Pre-Lightfall difficulty was nearly perfect. Especially fun for me personally, was soloing the Revision Zero mission Operation: Seraph's Shield. It was just the right balance of fun and difficulty. Then LF hit and they capped light and throughout this year each season, they've nerfed more and more survivability. You can run a meta load out and build in "normal" content and still get 1-3 tapped for no apparent reason. PvE is starting to feel like PvP where if the enemy engages you before you engage them you need to retreat and try again. Also everything is stun-lock proof and now it feels like ads can yeet you across the map. It's just not fun.

Something that annoys me about what Bungie considers 'difficult' is they don't design for challenging encounters so much as [i]annoyance[/i] and busywork. They craft encounters and enemies that 'induce death/respawn' rather than things you need to figure out and out-play. - Champions are the personification of this ideal. They are not difficult, they are inconvenient. And once you sacrifice your loadout to accommodate their presence in a mission, it's just a matter of melting them. Hysterically, Bungie is actually aware of this - which is why the actual danger of Champs are the health buffed enemies in the same encounter. - I don't care what lore relates reasoning to alien weapons Bungie could present: Bullets/Plasma that curves [i]hard[/i] onto you, including nearly 90 degrees around corners, is stupid. - In fact crafting encounters with enemy types or bosses that invalidate *taking cover* due to wild splash damage is ridiculous. Taking cover is a common sense tactic that should be rewarded in any shooter. - Enemy abilities beyond their primary fire should suffer cooldowns in the same way that our abilities do, though not as long, of course. An enemy spamming teleport is just frustrating. - At lower level difficulty basic enemies show the behavior Bungie enemies are famous for: taking cover, using grenades wisely, circling and flanking, etc. At higher levels minibosses just stand right out in the open, confident that you're doing nothing while they are one or two shots away from getting you. These and many examples show that higher level LASO-ish challenges are Bungie's go-to design for what they consider difficulty to be. They don't test our decision making, placement, timing, or anything inherent to a shooter. It's just how much are you willing to tolerate, replacing the thrill of success with... exasperation (like changing a tire on a hot day, relatively easy but extremely taxing). That also reduces the 'one more game' urge in stuff like Nightfalls or Lost Sectors. The threat of Game Over is absolutely required for any PvE experience, but Bungie's approach leads to burnout because of their simple solutions to cause busywork and annoyance.

They don't know how to design anything frankly. This combined with the sandbox and their laziness pushed me over the edge to dip this year after playing CONSTANTLY since HoW and demoing D1 at launch. Ghosts of the Deep, Spire of the Watcher, and Duality are the prime examples of god awful dungeon design. The dungeon for this season along with Prophecy and Shattered Throne are the prime examples of how to make a dungeon. Want to make a good seasonal activity? Something like Seraph Towers (just not in patrol), Sundial, Shattered Realm, and Expunge. And then of course all of the Y2 activites like Forges, Menagerie, and Reckoning. All these had strong design elements and only ever suffered from being too easy, too hard, too grindy, or not rewarding enough. Easy enough to fix. Raid design. As cool as it is to have our D1 raids back, the only update thats felt good to them is VoG and that was only because it made it less tedious. The rest have some sort of issues paired with sandbox that make em a whole lot less fun. Having master raids and dungeons? Amazing! Expect they don't feel like "Master" more like Grandmaster. Difficulty consistency is needed, especially in how things are tuned. For master raids why not more mechanical depth rather than OHKing bullet sponges plus champs and modifiers? No revives instead. Amp up the stakes without making it annoying and unpleasant. Patrol zones aka Neptune. Why? Legit just why? Im all for a zone like the Dreaming City with varying difficulties all around and slightly rougher at base than most places but not just a flat crank up of an activity that is foundational and about exploring and just relaxing. Its called patrol, not war. Being able to select patrol difficulty with better rewards? I'm game. But this? No. Exotic missions. What happened to making stuff like Whisper, Zero Hour, Presage, and Seraph Shield? Heavy exploration, sometimes timed but within reason, more puzze focused with spread out but brief high intensity combat? Don't even get me started on strikes. The variation in difficulty and quality from design alone is insane not to mention the nightfalls of each one. The list goes on and this is excluding the sandbox itself. I really don't get it. What the hell happened? We've had this discussion as a community before in either direction multiple times. How does it keep getting screwed up so much?

Honestly, no longer enjoyable to play. That's all. BTW streamers find it way too easy. We've come at a point where NOTHING they do is gonna be hard enough for streamers, but it's already far too much to be enjoyable by casual players. Even normal difficulty. The worst thing is that this makes all weapons obsolete, except meta. This new bow is very cool and clever, but meaningless, cause people will still use meta only, to make the game enjoyable in any tiniest amount. They've run themselves into a corner, basically, in which everything they do is hated by the majority, for one reason or the other.

Using the Coil activity as an example. Matchmaking could be a good thing if the difficulty wasn't what it is. On top of the scaled difficulty, players leave, get disconnected, or they just don't have the skill level to survive and all the revives are used on them. Maybe it's just me, but seasonal content should NOT be this difficult. The more times I run Coil and wipe, the more toxic I get. A game shouldn't be like this. The community already has enough toxicity and yet Bungie decides they're going to increase the difficulty and add matchmaking to it. It makes no sense to me. They need to turn down the difficulty for seasonal content and make a legendary version an option for those who want it.

They did go a little overboard with the leveling. Boss room design and enemy spawn rates have a lot to do with it, that's why I've never been a big fan of battlegrounds in the nightfall rotation. They nerd to stop thinking that just because 1 person solos a raid or GM that everyone in the community does

Yesterday I genuinely ran the updated Lake of Shadows for the first time. I think that’s a good example of what goes wrong with the game. Like ok, there was one strike that was actually easily farmable and I dunno … fun? No, can’t have that. It honestly blows my mind how this passive aggressive pettiness of some streamers becomes the standard for what this game’s experience is supposed to be. I personally don’t give a F about any of those YouTube-dwelling wannabes who play video games for a living. And if they’re going to dictate that when I get home from my 60-hr job I can’t have a good time bc it’s the one week where the GM is easy, then guess what: I’m not going to run it. People drop out left and right and Bungie fires a hundred people but still nobody seems to understand this fundamental issue. Those streamers are directly responsible for people losing their jobs. I’m not saying it’s the only reason but the difficulty is so off-putting that it drives people away. It’s the most petty and on a human level an absolutely disgusting type of motivation to make changes in this game. Weapon crafting glitch: Boom. Player numbers skyrocket. What does that tell you? Can someone please connect the dots!?

The last story mission: I got to the boss fight and was simply overwhelmed and overpowered by nonstop ohk ads and yellow bars. After several attempts—and no checkpoints—I bounced. It was not fun and that’s all there is to it - for this old ‘vanilla’ Senior Tortoise. This reset is another story / quest mission that also is more of the same, it seems?! ❌ Nope! Same as that exotic glaive mission. ❌ Nope! As much as I love the Destiny universe, I love it because of a bit of space magic ‘FUN’ - which seems to be rapidly evaporating from this game. I’ve never felt so underpowered as a Guardian…not since the early days of tissue wrap armour and guns that fired party streamers and popcorn…D1Y1 PvP - where just the sound * of a Vex M or Suros meant it was game over! This relatively recent trend of enhanced difficulty since LightFail / Neolunacy just makes me do less and less in game. I already do less stuff than ever before as it is…maybe it’s time to move on?!🧐 And I still haven’t preordered TFS…a first for this old tortoise since D1Y1. ❌ Ease springs! 🙄 *misspelling Bot typo removed; and a few ❌❌s added for effect! 😁

First season I will not be completing because of this nonsense. Not that I can’t, rather I don’t want to.

I agree, the game is too hard in many areas. It wants to force you to team up and use builds with complex game play loops. Some may like the so-called challenge but for me and many others, it's just frustrating. My feeling after completing one of those is not of satisfaction but more of thank god I don't have to do that again. I also hate the 5, 10, 15 under crap. What's the point of grinding power levels if they do you no good. If something is too hard, you can't make it easier. But if something is too easy, it can always be made harder. Run it with only sidearms and blue armor. And what about this latest starcrossed mission? Is everyone going to have to do it on all their characters just to advance the seasonal campaign? I don't need three of the exotics let alone the pain and frustration. And the first time I tried a nightfall that was one of battlegrounds, I gave up. I will never try one of those again.

I say get rid of that lvl knock down BS it literally made it so what's the point in lvl if our light lvl gets knocked down just so it can make it harder to the point you get 1-3 shot by everything nm our survivability keep getting nerfed yet the ads are not getting touched I want the infinite lvl back it gave me progression to get more powerful so I can solo or survive harder content the only progression now is the season pass and now just lvl to the hard cap and stop playing because it won't make a difference in harder content because your lvl will get knocked back down to make it harder

How thought-through are your builds? I'm an older gamer by modern standards (34 😂) and past my gaming prime, but with any solid build it feels about the same as usual. Got the exotic mission by myself fairly easily yesterday with just a basic strand Titan build.

This is how Destiny use to be before Shadowkeep & independent Bungie pushing it to be super casual. Many of the vets that remember how great the game was before all that are loving the current state of the difficulty in PvE. Nightfalls in D1 were the weekly endgame for a reason - they were hard. Any content that's rated above the "normal mode" should be difficult & have the player not conquering it with ease & a single attempt. It's the lame content since S17 that pushed me away from the game. Not the difficulty. I thought the difficulty tuning was the best improvement to the game in this year of our traveler. Not perfect, but a solid improvement over what we had previously. Pretending it's just a fringe minority is just completely disingenuous. I'd say it's a small minority that dislikes the difficulty tuning over it being 99.99% of the player base as this post suggests.

Pretty sure the legend seraph mssion was praised as being just the right amount of difficulty when it released.. maybe you should try teaming up with 1 other person?