Impressions from the live stream. [b]Character screen[/b] - Just showing character level and Light levels are separate. Light level is the average of your gear numbers, so if all your gear was 170, your light level would be 170. increased light levels let us increase damage and damage resistance, but gradually as opposed to the current system where the difference between a 33 and a 34 is 30% All gear has a score which contributes including ghost shells and class items. Also stats for intellect, strength and discipline now show how long cooldowns are for affected abilities instead of just saying higher is faster. Get a piece with more intellect and you'll be able to see exactly how much time our super recharges with old and new gear equipped. My take: We knew most of this, but it looks like a very welcome change. Current light levels suck and it caused a lot of problems by people not being to reach endgame level unless specific gear dropped. [b]Quest tab[/b] - We now have 16 bounty slots. Up to 4 bounties can be tracked allowing them to be seen by just pulling up our ghosts while travelling. Bounties are going to be less reliant on going to specific locations to complete tasks and more general thing that can be accomplished in the course of whatever we are normally doing. Bounties can also be turned in directly from the quest tab. There are up to 32 quests we can be on. Quests will list rewards for completion rep/exp/marks/weapon or armor upgrades/etc. Scrolling over will show us what we need to do and current progress. If we’re trying to get say a new weapon, rather than run strikes and pray to RNGesus, we can do a quest that gives a Primary Weapon Upgrade as a reward. The reward still appears to be random, but at least we are no longer beholden to randomness for the actual drop. Looks like quests can also be tracked, not sure if it's on top of bounties or a combination of both. My take: Wish this had been in since day one. It just looks like there will be more to do and doing it will be more interesting rather than going to the same 6 places to run bounties all the time or running from one end of the Cosmodrome and back doing patrols [b]Spark of Light[/b] - Everyone will have one at the postmaster, allows one character under level 25 to be boosted to 25. My take: Cool for quickly leveling up a secondary character, but I personally think that newbies should have to level a character to 25 before getting one. I don't know that I like that they won't have to level and learn their character and class. It's also going to be wasted for those with all leveled up characters. Why not give it a use where it grants us say 5 bonus levels to one of our secondary characters after we've hit 40 on one? We can now choose what weapon we show our Guardian carrying in the tower and see our Guardians faces in the character screen. My take: I have no take. [b]Acquiring Ghost Shells[/b] - Okay, we're at the Speaker. He now has Ghost shells as well as class items. Class items have perks now (increased reload, etc) as well as they can boost reputation gains for particular factions. The Ghost shells themselves have abilities. The ones shown were to detect various resources on planets (Helium, Spirit Bloom, etc) and call them out in some way. My take: Finally these things have meaning. Ghost abilities seem kind of meh, resources weren't very hard to find, but hopefully there are more than those abilities for them. [b]Emblem Collections[/b] - On a terminal kinda near Eva we have all our emblems stored like shaders will be (and apparently ships as well). My take: This actually is cool not only for them all being in one place and not stuck in the postmaster, but ones we don't have also show what needs to be done to acquire them. That is cool and hopefully one day everything in the game will have a specific way to acquire it. [b]Faction Rep[/b] - We can now go to a Faction vendor and declare allegiance to that faction. When we do we will gain rep for it when running Vanguard strikes and missions and playing Crucible as always, but it won't be exclusive. We will still get Crucible and Vanguard rep at the same time. You can change allegiance once a week. My take: Hell yes, got tired of constantly swapping out class items to pick one to level and hated having to wear the DO hand towel on my Titan. [b]Gear[/b] - They're looking at a NM chest piece. Armor now not only have the offensive perks like reload speed boosts, but there are defensive perks as well to say take less damage from particular sources or recover quicker from others. These are choices and we can flip back and forth between them depending on how we like to play. My take: this is really cool, gives us more reason to look for different gear pieces that might have bonuses that fit our play style better. [b]Etc on Factions[/b] - Materials are once again able to be turned in for faction rep, special faction mission unlock at certain levels (hopefully for guaranteed shaders as rewards), level up packages are guaranteed legendaries now and apparently a higher drop chance for shaders (which once are acquired are removed as possible drops, so no duplicate drops) [b]Crucible Quests and Bounties[/b] - Crucible vendor now has quests that can be completed for various rewards as well as a set of 5 weekly bounties. There is a 6th for completing all 5 in a week and they say it is for a Nightfall-quality reward. Crucible vendor also has ghost shells. These are legendary (speakers were rare). They have increased stats as well as additional perks like extract more of a resource when farming and gain glimmer killing people in PvP, etc. My take: Like it. The weekly bounties add a little more reason to get in and PvP and the guaranteed reward for doing them all is cool too. Hopefully will make regular Crucible feel a little more like IB. [b]Legendary Marks[/b]- Replace Vanguard and Crucible Marks. Now you don't have to run PvP to be able to buy PvP vendor gear (if you are already high enough rank to purchase items). And this is actually the coolest thing I’ve heard in this stream yet... Legendary Marks cap at 200 as far as what we can hold, but there is no limit anymore to how many we can earn in a week, so if we buy a helmet and use up our marks, we're not stuck waiting a week for the next gear piece anymore, we can just go run and earn more. Dismantling Legendary items will generate legendary marks as well. My take: was f**k yes. Was told to rewatch it. They're now shared like glimmer... Not as cool. [b]Exotic Blueprints[/b] - It's a kiosk by the Class handlers. Any exotic you've acquired, the blueprint will be stored, so if you accidentally hold down X for 25 seconds and shard your Gjally, you can just go get a new one. You can also get another for a second character immediately also instead of having to buy 3 from Xur. If an exotic levels up to year 2 (Some don't?) we immediately can purchase the year 2 from the kiosk for legendary marks. We still have to relevel them, but the old signature perks are intrinsic now and available to use right from the start. My take: Kind of disapointing. Cool concept, but was hoping that they were going to be basically new exotic bounties and that we'd get blueprints and have to do Thorn bounty type quest chains to build them. Ah well. [b]Suros Regime[/b] - Showing year 2 SR. It now has choice of Focus Fire with the reduced RoF/higher damage or Spinning Up which will actually increase RoF on it. It has a new skin which I think looks cool, but can see some wanting to keep the old. [b]Cryptard[/b] - Sells legendary engrams now for marks. Cannot turn into shards. Everyone's take: About damn time. [b]Gunsmith[/b] - Has rep now. It is earned through quests involving him as well as through killing things with his test weapons. He also has 5 different foundry orders available per week which allow us to purchase a specific type of legendary for 2500 glimmer. Orders arrive on Wednesdays (first Wednesday after purchase). My take: We knew all this already, but still cool nonetheless. [b]Infusion[/b] - Ah infusion. Looks like we are not bringing any perks forward or Transmogrifying. This will simply allow us to use weapons we don't want to up the attack or defense levels of one we do like. My take: Reforge showed as an [url=http://lostsols.imgur.com/all/]option for DeeJ[/url], but he had HoW weapons equipped. Tyson had all TTK and it only had a [url=http://lostsols.imgur.com/all/]vendor reset timer[/url] down below, so we may be losing that. Without the ability to bring perks forward, it means that all the time spent to get weapons that were the perfect compliments to our play styles may indeed have been a complete waste. Have to admit I am not really thrilled to have to hope and pray for year 2 weapons to drop with the perks I like for PvP (PvE I don't really care that much, but PvP perks make a huge difference to playability). If there is no way to customize our perks and it's strictly RNG, this is a huge letdown. [b]The Vault[/b] - I feel bad for Cozmo. His only allowed participation was a bad running joke on when they’d get to this. My take: Vault space cool. The last 6 months of blaming the it on old hardware... not so much. And that's it. Overall thoughts – Needed more Nathan Fillion. Overall Destiny in year 2 looks a lot more like the game that should have shipped last year. Weapons still concern me[i] a lot[/i] but the game itself looks like it should be way more fun.