The Black Armory season added a game mode that shooting glowing mobs, picking up orbs and dunking them into a receptacle in the center of the arena generally referred to as “The Forge”. There are two characteristics about this game mode, the first being you have a very short timer in order to complete it and each time you dunk a new orb you gain more points on the clock. Second it is set up on an endless play list where you will keep re-queuing for the forge over and over allowing you to farm it for drops. These two characteristics have lead to a few interesting circumstances in the past, setting up AFK farms.
With the Season of Arrivals, Bungie added in a chance for the new Umbral Engrams to drop from the end of any activity, including unsuccessful forge ignitions. This set up a scenario where players across the game have been AFKing their way to glory since June 9th when the season became active. Players knew about this in part because previously they could farm planetary materials this way. I tried it for a little bit yesterday afternoon and while afking in the background I racked up something around twenty engrams in total. This was patched yesterday evening after being active for six days and allowing folks to essentially grind up to maximum light in the process.
How did this work you might ask, because in theory your engrams should decode at your current light level. Essentially there appears to be another glitch currently active that allows armor-focused umbral engrams to occasionally decode as powerful gear, meaning it will be few light levels over your current level essentially forever ignoring the soft cap. The seems to only work if you purchase armor-focused Umbral engrams one at a time, but through this slow process of working up your armor folks have been able to max out their light at 1060 for the season. If I got roughly 20 engrams over the course of an afternoon, you can multiply that out over the length of six days of 24/7 AFKing with only a short trip now and then to clean out their mailbox.
This method of AFKing the forge largely worked because the AFK time out in Destiny is much longer than the fail condition of the forge. You are effectively matched with players of your own light level, and as a result afkers would artificially lower their light level to sub 700 with even New Light players starting at 750. The idea being that you would only match with players who were also afking, and as such every 50 seconds the match would complete on its own as a failure and then start a 10 second timer kicking folks back to orbit. So essentially once a minute roughly you had a shot of an engram dropping.
With yesterdays patch Bungie made a simple tweak that stops the Forge from queuing up players again, essentially making folks manually queue each time. The funny thing is… folks are still afking the forge even though they are having to queue back up every minute. If you are just wanting to farm Umbral Engrams, the fastest method I have found so far is one particular Nightmare Hunt, namely Dominus Ghaul. It doesn’t involve an awful lot of trash, Ghaul himself is pretty easy to take down, and in my experience you get an engram almost every time you complete the hunt. Better yet you are actually gaining experience which helps move your seasonal journey path forward.
It is my hope that with the breaking of this farm, that folks will actually start doing the planetary events again because in truth I find them pretty fun. However it was impossible to do pretty much anything that involved other players so long as the loot farm was active. I would have been fine legitimately farming forges as well, because it is one of my more favorite activities. However it is real hard to solo a forge when the other two players are perma AFK. I did one last night and even with two players it was a bit of a challenge to hit the timer, but we did it. This is not a grand start to a season, but I do seem to have the inkling to play once more knowing that come September a bunch of activities will be gone from the game. I think my play is more a farewell to the old world more than anything else at this point.
I was wondering where everyone was after coming back to destiny 2
I’m currently trying to get through the old content before Bungie removes it eventually. The Red War so far… has been interesting… I liked Shadowkeep a lot more… maybe I should have played the campaigns in the right order? Idk.
But it’s fun regardless of that and I’m getting tons of umbral essences from the campaign missions which is just great. I’ve been enjoying my time in Destiny 2 again and am also getting the essences there? Sure, why not? 🙂
As far as AFK farms go… I feel like they take away from the fun of your own game… if you do it, you ruin your own experience, not other people’s – at least usually. In this case, I wasn’t able to do any more Forge runs (despite me liking it as well) as there’s been so many AFKs in there… which is quite sad. Interesting to now hear that there’s a farm behind that^^ I feel like it’s good that they nerfed it.
Lovely post, Bel! Let’s play some Destiny 2, soon-ish if you’re up for it 🙂
I have a couple of Umbral Engrams but the Cryptarch won’t decode them, the rat! I guess I have to do some of the new content to get to where I can decode them?
I’m still back here avenging Cayde-6. Want to get this old content done for the first time before Bungie removes it. 🙁
If you follow the seasonal story, it will lead to the Drifter setting up a machine to decode them. You can also influence what type of item drops from them with another machine that gets set up. So you can take that engram and with some seasonal currency make it only drop a weapon or only drop armor, or even only drop stuff from older seasons.