Bungie is never going to let you steam roll content. You are going to have to craft and grind and build and tier-up just to feel like you did in a d1 nightfalls with the set skill trees. High level content won’t get any easier but high&low level content will get oh so much worse for not fully committing build crafting and getting the new shiny gear, see basic strikes/battlegrounds over the past year or so. Bungie are not raising the ceilings, they are lowering the floors. You are going to grind to get back to where you were. Any nails that stick up(op builds) will be hammered down. Enjoy the hamster wheel.

I would spend ever spare minute I had to grind in this game......as I used to in the past.....when it was worth it. The very moment that Bungie put that negative power cap on our characters for end game content, they completely obliterated the fundamental purpose of the game.....to grind, level up, and become powerful enough to defeat the hardest enemies. So no matter what your light level, you'll ALWAYS be underpowered. It's like trying to get to the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. No matter how far or fast or how long you travel for, you'll never get there.

I think there is a lot of confusion regarding the power system. 10-200 is standard fair and quite straightforward. 200-550, 200 as a base, about T2, to get T3 and above, player needs to complete more challenging contents. Completing said contents, you will be rewarded with T3, so on and so forth. So you need to gear up through playing incremental harder contents, sort of like a ladder. The system encourages players to play to achieve higher tier rewards. Is T5 mandatory? No. T3 which is quite achievable is good enough. 6% weapon damage bonus and 9% armour DR for pve. PvP needs T4 for better weapon stats as it is competitive. Now the question is about time investment. What are all these progressions meant relative to your presence, time and effort? If you like D2 and willing to commit most of your spare time in it, it is a very good progression system. If you tend to play variety of games, D2 might handicap you. T3 should be fine though for modest time investment.

I’m getting burnt out just reading about the new grind…such foolish changes for an aging player base.

"Only the ladder is real"

I dont understand why people are up in arms now about endgame content forcing you to be at a negative power delta when this has literally been a thing for as long as the franchise has existed As far back as year 1 destiny 1, hard mode crotas end and the skolas PoE guantlet were level 33 and 35 when the level caps at the time were 32 and 34 respectively. And keep in mind hitting the level cap required you to play these activities (there were no such thing as pinnacles from normal content you had to do raids to hit cap) for their exclusive loot, so you would really be doing them MULTIPLE levels below their level until you got what you needed to hit YOUR level cap which was still below that of the activity. Levels got complicated as the game went on with a deliniation between light level and power level but the hard mode content (hard mode raids and nightfalls) by year 3 were level 42 when our players were capped at level 40. So the negative delta is not some new thing to make destiny 2 excessively hard. It has been a thing forever. This idea of "you used to be able to overlevel for content and feel powerful" is a rewriting of history. It's beyond me why people choose to complain now. If anything it is infinitely easier to play at a power deficit now because while the negative delta has remained, the power fantasy in terms of the strength of our abilities and weapons has only gotten excessively stronger over time. It's to the point where its difficult to even notice the difference between a Master and Normal raid or dungeon because our players have become so strong than the level of the enemies hardly even matters at all. I acknowledge this will change when the deficit is higher in the [b]optional[/b] harder difficulty content in edge of fate but the point stands.

[quote]You guys say in the Livestream that power will be fully enabled while you're viewing world tier difficulties, but you're still capping our levels. So that's a lie. And the new difficulty levels (Fabled and Mythic) are scaling higher than GMs, capping us 30-40 below. Cool, we're potentially stronger thanks to these stat reworks, but you're immediately going back on your word and making the enemies even stronger to the point we're leveling up more to enable damage than to close the gap or surpass the enemy in power, as are the points of a power system. And to top it off, the rewards aren't going up much if at all for completing what are for all intents and purposes, higher activities than GMs. If players shouldn't be allowed to benefit from leveling up, you should have no say in how easily players get what they want from these. You make the game harder/ more challenging by actually making it harder, not by capping the player, then nerfing the player, then buffing the enemy 4 times more. At this point, we're leveling up to enable damage, then focusing our stats to increase our resistance or damage output to match GM difficulty IF that. Why? Why even have a level system if it doesn't even work? You've had YEARS to figure it out and it looks like we're only getting further and further from the "power fantasy" Destiny is supposed to be.[/quote] Because level directly correlates enemy difficulty. Many of us like difficulty because it’s the only way to actually test the limits of your build. If you don’t want to play the higher difficulty content, you don’t have to. There are lower difficulties. And your level now impacts your reward tiers.

Of course, if we could overlevel, they would have to put forth more effort to make encounters engaging without just increasing a number

I listened to Aztecross recap this morning, and yeah I really don’t hear anything excited. Most game mod will probably drop shitty loot, they haven’t said if running current GM would still reward high tier loot or if it’s going to be tied to buying the expansion. In a nutshell, wait and see for the real reviews to come in, right now it’s just shill and salesman talk.

No more GM's and no more needing to rank rahool for exotics.

I think certain activities are locked under level like World Tiers and I think maybe Conquests which are just the GM replacements. But I think everything else doesn't have the mettle modifier.

Pretty sure you can only level now based on what i've seen thus giving you that power fantasy..but with that said, if you want the best gear available, you'll have to challenge yourself. IE if you're LV400 and enter a 200 activity, my guess is you'll steam roll everything Could be mistaken, but that's my takeaway.