Over the last few nights I have been super engaged with the start of the new Destiny 2 season. One of the things I dig so much about it is how I can focus in on a different activity each night and vary up what I am doing… but still enjoy whatever it is that I am doing. I am not so much into the Crucible so I have not touched that this week yet, but one night I focused on the Planetary Flashpoint, another I really focused on Gambit, and last night for example I mostly focused on completing stuff in the Dreaming City including a bunch of Blind Well. At some point I am sure I will at least do 3 strikes and 3 heroic story missions to get the powerful engrams included. The only complaint I have to be honest is the fact that I keep getting Helmets instead of pieces of 600 gear that I actually still need for a given slot.
One of the things that came up in my little social community was some comments about loot boxes and how a friend of mine did not like the Destiny 2 implementation. On one level yeah… it is less than optimal, but after living with it for awhile and having them tweak the formula… I no longer feel it is anywhere near as heinous as some of the loot box schemes I have seen. What changed is there are a bunch of tweaks that were made, not the least of which is the fact that once you have earned an item you can always go into your collections tab. This is any weapons that are static rolls, so basically anything pre-forsaken… any ghosts, sparrows, ships, shaders, etc so essentially anything has less need for permanence which is making me way more liberal at scrapping things. As a result I almost always have a decent balance of Dust… which you can see in the above picture is like 6044. This morning I opened one of the Bright Engrams and got a skin for one of the Titan exotics, 3 shaders, and a bounty note. The skin could be scrapped but I have not collected it yet so that was not going to happen, the shaders scrap at around 10 dust per… and the bounty note is turned in for Tess Everis specific bounties that reward glimmer and dust.
Essentially I feel like the game is giving us a bunch of options to get cash shop goods without spending any real world money. There is always the problem that everything coming from a Bright Engram is super random… but that is mitigated by the fact that each week during a given season Tess is offering a bunch of items for direct purchase. Last week they had a ton of the exotic items but this week it looks like they are mostly selling legendary stuff… 2 emotes, 2 sparrows, 2 ships, 1 ghost shell, one armor piece and a couple of the exotic weapon skins. Basically this helps to mitigate the randomness of the engrams and allows you to just straight out buy the item you were wanting. Unfortunately this also means you need to be logging in each week to check out and see if Tess is selling that one thing you really wanted.
In a night of casual play I tend to get one or two engrams as the bar feels like it fills way faster than it used to. You can see in the above shot that I am pretty damned close to getting one, and that happened to be the one I opened this morning and screenshot its contents. One night this week I got 3, and last weekend there was a really heavy play day that I got four of them in a single day. Essentially I am saying that they are way more generous with said loot baubles, at least compared to how it felt when the game initially launched. This isn’t a “Belghast Luck” thing because experience game is experience gain for everyone, and sure maybe the fact that the first engram I opened this season gave me the sweet ghost rider sparrow… is luck. Anyways I just wanted to take a moment to talk about the cash shop in Destiny 2 and how it has gone from really horrible… to completely manageable. Having a cash shop in a game is always going to incur some problems, but the tweaks they have made since launch have turned this one into a completely manageable situation. The biggest change for me personally was when I realized I could re-buy shaders… which has made me way more cool with scrapping them knowing that if I really want a specific color I can buy it again.