They nerf everything that makes you powerful eventually anyways. That's whats unbelievable. For a game like this it makes no sense. Like taking away the barrier mods and nerfing Ruinous Energy. Don't let the players have more fun for the sake of crying youtubers. That's why I quit playing Call of Duty. Everything has just become about balance rather than making a fun game.

Did you even play Destiny 1? It was the same design when it came damage penaltiies as it is now in D2, with the difference that it was actually more severe in D1. In D1 (before The Taken King) you dealt 66% of your normal damage if you were ONE level below the enemy. If you were two levels below you dealt 33% of your normal damage. When The Taken King dropped and they changed the light system it was actually very similiar to exactly what we have today.

I wish it was like Borderlands. Every level up you got, you can immediately feel more powerful and enemies deal less damage to you and you deal more damage

Power Level only exists to gate off content. So new and returning players are forced to play the older content that they chose to not play instead of the stuff they actually want to play.

Artificial? As apposed to organic?

Well yeah. In D1 we were only 400 by this same point in its life cycle, and the game was sufficiently challenging. We don't need to be 3x the power to have difficulty. The enemies level is the only thing that needs to change.

I had a friend who tried out d2 last year and hated starting at 750 so much he didn't bother playing much. It really puts home the fact you've missed a lot of the game and really dimishes the feeling of progression.

I’m guessing that without the long power level grind, the lack of actual new, fun content would be more definitively exposed. The long grind distracts from Bungie’s decision to keep their game budget low (which in turn limits the amount of new content that can be created).

Power level on gear is just to damage-gate content. Your power-progression comes from build optimization. Warframe works in a similar fashion.

The only time I felt strong in D1 was when those ?? level characters finally had a finite number slapped on. As far as power beyond the recommended level goes, it has and always will be a placebo even back in D1 days. In D2, were it not for sunsetting, you could easily remove light levels and the game wouldn't really change for the worse; enemies wouldn't be any less challenging and gatekeeping certain content can easily be done through quests or challenges. If power advantage wants to remain in PvP, use the artifact for that or something else entirely. There are creative ways to go about this if the time and effort is there.

Sad and True.

[quote]In D1, you start with nothing. You light/power level is 1 or 5, so next to nothing. You are weak, slow, near powerless. As you play, you can feel the power creep and those early enemies aren’t dangerous, it takes them loads more to kill you and you can wreck them. It felt satisfying to finally be able to go down into the cave where invincible enemies appeared and finally be able to kill them. Maybe that isn’t the optimal way of handling things, but it was a fantastic base to work from. In D2, we now start at an artificial number and outside of things that are specifically power leveled, everything always feels the same with input/output because it scales with you. Obviously different guns do different amounts of damage, but my power level doesn’t feel like it matters. 1050 is just 750. So at 1260, outside of being capable of doing activities with requirements, the number doesn’t really mean anything. I don’t suddenly feel more badass. Considering I am not even without my powers now, I’ve never felt at a disadvantage starting a new character. The experience is static and that removes part of the power creep/power fantasy big kids want and smart moms need. The haunted forest is a good example of power creep in reverse. You start out mopping the floor with everyone and as you go deeper, as modifiers are added and enemy levels grow, you feel the danger growing in real time. I know it’s all illusion, but the journey was what I liked about Destiny. Working your way from the bottom to absolutely manhandle enemies. Yeah, they could still become a danger if you did something stupid, but it was great to have to be more cautious starting out and then just walk towards an enemy and just punch them in the face. I don’t feel intimidating anymore. I don’t feel the field of play tilting.[/quote] The implementation of the season power additive was unneeded and uncalled for but a passing decision (thanks Luke the sellout Smith) to find ever more ways (eververse) to get people to invest real money on the game, so they created a need for it as they will probably continue to do with any and everything they can add long as people continue to spend money on it, however there will come a point when 90% of the fans finally get feed up with it and it will become another game like Wow, once great ruined to the point when mentioned in general all you here is laughter and a comment about a try game that used to be good, and as long as you have a leader in place who copies his ideals from a once was great but not failed game your game in turn in the end will be fail, sometimes you have to get rid of a plant for a harvest to grow, though I have hours I'm afraid this field is doing the next year will tell, until then I'll back Bungie but with out some major changes figured for once for the soul advantage of the fan base and not Bungie's insatiable growing greedy fear it will end as badly add it's year two started this game really had never been anything more then a graphic tweeked destiny 1 with a few more classes, less content, less rewards, less originality as well as low less of other things, in this latest year of this game where it should really be shining it is a mere wanting shape of it's predecessor, yet you still have those of us who have the deep beliefe and hope that it will change.

And what’s worse is there is nothing in the game that ever really acknowledges your growth. You just seem to be able to magically defeat things that [i]legendary[/i] Guardians and Guardian armies couldn’t. We went from being this freakishly super powerful Guardian in D1 to one of many freakishly power Guardians in D2. Oh and apparently everything infused with Light grew stronger after the Traveler awoke. Yet your hard pressed to notice that.

Power level increase season by season and necessity to grind it up again never was and never will be anything else but just a lame way to keep people longer in the game and putting artificial constraints into their way. You reached endgame level? Never mind, not for long. It was (and is) like you passed the exam (reaching hard cap PL) for getting your driver's license and three months later government agency tells you you need to pass the same exam again. Every three months. Where in the past you could at least continue driving the same car you bought for hard earned money for how ever long you chose to drive it. Now on top agency tells you your car cannot be driven anymore in the public (still in your privat backyard though) longer than a year. Buy a new one. Every year. I don't need to like it. In all fairness to Bungie - you see the same user-unfriendly approach in many businesses. Take care guys!