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Dawning 2024 Event Review: Challenges and Feedback

The Dawning, 2024. It feels pointless to give feedback on this event and most holiday events at this point because they haven't changed in a big way in a pretty long time, with some exceptions here and there. To a degree, I understand that changing every holiday event, every single year, especially now while you're pressed. For employee power, is maybe not the most reasonable, but the dawning 2024 should be, if it's not already, some kind of a wake up call to Bungie for one specific reason.

Let's talk about the good of the dawning. 1 The weapons. There are some good things here.

Avalanche is a 450 RPM solar machine gun, a rarity in the current landscape, which can roll with some. pretty good options, maybe something like Subsistence Incandescent in case you don't have fixed odds from duality. The linear fusion, Mistral Lift, can roll with Envious Arsenal and Bait and Switch, along with a multitude of other combinations that include Envious Assassin, Reconstruction, Firing Line and Precision Instrument. Linear fusions aren't at the tippy top right now, but power weapons are one weapon category, that I'm a bit more willing to lean into the whole, but what if it gets buffed world that so many people tend to cope on. Glacioclasm can roll with Lone Wolf in closing time, a fantastic PvP set of perks, and most of the other weapons, Stay Frosty, the Stasis Pulse, Albedo Wing, the Arc Glaive, and Zephyr, the Stasis Sword, can also get some pretty good perk rolls too.

Not only this, but there are upgrades at Ava to give you double perks on these weapons when you focus them directly, increasing your odds of getting the thing you want on the weapon. Next, the armor at the Eververse. I know people are probably hearing good and Eververse in the same sentence and are ready to throw me out of a window, but the armor looks pretty good this year. You can also buy it for dust, which I will likely do for at least one set of armor for the first time ever. that I will be buying an armor set with dust.

Speaking of which, finally, the last thing, Bright Dust. A somewhat efficient way of playing The Dawning right now is to focus on the repeatable bounties, which involve making whatever cookie is on the bounty. After you already have a bunch of ingredients, you just scoop as many of these bounties as possible, make cookies, and pass them out.

It takes a little while to do, but it's not that bad and interesting. it can actually provide a really solid amount of Bright Dust from doing so. The Dawning is one of the better holiday events that we have in the game, but I still have notes, even if most of this feedback has already been given. How is The Dawning probably meant to be played? By just playing the game as you normally would.

Over time, you'll gain different ingredients and Dawning essence and spirit and all that kind of stuff, and over the 3 week period, you'll be able to play it as a whole. You should get a good amount of things, assuming you're playing constantly over that 3 week period. Personally, I'm not gonna be around that much over the next 3 weeks, so I wanted to try to focus fire some stuff to try to get some weapon rolls.

And still, to this day, the most efficient farming for this and any other event that relies on activity completion for currency is checkpoint farming, which is some of the most boring stuff in the game. game, especially considering which checkpoint people are farming for this event. This feedback is not really anything new, but as someone who actively tried to participate this year for the first time in multiple years, I'm just here to reiterate. Dawning Essence is the main currency, as we know. This currency is used to make cookies to give to vendors who then give you 3 Dawning Spirit and a low chance at a gift in return, which is required.

to focus the individual weapons of the event. To focus an individual weapon costs 25 Dawning Spirit, meaning it takes 9 cookies to focus 1 weapon. 9 cookies is 90 Dawning Essence, let's say you manage to get 1 extra Dawning Spirit from something else, let's call it 8 cookies.

If you are looking to be efficient, you must resort to checkpoint farming. If I were to sum up the next- However long I'm gonna talk, in one sentence, it would be, checkpoint farming sucks ass. Dolon Karu checkpoints, the final boss of Shadow Throne, or some story mission checkpoint to hit over and over again usually only take a minute or less of your time for a pretty big payout of essence.

Dolon Karu gives 21 or 22 essence on every kill and it takes less than a minute to execute, not including the swapping of characters. There are story missions that might be even better than this. Compare that to a strike or GM. Seasonal activity, let's say you're doing a strike, that's the easiest thing to compare.

A strike takes, what, 10-15 minutes to complete if you're solo queuing and it awards 17 essence. So you can get 17 essence for 10-15 minutes of your time or with the same amount of time, let's say you could do 4 Dolin Karrue kills in 10 minutes, you could get over 80 essence. Do I think strikes should be dropping 80 essence as a result? Probably not. I'm not exactly asking for a 1 to 1 scaling of this.

Also, it's been multiple years and checkpoint farming continues to be the best in terms of efficiency, it's either something Bungie is unable to change or unwilling to change. However, my problem isn't necessarily with checkpoint farming exactly. If you want to do checkpoint farming, great, go crazy, do it.

My problem is that it feels like your 2 options for targeting the event are 1. 1 Horribly boring but efficient checkpoint farming or 2 Much more fun but inefficient EVERYTHING ELSE. Strikes are 17 essence for a completion. GMs, you would think, would scale much better, they only give 22. I cleared Birthplace of the Vile in less than 10 minutes. That's still not even close to checkpoint farming in terms of efficiency, although the tradeoff is that you do get GM rewards upon completion of a GM. Why can't we have higher difficulty things be worth a little more, or even just stuff that takes longer to do be worth a little more?

I would much rather grind GM strikes than checkpoints, or onslaught, or contest of elders, The only way to make GMs or any activity really equal with checkpoint farming would be to give them multiple hundreds of Essence per completion, which I'm not even looking for. I would be happy with something in the 50-100 range per completion for a GM and then scaling everything between Vanguard ops and GM accordingly. The same goes for any other activities in the game.

On slot 50 takes over an hour and you get somewhere in the 120-140 range of it. of essence, that's 6 or 7 Dolon Karu kills, which you can do in about a fifth of the time. Contest of Elders, a full clear, 13 essence for 30 minutes of gaming.

I just want other things in the game to give a little more essence per completion so that I can feel like the time spent trying to engage in the holiday event is justified and or just a little more pleasant. I realize it'll never be perfect, like chances are that something will happen. something else just becomes the new best farm or whatever, but like, just gimme something, anything other than checkpoint farming, it's miserable. Can we also introduce these weapon drops alongside of the drops that we're currently getting from activities, like a chance to get a dawning weapon when you complete a whatever. We could do something where like only focused engrams have the benefit of the double perk upgrades.

So, that's rewarding direct interaction with the event through Ava while having single perk drops happening across the entire game. Finally, the potential wake up moment? The bugs. This event launched on the 10th and approximately 1 thing worked.

We could patch the game and log in. 45 minutes into the event, Bungie disabled challenges. Why? Because the event card, which is normally 1000 silver or something, was accidentally made free to everyone.

Bungie shut this down, which I'm not really blaming them for, I kind of expected that. Bungie still does these event cards because they're still probably bringing in a not insignificant amount of money. If they weren't bringing in some cash... They wouldn't keep doing them, so I get it, you gotta run a business, even if I think 99% of people who got the card for free would've never actually purchased it on their own, present company included.

I haven't bought any event cards. Bungie I really had no easy way out of this issue, I fully expected them to wipe the event card from everyone's inventory, but the people who claimed it for free did actually get to keep it. Very surprised by that, although maybe it was more work to get rid of it than it was to just let them have it. But in doing so, the crowd that missed out complained that they were unable to take advantage of this bug and argued that they should've just made it free for everyone. It's not really my place to say what Bungie should've done.

But, obviously, a free event card for everyone after how things have been going recently probably would've gone over pretty well with the community. But, in shutting down the event pass, pretty much everything else was broken or was already broken from the get go. People's intro quests were breaking where they couldn't get past step 1, weapons were not focusable with the upgrade and then also weren't dropping with the double perks when that upgrade was active. Even challenges were broken, which Bungie just Auto completed for everyone, kind of a good move there.

One of the ingredients still has the pink placeholder icon. Not as big of a deal as other things, but just the cherry on top really. Things launching and being broken feels like the norm nowadays. Like I guess that's just what happens when a bunch of QA get laid off, right? Now I will give some amount of credit here, I guess, at least Bungie acknowledged the issues quickly and worked to get them functional again as quick as they could.

and no, I'm not gonna entertain any kind of like, oh, well, they shut down the free event card for the players, but they can't fix the second boss in the dungeon, blah, blah, blah, like whatever kind of conversations, because I think they're incomparable, and Bungie has been trying to fix that issue for like months now. And, at least Bungie has been responsive to certain things breaking and trying to get them rolling again. But, this needs to be a wake-up call for Bungie if the past three months haven't. Perhaps something will- discuss more in the future. The game is buggy, things are launching broken and it has reached a point of unacceptability if it hasn't passed it already.

Half the time, I can never be confident in what I'm telling other people because I don't know if something is bugged, if it's still bugged, if it's not bugged anymore, oh, they fixed that in the last patch, oh, it's getting fixed in the next patch, it's getting fixed soon, it's getting fixed months from now, I don't know anymore, I can't keep track of all these things. Sorry to kick you when you're down, Bungie, but It's hard to have conversations about the state of the game or balance or design or activities or sandbox or whatever the hell when it feels like the thing is barely working in the first place. I realize an event like this being broken for like 1, 1.5 days out of a potential 3 weeks is probably not that big of a deal in the grand scheme, but at this point, it's just the principle of it all really and the frequency.

So, yeah, that's what I got on Dawning. I put about 13 hours into the experience, 8 of those being when the event was barely working on launch day and then a multi-hour dungeon farming session that resulted in every roll of the linear fusion EXCEPT for the one I wanted, so I guess I had a bit to say about it this time. Thank you very much for watching, for listening, I'll see you next time.

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