To put it simply, there's a subjective line everyone sets for difficulty, and anything over that line is sloppy/forced/unacceptable/whatever other word you want to use. They have used every "knob" to tune difficulty and it's just too much for some people. Not because of HOW they did it, but that they did it all. They've tuned enemy health up and down. They've tuned enemy density up and down. They've tuned player power up and down. It's all met poorly. Why? Because, at the end of the day, many people don't want resisitance of any kind. They want to hop on, feel like Mario after eating a super star, and log off. I'm glad Bungie has brought some level of difficulty back to the game. It's not perfect, by any means, and could always use adjustment but I hope they continue to try new things with that as opposed to feeling like im tearing through a wet paper bag in 90% of the game.

At this point, it feels like Bungie have tried every way of altering difficulty. They've played with enemy health and enemy density, tried adding timers, mechanics, modifiers, loadout restrictions and level caps, made us prepare loadouts in advance to deal with Champions and Match Game etc. Not all of these were hits, but no matter what they do, it always upsets [i]someone[/i], and that's an unfortunately common theme with this game. You see it with changes to balance and matchmaking systems too. It's impossible to satisfy everyone, and the players who don't like a new change are far more vocal about it than those who do, so they end up changing it again and upsetting a different set of players. The other side of the coin is our power, which has hugely increased over time. The best showcase for this is old Dungeons, Shattered Throne in particular. It now feels like the bosses in there would die to a slight breeze, because we've outgrown the difficulty they were set at 5 years ago. Back in D1, just completing a Raid and beating the boss was good; now, it feels like a disappointment for many teams if they take longer than two damage phases. If something new takes three phases or more, then people whine than it's overtuned and needs to be nerfed. In the power cap system that we have now, Legend difficulty was the biggest casualty. Many players were happy to do stuff at that level because it was easy, and they felt like they were accessing the endgame. The changes came as a shock to people who don't regularly play beyond that. What's not talked about enough, though, is that Master Raids, Master Dungeons and GM Nightfalls all got easier at the same time. There is also a hypocrisy between people saying they love the difficulty of the Legendary campaigns, but hate Legend difficulty, even though both are -15 power.

I have played this game the most during season of the Haunted. Why? The game was the easiest then. It was the most fun I've ever had. It was simply cause I felt my time investment was valued. I didn't go into an activity and wipe after 20mins and get nothing. What that makes me do is switch the game off and play sth else. It's just a waste of time, nothing else. This is a looter shooter. The faster you can get the loot, the better, cause random rolls make 95% of it shards anyway. It's just common sense. I will still have to kill that Ogre in Avarice maybe 200 times before I get a good shotgun roll, but I will not have to sweat and stress out during that time. It's just how I play these games. If I have to sweat to get RANDOM rolls, then I just can't understand such an approach. I really can't.

Yeah the new difficulty settings are too much. They have made the game work. I don't play games to struggle. I wanna shoot lots of things & be a Space Zombie god. For example this weeks partion backdoor. It is stupid to have to fly past all the enemies to defuse the bombs. Then the end boss adds were 1 shotting me so I had to resort to cheesing it with my symettry by hiding on the 2 sides with the additional mines that had to be defused. That wasn't fun it was boring work. All for 1 lousy piece of pinnacle gear. Gen Z wouldn't know anything about team work or, real fun cause they spent 2-3 of there formative years locked up inside all alone being told the chinese flu was going to wipe out humanity. Edit: i have 19, 20 & 21 year old children.

I feel the issue isn't the game and overall it hasn't really evolved at all at it's core. The biggest issue is that the generation of players that make up the bulk of today's community is vastly different culturally. Most of us that started when D1 was in it's vanilla state were excited to LFG, talk to new players and hang out and farm. For the most part we were in our 20's then and today add 10 years. That generation has families and careers and although we are still around our replacements want to solo que everything, no mic, and want to watch a walk through and call it good. I work with that age group daily and failure is met with with eff i'll go do something else instead of learning and trying new things. Destiny was built on an MMO platform and although Activision changed quite a bit of it today's Generation doesn't want it. As a whole failure equals frustration and they have a hard time accepting that the problem most of the time is operator error. The game was built for teaming up to do things and todays bulk of players don't want to.

Difficulty spikes have their place to preserve said power fantasy while still offering the option. I still dont understand why they have deviated from the original core endgame loop that served them so well in D1 and earlier D2 raids, NF, etc

Bungie had to make the game more difficult because too many content creators couldn't convince their viewer base that they're "elite" enough. You know, instead of making their own interesting challenges like Dark Souls players who use the worst weapon in the game with no upgrades on new game 7 and never take a hit. Now that's elite enough to get my attention. Completing a Destiny dungeon solo? Ummmm, no.

Just ignore them as the try and start the quest, just push on. They need you to activate your statue If they want to do the exotic quest they need to get a Fireteam together. Say they rage quit, well you whip up the app after the match is over and report for disruption/evasion, or afk/leaving

casual and l2p issue, stop crying