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Edited by lettuceNcarrots: 12/8/2025 5:00:49 AM
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Difficulty Tiers Feedback

Hi Bungie, I want to say how much I love the difficulty tiers system you implemented. I remember way back when you had Nightfall and the various difficulty tiers for it and how it was frustrating, as a player, to attempt playing the higher tiers. With this system, for the first time, I was able to play Grandmaster levels with auto-matchmaking instead of having to see if anyone in Discord or clan was available/interested in playing. So, thank you for the refreshing change! I personally think the system could be vastly improved with a few simple things – not necessarily changes, but maybe more of looking at it from a returning player or a new player’s perspective. I think you have been trying to “lift the curtain” of how the difficulty tiers, of how activities are affected by modifiers, etc. for all players – a sort of attempt to show the behind-the-scenes of how the game works to some degree. And it’s wonderful, though confusing at various points. I uploaded a video to demonstrate a bit of what I mean and some of the things I noticed when playing the game. Under Portal>Fireteam Ops>The Sunless Cell>Customize, you’ll see that there’s a total of 6 difficulty tiers (Normal, Advanced, Expert, Master, Grandmaster, Ultimate). On the far right of the screen, you have “Normal” and “Hard”. (As an aside, I tried adding modifiers to get “Grandmaster” to show “Hard” on the Difficulty Badge and it didn’t work on the first try – I added the hard stuff and did not add boons.) Under the same, but for “Matchmade” mode, you’ll have Master, Grandmaster, and Ultimate. (Also, why are the other 3 lower difficulty tiers unavailable for “Matchmade” mode?) Then if you go to Edge of Fate>Kepler>World Tier Patrol Icon>Customize, you get the following difficulty tiers: Brave, Legendary, Fabled, and Mythic. Brave and Legendary have the “Normal” difficulty badge (far right side of the screen) while Fabled and Mythic have “Hard”. The same is available for the Campaign Badge on the map. (Pale Heart campaign replayable missions have “Normal” and “Legendary” – I didn’t go further back as those are older models.) Then if you go to The Pale Heart>The Blooming LZ>Launch>Run to The Blooming Deep Lost Sector>Start Lost Sector>Customize and you will see Expert and Master tiers - normal and hard difficulty badges, respectively. I understand that each of these are different activities: Lost Sectors, World Tiers (kinda reminds me of Outriders’ world tiers), Replayable Campaign Mission Tiers, and Portal Ops. But they’re all duplicate-y with confusing consistency. The casual and new player is going to see the terms and intuitively make difficulty assumptions based on that (please don't remove the summary of modifiers! It helps challenge casual players for a better experience!). The difficulty badges, while important, aren’t clear to the player as to why it’s “normal” or “hard” when it’s already on a “normal” difficulty tier or a “grandmaster” difficulty tier (which is a hard tier!). What is the difference between Fabled and Ultimate? Hoping that made sense! The other thing is, while we can hover over the Difficulty Badge (right hand side of screen) and get a small explanation, “Delta” isn’t available for a hover. I looked around and couldn’t really figure out what “Delta” actually means. What is “Combatant Power Delta”? Why is it negative and red? What do the numbers refer to (in the sense of, I don’t have an initial context of “0” delta, so what does -25 delta mean? What does -10 delta mean?) Why is there both on the same page? For example, World tier “Legendary” has “Combatant Power Delta -20” but Fabled has “Combatant Power 180”. And “Brave” has nothing. I think if the labels were more streamlined from a player’s perspective, then players would feel less intimidation with the tiering system, leading to less frustration. I oftentimes find myself scared of trying new games as well (outside of Destiny) because I dread the new terminology they might use. It's not actually hard to learn the new terminology as you play the games. But it's the anticipation of dread that leads to fear, leading to confusion, leading to frustration. This difficulty tiering system has so much potential to be an incredible backbone of the game so I’m really hoping it’s as simple as a few label changes and a couple hover info popups. I’m hoping it doesn’t require you guys to make massive backend coding! Is this something that you guys could consider to help us out and give players a more streamlined experience?

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