Haha I meant Venus onwards but I know what you mean :)

I'm in a bit of a weird spot at the moment. I've hit level 20 with basically most of Mars left to go and one of the Venus strikes. I'd like to finish everything I've not played but I'm getting absolutely no rare gear with any light out of it so my level isn't going anywhere. I'm not sure if I should just come back to it later and do some of the harder strikes for gear or if it'll be even more pointless playing through it when I'm in the mid-20's light wise.

I finished the story before I hit level 20 so you don't need to be higher than that. There's very little structure after hitting a 20. What I did was Daily/Weekly challenges, Crucible bounties, and Vanguard playlist Strikes. Basically do random things to get random drops to get better gear. Like I said the only reliable way to get gear is to raise your Rank to 3 in everything, and that could take months getting 100pts a day.

The grind to get higher gear is a long and arduous one, and it's pretty deceptive, in that your level will go higher but your stats will not. The defense boost feels pretty minor, but it is required to unlock higher level missions.

I might have been lucky but I've got some decent rare item rewards doing the last few missions on Mars so I've just got enough light to have hit 21. Think I have one more story mission left but I should be in a good spot to do some of the strike playlists for some better gear now. I'm only 70 Vanguard rep off of Rank 1 as well so thinking if I can cane it before the reset Tuesday, I should be able to get enough marks for some legendary armor once I reach rank 2 plus 20 or so spare to drop the 100 I could earn next week on a helmet. After that, hopefully I'll be rank 3 to get a weapon or have bagged one from the Queen or Xur in the meantime.

Such is the way I'm actually planning busywork to play a game mind.

You should probably rethink all that, the latest patch removed a ton. http://www.bungie.net/7_Hot-Fix---09252014/en/News...

Dismantling Legendary gear/weapons acquired from Queen's Missions no longer provide Ascendant Shards/Energy
The Loot Cave is dead, and respawn timers through out Cosmodrome have been greatly increased
If you or your squad dies during a Strike loot/glimmer will not respawn (and by the sound of things may disappear if you haven't picked it up?).

Everything that made this game slightly bearable has just been wiped out.

I'm already past the minimum Raid requirement, but given that Nightfall missions are still a tough job for me, I haven't attempted them. But before I completely quit this game I will try Vault of Glass.

That list that Bungie made of improvements they wanted to make before "the end of this year" was pretty pathetic. They're improvements that most games should be able to have made by now, and ones that most games don't ship without. They're improvements that independent developers who don't have a publisher or decades of experience need to make. It's like not only did they not do any research when entering a new genre, but they had no one whose job it was to "think things through". It was a list of things for a game that had content still undiscovered, not one that reuses 20 odd indistinguishable missions under different names.

The only reason to do PvE if you are above level 24 is if you need crafting material for upgrades. and you will run out of Ascendant material long before you do. Something tells me they'll reduce those pathetic chest respawns and reduce supply items in the world. Can't have players getting items they need. It's like they tried a soft shutdown of 75% of their game.

Cryptarch threw me a bone. Not had a single legendary engram yet but a a rare one just decrypted into a legendary sniper, Epitah 2241. w00t!None of the changes really affect my plans at all. I had no intention of farming the cave and as a level 21 I'm not in great need of shards/energy yet. I've got a bit tucked away from the course of normal play for future upgrades. Stuff I get from the Queen is likely to be a bonus at this stage. The only snag in my original plan was I was dumb enough to think that Vanguard Rank 2 only required 500 extra rep being cumulative, rather than the 2000 odd it actually is. Now I've finished the story, I'm still hopeful I can get 85 marks before Tues so I can get 100 the next week and guarantee myself a legendary helmet plus one other bit armor. The vanguard stuff seems achievable enough. 2000 rep can be done in 20 bounties, probably less as you'll earn extra doing the patrol ones. The marks can be garnered with a few patrols & vanguard strikes.

Perhaps I'm too casual a player but the pacing feels about right to me. Whatever I choose to do, I'm making progress towards something. Even if I played nothing but Crucible. I'm not entirely sure "loot system" is even an accurate way of describing the game. It feels like it should really be an aside to main track of earning your stuff through marks, the problem being Bungie really haven't communicated that to the player base who were expecting Borderlands/Diablo III (not without reason, I hasten to add).

I would agree that Strikes should be dolling out better stuff. I've still not had a single rare helmet with any light in whatsoever which has held me back a bit but up until now, I have been playing missions a few notches below me level wise to be fair.

They're finally fixing Legendary Engrams http://www.bungie.net/7_102-Patch-Preview/en/News/...I saved up some of them hoping for news like this, but they'll be blue regardless. Good that it FINALLY got metnioned. It's pathetic right now, I've decoded 50 Legendary Engrams and only 46 have given me Legendaries, and only 2 for my actual class. The rest have been green or blue.

Since I'm a level 28 it's all about Ascendant Shards/Energy until I hit the cap of 30(32?). To do that I'd need to constantly do Daily/Weekly Strikes and wait for the inconsistent Public Events. Neither of those are much fun so I'm playing Crucible until the new patch where the Engrams going to become useful.

Also I'm just grinding experience for my guns by doing the easier Bounties. Rinse repeat that for my Warlock character and it's that until I get tired decimating players in PvP. And then of course Vault of Glass. There's not a lot to do in this game but what's there hasn't become completely stagnant yet.

After doing the Vault of Glass about 10 times (and being given nothing but duplicate weapons, duplicate shaders and a duplicate Legendary Ship of all the f*cking things, and a butt-ton of Ascendant Shards), when the Raid rolls over next week, I am looking to receive Raid Gear as the only way you can get to level 30 is by equipping Raid Gear or Iron Banner Gear due to the light levels, and based on the mess that is PvP, I doubt I am going to find Iron Banner any fun. I will be officially done with the game if after doing the Raid with 3 different Hunters this week gives me nothing but more Ascendant Shards ffs.

Seriously, wtf am I supposed to do with 85 Ascendant Shards right now? I am definitely not levelling up my ordinary Legendary Gear, just so I can fall in line with Bungie's vision of stretching out the game and grind for inconsistent Ascendant Shards again, if it doesn't max out to 30 light, I'm not putting shards in it.

The reward/loot system in this game is stingy and needs work, what is so awful about giving players who participate in Crucible matches some material based on the map of the planet they are playing on? Why can't I receive Spirit Bloom on Shores of Time at the end of a match? 3 for winning and 1 for losing. I've played skirmish matches where the guy at the bottom of the table went 0 for 15 and received a Legendary Engram, before, I would rest knowing that it could potentially be a green, but now it is definitely going to be a Legendary? Amazing.

What the game also needs is a mode without supers the core mechanics are fantastic, but are ruined by the presence of supers. Most noticeably with Warlocks and Titans, the amount of players I've out-gunned to an inch of their life, only to have them activate their super to win is ridiculous.

Even if you kill a Titan before they slam their fists in the ground, it doesn't count as using a super bar, so they respawn, make a mad dash for you and do it again before you've even recovered.

Anyway, I kind of wish more of the game was designed like the Vault of Glass, as it would have been a fantastic game, after my disappointing 3rd Raid run last week, I crawled back to Diablo, did 1 Rift and received 5 legendaries (2 of which were set pieces) and it felt amazing. Bungie need to lift the lid on the drop rate of loot, although, I fear they won't do that until they find a way to raise the level cap without compromising the stingy loot drop rate.

I feel everything they've designed, every restriction, is only in place because they tried to ship this game with as little content as possible. And the Expansion Pass sounds completely forgettable as well. 5 new missions, 2 Strikes and 3 maps = $20 ea. The Expansions would need to have as much content as the full game to be meaningful, that's how little this game has.

I don't understand how Bungie expects this game to survive with this sparse content. I can't imagine much of Bungie is focused on Destiny either. More and more it seems like they took Activision's money and assigned 1/3 of the studio to it while the rest work on a bigger project.

Someone put together a pretty damning collection of content they've shown and cut over the years. http://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/2h...

Unless that "bigger project" is Destiny 2, then I highly doubt that. Hell, Bungie was probably spread thin on Destiny, having insisted on handling all four versions in house.

I don't think that's the reason either. For all that can be said about the game it holds up technically very well. I've had zero problems on 360. They hit 1080p on the Xbox One with very little discernible differences to the PS4 version. I'm sure that took a significant engineering effort but for the most part the "content" will largely have been produced by other disciplines.

There seems to be enough smoke suggesting a Halo 2-esque fire prompting some dramatic changes to the game over the past year. Given the reverence with which those at Bungie always seem to speak about the development of Halo 2, it's surprising that they might have allowed themselves to get into a similar situation but I think that's far more plausible.

As for how the game might survive;-

http://www.bungie.net/en/Legend/1/4611686018430057...

I've played about 23 hours. I've not tackled every strike yet, not high enough to do the Raid and only just high enough to give the heroic missions a go which are certainly a different kettle of fish. This is my only character and whilst I am almost certainly playing the game at a leisurely pace the longevity of Destiny is largely going to depend on if I'm an outlier or not.

Pics of me and my Raid squad post victory https://twitter.com/Phaethon/status/51819261331348...

Vault of Glass was incredible. It was collectively better than the entire game, and it's a shame that the same creativity and cooperative challenge were found nowhere else outside of it. It may possibly be Bungie's best work, and it was probably the best coop gaming experience of my life. I hadn't played with some of my friends since Halo 3 but they were still sharp enough to get us through this.

I can't be too upset when the Expansion pass is going to contain two Raids like this. If they're as challenging and creative as the Vault of Glass I'll have gotten my money's worth. It took us about 6hrs to complete over two days.

Cool stuff. I managed to bag a couple of legendaries from the Queen and finally upped my Vanguard rank to get another so I'm level 25. Still have not had a single legendary engram or Exotic bounty or enough Strange Coins to get something from Xur in 30 odd hours.

I saw they are looking at Raid matchmaking. They really need to add it to the Weekly stuff first. There's no reason not to given the Strike playlists. I was only just about able to jag the Queen's Wrath kill orders at level 24 solo because I rerolled until I got restoration. I've not got a prayer with the Nightfall but that's what I really need to be doing now.

Hope I can find some good people to do the Raid with on 360 when I've gotten up to 27 or so.

It's the best console FPS I've ever played, trapped in a terrible RPG. Take the actual mechanics, some of the higher level guns, limit the powers, and you have some amazing multiplayer. Everything you do in this game is purely to enhance the amazing gameplay mechanics. You level up guns, armor so you can take more hits, throw more grenades, fire more accurate shots. Nobody would still be playing this if it weren't fun to actually play. It just throws so much manure in your way of doing that.

If Bungie were to take some of the better guns, remove the character customization and just have players play 3 classes, you'd have an amazing FPS.

I got lucky last night. Managed to get my first legendary engram drop in 32 hours when soloing the weekly heroic. That decrypted into shards but doing so put me over the next Cryptarch rank and the legendary engram I got in the post gave me an exotic (red death). I then got a legendary rocket launcher from a blue. Happily at 26 now.The most interesting games to me are usually flawed. The first Assassin's Creed I love despite the litany of things wrong with it and Destiny is the same in a way. I could talk for an hour about stuff they need to do, fix, improve but it shows engagement if anything else and I'm sure Bungie would prefer that over apathy.

I've stuck 34 hours in and don't feel bored, which given that it is a little light on content is not a bad return. Whether I return to it after Halo: MCC however, is another matter entirely.

I haven't encountered any hit detection problems. However the stats system seems to take a page from BF4 in stability vs range.

I don't think I could honestly go back to Halo as a mainstay. It'd feel too pedestrian. Being able to teleport, jetpack, sprint all in one character is a monumental change up from Reach. Atleast as far as movement is concerned, weaponry is vastly more COD with how the Assault Rifles work. Fights in Halo have previously taken longer as it's a slower shooter. Drop the shields, grenade, headshot headshot. In this it's pretty much line up sights and kill. Really down to personal preference, I like the slower fights more, but fast pace is winning me over. Movement however is hands down better. Even in SP those changes create much more varied gameplay experience, it's just the mission design that severely holds that experience back.

Needless to say I'm more interested in Bungie's refinements to Destiny than anything 343 will do with Halo 5. It's very random, can be majorly unbalanced at highest levels, but if you take what's there and simplify it, it could be an incredible stand alone MP FPS.