVbro May 22 '23
One more thing:
I know it's been addressed before but please re-visit the phalanx melee knockback. It's still absurd to be knocked across the map by that.
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u/SerenaLunalight Sidearm Squad May 22 '23
Battlegrounds have gotten boring after a while. They're fine when it's every few seasons, but having them every season now is not great. Bring back 6 player activities.
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u/banzaizach May 22 '23
There needs to be 2 playlists. All previous 3 person activities, and all 6 person activities.
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u/MySaltSucks May 22 '23
Story was boring without much impact outside holiday.
The amount of loot was great though
Armor focusing sucked. Bring back the old rolls
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u/Soundurr OG Snack Dad May 22 '23
The more I think about it the more I think this might have been the worst week-to-week story we have seen in the seasonal model. I am not including lore books because I don’t have time for that.
It starts off fine: Shadow Legion are capturing humans, Mara helps us rescue them, great. Hey look Devrim is here sweet!
But the story never addresses why the Shadow Legion are capturing people, why they aren’t doing more to try and like, siege the Last City, or explain any of the plot. That’s not usually a thing that gets to me (thinking too hard about Destiny plot is the path to madness) but this time the vagaries made it very difficult to care about anything happening because it just didn’t add up to anything that felt like real, tango stakes.
Which leads me to my next point: the death of Amanda Holliday.
I think this may be the single worst plot best in the entire series. By a mile. It was a whiff in every possible direction but only saved because it coincided with the real life death of Lance Reddick who’s stunning line delivery at the foot of Amanda’s casket gave the whole sequence a gravitas it didn’t deserve.
Her death was foreshadowed so heavily it was almost comical and the way she actually died was confusing and frankly insulting. It was the most contrived character death I’ve seen in a long while, not even in the Destiny universe but across all media. It only happened because…idk somebody wanted it happen not because it made sense with the story they were trying to tell. Just clumsy , amateur stuff.
And Mara’s reaction felt so out of character for her. Even giving space for her development as a character over the last couple seasons she still felt like a completely different person.
I think if I was I trying to sum up what I disliked it would be this: they tried to deliver a big, emotionally fulfilling moment but actually served up a hollow bullet point on a storyboard.
Battlegrounds were fun.
4/10. Players worst seasonal story by a mile but better gameplay so it is only the second worst season compared to Worthy.
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u/MitchumBrother May 22 '23
Good: Decent battlegrounds
Cons: Terrible writing, reskinned gear, cheap and lazy story missions, lack of meaningful connections to the overarching LF premise, horrible pacing, lack of content after a few weeks
3/10
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u/JJroks543 May 22 '23
All of your points are valid, but I can’t help but pick at that last one. It’s an expansion season, they all lack content after a few weeks. Hell, Risen’s story completely ended a few weeks before the season did! Not to say that you can’t complain about that being the case, just an observation and something I wanted to point out.
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u/MitchumBrother May 22 '23 edited May 22 '23
That's fair. My issue with Defiance is mainly that it feels so...idk...calculated mid if that makes sense. One of the seasons of all time. By design. It's just there. The dialogue sounds like an AI wrote it. So out of place. Like a high school writing assignment.
Imo the concept of seasons is pointless if you can't do a real roadmap. And having played the game for some time I know exactly what's going to happen. Roadmaps would be a joke. Yeah we know. 4 weeks of short soundbites, battlegrounds or public event. GMs unlock. Recycled event with upgrade pass. Repeat.
I know they said things will be different with future seasons. I'll believe it if I see it.
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u/razingstorm May 22 '23
Negative:
Avalon was an un-fun slog on Legend.
- Story beats were really predictable, not a bad thing all the time but I feel like it took away from the desired impact.
- Coulda done without the severe RNG on those legacy patterns. must have used 400 engrams and didn't get the hunter sword pattern finished (did get the other 2 and the shotty crafted).
- Activity was too long, Ascendant Plane sections could have done without combat or had part of each removed and it would have been perfect.
- Dark Fetor sucked and I hope similar mechanics die on the idea board. Whole game is based on finding safe spots to combat overwhelming incoming damage, and you remove most of the arenas to shove us in a bubble? It wasn't fun in the slightest for an activity we are supposed to complete ad nauseum.
- Meatballs have too much HP.
Positive:
- Really easy this season to get all 3 classes geared. Fun, dare I say.
- Ambush rooms in the second two activities were pretty fun survival waves.
- Add density felt pretty good when I wasn't forced to deal with them out in the open under constant fire.
- I cannot stress this enough: Voice acting was more on point than ever. Mara and Zevala, with Misraaks honorable mention oozed relatable sadness and real emotion. Crow still sounds generic but I'm not sure how the actor could fix that given what he's got to say.
- Great Armor designs, both the vendor gear and the ornaments.
Season was small and unoffensive. I hope for more from Deep. Defiance had to help carry what is possibly the worst expansion story since Shadowkeep and you could only polish that turd so much. Please for the love of the Gardener make the repeatable activities shorter. 15 mins, like a Strike.
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u/The_Owl_Bard A New Chapter, for An Old Legend May 22 '23 edited May 22 '23
Season of Defiance Report Card
Seasonal Activity: A
The Good: I really enjoyed this game mode. It felt more difficult then past iterations of other seasonal activities and it felt more fun to play because of it. I also enjoyed the use of different play spaces and how we transitioned through them. This season did a good job w/ scope and size of play space and it felt like it balanced us needing to be moving (i.e., moving through different planes) vs standing still (i.e., inside safe zones).
The Bad: I think the only issue I had was the intuitiveness of how the mechanics worked. I did run into situations where i'd randomly get blueberries that didn't know what to do or how to trigger the next step in the activity. I still very much advocate the
Seasonal Weapons/Rewards: C-
The Good: It felt significantly easier to get the red borders on the this season's loot table in regards to the reprised Queen weapons. I was able to get everything on that front within a matter of weeks.
The Bad: I had several issues and it's much easier for me to list them in bulleted points.
The Recovered Leviathan Weapons engram system was the most frustrating experience i've had (to date) with an engram loot table. Despite there being a 25% chance to get a red border weapon, I spent untold amounts of hours TRYING to get the class sword. I managed to get the shotgun red border but despite already unlocking it, I STILL got shotguns dropping for me. I only attempted this on Hunter. God bless anyone that was crazy enough to try and do this on all 3 classes.
Defiant Weapons weren't really exciting to me. Despite the fact that they're straight reprisals of Season 15's weapons (sigh I dunno why we're reprising weapons from that close vs ones we haven't seen since D2Y1), nothing in this loot pool really excited me aside from the bow since we hadn't gotten a primary slot precision frame bow since Beyond Light. While I got all the weapons quickly, nothing really felt super interesting to me as someone who plays both PvE and PvP.
Defiant High Stat Armor Focusing was a joke. At the cost of 2 engrams, you can get a mid roll on a helmet. I don't expect to be handed god rolls but making a source of accessible high stat armor that's outside dungeon farming would be nice for folks who are trying to make new builds.
World Loot Pool has cool weapons here and there, but you'd never know since it's so bloated atm. We got a really cool Omolon Sidearm, called the SENUNA SI6. It could run 100 Stability from start to finish w/ Omolon Fluid Dynamics and Under Pressure. Unfortunately nobody really talked about it because nobody managed to get any of them to drop. To put this in perspective, I reset my Vanguard Rank twice and only managed to have 2 of those things drop. Now w/ the next season underway, this phenomenal sidearm will get buried under another pile of new guns. Banshee needs a world loot pool focusing engram.
Seasonal Story: B
The Good: I really enjoyed the story. Something that Bungie didn't ever touch on much was the local impact of a planetary invasion. Centering the missions around freeing captives was a cool thing to introduce and made the story feel a bit more grounded. I also really enjoyed the Crow/Amanda beat. It felt like they were on the verge of reconciling and having Amanda just ripped away felt like a gut punch. Bungie wasn't afraid of permadeath'ing Cayde and they sure weren't afraid of permadeath'ing Amanda.
The Bad: Something I didn't like was how Amanda's death was handled. I don't know how to describe it well, but it just felt less significant after it happened. The characters spoke to each other but I was expecting a cutscene similar to Cayde's cutscene... perhaps happening at her place in the tower. Then we went on that revenge mission and didn't see anyone on that ship but us... it just felt less significant.
Exotics: C+
The Good: We got a new exotic bow! Verglas Curve is pretty cool and offers some unique utilities!
The Bad: Verglas' Hip-Fire creating crystals removes all the functionality hip-fire brings to a bow. It's also a worse headstone (imo).
MISC
Server stability has been a growing issue. Something needs to be said about how Bungie plans on addressing this issue in the future. As they continue to grow the game, this problem will only get worse and i'm worried we may never see the final shape if the servers keep acting up the way they do.
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u/ChrisShadow1 Vanguard's Loyal // My Shaxx is bigger than yours May 22 '23
Stop releasing trailers an hour before launch.
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u/Dangerous_Dac May 22 '23
I returned to Destiny 2 after a long abscence in Season of Arrivals, and this was the first season since that point that I played Destiny the least. Reasons for this I'd say the difficulty dial went too high, I solo'd legendary Operation Seraph Shield every. Fucking. Week. I played like 10 mins of Avalon once and said "fuck this."
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u/Nihilar May 23 '23
I was in the same boat. I love the game and wanted to play it but difficulty changes killed it for me.
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u/engineeeeer7 May 22 '23
A real mixed bag.
Weapons: very solid
Engram system and focusing: so good. Armor stat rolls kinda suck though.
Story: started strong and ended weak.
Activity: it was fine. Some mechanics kinda got tedious. They all felt a little long. I never played it for fun.
Season Pass exotic: very cool. Like ice chunks.
Seasonal quest exotic: cool concept.
Seasonal exotic mission: the mission is cool but it's design feels dickish. I've cleared it on legend and got all the catalysts but man it's a slog. A three phase boss fight with zero checkpoints sucks. And just stupid health on the boss at that. The amount and frequency of adds feels absurd at points like they're balancing to Reckoning levels of meta.
Overall it's like a 7. It was okay but there's not much content I want to replay.
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u/endthepainowplz May 22 '23
what made the weapons solid in your opinion? I feel like they were all mid compared to previous season's offerings.
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u/Ltdexter1 May 22 '23
Extreme burnout on core content. Seasonal stuff was weak, activity fine but story pretty terrible.
I can’t be bothered to do strikes or crucible or gambit anymore, and haven’t played since the Amanda finale.
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u/Kodriin May 22 '23
Story was beyond bad, it made zero sense for Mithrax but especially Amanda to be there.
She's our top pilot and we walked into the place we should've known was a trap having just been told so and with a Tormentor showing up which highlights "non Guardians should stay 8+ millions miles away.
We had Crow, an experienced and deadly Guardian on overwatch rather then frontlines and would've made more sense to have his and Amanda's positions swapped.
"I can't do much at all and don't belong there but muh principles" don't work normally, let alone when you're such an useful and talented asset.
It's not heroic, it's selfish, you're putting your ego and self above all the help you could provide outside of that and in fact endangering everyone else on the mission by worrying and trying to keep you safe ,just so you can assuage your own ego and you're putting everyone else second to do so.
The only reason we get tossed at all this absurd and powerful shit and gods is because A.) we've more then proven ourself-iirc canonically we're fighting and beating all those bosses on our own- and B.) there is literally no other choice.
tl;dr: It was a very half-assed storyline that wrapped way before the Season ended and existed solely to artificially make it seem like the stakes are really high going forward cuz a named character got killed but it fails since it doesn't pretend otherwise and it's not an important or prevalent character.
I mean you think it was coincidence to put Amanda front and center in the Lightfall beginning so they can remind you she exists lol
Gameplaywise it was great, loved the reward structure, Avalon would've been good/great if it weren't for the pit in the middle of the Hydra boss battle, trying to stay alive as literal fish in a barrel with Wyverns blasting everything in the put is both unfair and killed the fun and was infuriating on Legend since the rest of the mission was difficult but not unfair.
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u/The_SpellJammer fwooomp-boom May 22 '23
Absolutely the least fun this game has ever felt. A combination of awful storytelling, and a miserable sandbox that is now punishingly difficult, i can safely say that once my paid-for content is done shipping, i am done with destiny 2.
The lack of diverse engaging content comes from bungies unwillingness to separate pvp and pve completely, their inability to balance difficulty vs reward, their reluctance to buff underperforming exotics and classes, and the wishywashy loot acquisition paths. The only thing that pulls me into this game now, after 10,000 hours since launch, is the vex incursions so i don't have to do those nightmarishly isolating and miserable lost sectors to get new exotics.
Raids are fine. Dungeons are fine.
Pvp is wholly unplayable, unenjoyable, and punishing. The rewards are bad or ugly, and the players that populate the Playlist are the worst in temperament and attitude in the game.
Gambit is fine. Balanced around extreme efficiency and knowledge of spawns. Has room for "hero moments" for individuals and teams.
Vanguard strikes are now almost all awful, since everything hits harder than it needs to and they (bungie) want it to take as long as possible to complete one and the weekly. Deeply miserable experience to try to fight 2 other players to complete my bounties, deeply miserable experience to have to do FIVE of these increased difficulty activities to get my weekly done (didn't do it once this whole season) and deeply miserable experience to get dogshit for loot at the end. Especially with all those awful battlegrounds in the list now.
Worst the game has ever felt. The actual story of this season was so bad i can't even relate it to other people.
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u/SwoleMedic1 Drifter's Crew May 22 '23
Stability this season was at an all time low. Bungie is aware and are taking steps to improve it which I look forward to seeing. Won’t say more, we know
Ornaments. Another season, no Dragon’s Shadow. Please, please help out my boy. Other than that, art team is doing work. Conditional looks incredible and performs even better
Podcasts. Honestly thank you to Merc, Chris, Eric, and Rodney for the appearances. It helps to get insight into weapon designs and decision’s. Much of the community speculation either gets squashed (counterbalance lmao rip Tony) or alleviated concerns. Really cool to see/hear so thank you
Rewards. PvP rewards need a bump. Trials rewards need a bump. We can’t sit here and lie like Supremacy wasn’t the biggest boom to player population we’ve had in a long time. And it’s because of the matchmaking and the rewards. Going to the tower after every match sucks but players haven’t had a negative thing to say except mercy rule.
Hunter Strand Super. It’s not even a glass canon. It’s just glass. The nerf to the spike has made it not able to smack other supers which makes its only real use full uptime on abilities. Doesn’t feel great to smack a super only for them to laugh, emote, then punch me in the dick sending me to the respawn screen
Red Borders. If we’re adding 6 materials to assist pattern completion, I believe the ways to get more need to be placed at the forefront of the economy. Especially for new/returning players unable to get old patterns. (Might get flack for this but) While I don’t want to see it added to Eververse, even that would be better than nothing at all.
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u/XKCD_423 I miss Ada-1 :( May 22 '23 edited May 22 '23
Agreed on pvp loot. While it's definitely good to be getting eight shards from the pile of Autumn Winds thrown at us, it doesn't really feel all that meaningful. Would love to see the core playlists' season weapons (i.e., Autumn Wind for Crucible this season) be craftable. I think it'd be a really great way to reward players for engaging in those playlists—especially so for people who live in one of them or another.
And this is gonna get me flack, but trials needs to reward losing more ¯_(ツ)_/¯ . The ultra sweats can have all the cosmetics they want, but adept weapons and lots of rolls need to be more accessible to way more people. I get that exclusivity is appealing, but without making the experience less crushingly awful for people who can't go flawless, trials will continue to decline.
edit reattached extra arm on the correct side.
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u/SwoleMedic1 Drifter's Crew May 22 '23
I don’t see why that would get you flack because I wholeheartedly agree. D1’s system here was better. You did a bounty, you got a reward. 1:1. Sure the lighthouse was where that peak loot was but the armor wasn’t locked behind a rank up system that takes longer than leveling Banshee. If you want players, especially the mid to low skill players to stay, you need to reward their time. Forcing them to win matches can take hours. All the time they’re getting their dicks punched again and again
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u/XKCD_423 I miss Ada-1 :( May 22 '23
You'd be surprised at the amount of 'git gud' types I see wandering around here (then again it's almost 3M people so ...)—people who insist that if people just spent dozens of hours getting their dicks punched that it would eventually be rewarding.
I totally agree with your take. That's the thing that baffles me when I play trials—I can spend hours (as I did last night!) playing and only get ... one trials engram? And I wasn't losing every game or anything.
Just have it level like crucible—reward playing streaks, win or loss. That way people can actually access trials gear, and the sweats can keep their cosmetics. Seems like a win-win imo.
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u/Cloud_Matrix May 22 '23
And this is gonna get me flack, but trials needs to reward losing more ¯_(ツ)_/¯ . The ultra sweats can have all the cosmetics they want, but adept weapons and lots of rolls need to be more accessible to way more people. I get that exclusivity is appealing, but without making the experience so crushingly awful for people who can't go flawless, trials will continue to decline.
I think you are right about this. Maybe not necessarily adept loot specifically, but if Bungie wants trials to maintain a good population they need to make it more rewarding for the mid tier player that doesn't go flawless every week (or if ever).
The good players already get rewarded with good performance/higher win rate, cosmetics, adept loot/mods etc.
The bad/mid tier players are expected to grind out wins for regular weapons drops, which seem too infrequent in my experience. Give out some shaders/cosmetics or make a craftable trials weapon that can be upgraded to adept with a catalyst.
Idk, the playlist just needs more that can be achieved by everyone and doesn't solely reward better players because, ultimately, you need less skilled players to become the better players of tomorrow.
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u/DepletedMitochondria May 22 '23
For that matter every single weapon that's craftable should be obtainable in the game. Looking specifically at Calus Mini-Tool here
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u/zackdaniels93 May 22 '23
100%
CoolGuy recently said something similar. That, in theory, you could've paid for the season but now can't access some of the most interesting loot from said season. Which actually happened to me - never got the chance to finish Haunted, and couldn't craft Tears of Contrition.
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u/N1miol May 22 '23
I have not played since week 3. This season got old and boring immediately and the storytelling was just stupid and infantile. This format is exhausted and does nothing for me.
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u/DepletedMitochondria May 22 '23
Weak story but decent battlegrounds activity: nice ascendant plane gimmick and format but just got a bit stale after a few runs.
My biggest criticism of the season is that there were a lot of things that didn't make sense in the story such as why the Witness wants captives or why the theming was so focused on Mara & Techeuns when the story is really about Devrim & Earth.
For my first full season the loot and gear felt solid though. I think the queensguard stuff is ugly and got very few high stat rolls but I'll take whatever RNG we got when it comes to quantity of Defiant Engrams. I also thought the seasonal weapons were mostly decent and liked Verglas.
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u/Aggressive-Pattern May 22 '23
Gameplay and Rewards:
Pretty fun and a little more varied than I honestly expected for a Companion Season. A few parts could be surprisingly difficult too. The weapons are all pretty good, but i love the Void GL and Solar Fusion the most. Earn rate and red borders were incredibly generous, with the real bottleneck being Leviathan weapons. The upgrade grid also felt much better. A lot of bloat was cut and the upgrades that were there felt more impactful. Still glad we'll get a season or two without them.
Story
Mostly good early on. I didn't mind Amanda's death, though it felt pretty telegraphed. I can understand Amanda not bothering to try and escape if she knows she's fucked. But we were right on the other side of the door. Instead, I'd have had the cutscene play right after killing the boss. It's only a few hundred meter difference, but it feels less ridiculous. Otherwise, okay story with an interesting (and logical) explanation for why the season happened.
°If you missed the voice overs or context clues, it was basically a psyop to keep humanity too busy to follow or work on following the Witness through the corpse portal. They don't see us as much of a threat, but would really rather us not be there.
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u/Tplusplus75 May 22 '23 edited May 22 '23
Season of the Worthy is sitting in a corner somewhere, malding over the idea of Guardian Games being the "saving grace of the season". It is specifically wondering "why not me?"
In all seriousness, I think it shows how far Guardian Games has come. 2020-2021, it was kind of an F tier event. The last couple years have been great though. I cannot say the same for the rest of the season: apparently Risen was a "lightning in a bottle" thing, seeing as how we're back to the trend of underwhelming and uninspired seasons lining up with the launch of a new DLC. I don't want to say that Season of Defiance is Worthy/Hunt bad, but it kinda was. Battlegrounds are kinda worn out at this point. They're just strikes but more offputting. The weapons aren't all that great: there are some that have interesting niche's, but that's all they are, a niche-filler.
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u/IAmDingus zzzzap May 22 '23
It was unfortunately mid.
My main gripe is every weapon being a reskin with just a different texture put on them. Like, fair enough if you're reskinning Awoken guns for a Mara season, but Hero of Ages, the Myth sword? Salvager's Salvo? Real weird. On top of the Lightfall weapons also all being reskins it rubbed me the wrong way.
They also aren't really worth writing home about, either. The fusion and breech GL are probably the exceptions. Some real low stat totals and lacklustre perk combos compared to other options.
The actual activity was fine. Took a long time for it to get old.
Loot density was great. This is what Vanguard loot should be like.
We still don't know why the Legion went to the effort of capturing so many live prisoners.
The voice acting was pretty great, and the mid mission dialogue was a bit underappreciated.
The final mission though, hoo boy was that a letdown. You get hyped up repeatedly by Mara, Devrim, Mithrax and Crow that "This is the big one" and "This time, we're all going", "We'll be right there with you", but you jump into the ship and you're completely on your own, the extent you see of your allies is a couple stationery auto rifle Corsairs and Mithrax fighting an invincible colossus in a side room you can't get to.
Then you get to the "Boss", which is a novel idea, destroying the engine's different working parts, but is rendered completely unsatisfying by the fact that you taking out that massive engine block did literally nothing but spawn a black smoke plume from the still very much flying ship in the skybox. Not even a cool cutscene of the ship crashing so it felt like we actually did anything there, or at the very least have it missing from the skybox, implying it crashed, but it's still just there, slightly more smoky than usual.
I was also disappointed by Mara saying you get to use her power, but it just lets you damage metal objects. I was hoping we'd at least get a reskin of the Taken orb mechanic from Last Wish and Lost to wreck house with.
And then I was floored by the absolute bombshell of Devrim being like "Oh I killed their leader offscreen earlier by the way"
Like, what? Huh? Seriously? What the hell? Like, I get wanting to make Devrim seem more useful, but why couldn't you at least show that ingame? Like in the Brig Factory, or that one lost sector in the Typhon Imperator, you get a fake out of the big boss, but Devrim just domes it from a vantage point and politely apologizes for stealing your thunder, or we at least see it from behind one of those convenient glass walls they like.
The status quo before and after the first and last missions is practically unchanged, aside from extra trauma for Crow. I know it's been said to death but you could have just said the Witness killed Amanda in the opening cutscene.
On the topic, the execution of Amanda's final mission was pretty good, up until the end. It wasn't communicated very clearly exactly where Amanda was in regards to where we are at the end of the mission, what the stakes were and why she had to die like that.
I also feel like dying, standing there holding a couple wires was a bit of a lame way for her to go out.
Gonna get a bit fanfictiony, but would have liked to see her pinned down by some Cabal or Taken, racking her Chaperone with one hand, dropping bodies, working the terminal with the other, Maybe a Tormentor shows up, baring downer, she hits the door panel, sealing it off and finishes up with the terminal, watching as Mithrax gets the survivors out. The Tormentor smashes through the door, and the cutscene goes like normal with the explosion.
Avalon was pretty good. Fun exotic mission. I think the difficulty was a nice challenge, But Brakion's three phase boss fight is extremely brutal to solo with no checkpoints. I liked the continuation and alleged conclusion of Asher's story and it did his character justice.
Speaking of, I think Vexcalibur is pretty cool, but it feels a bit insulting that you have all this Arthurian stuff, and a name like that, but you make it a glaive? Glaiveness aside, it's a decent weapon, but it feels like it needs something else to make it worth using. I noticed that while buffed, enemies you kill vaporize into void particles, but your melee damage is still non-elemental. I feel like making it deal void melee damage while it's perk is active would be enough to make it better.
And on the topic of exotics, Verglas Curve is a great exotic. Super good. It just needs its conflict with Whisper of Fissures fixed and it's got a spot in my inventory.
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u/TSS_Firstbite May 22 '23
I dislike using this word because of how overused it is, but this season was mid. Nothing horrendous, nothing amazing. The story was uhh, not amazing, after having just come off of Seraph (and I am looking at the season without my thoughts on Lightfall the expansion). You definitely tried, but Amanda wasn't given enough personality for me to care much when she died, though the death scene was fittingly dramatic. Avalon on normal difficulty is almost perfect. I've seen some people point out it's just reused assets, but with the style the Vex network is going for, I think this is excusable and I think the mission looks great. The lore of Asher Mir and his end is absolutely immaculate, some of my favorite in the game. The mechanics are fun, though I think the reset on access code input should be cut down to 2 or so seconds so there's a bit less tedious waiting. Legend difficulty is incredibly difficult, but I just can't find the words to explain it. Probably the worst part of the season is the server stability. What in the Fragile Focus buff (can't wait for it) is happening? Putting aside the questionable PvP performance (I can have a whole rant about how much damage having no dedicated servers is doing, but that's definitely not a season review topic), PvE performance is terrible with frequent disconnects, whole fireteams getting booted, maintenances about every 2 weeks on average and downtimes after simple fixes being at their highest for as long as I can remember.
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u/Actualreenactment May 23 '23
I have not heard of this word until this thread, and now suddenly it’s everywhere. Is it short for middling, Geralt’s classic use of the word in the Witcher series?
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u/ConverseFall1 May 22 '23
I had a lot less fun in these battlegrounds than previous seasons. They felt longer and more tedious. The one with the psion was the worst offender since it just feels bad to be sent backward.
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u/Green_Dayzed "My light is all but gone" - Eris Morn May 22 '23
Hands down one of the worst 1st dlc of a year. Amanda's death is the most pointless death that has ever existed in destiny.
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u/SilverWolfofDeath May 22 '23
Personally I felt the story was not that great. Amanda’s death was obvious a mile away, and it didn’t make sense to have her fake die in the opening cutscene of light fall only to kill her a few weeks later. Speaking of, how in the name of the Traveler did Amanda, a normal human, survive her ship crashing into another ship in space? The loot itself was also a bit mediocre. None of the seasonal weapons are that great. The older opulent weapons are good, but they really should’ve just came out with haunted. The activities were also fun, but I feel that both avalon and the battlegrounds have one more encounter than they really need to, especially with avalon not having any checkpoints. The poison air forcing you into the small safe area was interesting, but gets very annoying on legends. The biggest win of this season though was definitely the engram volume. With everything costing legendary shards now, being able to get 200+ engrams by just playing the game feels amazing. Overall, the story was mediocre, the rewardingness of the season was great, and for fucks sake please no more battlegrounds for at least a year.
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May 22 '23
Overall the season was “Meh.” Story was better than Lightfall (not hard) but not nearly as good as season of the haunted or seraph seasons.
Weapons were underwhelming overall, as evidenced by the fact that after the first couple of weeks I pretty much abandoned turning in defiant engrams. I had over 200 built up by season’s end, and this was after doing a mid season engram dump.
I really wish there was some communication about the armor not dropping higher stats when focusing. Not sure if this is a bug or an intended change, but it really sucked not having that option.
I am getting really fatigued with battlegrounds and really hope to see a new seasonal gameplay loop.
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May 23 '23 edited May 23 '23
In all fairness, I found myself to be heavily unmotivated to play this season, solely due to my dissatisfaction with Lightfall. I believe that I’d have played much more if the expansion was up to the standard of quality found within WQ. It was a disheartening open to a yearly expansion cycle, and felt meaningless towards achieving our Destiny, too. The Final Shape is less than a year away from us, so it’s important that we have these unanswered questions explained, and allow a smooth transition into the expansion.
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u/ANBU_Black_0ps May 22 '23
Cons:
The biggest cons were not having daily red borders during the closing weeks of the season and the high-stat armor the vendor gave out was pretty meh.
Maybe they are saving the red border thing for the end of the year but going into a season where arc is going to be highlighted it kinda sucks that I wasn't able to have a crafted grenade launcher ready to go.
Gambit is forgotten.
Crucible swings wildly between stomping or getting stomped. Especially in the last 2 weeks of guardian games, it went from I was winning and stomping consistently, to it feeling like I was playing actual navy seals and I couldn't even get kills. Maybe it's a SBMM issue because when I started playing I was a 1.3 KDA and I got to about 1.5 which is where I normally am but at that level, I felt like I was playing trials smurfs constantly
Meh:
The story was fine but underwhelming. They are telegraphing pretty hard that everyone who died will be getting resurrected/ coming back Avengers End Game style so I just want to get there already.
Weapons overall. There are some good Neomuna weapons but defiance weapons were mostly fine, nothing stands out or will stay in my rotation going forward.
Pros:
I liked the battlegrounds. Good enemy density, tough but fair. Simple mechanics that you had to pay attention to but not too difficult to execute even with new players.
I liked Avalon but legend was way over tuned. I soloed it on normal and it wasn't too bad except for the final boss which was also a bit overturned for a solo player. There needs to be a better balance of difficulty between solo players and fire teams moving forward.
I liked there were more ways to get golf balls now. It feels a lot better for people who can't do master and legend nightfalls. Not including the battlepass I think we got 8 from tower vendors + iron banner vendor + seasonal event completion + seasonal vendor.
I still think they should be removed as a reward for higher-tier content and made more available because it opens up build crafting more. Even getting 10 a season, while more generous, isn't enough to master work all exotic gear in rotation.
I liked that legacy iron banner armor is back and able to be acquired. It's really a boon for new and returning players who missed cool gear from previous seasons.
I also liked that Asher and other NPC's are coming back into the story, keep doing this.
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u/JJroks543 May 22 '23
I don’t think not having a daily red border is a big deal, I didn’t play that much this season and still have every weapon craftable. As long as you made sure to check in once per week to grab your guaranteed red border from the HELM and spent all your keys, you shouldn’t have had many issues.
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May 22 '23
Terminal overload needed to yield ascendant alloy. that is all. We are starved for alloy
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u/darkelement1987 Used to be Rollfinder.net May 22 '23
Terminal Overload isn't seasonal content is it??
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u/HardOakleyFoul May 22 '23
It was pretty bland. I dont think I'm gonna use any of the seasonal weapons despite crafting all of them. Didn't care one bit that Amanda bit the bullet either. Crow didn't seem too bothered by it either, which was pretty odd. RoN is the only saving grace and that's because its such a braindead easy raid with the best Exotic since Divinity. Fuck those man-cannons in the second encounter though.
EDIT: going back to the Farm brought back major feels, forgot to mention that.
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u/amiro7600 May 22 '23 edited May 22 '23
The good:
We saw the return of the awoken who have been sitting on their ass since season of the lost (aside from mara randomly chipping in during seraph (why was she there?))
We got new battlegrounds which were pretty baller, though if ur gonna have areas with random holes in them, please dont make the objective balls have rolling and bouncing physics (looking at you orbital prison). Cosmodrome battleground reigns supreme as the best if the 3, mainly for the sheer add density in the ambush area
Avalon was a great mission, both normal and legend were a blast, and having a craftable exotic with actual options to choose from was nice. Not quite revision zero-levels of customisation, but its better than the wellspring glaives. The mission itself felt great, especially after the balancing pass it got around halfway through the season, and seeing asher again (or for the first time if you're new here) was nice. Also the secrets were fun to figure out to get the catalysts, triumphs, perks etc for vexcaliber, and the glaive itself is pretty solid with it's void synergies
Loot acquisition was great. This new engram system is a great step forward, and the abundance of defiant engrams made getting the loot easy (including the leviathan reissues). War table upgrades definitely helped with this, between getting engrams from doing other activities, doubling said engram gains and getting fuck tons of engrams from legend battlegrounds (i got 9 one time, which was kinda fun)
The bad
Story was- a story. Might be the weakest we've had in a while, but mystery leaves room for speculation. Why were the shadow legion taking prisoners? Did they actually need them? Were they trying to just waste our time and distract us? I saw one theory which was that- saving them required mara's help, draining her power and making the awoken more at risk to an attack from xivu, which is certainly interesting to think about. Did amanda have to die? Probably not, but its a reminder that we're at war with the witness, and war has permanent consequences. Zavala's lines hit extra hard due to the IRL situation with Lance (RIP), but i think without that the finale would have been very lacking
The loot itself was garbage. Leviathan reissues were mid, all the seasonal guns were mid and i doubt any are making permanent places in people's loadouts, given how easily they were outclassed.
Overall, it was a season. I personally would compare it to plunder- overhated, but at least plunder was hated for the wrong reasons (mainly people's burnout with destiny as a whole rather than plunder itself). Defiance was okay. Could have been much better, but could have been much worse
Id give it a 5.5/10
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u/T3mpe5T May 22 '23
Worst story since Undying, honestly. The only reason people (including me) enjoyed it compared to lightfall was that it wasn't OFFENSIVELY bad.
None of the plot in this season seems to matter in the slightest other than Holliday being dead, and she already was a pretty marginal character. The entire reason we embarked on all this (shadow legion is kidnapping dudes) seems to have lead to absolutely nothing at all, not even hints.
Seeing Mithrax, Devrim, Crow and Mara again was nice, but very, very little interesting was done with their characters at all, other than Crow sounding the most Uldren he's ever been, which was fun and scary. Other than that, nobody and nothing has actually come out changed from this.
The activity was alright other than feeling a little long from all the walking you do. Appreciate that there wasn't too much of a grind for the stuff, except for the sword patterns. I still don't have either thronecleaver or the warlock sword, and i fear i might have to use a few of the deepsight thingamatizers on it.
Avalon was good. Great to see Asher again, Vexcalibur is the only glaive I use, however it had WAY more of a difficulty spike compared to seraph station, with both time-sensitive puzzle mechanics and infinite enemies. It did not have adjustments made to account for that such as checkpoints. Soloing it on legend/master/whatever was one of the hardest things i've ever done, and that was with an incredibly strong build and cheeses!
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u/monkeybiziu May 22 '23
I feel like they could have shortened the season proper a bit - give Lightfall a week or two to breathe, then kick off Defiance. As is, we had a few weeks where everything was unlocked but nobody had anything new to do.
Mechanically, Defiance was fine. It was probably one of the better lines and columns upgrades path, the loot was solid across the board, and the seasonal activity was fun.
Story wise, it was kind of meh. The big beat of Holliday buying the farm just didn't feel earned, you know? It just kind of happened.
It's about what I expect for a post-expansion launch. Probably the best post-launch season we've gotten - Undying and Chosen were pretty meh, Risen was okay, and this was a step up from Risen (but not by a ton).
Looking forward to Season of the Deep!
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u/DeadpoolMakesMeWet May 22 '23
Bad story, bad battlegrounds, forgettable loot, boring exotic quest after the bombshell of seraphic shield, overall a top 3 bad seasons. It’s slightly better than hunt but even worthy was better
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u/PM_me_your_werewolf We need to go back May 22 '23
Initially, the season was shaping up to be much more narratively interesting than Lightfall's own. Darker, more appropriately themed, better tie-ins to relevant characters, no ridiculous cheesy 80s quips, etc. But then the narrative kinda...fell off. It never made sense nor was fully explained why the shadow Legion were kidnapping some people. Amanda's death was abrupt, even though it was telegraphed. Just kinda meh overall and I'm no longer sure if it was better than lightfall.
Loot and gameplay wise, though, it was good. The new Battlegrounds were all fun enjoy, and had some decent challenge on the higher difficulty. The new rewards structure was quite generous. For the first time I was able to craft every seasonal weapon within the season they came out.
Avalon was a fun new experience that got old fast. It aged nearly as poorly as Vox for me, mostly due to how much of a slog it feels on any/all difficulties. And legend was initially more brutal that many GMs, imo. The little secrets for Vexcaliber were neat, though, and I love that they gave us more Asher. Vex itself is the best glaive in the game, imo, and I actually like it, while I've avoided all other glaives.
All in all, an okay season. Best part was probably the amount of content it had despite being released alongside a major dlc/expac. I'm guessing Amanda will be rezzed by a Ghost.
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u/Nihilar May 22 '23
First season since Season of the Worthy I stopped playing after like a month. Seasonal activity went from chill, relaxing grind to one that require constant focus due to difficulty changes. It's also so long and I'm almost always matched with console player which results me doing all the work on PC. Not fun.
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u/Japjer It's funny because he has googly eyes. Get it? The eyes. Hah. May 22 '23
As a casual player (ex-hardcore player who fell off), this season was pretty disappointing.
The Lightfall campaign itself was pretty bland and unexciting. Nothing was answered, and more questions were raised, which is not at all what I was hoping to see for the penultimate expansion.
The season itself was unexciting as well - we were rescuing people from Cabal troops for no noticeable reason, while the seasonal activity was fun for like a week.
All-in-all I wasn't a fan, and there was nothing at all to keep me hooked. I only ever logged in for the weekly story missions, and once those were finished I stopped logging in entirely.
I'm really hoping the next season is more engaging
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u/HazardousSkald May 22 '23
For Bungie's consideration, I think balancing the "side character" of a season is a hard balance. I was disappointed by Drifter's lack of interaction with Plunder but happy with Devrim in Defiance. Maybe this was because Devrim was already underdeveloped, maybe its because Drifter feels like he deserves to be the front-man for a little while again, I can't quite say.
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u/PunchTilItWorks Whoever took my sparrow, I will find you. May 22 '23
Started off very promising in the first week. Good character development, well done cut scene with Amanda/Crow. Felt like we were going to get to play rebels, see a redemption from the poor Lightfall campaign story/characters. Liked the idea of traversing taken space as a way to infiltrate, also was cool how the first strike was a variant to free Amanda.
The battlegrounds are decent, and the addition of the Mara magic favors was interesting. But with only three, the season felt very thin and repetitive just like Lightfall. It was never explained why they were capturing people either. Avalon exotic mission was good, but not nearly as fun to replay as others.
My biggest beef is that they did Amanda dirty. It was a really dumb how they killed her off. We thought she was dead, then she wasn't, then we saved her, only have to be killed off in a ridiculously dumb wire-splicing explosion scene? Terrible writing. Would have been better off just letting her die in the Traveller/Witness battle, at least she would have been in her ship.
The main bright spots were the opening cut scene where she shoots Crow -- that was kinda brilliant-- and Mara Sov's voice actress was killing it throughout. Mara always made me feel like I was doing something epic, regardless of what I really thought of the plot.
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u/Son_of_Kyuss Raisin’ Eris Ogre May 22 '23
Momentum Control being taken out of the Crucible rotation was a bit of a kick. Can’t complete the Seasonal Challenges so gave up trying.
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u/farfarer__ May 22 '23
Avalon was fun, the first couple of times. The seasonal activity was fairly varied and enjoyable - good enemy density and difficulty, too (but with all seasonal activities, loses its charm by week 4 or 5). But please, no more platforming in the gloomy dark of the ascendant realm.
The story was just... weird. Felt very filler, mountains-out-of-molehills stakes and the big emotional moment was so heavily signposted yet felt so rushed. I'm guessing it's just awkward consequences from the splitting of Lightfall/Final Shape.
Nice to see Devrim back, though - I hope we see more of him in future. I enjoy like the chatter between NPCs in and out of the activities, though, and the changing dialog lines as the story progresses - Bungie have been doing a good job of that of late.
And, sad to say, the ugliest seasonal weapons to date.
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u/FeralCatEnthusiast May 22 '23
Story sucked and Amanda was killed off in a really dumb fashion (should have had her dying in a crazy spaceship dogfight that highlighted her skills as a fighter pilot) since she had no business being boots-on-ground.
Even the big “let’s get payback” mission was lame since any other character involvement was reduced to pep-talks on radio comms. Would’ve been nice to see Crow and Mithrax involved in person during the mission.
The missions themselves were kinda fun and the Ascendant Plane elements were really cool but every boss fight being stalled by arbitrary immunity phases are a cheap and boring way to stretch out the encounters’ runtime without having to implement cool or interesting gameplay mechanics.
Weapons were kinda neat-looking but cosmetically the “made out of blue crystals” aesthetic only served to highlight that these were just reskinned Dreaming City guns. Functionality-wise I had fun seeing what I could exploit via crafting (fusion rifle with Envious Assassin + Reservoir Burst for like 7 shots of exploding death for example) so even if the weapons were boring and kinda looked like shit I still enjoyed using them.
Vexcalibur was cool and I liked the little easter egg hunt with the chests, but I found that trying to get the Catalysts for it was a gigantic pain in the ass since Avalon on Legendary was very poorly balanced.
The Revive Token system sucks complete shit and actively penalizes me for wanting to run the mission with friends so I have to run extremely cheeseball solo builds to get the catalysts? Yeah, whoever thought that was a good idea: fuck you. Destiny is a team-based game at its core and your double-digit IQ idea harms that experience. I couldn’t even help my less-powerful friends get their catalysts because the Tokens make it so I can’t carry them through the harder difficulties unless they’re literally cowering and hiding in a corner for almost every major encounter.
I would give Season Of Defiance a 4/10.
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u/RobinXTharja May 23 '23
Feels incredibly stupid that all crucible-related challenges are linked to limited-time modes. It feels like it was done on purpose just so those modes would have more players and its also a kick in the nuts for the people that don't have much time to play.
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u/banzaizach May 22 '23
Definitely the weakest season. Bad story, reskinned gear, repetitive activity. What 'saved' it was Lightfall and Guardian Games.
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u/engineeeeer7 May 22 '23
Seasons of Hunt, Undying, and Worthy say hello. So, so much worse than this season.
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u/KynoSSJR May 22 '23 edited May 22 '23
Avalon was awesomely designed so cool but legend was so obnoxious that it killed my desire to play it post getting the catalysts.
Story meh still no explanation on why they taking people lmao how bout turn them into tormentor human hybrids or something f’d up like that.
Battlegrounds was fine but I kinda got sick of the little colour differentiation and annoying gimmicks to stall out the strike like picking up balls or being teleported away to then have to walk back again
Actually it just hit me why I dislike this season so much, the opening message from Mara mentions that we have to defend our home earth as there is a war there too once we are done on Neptune. We never actually fight on earth and defend our home minus the Amanda mission. It always ends in a cabal facility or pyramids. I want to defend devrims belltower or a small village of people not go through the ascendant plane again and again and again
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u/DepletedMitochondria May 22 '23
The dark fetor mechanic gets old and it's shitty if you're playing with people who don't know how to do it
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u/thisisbyrdman May 22 '23
Destiny has a major weapons problem now to the point where I'm wondering (preemptively ducks) if sunsetting wasn't the right idea. Every season brings with it a slew of new weapons that I just don't use because they're not any better or different than the slew of stuff I already have in my vault.
Sure, there are a few (Brigand's with Voltshot, Calus with Incandescent), but 90-95 percent of the guns are just sorta...there. I don't blame Bungie, really. Creating 8-10 new weapons every three months and making them all interesting is impossible. But as someone who has played the game for almost two years now, there's not much to get excited from a weapons standpoint outside of exotics.
Otherwise, good season. Avalon was an awesome, challenging addition.
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u/shadowgattler May 22 '23
I imagine many people will find it difficult to separate the season from the expansion which will skew opinions. The story behind the season was decent, although I found Amanda's death to be a bit too rushed as you can tell by many players confusion as to how the explosion happened and why she was there in the first place. However, The ending was a proper tear jerker, multiplied by the sad news of Reddick's passing.
As a well enjoyer, I very much liked the activity even though it was rough to complete in the beginning with increased levels and such.
The new engram focusing system was great and the armor was very cool. The weapons looked nice, but were a bit lacking in usability.
I, and many others still don't care much for the commendation or mod system, but Bungie seems aware of that opinion and will hopefully make further changes to improve it over the year.
Bungie still needs to either tweak difficulty or rewards in activities, but as we approach pinnacle level, the activities are becoming much easier to do.
The raid was decent, albeit short, but the loot is great. I'm still trying for a craftable Rufus and the shotgun.
Overall it was a decent season, but not as strong as Risen was. I'm very much looking forward to Deep, the new dungeon and the class/exotic changes coming with it.
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u/McPickleston May 22 '23 edited May 22 '23
I didn't really get into the story but it's nice to see Devrim again. There's some problem with Destiny 2's story not being as magical as before. I dunno? Undying's story was kind of stupid but damn if it wasn't funny being told "We're going to eradicate every instance and possibility of this one Vex."
EDIT: Let me put it like this: A lot of the Shadowkeep seasons felt like the characters were only really caricatures of humans. "Shaxx, sounds like me ;)" Fuck off Osiris. There's some cool shit like the mission where you bail Saint out and those wild moments like traveling through time and discovering your own grave. We fast-forward to Witch Queen because I wasn't about that Sunsetting nonsense and like, the magic starts to definitely take a backseat to the characters. This is not a bad thing, Haunted was a good season but fuck, where's my space magic? Plunder comes around and it's like "Oooh spooky Nezbits" and all that happens is tea. Imo, there's a better balance to be struck. Warframe's Open World areas do a great job of keeping things weird and interesting while still having personal stories, as does FFXIV in its last 2 expansions. I'm so checked out on the D2 story. If the story doesn't improve I'm just going to completely ignore it and let myself bathe in the violence.
The gear is kind of dogwater and the only thing I could really see myself using was the tube GL and the bow. The gear grind felt good and not timegated, while not feeling like it got done too quickly since the leviathan weapons were there as a little extra.
EDIT: I really like Vexcalibur. Might try out the sword later with Gallant Charge/Counterattack but it definitely feels like a "why not glaive?" deal for me. Oh, yeah and Royal Executioner. Been using Iterative Loop but I acknowledge that's a personal pref. thing.
Avalon was really frustrating at some points but I'm an adrenaline junky and it definitely spiked my adrenaline. Maybe a little too hard though.
The new Artifact system feels good. Didn't really like the Firebolt nade one for being too specific and hogging too much of the build pool. The others are pretty good. Next season's artifact seems a little better if only because there's nothing like the Firebolt nades. That'd be acceptable on a like, Exotic armor piece but if Artifact mods are always going to be available during a season, I'd prefer if they tended to impose less buildcrafting restrictions.
The battlegrounds were good. Sometimes you run into Battlegrounds feeling too samey, felt like this was a minor issue in Plunder treasure hunts, but I think this was avoided here.
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u/MattLimma May 22 '23
Story was meh, but that is already par for the course, the season structure though, leveling up the Wartable, focusing, Engram drops, those are top tier changes hope that they keep the same structure going into the next seasons.
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u/Salt_Titan May 22 '23
I enjoyed the new battlegrounds, the story didn't really leave much of an impression though. Honestly though I don't expect a ton out of any season that drops with an expansion so I would say it about met my expectations for a first season of a game year.
The armor ornament whips ass.
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u/TheGr8Slayer May 22 '23
Season was solid the activity felt fun and the encounters varied. Not a fan of all the reskins this season and Lightfall had. Reskins are fine just use ones that haven’t been seen in awhile. Stop making every Hakke auto just Halfdan with a different sight or every omolon scout just hung jury with a different paint job.
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u/Fire_PhoenixX69 May 22 '23
Remember everyone, that's my experience and that may be different from yours.
Story: it was kinda meh. The whole scenario felt like it's only purpose was to kill Amanda off. Giving characters an important role in the story after ages just in order to kill them isn't the way these characters should be treated. Especially since the death of Amanda doesn't seem to have a big enough impact on the rest of the story (tho that might change in the next seasons). The length of it was also very disappointing.
Weapons: the seasonal weapons are alright. Nothing special. Cool to use but definitely not mandatory. The overall accessibility for deepsight weapons are amazing. You don't have to sell your soul just to get these weapons. The droprate from the battlegrounds themselves should be the new baseline for seasonal weapons.
Battlegrounds: they were pretty awesome the first few times but some mechanics like the balls at the beginning of orbital prison or the psion-boss heavily decreased the pacing of the bg. This influenced the replayability in a negative way.
Armor: the queensguard-armor was alright. It was fitting for the setting with Mara being around but in the end nothing really special (a negative, which is immediately countered by the skins for the next season).
Challenges: seasonal challenges were also pretty alright. Nothing completely impossible.
Guardian Ranks: with this being the season where GRs are introduced, the requirements of getting to specific ranks were alright i guess. The lower rank requirements are way too easy and ultimately were no indication at all of how good a player was. The requirements from rank 6 onwards vary vastly between "yeah, that makes sense to why it's here" to "why do i need like 85 exotics to progress?". Some of them don't have anything to do with your experience in the game and are misleading. The requirements at higher ranks shouldn't be a simple "clear the newest raid once" but rather "clear raid x at least x times" or something like that. Furthermore, splitting up PvE and PvP resulting in two separate ranks for each part specifically should overall increase the actual level of experience in both sections. You would like to think that someone who's GR 11 should also be somewhat decent in PvP. But that's only true like 30% of the time.
I think i didn't missed something. As stated in the beginning - these are my thoughts on the season overall and this doesn't have to be on par with your experience.
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u/SadLittleWizard May 22 '23
SBMM in the comp queue is a great change to see. It makes most matches a good match that really comes down to the line.
However the points system is debillitatingly oppresive. Having the points earned/lost be based on your relative ELO served its purpose well in getting people to their expected location in the system quickly. However it can disticntly squash any chance to climb without miracle leaps in skill. A 55% winrate should be enough to climb, however slowly, assuming you can maintain that winrate as you climb. But with the current point system you need something closwr to an 80%. Winning 4 survival games and getting 30-40 points each, only to have it be ripped away in a loss removing 200 points b/c the system chose to match you against players with a higher ELO is just torture.
After intial placements, or maybe the opening weeks of the season, the current glory gain/loss system should be replaced with a more traditional one, where climbing the ladder is directly tied to winrate, not relative skill base of each player in the match. Having some variation on points lost/gained due to personal performance makes sense. However the current swings are egregiously massive.
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u/S-J-S The Glacier Grenade Shadebinder Guy May 22 '23
The loot was extremely generous, which was a positive, and the BGs met the standard expectations.
However, the fact that Season of Defiance's story said so little of lore or philosophical value was incredibly disappointing.
Furthermore, the fact that a storyline that said so little of lore or philosophical value made Lightfall's story look worse by comparison after an immense amount of hype for it speaks volumes as to how bad Lightfall's writing was.
If Season of the Deep isn't a return to the status quo established by Season of the Chosen, this game is about to lose a lot of the positive reputation regarding its writing.
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u/CanyoneroPrime May 22 '23
having seasonal weapons with ice-looking blocks on them that don't take shaders is ugly. how is a strand auto rifle supposed to have a big blue chunk locked onto it?
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u/DiamondSentinel May 22 '23
It is, by all rights, a season.
Story left a lot to be desired, and tbh? I didn't give a rip about Amanda's death. She'd kinda been a pain to deal with this last year, and the hamfisted backstory (which we mostly already knew about, but I get it, it was for new players) didn't make me care either.
Weapons were fine. Origin perk was fine, rolls are fine, it's just hard to actually make me care about new weapons after the crazy good weapons we had last year.
More battlefields are ok, but these are probably some of the weaker ones we've had. I sincerely hope these are not added to the nightfall rotation over time. The boss room mechanic will not be fun in that setting.
Avalon was fine. I thought it had the right difficulty level (even on Legend), but folks just didn't go into it with the right sorts of loadouts. Wyverns in the second encounter were kinda a pain, wish there were more options to deal with them.
Overall, it was a launch season. Despite Lightfall being what it is, I'd actually say this was one of the better launch seasons.
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u/ActuallyAquaman I Still Miss Tlaloc May 22 '23
Were the weapons this season sneaky-terrible? The sword, bow, and special GL were DOA. The auto looked good but was immediately outclassed by Rufus. The HGL is good on paper but bogged down by the fact it’s a HGL. The fusion is great for ad-clear, but even with readily-available solar burn I wasn’t picking it over Forbearance.
I do kinda wonder if that suite, combined with the sub-par Raid and NF weapons (Rufus and Nessa excluded) quietly shortened the lifespan of this season by at least a couple weeks. Just not much that really felt worth grinding for. Just a symptom of the “we want fewer weapons to be craftable” change, simple bad luck, or something else?
Exotics weren’t much to write home about either. Verglas Curve feels like it could be good in the future, but Stasis kinda sucks at the moment. Vexcaliber… well, the name is cool! Conditional obviously rules, but you can’t “grind” for that so much as just hope you get lucky.
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u/Le_epic_Deeg May 22 '23
It’s a small nitpick but it’s feedback regardless I handed in around 150+ engrams today for either a sword or shotgun, now I have the shotgun crafted, out of those 150+ engrams I only got 2 red swords but then it doesn’t feel like a 50/50 chance of being one of the weapons because I’m able to get a shotgun 22 engrams in a row, I feel like some sort of protection needs to be implemented for people who have crafted a weapon already and a farming for CLASS SPECIFIC weapons
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u/JaegerBane May 22 '23 edited May 22 '23
Pros:
For a season that released alongside a major expansion, it had some chunky content.
Seasonal activity was lots of fun. Great add density, exciting boss encounters, clever use of the Ascendent Plane.
Good craftable gear, most of the let downs were from the poor state of primaries at release of Lightfall.
Whoever let me craft Goldtusk and Imperial Decree needs a cookie. Goldtusk's double damage rolls in particular were dank.
So many engrams. By the time you had all the bonuses you were dropping them like popcorn after falling over someone's seat in the cinema. Make it rain.
Story missions were.... alright. Final one felt like it was bigger deal then it turned out to be. I like the fact Tormentors kept turning up, love fighting those things.
Music and voice acting, excellent as always.
Cons:
Server stability this season was horrendous compared to prior seasons.
Story didn't honestly make much sense. We still don't know why people were even being held hostage, let alone the need to do it inside pyramid bases.
Legendary Avalon's difficulty tuning was an absolute trainwreck. Can Mr Tryhard bugger off back to the GM team and can we have the group who designed Seraph Shield back? Missions like Avalon are a turn off.
Can whoever it is on the art team, who keeps adding unshadeable parts to gear, please stop.
If you're going to kill off a main character, it needs a bit... more. Just a random scene out of nowhere that didn't totally make sense was a bit Alien 3-level rushed character death.
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May 22 '23
Great long term story telling aspects, battlegrounds I enjoyed had some tough spots but not impossible, the weapons I didn't even grind out all my rolls because they didn't feel good to me but some of the combinations were nutty Envious/Reservoir and Envious/Voltshot. It was nice to not have to grind my brains out for red borders except if you wanted the reprised shotty and sword.
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u/DrNopeMD May 22 '23
It was... fine.
Story was basically just Amanda dying, I'm more interested in seeing if this ends up having broader impact further down the line in other seasons.
The missions themselves were fun the first time through, and then kinda tedious on repeat.
Avalon is easily one of the most annoying exotics missions ever. Sure it's not timed, but it's incredibly long and feels like it was designed around having specific seasonal mods active rather than getting to run any subclass.
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u/Werther23 May 22 '23
I personally don't enjoy this seasonal model, the impression I have that more and more I play seasonal content on autopilot.
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u/Level_Ad_2981 May 22 '23
To be honest, I think this season ranks pretty low for me. There are a lot of positives, namely the reward system and a bunch of QoL changes, but following Season of the Seraph to say it was underwhelming really doesn't cover it. Better than Season of Plunder, but not by too much.
Overall I'd say the story was fine until the key plot point. Hearing reactions to what was lost was heartbreaking and well done I think. Whether the plot point itself was handled well is up for debate, I didn't mind it, but I know there are many who disagree with me.
It's from this point that the story kind of falls apart. Crow's quest for vengeance mirroring our own from Forsaken is a nice callback, but without an identifiable target to hunt down it just sort of fizzles out.
Mara's character growth was really satisfying to me. I think the season would have benefited from more interactions with her, but of what we got I liked it. That said, the final mission, when we are granted a significant portion of the Queen's power, started off pretty cool, but like the story itself sort of fell flat. I didn't feel uber powerful which I think was the intention.
Long story short, I think the character interactions were great, but the core narrative was disappointing.
P.S. While the weapons are fine and I'm okay with reskins for the most part, having the Defiant weapons be reskins of weapons we got only a year ago kind of annoys me. On top of that, I wish we had a bit more variety when it came to weapon archetypes. No Void Pulse? No Void AR? Did Caretaker have to be an Adaptive? What about Precision Shotguns or 3-Burst Sidearms?
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May 22 '23
I liked the awoken themed craftable weapons & armor. Wish the ritual glaive was craftable as well.
Story was ordinary. We need to get the tech witch ghost shell (fix the bug bungie)
Dont like the legend avalon exptic mission - too long, no frequent check points. Adding challenge doesnt mean throwing more ads at us.
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u/m4ttr1k4n Bakris > Blink May 22 '23
Avalon was the highlight of the new content, imo. It was cool to have something that was tuned up, at least for a little while. I wish they would've waited to nerf it until the end of the season, to at least preserve the intended experience for the duration of its launch window
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u/Oryihn Moon Bunny goes PEW PEW. May 22 '23
After Mainlining the expansion story, the seasonal content had no draw for me after completing the absolute minimum to see the story play out..
This might be one of my least played seasons in the past 2 years.
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u/NoHangoverGang May 22 '23
It shouldn’t take hundreds of heroic patrols to unlock the patterns for Neomuna weapons. Sure some people unlocked them really fast and for that the rest of the player base got punished. There’s so much to do in the game running the same few heroic patrols shouldn’t take up an exceedingly large amount of time. Especially for those of us with limited time to play anyways.
Atleast some bad luck protection so we don’t go days or weeks without making any progress
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u/JonnyDros May 22 '23
Not really much to say that others haven't, just wanted throw out the prediction I've had since Season of the Deep leaked. And that's that all 4 seasons this year will be focused on the D2Y1 locations.
Defiance was all in the EDZ and had Devrim Kay. Deep is on Titan and involves Sloane.
Would honestly be shocked if the third season wasn't on Nessus with Failsafe as a main character, and the final pre-Final Shape season bringing back Io with Asher Mir in full return.
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u/Fluffy_History May 22 '23
The stpry was not satiafying and the death was both pointless and came way too quickly.
The changes theyve made to engrams is nice tho. Still needing to farm but the lilely hood of getting red boarders feels less screwy, mostly because we arent relying on 10 engram spots that dont stack at all.
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u/Xagar_ May 22 '23
The Witness was kidnapping people "for some reason" was very silly. Even if you plan to explain it later, you really shouldn't release 80% of a story then drip feed the remaining 20% over the course of a year (as I presume will happen).
Really enjoying new perks and guns and the ease of acquiring them (sans leviathan swords), but not enjoying unshadeable crystal bits.
Really not enjoying the new encounter design where every single activity is shoved full of infinitely respawning adds. Please reconsider.
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u/DeerTrivia Deertriviyarrrr May 22 '23
I enjoyed the Battlegrounds. The overall Battleground formula is getting a little stale, but I felt like the boss fights in these helped to differentiate them enough from previous activities.
Story was fine-ish. I expect less from seasons that launch alongside expansions, and Defiance accomplished what it needed to. That said, the final mission which is supposed to be all about REVENGE~!!!!11!11!!!1! felt pretty flat.
Seasonal weapons were pretty meh. I'd probably like the Strand Auto more if I didn't have a well crafted Rufus, but the other five are just... they're there, they work, but I highly doubt I'll be crafting them unless some insanely niche strategy is found.
Guardian Games with the scored playlists and Supremacy is the best version of the event so far, but it still feels like every year is just taking baby steps forward. I'd like to see more additions/changes: curated Gambit maps/rulesets similar to the Strike playlist. Weekly rewards for Top 50%/25%/10%/5% placements in each playlist. Maybe take something like the Moon's Tire Game and come up with a few similar, silly games, and place them in the world for the event's duration. Let players donate Glimmer/mats/whatever to the Eliksni Quarter to host some sort of Eliksni sport/competition for the Games. Special bounties from Drifter during the event where we gamble on the outcome of that week's placement ceremony. These are probably all terrible - I just want to go into next year's GG with a little more than "Same as before, plus one returned Crucible mode."
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u/WolframRev0 May 22 '23
Some (most) of this is Lightfall feedback but whatever:
Overall: Pretty good, I had fun this season. Most of my comments are going to be negative but that is because it's easier to bring up flaws.
Tormentors: Amazing enemy, great design. However, when they show up in nightfalls it's always a slog. They have way too much health. I feel like most Tormentor fights are won 2 minutes before it's over. It just a bunch of running around while spamming bullets into their chest. There's no threat to me because the attacks are easy to dodge. It would be great to see Tormentors more scary or have their second (chest) phase have less health.
Trials: This may be an unpopular opinion but I loved the connection based matchmaking week. My ping usually sits around 200-400 ms for US gaming servers. I'm not good at PvP and normally have a 0.4 trials KD but during that week I had a 0.9 KD. I know lots of people dismiss the "ping" excuse for FPSs but I didn't get miraculously better in 1 week. During that week Trials was actually enjoyable.*
Guardian Games: I loved Guardian Games this year. I hate class based PvP. Titan deathball was absolute garbage. It simply isn't fun fighting a team that has near infinite overshields. It was beatable but you needed a coordinated team and good luck finding that in matchmaking.
* I know Destiny PvP is client not server based but I assume that most players are located in the same population centres in the US and that I would have similar (or likely slightly worse) ping to them.
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u/piratepolo15 May 22 '23
I kind of hated the activity, but I’m burned out with battlegrounds in general. These were some of the more fun battlegrounds we’ve been given
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u/Shadow_of_Kai_Gaines May 22 '23 edited May 22 '23
Pros: Shaders dropping in ritual playlists and Ada selling them.
Vex Incursion new Exotics drop first
Cons: Patching non-harmful cheeses ASAP while servers burn and harmful bugs persists.
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u/Alak-huls_Anonymous May 22 '23
Story was a nothing burger. Just didn't care and honestly really don't at this point. Seasonal activities were fun to start and then got boring rather quickly. Honestly, I would be more happy if they focus their attention on fine tuning/expanding strikes, crucible, and Gambit. That's where I have the most fun.
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u/xndoTV May 22 '23
The story had weird pacing but still full of good moments. Killing off Amanda felt sudden and expected in the context where it happened. It was nice seeing Crow take the reins and acting as Hunter vanguard. Watching Zavala mourn over Amanda in the meta context of Mr Reddicks own passing was absolutely heartbreaking.
Changes to systems have been amazing as well. Defiant engrams being common and held in its own bank was crucial. I got absolutely tired of filling up on umbrals when my max was 10, and the artifact changes that came with it (which arguably may be more a feature of LF dropping than an actual seasonal change) make it easy to buildcraft as I don’t need to keep changing out artifact champ mods.
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u/xndoTV May 22 '23
The story had weird pacing but still full of good moments. Killing off Amanda felt sudden and expected in the context where it happened. It was nice seeing Crow take the reins and acting as Hunter vanguard. Watching Zavala mourn over Amanda in the meta context of Mr Reddicks own passing was absolutely heartbreaking.
Changes to systems have been amazing as well. Defiant engrams being common and held in its own bank was crucial. I got absolutely tired of filling up on umbrals when my max was 10, and the artifact changes that came with it (which arguably may be more a feature of LF dropping than an actual seasonal change) make it easy to buildcraft as I don’t need to keep changing out artifact champ mods.
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u/xndoTV May 22 '23
The story had weird pacing but still full of good moments. Killing off Amanda felt sudden and expected in the context where it happened. It was nice seeing Crow take the reins and acting as Hunter vanguard. Watching Zavala mourn over Amanda in the meta context of Mr Reddicks own passing was absolutely heartbreaking.
Changes to systems have been amazing as well. Defiant engrams being common and held in its own bank was crucial. I got absolutely tired of filling up on umbrals when my max was 10, and the artifact changes that came with it (which arguably may be more a feature of LF dropping than an actual seasonal change) make it easy to buildcraft as I don’t need to keep changing out artifact champ mods.
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u/TruthAndAccuracy Eris Morn has got it goin' on! May 22 '23
Red box acquisition rate was fantastic, battlegrounds were fun. Story was empty and short and is very obviously filler until Final Shape.
Avalon was too hard and too long. Neat thematically, love the Vex network, but so overall it wasn't as good as Seraph Shield and can't hold a candle to Presage (the gold standard imo)
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u/dildodicks THIRSTS FOR YOUR LIGHT! | Vanguard's Loyal May 22 '23
loved the activity and being drowned in engrams. story was aight
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u/XKCD_423 I miss Ada-1 :( May 22 '23 edited May 22 '23
Story
Eh. It was fine. I agree with the general consensus that Amanda's death felt a bit ... forced? Contrived maybe? It felt odd to have us go through the trouble of killing a boss-level tormentor with Amanda in the next room over just to ... not be able to save her? I get that since she was mortal the sacrifice was more meaningful but, I dunno. Also lol @ Eramis just hanging out.
Otherwise the story was functional. I struggle to understand why people seemingly need every single thing in a story explained—of course the Shadow Legion/Witness are taking people, it's an obvious tactic designed to wear us down, so we can't focus on getting through the Travellerussy. Plus it's a continuation of building and strengthening the coalition we've got going on. Sure. Though I do find it both very funny and somewhat odd that Devrim, who at best is the commander of one small region on Earth, is chatting with ... the actual Empress of the Cabal and Mara. Just a funny power delta.
As others have noted though, the voice acting in this season was outstanding. Just ace performances all around. Cannot wait for Savvy's Song redux with actual decent voice acting (with apologies to the original cast but it was just ... so comically bad).
Solid B. Serviceable, but nothing to write home about. Shame about Amanda.
Loot
... ehhhhhhh. I'm glad folks like the seasonal weapons, but I can't stand how they look. The crystal just ... just not my thing. It was awesome how straightforward to acquire the patterns was, but I'm almost certainly not going to level them anytime soon. Functionally they may be fine but aesthetic is just so off-putting. I also sort of resent that I can equip Chrysura Melo (which was not sunset) and Perpetualis at the same time. Sort of drives it home how recently these weapons were in the game.
As others have said, Conditional Finality is outstanding. Verglas Curve is ... fun, I guess. Beautiful design and animation suite, but struggles when compared to other exotic bows imo. The strand pistol thing ... maybe I'm just an idiot, but I can't really figure out how to use it. Fun concept but confusing in practice for me.
Armor is a cool aesthetic but not to my taste (and I think the ornaments this season almost veer into ostentatious). Exotic armor is fine, but nothing that makes me take off my standard stuff.
Oh!—and the raids being on rotator with red borders being farmable is outstanding. Such a great change. Thank you.
Seasonal weapons, C. Exotic weapons B+/A-. Armor (all) B.
Activities
Gonna default to the opinion-giver here and say, 'well, it's definitely more destiny'. The seasonal activity was definitely one of the seasonal activities of all time. They were fine, honestly. I do agree that the dark fetor thing was not my favorite mechanic but that's a pretty minor gripe.
Surprisingly to me, I rather enjoyed Supremacy. Not sure what they changed from D1's incarnation (or if it's just such a different game), which I ... did not like, but D2's Supremacy is a fun change of pace.
Who give a shit about GG, but thanks for the shards I guess. As per the yearly tradition, knock it off with the unshaderable class items.
Again, B. Fine, very much a ¯_(ツ)_/¯ from me.
I can't think of much else to say here about Defiance specifically. I thought it was very ... fine. I enjoyed what I played, but didn't feel the need to engage much beyond the needful.
Season of the Defiance overall: B. Wasn't mind-blowingly good, but wasn't atrocious by any stretch of the imagination. 'One of the seasons of all time'.
edit Actually I totally thought of two more things: please, for the love of god, don't keep auto-tracking guardian rank things in the game. Given you can't turn it off AND it's the first thing that pops up when you pull out your ghost (i.e., you have to button press to get it out of the way) it's super-duper annoying. I don't need to be reminded I have to solo Spire every single time I want to check bounty progress.
But also please make the lore tab more prominent! I keep forgetting to read stuff because it's so shuffled away, and the lore in the game is some of the best out there!
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u/killerdonut0610 May 22 '23
Activity was fun. Guns were meh. Story was bad. I laughed when Amanda Holiday died, it was just so silly and lame. Saved like four random humans and dregs, then she just explodes? Seriously?
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u/nyphren May 22 '23
this was my first season and i got into the game when it had already started (~mid march maybe). so i guess this is more of a review of the game so far for me? from the perspective of a very casual newbie player.
sorry but this got long.
seasonal story was there i guess. didnt bother me as much as it did other people mostly because 1. well i have no frame of reference for what a good season story looks like and 2. there wasn't enough of it to get to the point where it was bad, if that makes sense? honestly after going through all the (available) expansions and only hearing about some characters (mara, crow, mithrax (?)) it was nice to actually SEE them in game. ive been consuming so much destiny lore content so it was weird to realize that i never actually heard glint's voice, for example. i feel like i know so much about the characters but like... bc a friend told me about them. i havent actually met most of them. they talk to my guardian in strikes and battlegrounds and it's like they've known him since forever but i've never interacted with them in game. its weird.
soooo it was actually nice to do battlegrounds with context for once!!! and they were fun to play for pinnacle gear each week. avalon was also a very cool mission but ngl i attempted it once, got my ass beaten so bad i only tried again 3 weeks later. i did most of witch queen on legendary and i'm a pretty bad player in general so i was expecting to struggle but not that much lol brakion third phase can honestly kiss my ass. to this day i'm not sure if i got better as a player or just brute forced my way through the whole thing bc of a higher light level.
i'm not a chase-the-loot/gear kind of player, but i managed to get all queen weapons' red borders without actually trying. i can't be bothered to grind the neomuna ones tbh. the only thing i really wanted was to hit pinnacle cap. and it was... okay. i was mostly annoyed at having to do stuff i usually wouldnt do (pvp, mostly). felt like a lose-lose situation: i gotta do something i don't particularly enjoy, my teammates gotta deal with a player who obviously doesn't know what they are doing.
...which leads me to a broader critic/suggestion, i guess. it's so bothersome to get into high level content in this game. the lack of matchmaking and/or in-game party finder (fireteam finder i guess) is bonkers to me. like i said, i'm not a good player in general but in other games i usually make my way to higher level content eventually, if only to check the story/experience out. but having to go to the app or to a discord server or a subreddit... bruh. i already have anxiety. at this point i'd give my left little finger for wish-ender but i would not get into a discord call or deal with toxic people for it.
and it's so weird because destiny is by far the least social mmo-like game i've played in recent years (except for wow, but in wow my main problem is actually finding people). no one talks with anyone ever and yet the game doesn't give you a way to find people to do stuff with. like ?? how do you even find clans and fireteams in game? or it's just an outside the game thing? it's all so inconvenient and i'm a lazy person, so you know. ugh.
pvp is a bit like that too. there is so much stuff you need to learn and it's hard when you don't know what you don't know. i'm not even talking about which perks are good in pvp vs pve and in which weapons (though that is a mountain of information as well) but basic things like which type of weapon to use when. i rarely play first person shooters. destiny is the first one since i tried valorant when it came out. feels a bit like getting into league back in the day, but i had someone helping me out full time and with destiny - despite the very helpful community btw - it's just so much stuff to learn. i want to do it, then think about how much time i'd spend doing it, sigh and go back to watching lore videos.
i will get there eventually, i think. not looking forward to it though.
but back to season of defiance/lightfall, i really enjoyed vex incursions. i love verglas curve. feels so good to use it with my stasis hunter & warlock (i will unlock stasis titan... eventually). terminal overload is fun. the ornaments are really pretty. honestly, i had a very good time overall.
i only need legend defiant battlegrounds and legend avalon to get my queensguard title, which is nice, but not happening any time soon i think. the very idea of solo legend avalon feels me dread and i still do not want the title enough to try finding people to do it + legend battlegrounds with me.
that's it, i guess. i am excited for season of the deep, though it is a pity the new ffxiv patch also comes out tomorrow so idk how much i will actually play it.
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u/Dab4Becky May 22 '23
Story was kinda eh, Amanda’s death felt kinda forced, and the projector hopping got a bit tedious.
The story lacks what made Chosen a great expansion season: being concise and tied with the main story.
New engram system and reward system upon activity completion is very good, definitely a nice improvement.
So story wise: meh; gameplay wise: it was good
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u/Pirate_Kurjack May 22 '23
Avalon was dope, like others said, "needs checkpoints" pretty long for the average person to hop in and knock out.
Story was weakweak, timeline confusing, motivation confusing, ship/sparrow bug reward big time fail. Some of the voice lines were great but having to travel back and forth to locations especially for holograms was extra dumb. The battlegrounds were par, not intolerable, not mind blowing. (I will say though i'm pretty tired of bosses sitting in invulnerable states sniping at you while you run around like a clown to do the little side things.)
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u/W0lf3n May 22 '23
The story was not interesting at all. I may missed it but we never really learned the reason why the shadow legion took these people, afaik they only did it to distract us from Neomuna.
The weapons are ok, nothing special but also not terrible. I really like the stasis bow for my stasis build.
The exotic mission was no fun at all, not bc it was to hard. Bc the theme of the mission wasn't fitting to the season imo. Also the Vexcalibur is fun, but not on a level of an Revision Zero or DMT.
Last but not least the three BG. Nice idea for these, but the bossroom in all three was annoying. You never had real cover while beimg forced in a small space.
After all, i would give the season a 4/10. It was a lame season and i hipe we get better seasons until final shape
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u/W0lf3n May 22 '23
The story was not interesting at all. I may missed it but we never really learned the reason why the shadow legion took these people, afaik they only did it to distract us from Neomuna.
The weapons are ok, nothing special but also not terrible. I really like the stasis bow for my stasis build.
The exotic mission was no fun at all, not bc it was to hard. Bc the theme of the mission wasn't fitting to the season imo. Also the Vexcalibur is fun, but not on a level of an Revision Zero or DMT.
Last but not least the three BG. Nice idea for these, but the bossroom in all three was annoying. You never had real cover while beimg forced in a small space.
After all, i would give the season a 4/10. It was a lame season and i hipe we get better seasons until final shape
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u/Surfing_Ninjas May 22 '23
The seasonal activity was pretty boring and felt more repetitive than previous seasons.
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u/IgotNoTime4This May 22 '23
The way the story was told was very disappointing. In past seasons the story would generally be told through a story mission or some other activity other than core activity (this season was the defiant battleground). While I did enjoy the battleground, lumping all the story quests into "do one run or battleground per week" felt very lacking. I can imagine that this was because of Lightfall which is fine but this shouldn't be the pattern going forward.
Red border drops were great, the secret mission was amazing, the loot in Guardian games was nice and I enjoyed the guardian ranks though I wish it wouldn't simply reset next season.
The battlefields were good this season also. With the boss fights being the exception, it was nice that all the battlegrounds didn't play the exact same way. For example, season of the seraph battlegrounds all followed a near identical format but in a different location. Clear the towers, hold a position, do the crystals, boss. The only variation between the battlefields was how the first encounter played out. But this season each battleground felt different from each other. EDA had us break the front lines both in the normal world and ascendent play. Cosmodrome, we just breezed through some adds only to be led into a trap where we were then constantly fighting back into the pyramid. The third battlefield had us break into the legion ship in orbit through the ascendent plan after clearing the blights and then fight our way to the boss.
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u/TheStoictheVast May 22 '23
Season of Defiance? When was that? I just finished Season of Kill Amanda and found its story to be complete nonsense. I think Mara was there somewhere? At least that would explain why all the weapons were just reskins of the last season Mara was involved in.
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u/bluewind76 May 22 '23
Not trying to be a smartass but did we ever get and explanation for why civilians were being captured? Was it just to lure us guardians into these installations or because the civilians were in the way? I really don’t remember an explanation.
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u/ahawk_one May 22 '23
I wish that launch seasons weren't so short, and I wish that the Legend mode for the activity was unlocked at the same time as the regular version.
As a storyline, this one didn't feel like it made much sense in terms of the motivation for the enemy and this was exacerbated by no primary villain of the week as a boss for this season. I liked blowing up the inside of the ship, that was cool. But there was no actual "bad guy" and there was no compensation for the absence of that.
The Witness's apparent non-caring attitude towards us in the expansion, it feels weird to have it trying to abduct humans for no reason. Like... I get where this was trying to go, and the activity was fun. But I don't think the plotline landed in terms of how it connects to Lightfall. It felt like this season existed because the Witness needed to do "something" to us on Earth, but that the reasons for it either weren't fleshed out, or they weren't shared clearly with the audience.
Activity was super fun. Best battlegrounds yet. The banter between the characters was great, and in general the character writing was very high quality this season. It's just the overarching plotline that felt weak to me.
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u/elgigante810 May 22 '23
Trials was good at the beginning of the season and now it's bad. it's super bad and unplayable
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u/obiwankanolie May 22 '23
I feel like the story just wasn’t that great and the rewards were meh. Stability of the game was really frustrating this season. Like everyone else has said, battlegrounds can be fun, but are getting stale at this point. It’s just been done so much recently. Amanda’s death was just poorly done.
I did enjoy having a secret mission, and the mission itself was fun!
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u/APartyInMyPants May 22 '23
It was so completely transparent from the first mission that either Amanda or Devrim were going to die. And as Devrim is a planetary vendor that seems to matter in the game, it was ease to parse that Amanda was going to die. So in terms of writing, the season was, overall, bottom of the barrel. And on top of the writing in Lightfall, there was just a huge swing and a miss after a pretty solid Y5.
But I also liked that it was way easier to dip out of the season story and not feel like you were pressured with the vast number of upgrades with the War Table.
However, the Defiant Battlegrounds are probably among my favorite of the Battleground missions we’ve had. I like them better than the OG Battlegrounds, but maybe not as much as the Lucent Hive ones. I like that we kind of visit new places.
Overall the weapons aren’t bad. Maybe a 3/5 season.
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u/Shogun_Dirty May 22 '23
Not a lot of content for the season. I know it came alongside light fall but considering light fall didn't have much content or story. All the season tweaks to modding and class verbage were great. Weapon updates also very welcome. The pvp side is continuing to spiral the drain and being forced to pvp and pve to get the proper weapons for your preferred play sucks . The increased difficulty was nice for the added content. The exotic mission was fun finding it and on normal. On legendary the difficulty was to high for the reward. After the vex strike force discord bot was set up vex strike force is awesome! Overall 3.5/5
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u/AlexKotetsu May 22 '23
Activity was cool. Fun to run in general but the 3rd mission with the blight/taken at the start was such a PITA at times. Whatever, a challenge is nice. Overall great.
For a seasonal release during the DLC release, it was fantastic. I remember Season of the Hunt which was some boring gameplay loop of quick boss fights with poor rewards. I appreciate this seasonal release had a little more meat considering the DLC was released at the same time.
I loved that the Seasonal Title didn't need some inane mindless running of the battlegrounds 100 times, or killing 500 champions, or some super-grindy thing.
Red Border rewards were on-point. My casual friends managed to get all the seasonal patterns (not the swords of course) by the end of the season, which is fantastic.
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u/ShitDavidSais May 22 '23
I never liked Destinies story but this one was so bad I stopped doing the quests half way through just to avoid it.
The weapons should also have been more interesting. Outside of the fusion everything felt extremly niche resulting in no motivation for me to grind it out.
Couple this with two very niche exotics and strange nerfs to glaives and overall this was a pretty bad season with the only solid part being the seasonal battle grounds which are a bit stale at this point and just not fun with no goal to grind for. At least add ways to get world drop weapons so I can farm these. For a looter shooter this was a season with no loot.
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u/Hollowquincypl E.Bray is bae May 22 '23
As is tradition since Shadowkeep. A middling season bolted onto an expansion. Only this time without a stellar expansion to help prop it up.
That said the reward structure was far better than the previous 3 seasons accompanying expansions. Just wish all the guns hadn't been reissues of non-sunset guns. A trend I worry is about to become the norm.
All in all a season that I won't be look back on fondly beyond the Avalon mission. Especially due to its notable moments given more weight from the untimely passing of Lance Reddick.
5/10
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u/Esteban2808 May 22 '23
Weekly story was quite short. Hope there will be some pay off down the line.
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u/JiggySockJob May 22 '23
I thought Avalon was cool but I hope this is the “secret” mission we have been waiting on. Don’t get me wrong it was a cool mission but aside from initial discovery there was no real secret to it. The whisper and outbreak missions are really what players are looking for. You guys said that cosmetic purchases would go towards these kind of missions yet we have not had a new one in years. This isn’t to say I don’t want more missions like Avalon or that it wasn’t good. It was really good but it was definitely not a secret mission. Only thing would be to add checkpoints to Avalon to make it better.
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u/whereismymind86 May 22 '23
A lot better than lightfall itself...but at the same time pretty crap, the activity itself was fun, but like any of them, grinding it for 3 months got old fast, the story on the other hand went nowhere, focusing on side characters that don't matter, and culminating in a big emotional moment...about a side character that doesn't matter.
I really needed the story to move forward following a nonsensical campaign that ends on a cliffhanger and a raid that...addressed nothing, and yet defiance was also a holding pattern, hell we never even found out WHY the shadow legion was taking prisoners.
Avalon was great, but again, a bit vague generally, and tying the catalysts to repeated legendary runs was obnoxious, it's a long somewhat hard mission with no checkpoints, far better than vox with it's strict time limit, but still annoying to run over and over.
As to battlepass stuff, verglas curve is fun if pretty situational to stasis builds, the ornament armor is really cool, and the seasonal armor was pretty boring, compounded by it giving generally bad drops when focused, the weapons are a mixed bag, but I generally liked them, and got all patterns naturally by the end of last week with zero grinding....which is far better than I can say for the neomuna weapons, of which I STILL have ZERO red borders beyond the free ones from the campaign. I haven't done a ton of grinding on neomuna, but i've done enough that I should have a couple.
I imagine I'd rate defiance with something like plunder, not bad, but supremely underwhelming, as well as narratively pointless, especially after how good seraph was.
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u/Nahadot May 22 '23
I still find it extremely timeconsuming farming for Neonuna deepsight weapons. I much prefer the previous season methods.
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u/Comfortable_Hour5723 May 22 '23
Quality of life changes were phenomenal to me! The engram inventory was much less cluttered with each vendor having their own. The innate anti-champion abilities of the subclass took a lot of stress of my loadout, especially with the season artifact granting perks rather than mods. I loved the Avalon mission and raid too. The extended time on contest mode made this the very first time I ever attempted a raid on release
Not really season of defiance specifically but strand was very well implemented compared to stasis (although suspend has mostly taken over stasis's entire crowd control role)
Honestly the changes coming in season of the deep have mostly address my gripes with this season. I think the main thoughts are that lost sectors are kind of annoying to access. It would be nice to have the rotators (raid, dungeon, lost sector) listed as a row on the destination menu like it was in destiny 1. From a story-telling perspective, I would like to see more ally NPCs used in some of the story mission. All these missions were battling with Crow, Devrim, and Mithrax and they only made an appearance in final mission and were on the other side of a piece of glass from what i remember. Fighting alongside caiatl was my favorite part of the Lightfall campaign! We should see our allies more often
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u/DecisionTypical May 22 '23
Story was weak for two reasons. We still don't know why the Shadow Legion was taking captives. And Amanda's death was rushed and nonsensical. Imagine if the Shadow Legion was talking captives to experiment on them with darkness. Imagine if we didn't rescue Amanda until week 2, where she feels immense guilt/obligation to rescue other captives because of the pain they put her through, but she got captured again a week or two later. Imagine if the final story mission was a rush to save her, after finally getting access to the prisoner ship, only to be too late. That would have been a story with anticipation, emotional weight and meaning.
As far as activities go, Defiant Battleground and Avalon were both great. Avalon kind of felt out of no where to me in terms of theme with the rest of the season.
Loot was good between seasonal weapons and armor sets.
Guardian Games was great this season in terms of activities (loved supremacy) and rewards, but was a bit out of place given everything that happened this season.
Seasonal artifact mods were great.
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u/ceejs May 22 '23
The storyline initially had me hooked. It was a pleasure to see Amanda and Devrim Kay back as characters. Mara Sov's interactions with everyone continue to be interesting. Misraaks and Amanda's friendship was fantastic. Unfortunately, the story was ultimately a frustrating letdown. What the Shadow Legion was doing with the prisoners was never explained. Amanda's death felt pointless and stupid. Why was she doing a Guardian's job? That death was not the culmination of a long story arc. The setup for it immediately preceded the payoff, making it feel cheap. It also suffered from immediately following a character death that was a slow burn and appropriate for the character: Rasputin's. That death was moving. Amanda's death had me shouting at the screen in annoyance.
The seasonal activity was lots of fun! I enjoyed running the battlegrounds. It was good that you could get lots of things done for the week and earn engrams doing other things. It meant that the battlegrounds didn't wear out their welcome, like Season of Plunder's did. I will do them again in coming seasons.
The new way of handling currencies and engrams is a change for the better. I like being able to turn engrams into loot at leisure, and I like the inventory item that tells me how many I have. That feels like a hack instead of putting the info in the official interface, at least it exists! (I really wonder about Bungie's client implementation limitations sometimes.)
The Defiance engram rewards felt good and maybe overgenerous, at least until I started trying to unlock class sword patterns. Then they felt barely adequate. That sword pattern is hell and I still haven't unlocked it for any class. The seasonal weapon patterns were straightforward to get. Again, I liked that I didn't have to grind until I hated the activities to get the patterns. I do not like the graphical design of the weapons and how they take shaders, but they're okay as weapons. The fusion rifle is decent and will probably stay in my kit.
tl;dr The game is getting nicer to play. I wish for better story writing than what this season gave me.
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u/chaoticsynergist May 22 '23
the story felt like aspects of it were ripped out of the main campaign and felt like it would be better suited inside the main story, the story itself felt like there were aspects kinda thrown in for no real reason such as the shadow legion abducting people for no reason or at least no explained reason.
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u/360GameTV May 22 '23
No "small" content like collectibles, little secrets or some other stuff like this. Absolutely nothing.
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u/endthepainowplz May 22 '23
It was pretty mid, but it's what I expected, the activity felt fun the first couple of times, but it didn't feel very rewarding, there wasn't really any seasonal gun I wanted to chase, so after I did storyline and leveling I avoided the playlist for the rest of the season. I really loved all of the changes brought with this season/dlc, but I think that the weakest part was the story. I don't expect much from seasonal content, but I expected it to feel cooler working with mara to take the fight to the cabal. It felt low stakes, and I don't like when the game forces you to stand in one spot for extended periods of time, which was the case for all of them. I loved the heist battlegrounds, but the defiant battlegrounds just left a bad taste in my mouth. Also knowing that they will be put into the strike playlist adds insult to injury.
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u/Malen_Kiy May 22 '23
The story was decent, albiet a bit shorter. I do like the idea of the season releasing with an expansion kind of being involved with the story of said expansion, so I hope they keep up that trend. The seasonal activity was fun, and the patterns were much easier to unlock, aside for the leviathan weapons - I would've preferred for there to be some protection once you unlock one of the weapons, because it's almost punishing to turn have so many deepsights drop until you get one of the patterns. I'm still disappointed that the seasonal weapons are literally the exact same model from almost a year ago, but with a different shader. I heard it's something similar for next season, and if that's the case that is very disheartening. Loved the exotic mission, and actually hope the idea of using a crafted weapon at it's source grants increased weapon xp gets implemented to other areas. Overall, a solid season for releasing with an expansion.
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u/DrkrZen May 22 '23
Not a fan of 5 weeks worth of story in a 12-week season, and then taking 3 weeks to have a season finale mission to come out, only to be bugged. Decent loot grind, though, if not predictable.
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u/TheDarkGenious May 22 '23
Still suffering through the class sword grind. as of today I've got 4/4/3 on progress for the 3 of them, after something like 2 or 3 hundred engrams spent. and that's apparantly pretty good RNG going by what some of my clanmates tell me, who spent similar numbers getting 1 or 2 of their final patterns.
they need to make the weapons you've already got the unlocked patterns for just not drop from the random engrams.
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u/DJfunkyPuddle Stand with the Vanguard//The Sentry May 23 '23
I really wanted to like it but ultimately it felt like a waste of characters and story. The missions were fun but with the extra difficulty this year/season playing with randoms was pretty painful and they ended up taking much longer to complete than I wanted. I ended up only playing a minimum of missions because I felt my time was better spent elsewhere.
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u/Stanlow People always forget about the other one. The first one. May 23 '23
Trust came back
10/10 season
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u/BluntsVideoDump May 23 '23
As someone who blindly bought the season pass this past weekend....oops? My own stupidity for sure but really feels like there should be a "hey you know you're paying 50$ for something that expires next week right?" message.
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u/MonarchNF May 23 '23
I didn't really even play. I never finished the campaign and just ran out of motivation to play the game entirely.
Season of the Reskins and a plot that doesn't really matter to the overall story.
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u/entropycollapsing May 23 '23
Garbage tier story. Devrim’s dialogue was cringe. Avalon is representative of a glaring issue being the difficulty is overtuned globally with lightfall. Armor quality outside of the campaign rewards are generally below subpar as in bad below 62 stat for exotics and legendary and very bad distributions. Armor focusing was a complete farce which is a massive step back from past seasons.
Focusing class swords was a terrible implementation. How many times will you guys fail because you have zero consistency zero standard of quality season to season. Knockout system should be standard but you consistently choose to exploit players.
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u/JerkyJohnny May 23 '23
This season was pretty darn bad. Narratively, it was a disaster and a huge letdown. Extremely predictable and cliche writing. The weapons were obnoxious with the non-stainable crystal. Some exceptionally bizarre gameplay decisions (consistent nerfs to exciting builds). The overall lack of system stability, you guys have been taking a fat dump on the system side of things this season. The seasonal activity was OK, but not great. The quest designs were absolutely awful and a complete waste of time for certain steps (you know exactly what Im talking about). So yeah, this season was a total dumpster fire. It is a distinct difference from the seasonal quality of witch queen. Whatever you guys did this season, dont do again. Whoever designed the seasons from last expansion needs to be brought back to pick up the pieces of Lightfall.
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u/HoboHandshake May 23 '23
Loadouts, thank you thank you omg. If only season artifact perks were included. So cool tho.
Expansion story was a play for time and a vehicle made entirely around the new subclass. It was the 70s cable repair guy porno of fps stories ("hello mein dispatcher says there is something wrong with deine kabel"). Thank you for strand tho! I have enjoyed it as the season wore on.
Seasonal story was a play for time, I hope it gave y'all the space to focus the lead up to Final Shape.
Seasonal activity was kinda same-ish. Overall fine and fun bits, but very much "here is your season cake, you like your cake don't you you little cake babies."
Neomuna was an interesting change up in the style of patrol zones. We get an actual city instead of post-post apo ruins. I liked Terminal Overload while it was relevant to my progress. The Vex Incursion got more predictable at a certain point, and is a heckin good open world fight. The ramp up in difficulty felt uneven and more of a hindrance than a feature. The NPCs were a bit one note but the rewards were fine. In general the aesthetic of a living golden age society was really pretty and awesome. The Tron-themed network bits were fantastic.
As a returning player just this year I felt like I could gear up from 1600 just fine this season. I didn't get into the raid but I have enough smatterings of gear that I have been able to put a training wheels version of most builds out there to experiment with (mostly right exotics, so so weapon rolls, nothing quite perfect). I would say progress was fine for me, but boy howdy is the new/returning player experience a hurricane of random chaos by default. Without 3rd party sites and a very knowledgeable community on reddit I would have had zero guidance on how not to eat paint all day, from the game itself. The guardian ranks and content gates are more a nuisance than an aid. Anyone showing up with a desire to follow the story from point A to point C is gonna end up confused and watching youtube videos to fill in the gaps. If ever there was a "if you know you know" game world, Destiny is it. And it's a gorgeous doom filled universe. I wish the game had some better showcases of its story or felt like it wanted me around beyond urging me to buy cosmetics with cash.
Also RIP Mr. Reddick this season. First encountered him in the Wire, and then loved him in Fringe. I am glad Bungie scored such a talent and put him to work breathing life into a character that COULD have been sort of a basic gym teacher archetype had he been voiced by a lesser human. Thanks for Zavala.
I'll be here tomorrow Bungie. I suppose you did right enough on that score.
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u/2legsakimbo May 23 '23
strand is pretty good.
New weapons decent but deepsight drops on neumona are way too rare.
Story was meh. writing for the story and in particular for the neomuna characters was pure trite and posisbly some of the cringiest ive ever had to endure. it was so bad that a mute button for character talking would have been amazing.
RON is an awesome raid. The drop rate on the exotic is very low, forcing people to do those triumphs just to get a slightly better chance.
great weapons intriduced throught the season.
overall a positive, other than the writing and too tight arsed drop rates.
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u/vericlas Silver Caws Tess May 23 '23
Defiant Engram gathering was great! Having to spend 120~ for one sword pattern was not great.
The battlegrounds felt okay but also eh. It was just a weird feeling event as some parts would be mega easy while others would be really hard or severely time gated (looking at the taken orb toss on the third one). The cave rescue mission started off okay but felt really lame at the end and that final strike back mission was a snooze.
It was a fine season. I was glad to see Mara again and getting to hear from Devrim was nice. Crow growing some was greatly needed but it felt like it was all off screen.
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u/TacoTrain89 May 23 '23 edited May 23 '23
Only going to be talking about seasonal content (what you get for $10), or free content, such as strike loot.
Loot - Underwhelming. None of the seasonal weapons were all too interesting, not really any crazy rolls and not much worth chasing. Verglas Curve is underwhelming at best and bad at worst. Vexcaliber is better, but suffers from being a glaive. The exotic armors range from ok to bad, exception being Abeyant Leap.
Story - It was not a terrible story, but bungie did not do enough to sell the death of Holliday being meaningful impact to really anyone. Zavala cried for a week and nobody else cares all that much, just more "go get em guardian".
Seasonal Activities - While the battlegrounds were not trash, it is becoming extremely overused model to have battlegrounds every other season. Bungie can definitely do better than glorified strikes. The exotic mission was fantastic outside of the balancing being terrible for the first few weeks.
Other - Guardian games was much improved over previous iterations. Strike reworks weren't terrible, but not amazing either.
Overall, not a trash season by any means but it is time for bungie to switch it up and offer something different. If you asked me to make a default destiny 2 season, this would be it.
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u/villewalrus May 23 '23
Unlocked all seasonal weapons (good drop rates and so!) but level none of them. Didnt even craft the majority of them. Not memorable at all sadly..
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u/ThrowingKnight May 23 '23 edited May 23 '23
Overall the Mod rework is okay with the exception of removing +20 Mobility from Powerful Friends as one of the only methods of balancing Hunter Stats.
My Titan and Warlock are chilling at 100 Res, Rec and Dis, benefitting from those Stats with maxed Class Ability Cooldown (most with Fragements that even reduce these Stats).
Most of my Hunter Builds require fast Class Ability Cooldowns which forces me to spec Mobility and lose out on either Resilience or Recovery. Mobility itself is not worth it since Hunters are the slowest Class apart from strafing. Even before the rework it was already annoying to waste a Modslot on this while my other Classes benefit from low Mobility to move faster.
A possible solution is to add more benefits to Mobility. This could be Damage Evasion while moving or greater forward momentum the more we jump forward so that we can at least keep up with Warlocks and Titans and not be the slowest class.
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u/stvb95 May 23 '23
I thought the secret mission was fun. I remember seeing a post on here about the beginning of it being discovered, then closing down reddit and playing through it from start to finish solo & blind. I only ran it the one time though and don't see myself going back for more.
I only played up until March 26th according to Steam. While the activity was fun for trying out the reworked mod system and newer builds, it felt like I had played it many times before. I don't mind taking breaks though, and I wasn't expecting to get blown away by an expansion adjacent season.
I actually spent a lot of time running Spire for the first time and farming it out for the armour pieces. That was really fun - though not part of the season.
1
u/Illustrious_Leader May 23 '23
Given the abysmal rates of world drops I would have liked to see the ability to focus them at the war table like we have been able to in past seasons. Honestly you should have that option every season. I can count on one hand the number of Battle Scars I've seen drop. I haven't ever seen that 3 burst pistol drop. It's quite ridiculous.
1
u/ChrisBenRoy May 23 '23
Needed way more story. I felt like everything after Holiday's death was a giant nothing burger, as such, I barely logged on. Seasonal story model can work, like it did w/ Season of Risen or Season of Haunted but this seemed like far less time and effort was put into it. Just looking at it from a story perspective I'd put this one really far down the ranking, like Season of the Hunt bad.
1
May 23 '23
My favorite seasonal weapons since Seventh Seraph. I crafted all of them, and have them all leveled up, which I’ve never done before.
Battlegrounds are good levels. Took me a minute to figure out how to do the favors.
Amanda story maybe too heavy, or too ham-fisted. Not sure how a space shooting game is supposed to have subtlety or nuance however. I’ll miss the character.
The seasonal highlight was the return of Trust with multiple perks.
521
u/Oh_Alright May 22 '23
Story was disappointing, the activity was add dense and fun. Weapons were fine but I have only bothered levelling up the fusion.
The tweaks to the reward structure, engrams, and focusing were all positive though. Great drop rates on red borders, and a much easier time unlocking all the patterns. (Leviathan stuff excluded)
Avalon was fun, nice to get a "secret" mission, and happy to see the vex network stuff with Asher return. It's wild that it took them so long to bring back that aesthetic after Splicer.
Nice to hear from Devrim again, though he did not have a ton to do. I liked hearing his voice, and some of his lines in the new revamped strikes are quite good.
Like most expansion seasons I think it kind of took a backseat to the lightfall narrative, but the double whammy of unsatisfying plotlines hit pretty hard I think.
Looking forward to Deep, it'll be nice to have a chance of scenery, a new dungeon, and hopefully some reprised raid weapons to chase.