The problem is Bungie took the only vertical progression system in the game and effectively made it useless with power level deltas (Effective maximum power). The only progression of the game now is horizontal in nature by gear farming (Weapons rolls & stat sheets), and through player skill levels. A lot of you who have posted in opposition here fit into the branch of higher skilled players, and that's perfectly fine, fellow 2%-er right back at you, but you're all wrong and OP is right here, even I can connect the dots as to why this has been a big problem for the game this year. Power creep this, power creep that, sure, I can agree that players have been getting stronger since Forsaken, but why was the solution to effectively destroy the one last vertical progression system of the game? Understand, many of the lower skilled players who engage with the game never touch a raid, never do high level nightfalls, and even legend content is a stretch. So they see exotic MISSION, and think, sure this is something I can do. In the old days being underpowered meant you were at a disadvantage, but if it was too tough, just go do something else, get some more power levels, get more XP, and then match the power of the activity and you'll have a much better shot at clearing it. So these players had the liberty of spending more time to get their power levels up to become more powerful than the combatants to curb some of the skill deficit they possessed and complete the same high level activities. Please tell me how this affected YOUR "challenge" in any way, shape, or form. It doesn't, you have just as much capability to play this in reverse under the old system, underequip and underpower yourself, hell there was even a triumph in Warlord's Ruin to do so with your weapons. The old system was actually much more "elective difficulty" than you thought, and it was much more beneficial for the community as a whole. If you still think this was a problem, then that's no longer a problem of the game being not "hard enough", that's just a problem of you being a condescending gatekeeping jerk. The short term solution would honestly be to just wipe out everything they did in Lightfall's now infamous "Bringing Challenge back to Destiny" blog as it pertains to level detlas, just put the game back at WQ for how power levels work, and then go back to the drawing board to make increases in difficulty be more focused on tuning the activity itself as a long term solution. Pantheon has shown us that Bungie is more than capable of tuning the fights to be harder through new boss attacks, adding in tougher mechanic based enemies (Tormentors - Hell, they have Lucent Hive available too!), and tweaking encounter mechanics. Why not just take that concept and run with it? Power levels are fine as is, hell, Fireteam Power is essentially going to nuke any remaining power level gatekeeping in the game outside of Contest mode, I'd much rather have a game that is "easier in general" to keep a much larger casual audience around versus what we have now where even veterans like myself are dropping the game because the endgame is just not fun anymore. Bungie wanted to tune down long range plinking and hiding in corners, hah! That's literally the ONLY play now.

Hmmmm... pantheon, legend onslaught, and zero hour are supposed to be challenging. Let's break it down Pantheon gives you nothing new, save for a title Legend onslaught doesn't give you anything onslaught, doesn't give you And zero hour gets you a guaranteed exotic So tldr, you're bad a want stuff for no effort

End game content is supposed to be difficult by definition Early and Midgame content is for learning and just playing Endgame is to prove you have mastered the game

Just wait. With Well being absolutely gutted into uselessness against ad waves - there will be a rise of complaints about content being that much harder because Bungie's level design is toddler-tier and they are too worthless and incompetent to do anything but rely on endless non-boss ad waves.

Bump! It won't change anything though because the idiots taking the decisions are not players and don't care about the player's experience or feedback.... 🤷‍♂️

The people complaining about well being nerfed, the pro nerd people would say that encounters are built around well. Many of those encounters are similar to D1, when there was no well. My problem, which I don't know if anyone brings is that the games seems built for PC. It's easier on PC, world's first (and probably most of the runners up) are on PC. They have many advantages including not paying a subscription fee like us console players. Just sticking to the game though, it's faster, smoother, easier, and I just feel like no disadvantages at all. I'm just making points people, don't get all huffy and puffy.

Get good casual

Where did you quantify “the vast majority”? Git Gud.

Datto is out there somewhere screaming [b][u][i]MORE!!![/i][/u][/b] like Kylo Ren

I agree with some points of this post. I've tried to get friends to play this game and it's not only difficult for new lights but also effing' confusing. They could not get into the game at all ended up in The division 😂 As for "veterans" i guess i understand the appeal of more difficult content since we hit the pinnacle cap there's little else to do. Most won't go to vanguard ops. I'm not saying make the game super easy I'm just saying it should be a bit more accessible to new players.

In the past, I've disagreed with posts like this because I love the challenge. Now that a lot of my friends stopped playing because it's too hard and frustrating for them, I have to agree. I have fewer friends to play with now, and it sucks because there's some great content this season.

I dont think they need to tone down the difficulty per se as long as they have options for lower skilled players...like they have the 10 & 50 wave Onslaught normal modes. Those are very accessible & offer nice rewards. Someone might not be able to run Zero Hour or Pantheon but they can do regular Nightfalls or strikes until they're better. You can get plenty of viable armor & weapons without running any raids or legend content. It would be nice if they added some practice environments (or something) for players to be able to learn the mechanics of things, try out different builds, practice DPS. I know you can do all of that by basically running an encounter but it would be more efficient for the player if you could practice it ahead of time. There are way too many garbage armor/weapons options too though & as a new player its not immediately obvious, at least it wasnt for me, that what I was using wasnt going to work for what I was trying to do.

Legend onslaught isn't even that hard... Pantheon is intentionally hard, the first week is actually very easy. Zero hour normal mode isn't all that bad. Stating the vast majority agree with you is weird, did you conduct a poll or something?

Those arguing to leave things as they are or make it even harder will regret their stance eventually. If players keep on leaving and new lights can't get going then the game will die as Bungie won't keep the lights on for a small group of hardcore players, they need to be profitable.

Revive tokens are a bad idea in base difficulty. At least in d1 I could pull some less skilled friends through while they learned.