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Destiny 2's Power Grind Should Get Less Grindy In Renegades Expansion

Destiny 2's loot grind is getting some major changes in its next expansion, including adjustments to make more activities more rewarding and to make gear more viable in the game's new Portal activity scoring system.

Bungie announced several of the changes in its livestream detailing the upcoming Renegades expansion, noting that many of them are responses to feedback from players in the wake of Destiny 2's Edge of Fate expansion. Several changes to the grind to increase players' Power level--the measure of the strength of their gear that determines the difficulty of content they can handle--are being walked back or adjusted to make the grind less intense.

The biggest of those changes should be an alteration to various activities to make them more viable as part of the grind to increase Power, including activities you'll do as part of the Renegades expansion's content, as well as legacy raids and dungeons.

Currently, increasing your character Power beyond a certain level is done almost exclusively with the Portal, Destiny 2's new one-stop menu for various activities, which includes a scoring system that determines what loot you receive based on the difficulty you set for the activity you're playing. That means that players are disincentivized from playing activities on the Edge of Fate destination, Kepler, if they're looking to drive up their Power. Other previously high-level activities, like raids, have been similarly pushed aside by the Portal system. With Renegades, those activities should all be more viable as methods to climb the Power ranks.

Bungie is making adjustments to how Portal works too. Bungie is removing the "featured" gear element for many Portal activities with Renegades, allowing for many more builds to be viable.

Currently, you get a bonus to your points in Portal's scoring for using featured gear, which right now is exclusively new weapons and armor that were added with Edge of Fate. That means that using old gear and weapons is an automatic disadvantage in the Portal, which has been frustrating for players, since they're forced to chase new gear and create new builds around it to maximize their scores and earn higher-tier loot.

Some activities will still include a featured gear element, but Bungie is altering featured gear to include all Exotic weapons and armor so players can use more of their favorite builds in the activities.

Another new adjustment with Edge of Fate is the inclusion of gear "tiers," which run between Tier 1 and Tier 5. Items with higher tiers have better perks and stats, generally, but that has resulted in some endgame gear feeling less rewarding. For raids and dungeons, Bungie will up the tier of all gear that drops to Tier 3, with the higher tiers being accessible from tougher versions like the "epic" version of the Edge of Fate raid, Desert Perpetual.

In Renegades, you'll also have the option to increase the tier of Legendary weapons using a new currency and mechanic. Bungie didn't include all the details, but the idea is that, if you get a set of perks on a gun you particularly like but it's low-tier, you won't have to throw it away in favor of seeking out the same gun at a higher level. Instead, you can boost the tier of that gun. That'll likely be an arduous process so everyone doesn't immediately blast all their guns up to Tier 5, but it should be an option to make it so you aren't immediately deleting all loot below a certain tier threshold.

To accommodate hanging onto more good guns in hopes of increasing their tier later, Bungie said it'll increase players' Vault space with Renegades, too--although it didn't say how much more space players can expect.

Finally, Bungie detailed a few balance changes. It's walking back some adjustments it made to Exotics like Queensbreaker recently, and it's putting a pause on all "noncritical" nerfs to weapons and armor while it evaluates its "philosophy" on making those changes. Critical adjustments, like banning certain gear during the world's first completion race for Renegades' dungeon, will still be on the table, but for the time being, developers are holding back on making major weapon changes unless they have a very good reason to do so.

Bungie also means to buff a few things, including the original Super abilities that launched with Destiny 2 and their subclasses. Expect those adjustments to come in waves, with some happening in October and some with Renegades. Bungie said it's putting together a roadmap for those adjustments it'll release sometime in the future.

Along with balance changes and adjustments, Bungie also detailed what's coming in the Renegades expansion and mentioned some changes to Destiny 2's Halloween event, the Festival of the Lost--and showed of this year's spooky armor sets.