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The speaker gives an in-depth analysis of Destiny 2’s latest expansion and raid, discussing raid mechanics, design choices, bugs, community reactions, and the franchise’s future. They reflect on key issues, positive elements, and upcoming plans for their content.

Raid Experience and Design

  • All four raid bosses are heavy damage checks, appropriate for the contest mode’s high difficulty.

  • The speaker views contest raids as aspirational challenges not meant to be easily completed.

  • Loadout swapping was inconsistently handled: previously discouraged by Bungie, but effectively required for raid completion.

  • Only a couple of effective weapon loadouts—primarily Thunderlord—limited viable strategies for the raid.

  • Thunderlord, an old weapon, dominates the meta, offering little mechanical skill requirement for high damage.

  • Limited weapon options result in exclusion for players lacking specific gear.

Stat System and Leveling Frustrations

  • Stat system overhaul rendered only weapon and super stats significant for high-end content.

  • Stat-optimized gear could only be acquired via repetitive, tedious grinding of activities like Encore and Grasp of Avarice.

  • Many hours were spent preparing for the raid through farming, though the impact of some efforts was minimal.

Raid Bugs and Technical Issues

  • The raid was plagued with more bugs than any previous raid, often requiring re-launching and causing uncertainty during attempts.

  • Notable bugs included weapon fire rate issues, rally banners not granting supers, and unreliable raid launching.

  • Persistent PC crashes occur after 5-7 hours tied to uncapped frame rates, an issue unaddressed by Bungie for years.

  • Frame rate affects gameplay elements, such as damage taken or output, due to engine quirks.

Streaming, Community, and Viewer Experience

  • Teams increasingly obscure screens or mute comms during raid races to prevent information leaks, diminishing the viewer's experience.

  • The speaker disapproves of excessive info hiding, advocating for prioritizing viewer enjoyment and transparency.

  • Winning is possible without hiding gameplay, and the speaker cites personal past success as evidence.

Positive Aspects and Expansion Feedback

  • Raid design encourages skill growth and team coordination.

  • Bosses can be tackled in any order, adding excitement for viewers.

  • The expansion's story and cutscenes received praise, though the campaign itself was underwhelming.

  • Post-raid, motivation to grind for high-stat armor is low.

Community Sentiment and Destiny’s Future

  • Community feedback remains mixed or negative, with declining player numbers noted.

  • The speaker expresses uncertainty about the franchise’s longevity, pointing to decreasing content and fading motivation.

Plans for Channel Content

  • Upcoming plans include a “variety month” featuring new games like Dark Souls 2, Cyberpunk, and Silksong.

  • The focus will shift toward enjoyable challenge content and personal interests rather than strict Destiny 2 coverage.

Personal Reflections

  • Mixed emotions persist after the raid; social media amplifies negativity around Destiny 2.

  • The speaker prefers to avoid Twitter and focus on making enjoyable content, taking a day-by-day approach.


Destiny 2 Expansion and Raid Analysis

I think it's about time that we sit down and actually have a serious conversation about Destiny 2. I've been getting asked non-stop the past week how I'm feeling about the expansion and I refuse to answer because I think the raid is the biggest determining factor on whether an expansion is good in the eyes of the community or bad in the eyes of the community. and as you as you can tell by the massive shopping bags under my eyes the raid was one hell of an experience the d2 twitter community is totally on fire right now because of the contest raid there are a few different reasons and we're going to talk about each of them first of which is that every single boss all four of them was a damage check in this raid i think that is perfectly fine because contest raids are the pinnacle this is the highest tier of anything that we have in Destiny 2 to say, I completed this and this is the most prestigious thing I can do in this game. It's something that you really should have to work extremely hard for and not something that you can first try. And maybe it even takes you a couple of years to build up to it. Because if I rewinded into my Destiny past, the first couple of years that I played Destiny, I would not be able to do a contest, right?

I'll tell you that right now. I was a straight burger. Not being able to complete it the first couple of times is completely okay. I know a lot of people are going to disagree with that because we live in a day and age where people just want their instant gratification 24-7. But here's the thing.

I'm not completely on what you would call the elitist side. There are a lot of things that I think were really, really crappy about the contest raid. The first of which is that Bungie went completely hypocritical on loadout swapping.

And let me show you what we're talking about. Not too long ago, they just nerfed basically the best loadout swap that you can do on a Warlock, which allows you to get a lot more damage on your Sanguine Alchemy. So what people would do is they would pop their well and then swap to the Sanguine Exotic so they could get a good amount of extra damage... in their well if their subclass matched their heavy weapons.

So for example, if you pop your well, you have the Queen Breaker on, you loadout swap to an Arc subclass, and your Queen Breaker would get bonus damage. So they nerfed it, basically alluding to the fact that they're not the biggest fans of us loadout swapping to get extra damage that maybe it feels like they didn't want us to get. But then in the contest raid, it was basically required that you were good at loadout swapping in order to be able to clear. And the other big problem that I have with it was weapon restriction.

If there were like three, maybe you could argue two, two loadouts that you could use the entire raid to clear this raid. If you used anything outside of that, you were probably not clearing. The first of which was Thunderlord. If you didn't have Thunderlord with the catalyst, good luck clearing the raid. And it's not that I have some weird hate boner towards Thunderlord for any reason.

I think it's more of the fact that this is a weapon that's over a decade old in Destiny's history. And it's one of two things that's meta for this raid that you could use to clear it on contest mode. And it doesn't really require any real skill to use it either.

You literally just stood there and held mouse one and aimed at the boss and Thunderlord would do the rest of the work. And I honestly think the best representation of this whole thing was a meme that actually floated around the community well before the raid came out. And it was this one right here. That on the left is showcasing some sort of crazy weapon swap you can hit with like throwing your silence and squall, rockets...

Weapon combo deluxe and hitting 3.2 million damage. And then those who just mouse one with Thunderlord hitting 3.3. And I honestly think that's probably what Bungie was going for here was making a raid that was more mechanically challenging than anything.

I do have a feeling that they knew what the meta was going to be for this. But hey, I could be wrong here. Point is, is that there needs to be at least a few more options that you can use to be able to clear this. Because if you don't have one or two weapons that you didn't get for any particular reason, you're not able to complete the raid, I think that's really cringe.

On top of the whole weapons thing, they just overhauled the entire stat system. And we quickly found out that all the stats besides weapon and super do not really matter at all in a high-end setting. If you didn't have at least 100 super, you weren't building multiple supers per damage phase with your Thunderlord. And that also ties in with all the work that we did before the DLC came out.

If you looked in the Twitch directory a week before the expansion came out, you probably saw every streamer and their mother literally just farming the Grasp of Avarice master boss. And the reason that people were farming this is so that they could get stat rolls that you can't currently get anymore. And this includes being able to maximize your weapon and super stat at the same exact time.

and to even go deeper into the rabbit hole was also the reason that people were farming exotics before the expansion came out so that they could get closer to 200 weapon and 200 super stat on their damage loadout builds which currently on the exotics that really really help you push towards that you can't get those rolls anymore the best way to level up during the expansion was also something that was very tedious and boring and not too content You had people running the Encore mission on repeat. I think myself personally, we probably did at least 30 hours of Encore for just leveling for the raid. Did you need all those levels?

No. Let me clarify why exactly people are running it. So the higher level that you go, the higher difficulty option you can choose. And at these higher difficulty options, you get the higher tiered armor.

So like at tier 3 armor and up is where you start getting a stat boost compared to the armor that we used to have. So you could get armor stat rolls that were like 73+. So this would give you a little bit of extra juice in your weapon and super stat if you really wanted to go the extra mile, but the grind for doing that was actual hell.

Moving on from the whole weapons thing, there are two other big things that were problems in this raid. The first of which is the amount of bugs that went on during this raid. Dear God.

When a new raid comes out, it's really hard to distinguish sometimes whether you're softlocked in a raid or you're just not doing something right. And that really isn't on the shoulders of the player to be able to distinguish that because we're all going in blind and nobody has any idea what's going on. When we're all in a big race to try and see who can finish the raid first, there really needs to be a structure where bugs are the least of our worries.

And there were more bugs than I've ever seen before. The amount of times that we had to relaunch the raid was more than every other raid I've done in existence combined. Because every so often, players would have the rounds per minute of their weapons just randomly re-launched. like change to like one bullet. We had one of our teammates was like reloading his tractor cannon one bullet at a time.

And then the other thing was is that sometimes the rally banners which are supposed to give you full super and weapons just wouldn't give you your super. So the solution to this is you had to keep relaunching the raid which sometimes would take a minute because when you go to launch the raid and the big green button that says launch you click it and it just doesn't work! The last big thing in terms of the raid race I wanted to address was the blacking out of screens. So a lot of top teams nowadays, it's been getting worse and worse every year, will blur out certain parts of their screen, if not the whole thing, or just completely black it out so that teams that have scouts...

Scouts are people that literally just go around to different teams and gather information for their team to try and finish first. They won't be able to get information. They won't be able to see the names of buffs.

Sometimes you literally can't even see the gameplay. So it's like all you can hear is noise. And I want to make this very clear before I get deeper into this.

I don't blame anybody for trying to do everything that they can to try and win. But I think there is a fine line between... wanting to win and ruining the experience for your viewers because your viewers are the ones that make it entirely possible for you to have a full-time content creation job and unfortunately nowadays we only get one new raid per year so there's once a year that we get to all sit and celebrate this giant fun event that everybody can be a part of But it's gotten to a point where half or a lot of the directory is blocking out their screens so they can farm viewership and ads.

But they also want like the clout and credibility from winning. And I just find it so strange because I'm a firm believer that these people can win without having to block their screens. If it's so serious to the point where you feel like showing your gameplay is detrimental and giving other teams information, you could just not stream.

It's quite literally that simple. And this is coming from someone who has won a raid race without blocking any screen or comms. We won Last Wish without a single mute or screen hiding. And to talk about that a little bit more, I think muting is fine. Completely reasonable to do like a team huddle and be like, hey guys, let's do this while muted.

Or let's try this strategy. I don't think strat hiding in itself is a problem, but Because the viewers can still watch the gameplay. They're there for an experience to create a memory that they will remember.

And if this only continues to get worse, where the screens are blocked out for half the raid race, those memories are not going to live in the hearts and minds of the viewers 10 years from now. They're not going to look back and go, oh, hey, you remember that raid in 2025? Nope, nope, I don't because I couldn't watch half of it.

So to be completely honest with you, I don't really know where the future of raid racing is going to go. A lot of people are going to have to lead by example. And I hope that people will come to the realization that they can win without hiding and hopefully want to create a good experience for their viewers and their community.

But at the same time, I'm just I'm not confident nowadays because it seems like a lot of people just want to show up to that and be in the lead just for the sake of clout and money. So. But to say some positive things about the raid, I love the fact that they really are pushing their players' limits on this.

And I do think that it is more encouraging for people to get better at the game, to optimize their builds a little bit more and get some team chemistry going and all those things. And one of my favorite things that we have not had since 2017 is that you could do the raid bosses in whatever order you wanted, which made things a lot more exciting from the viewer's perspective when you could actually see what's going on. In terms of the future of Destiny, there were some other things that I wanted to talk about too, but I wanted to go more into this post from the official Destiny of the Game tweet themselves.

They were talking about player feedback on the contest raid difficulty, which we just talked about. But this was the first time that they've ever actually acknowledged this. This was another thing that was a problem. PC crashes after 5+ hours with certain hardware configurations. So this has been a thing literally since the 3000 series of NVIDIA graphics cards came out.

Where if you played at uncapped framerate, your game would probably crash between the 5-7 hour mark. And after some time, we kind of figured out that it was based on the amount of frames rendered total. Your game would crash at that exact time, which is why people usually fall in the five to seven hour mark is because they're usually within like a certain frame window.

This is why I've been playing capped on 60 frames per second for the past almost five years. And by playing at 60 frames per second, this pushes my timer a lot farther out because my frames rendered is a lot lower. I'm guessing if I were to just leave it running for 14 plus hours, I probably would crash around that point.

So with the frames, imagine you get to Final Stand or something like that and your game crashes because you've had Destiny open too long. Like that just shouldn't be a thing and the fact that it's taken almost five years for them to even acknowledge this is disgusting. Also with frames, there's a thing in Destiny, this is an engine related issue, that the amount of damage that you take in game is related to how many frames per second you're running. This also used to be true with 1000 voices, you would do more damage to the frames that you had, that's fixed.

But there are other things in the game that are frame related that they just really haven't acknowledged up until this point. Has it been like super common knowledge? Maybe not, but the crashing related issue definitely has. And for the expansion, more as a total, besides the raid that I think overall was a really positive experience for myself personally.

I haven't gone back through and played it on normal mode yet, but I was pretty impressed with the raid for the most part. The rest of the expansion though... debatable. I wasn't super wowed by the campaign.

The the nine story is something cool that I've always wanted them to do. I don't know why they waited this long to do it. I was actually, I would say I was intrigued by the story for the first time in a long time. The cutscenes of the campaign though were absolutely exceptional.

Aside from that though, I don't really know what the incentive is now to go back and farm things like tier 5 armor now that the raid race is done. We have the epic version of the raid coming, I believe, in the September Ash and Iron update where they're going to add a new encounter to the raid. But is there really a point for me to go back and farm that tier 5 armor for a few extra stat points?

I just really don't feel the motivation to do so, personally. I think I'm probably just going to lean more towards like the fun challenge content that we've been doing on this channel for a little bit over a year now. You guys seem to be enjoying that more than just like the fun highlights where we hang out and grind the new stuff.

It doesn't really seem like a lot of new people are interested in the like new leveling system or anything like that. So as far as the future is destiny is concerned, I'm really unsure of how much longer the franchise will last because we've been getting less and less content year over year. The community sentiment hasn't been great and people do people on Twitter have been pocket watching the player numbers on steam so hard. I find it so strange.

Is it indicative of people are getting tired out by destiny? Yes, but they're using that to draw these crazy conclusions. I still want to enjoy it as much as possible and just make the fun videos that I actually enjoy making. I don't want to push myself to make videos that I don't enjoy making. Along with that, I just wanted to let you all know that I have streamed almost 300 hours of Destiny this month, and that includes the pre-expansion grind to get ready for this raid.

So coming up after the rate hype has died down a little bit and we get some challenges filmed, we will be planning to do a variety month where I try out some games that I've never actually played before. Like a couple of things on those lists are like Dark Souls 2, Cyberpunk. We're having Silksong later this year that I'm super pumped about. I just played Hollow Knight for the first time last year, I believe. Anyways, I just wanted to give you all an update on how I think things are feeling with Destiny right now, now that the raid is finally done.

There's a lot of mixed emotions, and it always seems like people hate the game on Twitter 24-7, no matter if something good happens or not. I don't really know. That's why I try and stay off Twitter now. But we'll just take things one day at a time.

Hope for the best, plan for the worst. Let's just try and have some fun. Thanks for watching.

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