Destiny 2 The Edge of Fate: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

     Destiny 2’s most recent expansion, The Edge of Fate, has been out for a little while now and is the glaring definition of a mixed bag. There’s a lot of good changes made to the core experience while simultaneously making changes to make the core experience worse. But first, let’s go over the campaign, because it’s surprisingly decent.

EXPANSION

Going into this expansion, I was not expecting much from the campaign. It was supposed to be a “non-linear” campaign, where you had multiple storylines you could choose at any point, going back to the usual open world format of the destinations. I didn’t really like this direction because I thought TFS nailed the formula and defined what a campaign quest should be for this game, but it was foolish of me to expect Bungie to iterate on an idea. Although, I am happy to say the campaign did turn out quite good, even if it wasn’t as non-linear as they promised. The format is very basic, you start with one quest, it splits into two and then converges back into one quest that takes you into the final part of the campaign. The actual missions themselves are in-line with the previous years, falling somewhere between WQ and LF for me. Although, the campaign does have some… undeniable baggage to say the least. Kepler is a special location because it has abilities that can only be used on the planet. The first one is… sigh matterspark.

Oh matterspark, you complicated ball of… arc energy. This ability felt like it was half of the marketing for the DLC, acting like it’s some revolutionary concept that’s gonna change the way we live our lives, giving it the same treatment as a new subclass. However, upon actually using the ability, it’s not anything noteworthy. In fact, it feels more like the level designers forgot how to make fun worlds and instead just built the entire destination around matterspark. You WILL use matterspark at every twist, turn nook and cranny of Kepler. I don’t think the ability is offensive, assuming you can get past this borderline epileptic camera and strange controls, but for the first half of the campaign where it’s the only special ability you have… it gets real old real quick. It’s used in every encounter, every platforming section and every boss arena. Actually, speaking of, this is the most formulaic a campaign has ever been in this game. Every mission is damn near the same format: enter a combat room, do a matterspark puzzle, enter a platforming section where you’ll eventually use matterspark again, rinse and repeat until you get to a boss, and some missions make you fight 2 bosses, meaning you go through the cycle again. By the way, did I mention matterspark? Please tell me you got the part where I mentioned matterspark. I really hope I remembered to mention matterspark- is this bit getting on your nerves yet? That’s how the first half of the campaign feels. It’s not horrible by any means but the over reliance on matterspark and the very predictable format really dampens the experience. Sadly, it only marginally gets better in the second half.

Mattermorph is the second special ability and I think it’s used really well, but maybe that’s because it’s used as a complimentary mechanic instead of the main crutch of the level design. Instead of turning into a ball that alters your gameplay mechanics, your melee is replaced with a strand melee that can fix certain parts of the environment and again, I think it’s a really cool idea. A bit limited since you get it so late into the campaign but maybe that’s for the better. The melee itself is also just really good against regular enemies, being an on-demand suspend that recharges almost instantly. 

The final Kepler gimmick is the relocator cannon, which I don’t really have much to say about. It’s basically a portal gun with a couple extra steps, and it’s neat. Not used as much as the previous abilities but it’s neat. Shame the projectile just doesn’t wanna shoot straight sometimes. It’s just still a shame that Kepler is so over reliant on these gimmicks to build the entire world. Like yes the other destinations had gimmicks but they didn’t feel this prevalent. I feel bad harping on this point as much as I have but it really can’t be overstated how much I dislike this direction for the game. 

The story is fairly good too, it starts with a train that crashes somewhere in Old Chicago and–upon inspection–is a call from the nine to visit Kepler. Upon entering the train, we meet Lodi, who I did not expect to like as much as I did, and explains that the singularity that holds Kepler together is unstable and would destroy the solar system if it ever collapsed, so we’re tasked with finding strangelets to stabilize it. Along the way we learn about the factions on Kepler, The House of Exile and Maya’s vex, who both are battling for control of the singularity. We also learn of Lodi and Ikora’s past, that they used to work together and how Lodi got sucked into the future through a phone and that the nine sent a train to kill Ikora so her body would be in the place she resurrected, and I’m sorry I know this is supposed to be a serious segment but the train was such a jumpscare my first playthrough I started crying from how hard I was laughing. It’s just too funny of a premise. Regaining my composure, we also get to work with Orin, who is the former emissary that we’ve interacted with for the past 8 years. She’s a pretty neat character who I hope we see more. Afterwards we head to the singularity, where we find the singularity is actually III’s dead body, pulled into this reality by Maya. We secure the route and Drifter sends the haul into III, reviving it and it begins to speak through Lodi, warning us it will die again and cause a chain reaction that will wipe out the universe. During this, Maya attempts to absorb III’s power but fails, with III dying again and neutralizing the singularity. Lodi then takes on the role of the emissary. I really enjoyed this story, more than I probably thought I would initially. It was neat getting to see Ikora’s pre-guardian life and meeting a character that is literally just some dude.

The amount of missions here are nearly doubled from the previous year’s campaigns, totalling 14 missions. Half of which are just matterspark the mission but I already spoke my grievances with that earlier. The NPCs you encounter are pretty neat, with them even sporting a new dialogue screen more reminiscent of a traditional rpg. In terms of aesthetics, the weapons and armor are pretty cool looking. The cutscenes also have had a massive increase in presentation and quality, somehow managing to be a step up from TFS’s. It is a little surreal going from the life-like cutscenes to the in-game visuals. Not a bad thing necessarily just… weird. The overall difficulty of the legend campaign was fine, nothing too remarkable. Fabled–and especially mythic–world tiers just feel pretty unfun, especially their world quests. There’s a fair amount of side-quests that open up post-campaign too but they’re just doing more matterspark puzzles so I don’t really care about doing them, especially since I don’t think there’s any incentive besides getting more lore.

The destination itself however, is boring. Coming off the heels of the very loved Pale Heart, expectations were high for Kepler, and it falls flat in every single regard. You remember that ship we saw at the very beginning of the campaign? It sparks intrigue and wonder, causing you to wonder if it’s relevant to anything happening here. Turns out no, it’s just cool set dressing. Now, this isn’t a super uncommon thing–especially for this game–but to not only feature it a fair amount in marketing but for it to be a centerpiece for the very first cutscene you see feels like lost potential. Leading up to launch I wanted to explore it since it’d be a unique set piece for a level but sadly they don’t do anything with it. Again, having interesting set dressing is a completely normal thing, the problem is that the other destinations never really focus so much on a set piece you never get to explore. Think back to the first mission of Beyond Light, landing down on Europa and seeing the Pyramid standing there on the horizon line. While the pyramid itself wouldn’t be used as an actual level design until the next campaign, we still interacted with it. It was still relevant. Even Witch Queen had something like this, with the giant bowl hanging over the horizon after you step foot into the throne world or the pyramid ship over the horizon that would eventually house the raid.. Or the Monolith’s constant presence in the Pale Heart, being used for the raid. It feels silly to harp on this point for so long but it’s only the beginning of my problems with Kepler, because unlike other destinations, there’s not really any interesting background structures. Something I’ve always done in the other destinations is just wander around with no hud, admiring the beautiful worlds this team has always excelled at crafting. Europa in particular still captures that feeling the best, but the other recent destinations haven’t really failed me to this degree. I never felt any of those emotions roaming through Kepler. I never stopped to smell the roses, to look around at the environment until the very end of the campaign, where the coolest backdrop in the entire destination is. I was a little speechless when I got here, just wanting to admire the beauty of it all. Moving onto the areas you actually get to explore, these are some of the most uninterested I’ve felt in an environment in years. Granted it’s hard to try to appreciate the world when I’m in a ball for 90% of the campaign, but overall I’m just not a fan of the world aesthetic. The Aionian stuff is actually fairly neat and is probably the biggest saving grace for me. However I’m not the biggest fan of… whatever the hell this is. It just isn’t very appealing to me, not much else I can critique here. Finally, something nobody in the world probably noticed but there’s also no matchmaking in the world here, much like the Pale Heart. Now for that destination, I can kind of understand why they ditched matchmaking until the campaign was finished. But here? The only reason I can maybe think of is something with the world tiers maybe complicating things, but it’s still just disappointing. It’s such a small part of the game that nobody really appreciates but it’s the little things that can help the game feel more alive.

Ok, did not intend for that rant to go on for that long. Let’s move onto the exotics now. For weapons we have New Land Beyond, the pre-order bonus. It’s just No Land Beyond again, but with a far more powerful version of precision instrument. To be completely honest, I do not care for this weapon. The entire point of it in D1 was that it’s a sniper in the primary slot but we’ve been able to do that in this game for years, so for it to return is strange. It has the same clunky rechamber animation that while you can cancel, just doesn’t really feel that great to play with. It is a really good weapon for DPS if you can make a lot of ammo but I have other options I’d rather use. For the season pass we got Third Iteration, a scout rifle that fires a spread of bullets normally, but can be aimed down sights to tighten the spread into one shot that marks them. You do increased damage to marked targets and upon defeating them you gain true sight and invisibility, which is pretty handy. It did have a really funny bug at launch where by equipping anti-barrier scout this weapon did 3x the damage but it did get patched the week after launch. My main issue with this weapon is the reload just doesn’t really feel that great and while loader mods do help with it, it’s still a bit strange. The final exotic weapon that I can review is Graviton Spike, which is probably my favorite of the bunch. The default fire is a 150 arc hand cannon, but after hitting 3 precision hits it overcharges the alternate fire, where it turns into a 110 stasis hand cannon. Hitting 3 precision hits with the stasis mode overcharges the arc mode, where for the arc mode it calls down lightning strikes on precision hits and the stasis version creates a bunch of crystals. I don’t really have a complaint with this, it’s a really neat concept but I do wish the overcharges lasted more than 3 shots. There is an exotic from the raid but I don’t have it yet, so I can’t really review it. But I’ve been told it’s similar to the Fuel Rod from Halo, which sounds really badass. For armor we only got one armor per class this time around, which is disappointing. For Warlocks we got Eunoia, which is pretty much useless. It basically gives helion full court and shoots out more projectiles, but these projectiles don’t track and miss their target 99% of the time. Add onto the fact that helion already lacks subclass synergy and this exotic is just complete garbage. Titans get Melas Panoplia, which allows you to recall your hammer if you pick up a firesprite or get rapid solar kills. It’s a neat idea but having to forgo your exotic slot just to recall your hammer–especially when we’ve been begging for a hammer recall for YEARS–is just lame. Finally, Hunters get Moirai which allows your threaded spike to detonate tangles and also reweave them, meaning you get 2 tangles for the price of one. Combine with whirling maelstrom and it’s very good. 

We also got some new weapon archetypes which, much like the previous expansion, are really fun to mess with. They introduced a high-impact longbow, which comes with overpenetrating arrows and it’s pretty solid. We got a hand cannon that fires like a shotgun and it’s honestly one of the most fun new weapons I’ve played with so far, I absolutely adore this thing. Finally, we got a rocket pulse rifle, which actually might be the most fun weapon they’ve introduced in this expansion. It fires just like a pulse rifle but instead of bullets it fires rockets and it’s just as fun and powerful as the rocket sidearms are. The raid even introduces a new heavy weapon in the crossbow, which I sadly haven’t obtained yet but it looks pretty fun,

Speaking of the raid, let’s talk about it. I’m aware there’s a cheating scandal around this raid and that does suck, but judging the raid for what it is, this is up there with Salvation’s Edge. Sadly, much like Salvation’s Edge, I can see this raid being pretty hard to LFG for in a couple months since it’s a lot harder than a usual raid. Shame because what is here is really good. We have a non-linear progression system, meaning you can choose the encounter order, very close to what the original Leviathan raid offered back in Year 1. This raid has no puzzle encounters, instead it’s a gauntlet of 4 bosses all with their own mechanics. The hydra boss has you reading eyes to your partner and having a really unique dps phase where two people will randomly get chosen and have to break the shield in order to extend the phase. The boss is also immune if you aren’t in the shield’s light, meaning everyone has to be prepared and I really like that. Although this encounter does suffer from having one room being significantly harder than the other, which is just weird. The wyvern boss has people shooting boxes in pillars and a person climbing up some platforms that get generated from these boxes being destroyed, as well as having people run chronons into the hourglass to stop a wipe from happening. It’s a really easy encounter but it’s a very hectic one. The boss is super annoying to deal with and sometimes the minotaurs you need to kill can just randomly despawn, making the encounter’s timer really rough to deal with. The hobgoblin encounter introduces the temporality buffs, which there are 3 types of. The boss will make one of the players with the temporality buff align to the portals, and the other 2 need to call out what portals need to be activated. Then during DPS one player, which isn’t chosen at random for some reason, needs to run through the portals again to parry the boss’s shot to extend the dps phase. Finally, the final boss combines all of these mechanics into one fight, and it’s really good. You have the temporality buffs which have their own roles: Absolute needs to call out the portal color and shoot the correct mine, Constant has to stun the boss and call out the color of the mines and Cyclical players need to verify if the mine that is being called out is glowing, and to deposit the chronon to continue the fight. Typically the setup is to have 4 people on constant, 3 of whom will dedicate their entire role to killing ads and stunning the boss, and one person on the other 2 buffs. After 6 chronons are deposited, you can climb up the boss and start the pre-DPS phase, where one constant and cyclical player needs to stand where a cube is not present and the absolute player will interact with the cube that is not being stood at. Finally, DPS will start and one player needs to deposit chronons into the hoop to extend dps, while the rest of the team damages the boss. You do need to be wary of the boss’s laser during dps but slap on 3 arc resists and you’ll be fine as long as you’re in a well. Last stand is pretty much the same, but after the boss’s death you need to jump off and that’s the raid. It’s a really fun raid that I hope doesn’t die off in a couple months, especially because of the feat system. It’s basically allowing you to place modifiers on the raid to increase the tier of your loot and it’s pretty fun. However, the fact that in order to even get half decent loot from the raid you need to do these feats really kills my motivation. Watching people in contest mode getting t1 drops did not boost my confidence at all. The environment around the raid is also really well designed, with each area being completely unique from each other, ending with the twist that the final boss has been a part of the central hub that you’ve been running around was really unique and something I kinda hope we see again. Finally, the weapons and armor are some of the coolest to come out of a raid, while my preference still lies with SE/VOW, this is up there with those raids.

And that about wraps it up for the expansion itself, while it may have more missions than previous expansions none of them really stood out to me and not counting third iteration–which is the seasonal weapon– and NLB–since it’s a pre-order–we only have 2 exotics to chase in this dlc, with one being a quest and the other locked behind the raid, not to mention only having one exotic armor piece. It’s a bit disappointing but maybe the mid-season update will add more, since it also seems to be adding a new season pass but only time will tell. Fortunately, this expansion also brought some massive changes to the core gameplay that I have yet to talk about, so let’s get to it.

EVERYTHING ELSE

The portal is a new interface that is supposed to be a quick and dirty way to just hop into the game, get some focus loot that rotates daily and the new way to power grind. It’s a pretty inoffensive addition, in fact I’d argue it’s a good addition despite the outcry from the community because it streamlines the power grind experience. It’s split into 4 categories: Solo, Fireteam, Pinnacle and Crucible. It also allows for full customization of the difficulty, with the power level of the rewards being dependent on your final score, to max of dropping +4 power items until power 300, which only drops +3. However, this comes with its own problems. Not only is a lot of legacy content missing from the portal–raids, dungeons, and older seasonal activities just to name a few–there’s not much new content here either. While I think it’s a good idea to revitalize old content and give us a reason to run it, it has to be balanced out with completely new content as well and that just wasn’t done here. They also replaced GM nightfalls with conquests, which are limited to having 6 and only being completable once per season. This is such a backwards change because GM farming was a really fun thing to do near the end of a season, so to see nothing like that now is really strange. Another issue people had with the portal was its original intent to flat out replace the director. Now this has been backpedaled, with Bungie claiming to revert the desaturation of the director and continue to update it over time, which is yet to be implemented as of recording. However, given that internal playtesters found this change confusing, I gotta wonder why it even shipped in the first place. I understand that the developers have a vision for the game, but if your vision is so confusing your internal playtesters don’t understand it, maybe it’s time to budge a little. The amount of confusion I saw people endure over the portal/director system is something I have never seen in this game. The portal itself is super easy to understand but its the placement and presentation of it that I think confuse people. To reiterate: The Portal itself isn’t the problem, it’s the implementation of it. The Portal is the power grind now. Anything outside the portal is essentially meaningless for power, which–coupled with the lack of legacy content–hurts the system even further. Sure, in 6 months I’m sure Bungie will have softened up this system and it’ll be a lot better, but I’m not making this video 6 months in the future. As it stands the power grind is the most monotonous it’s ever been, and even lonely at times. The most efficient power grinding method is solo ops and I just can’t bring myself to grind that out all the time. It’s boring and unfun just grinding out activities by yourself, isn’t this supposed to be a social game? Why are group activities not giving out comparable rewards compared to just grinding the same lost sector for hours on end? I’m not calling for solo ops to be nerfed, I think it’s a good thing to have a rewarding solo experience, but the group activities need to give more loot. There’s 0 reason for Bungie to be this stingy with loot all the time. Also why does it feel like the modifiers put on the matchmade activities are always hand picked to be the worst ones? Like yeah I get the modifiers aren’t always gonna be favorable but it feels like every activity just has the same 3 awful modifiers that are always on. Grappler is NOT a positive modifier and you cannot convince me otherwise. It’s similar to the low-gravity modifier where I think it’s really fun on lower difficulties but the higher difficulty you go, the more annoying it becomes. They also brought back match game as a modifier? Which like… why? Yeah you can customize solo/pinnacle ops so there you can avoid the awful modifiers but for matchmade stuff you can’t unless you wanna use fireteam finder all the time, which I don’t. I don’t wanna be “person that wants bungie to remove all the negative things because ‘waah game too hard’” because most of the negative modifiers are perfectly fine, there’s just a couple that are just straight up unfun, including grappler because you are NOT convincing me that is positive in anyway. Like if they allowed it to have the melee it’d be fine–especially given the heavy-handed nerfs it just received–but it doesn’t, so I have to ask what the point of it is outside of just completely getting rid of grenade builds.

This update also overhauled all of the armor stats, replacing mobility, resilience and recovery with health, weapons and class. Discipline, strength and intellect still exist but were renamed to grenade, melee and super to improve readability. Every single stat point now matters, instead of following the tier system of the previous incarnation. They also increased the stat caps to 200, with 1-100 and 101-200 having different effects, a really good change. Health increases the amount of health you get for picking up an orb and flinch resist, and past 100 it makes your shields recharge faster and gain more health. Melee reduces your cooldown and makes you gain more melee energy from all sources, and past 100 it makes your melee do more damage. Grenade and Super do the same thing. Class does the same thing, but after 100 it gives you an overshield when you use your class ability. Finally, weapons increase your weapon’s handling, reload, and damage, and past 100 it makes ammo bricks have a chance to give more ammo, as well as further increasing weapon damage. These are very welcome changes as they all feel pretty useful, although for some reason in the subclass screen they removed the cooldown timers which is a really weird change. Hell the super stat doesn’t even tell you the cooldown of your super anymore which is just bizarre. The only stat I really view as not that great would be the class stat but even that can be useful with the right builds, not to mention every stat point matters even if only by a little bit. They also changed the way armor stats are distributed, with them reintroducing the archetypes from Y1. Each archetype has one primary stat, one secondary and a random third stat. I think this system is actually pretty great, if it wasn’t for the fact we only have 6 total archetypes right now, meaning if you farmed certain armor rolls before the expansion, you’d essentially have armor with illegal stat rolls, like weapons/super for example. The sad part is I totally know Bungie is going to introduce more archetypes in order to draw people back into the grind. I do like the archetype system because it makes armor way more deterministic but it’s just far too limiting with the archetypes we have available.

They also overhauled how ammo works, adding a little ammo bar to the bottom of the weapon ui and while I like this shift to more deterministic ammo drops, I think they took a few steps back. They nerfed the amount of ammo you get per brick and also removed scout mods, which only adds onto the very anti-group design philosophy this game keeps pushing. You’re constantly fighting for kills not only to make your abilities work, but now kills also impact your ammo economy. Assists don’t do anything either, meaning someone can swoop in and steal your kill at the last second and you’ll get nothing for it. Adding scout mods back in would help out, as well as assists giving a little bit of meter. Despite these shortcomings this system is really good and definitely my preference to random ammo drops.

This update saw the addition of a tier system to legendary drops and this is the single most time wasting part of this entire update. Notice how during the section on the portal I very deliberately avoided using the term tier, because the portal can only drop the tier of items your power bracket allows. The tier system goes to 5, and in order to get higher tier drops you have to power grind. 10-200 will primarily get you tier 1s, 200-300 will be tier 2s, 300-400 will be tier 3s, and 400 onwards will drop t4/5. However, starting around 300 you can start getting random tier 4 drops, with me getting quite a few on my climb to 350. It’s not based on the difficulty of the activity like it should, instead it’s locked behind the power grind which–as mentioned prior–is so boring. It’s never been a fun part of the game and the fact bungie wants to reset this grind every 6 months is completely demoralizing. I get they want players to use new gear but fully resetting our power back to 200 every expansion means we’ll be earning tier 2 gear, which is barely better than the gear from the previous system. I’ve also read that tier 5s are really rare, which while I understand why, those also being the only way to level past 400 is just ridiculous. I like that we’re de-emphasizing getting max power (as it’s largely pointless with all the power caps put in place) but this just screams way too grindy with how monotonous the grind has become. I think if they just lowered the power cap and upgraded your loot tier every 50 power that’d work so much better than this slogfest we currently have. Ideally the difficulty of the activity would dictate our tier level but that clearly isn’t happening anytime soon.

Ok, now with the negative out of the way, what’s the actual benefit of higher tier loot? Starting with weapons, tier 1s are your standard weapons with no enhanced perks. Tier 2 enhances the perks. Tier 3 gives double enhanced perks. Tier 4 enhances the mods, magazine and barrels and finally, tier 5 enhances the origin trait and gives a unique ornament and holochip. At first I wasn’t a big fan of this system but after getting my hands on a few tier 5 weapons, I can safely say I’ve fallen for the bait. To be fair, a lot of my previous stance still stands. I haven’t found most enhanced perks to be truly worth the cost of crafting them, but now that they come free, I guess it’s not so bad. For me, the real treat of obtaining tier 5 weapons is getting those triple perk drops. I thought the double perks of tier 3 would be enough for my little goblin brain but seeing a tier 5 weapon scratches an itch I didn’t think I had. But what about armor? Before getting into that though, armor finally has set bonuses, which we haven’t seen since Gambit Prime back in 2019 WOW just saying that sentence made some of my hairs turn gray. The tier system for armor dictates how many total stats it can receive, with tier 1 being 52-57, tier 2 being 58-63, tier 3 being 64-69, tier 4 being 70-75 as well as giving another energy slot, and tier 5 always being 75 and allowing stat tuning. Stat tuning allows you to either give 5 points to one stat while taking 5 away from another, or boost the lowest three stats by one. They changed armor masterworking to also boost the 3 lowest stats by 1, up to 5 times. Armor also has all 10 energy slots unlocked by default, which is really nice. They also capped exotics to be tier 2 which is really messed up.

This system also replaces crafting entirely, which is sad to see but kind of expected given how much they cut back on craftables the previous year. I also never really agreed with enhanced perks being able to be applied to any weapon as I really liked that they gave crafted weapons an edge above normal weapons but seeing that they’re dropping like candy I hope bungie can buff them to make them more desirable. Also speaking of, they changed the perk description ui a bit to specifically highlight what the enhanced perk does, and while this is a good thing, it of course is inconsistent. Take Incandescent for example. What does this mean? This could mean literally anything in the world. It’s not just incandescent but most of them are fairly straight forward so why are we continuing to be vague and inconsistent about it. Truly a baffling decision.

As if resetting the power grind wasn’t enough of a burn, they also introduced the new gear system, which gives you bonuses for using gear with this ugly blue watermark on it. This ranges from damage to damage resistance and this system just doesn’t do anything for me. For armor it doesn’t really bother me for now since all my armor will eventually be t4/5, which of course is only possible with the new gear system. For weapons it’s mildly annoying because most weapons nowadays don’t truly excite me, maybe a few drops here and there–like my ever-beloved Luna’s Howl and the new rocket pulse as examples–but most of my weapon acquisitions the past few years have just been to cover potential builds I may want to make. The part that really annoys me are the exotics also being subjected to this system. Now yes I think the new gear system is easy enough to avoid if you really want to, as nothing requires it except the optional modifier but them trying so hard to funnel you into certain builds, especially when so many exotics are lacking in power, doesn’t sit right with me. I get they’ve been going down this path for years now but trying to essentially powercreep select loot to push people out of their comfort zones is wild. I don’t really know what they could do to remedy this system, given that I don’t see them really reverting it anytime soon, but as I said it’s easy enough to avoid so I wouldn’t stress super hard over this system.

They also finally allowed buffs to occupy the right side of the screen but surprise surprise it only hosts buffs related to portal activities and they still haven’t increased the buff channel limit, meaning you can still only see 4 at one time. I’m also fairly certain the dev team forgets that they have buff channels at the top of the screen they can use because there’s some buffs that really need to be moved up there instead of being pinned to the top of your left buff channel. At least make these special pinned buffs their own slot instead of taking up one of your valuable slots.

Finally, I wanna talk about sandbox changes. Because I am not that big of a fan of a lot of the changes made recently. First off, a lot of changes–specifically to warlock–weren’t even documented in the patch notes. On top of that, a lot of the warlock toolkit got blindly nerfed while titans and hunters were eating good with changes and buffs to their kits. This isn’t subclass 2.0 anymore, warlocks aren’t this super dominant class anymore. They’ve nerfed everything we used to have and gave the rest away to the other classes. I thought I was crazy during 3.0’s rollout but no, they’ve really just been worsening warlock to the benefit of the other two classes. Not to mention the complete shift in our class identity to “the buddy class” when the buddies have little to no subclass synergy. They also want to funnel us into well so hard but then decide to nerf everything surrounding the well, meaning we’re just the well class and nothing else. It’s getting super tiring to see titan and hunter getting all these godly builds and warlocks just get more buddies until somebody finds a build that’s a fraction of the power of the other two classes, just for it to get nerfed into the ground in the next major update. I don’t think the buddies are inherently the problem, it’s just their lack of synergy and also them being the only way bungie knows to add onto the warlock kit. I can’t really speak for the other classes as I don’t play them nearly as much but reading the patch notes I also noticed a lot of nerfs that really don’t make too much sense to me, but as mentioned I barely play anything outside of my warlock. 

Secondly, most primary weapons feel like I’m shooting wet noodles at my enemies on anything above master difficulty, leading me to resort to special ammo to do basic add clear, leading to me having 0 ammo all the time. Enemies are far too bullet spongey, and I’m scared that the few weapons that can do good–most notably outbreak perfected–are on the chopping block since I know bungie loves to nerf things based on usage and not actual power. I hope they meaningfully buff primaries soon but I’m not holding my breath.

CONCLUSION

Overall, Edge of Fate brought some well needed updates to the game, but on top of breaking a lot of things, also brought some of the worst baggage one of these expansions has brought in a long while. The game isn’t in the worst state it’s ever been in–contrary to the community’s opinion–but things could always be better, and all we can do is hope bungie actually iterates on these ideas instead of spending all this time reworking them just to leave them in the dust. My only hope for future updates/expansions is that they keep fleshing out the core systems while adding enough new content. I don’t really know if I’ll make another video on Ash and Iron, or even Renegades. We’ll see how significant they are and how much they change my opinion. But for now, I’d like to thank you all for watching, stay hydrated and I’ll see you next time.

 

    video link: https://youtu.be/I-QwFHdYErs?si=BvvzxFYRbEds_tIR

 

    short director's commentary: i honestly kind of forgot about this dlc, and while first impressions were strong and made me excited to work on this video, the longer i spent working on it the less excited i got. i'm still proud of this video but not as much as the tfs video. i'm getting better at writing the way i talk and i'm excited to keep trying to raise the quality of videos going forward. i also edited the entire thing in about one day and i genuinely don't know how i did it. power of unemployment i guess. 

word count: 6,407
video length: 32:24