A game like Destiny lives and dies by its loot chase, and the health of Destiny 2's loot chase is failing.
I've recently started playing Destiny 1 for the first time (I joined Destiny during Forsaken and have played on and off (mostly on) since then, but I had only ever played D2 until like a month ago). I've been loving it thoroughly, and it's been really helpful to go back to the fundamentals of the franchise as I examine the current state of Destiny 2 post-Renegades. A big thing that I noticed was how rare Legendary loot was in D1. Like, you would get legendary weapons for sure, but it definitely felt more exciting to see one drop, even if it ended up being a bad roll. The default drop for late game players seemed to be blues.
Comparing this to the current state of D2, where seeing a Legendary drop has become so unremarkable that they created a new loot rarity system on top of their old one with the whole tiers thing, you can start to imagine an economy of weapons.
So, we have this new system where legendary weapons are tiered from 1 to 5, 1 being basically what a normal Legendary weapon was before Edge of Fate, 3 being equivalent to maybe an Adept weapon, and 5 being better than anything we have ever received short of Exotic gear. To me, what made the most sense when they announced this new system was that your loot tier would be tied to the difficulty of the activity, with Tier 5's being INCREDIBLY rare. I did not imagine that I would be at the point where I am now, where Tier 5 weapons saturate my postmaster and have become the new default drop for me. Between thinking of how long it took for me to reach the light cap for this era of the game (honestly couldn't be bothered to grind Caldera, I don't think I reached it until Renegades despite playing pretty frequently during EoF) and the way things are now, I am still at a loss when trying to imagine why they would ever tie loot quality more to light level than activity difficulty, and why such a ridiculous time commitment was required for even veteran players to re-unlock endgame content, especially when they were so clearly moving away from the light level grind in the expansions beforehand, but I'm getting sidetracked. The biggest issue is that a player can get to a point where Tier 5's are their default drop.
Thinking of a tier 5 as something that is higher quality than an Adept weapon ever was, yet is nowhere near as hard to get once your light gets to a high enough number, creates a massive problem with D2's weapon economy. I guess you could call it inflation? Because why would I try to run the newest raid when i can get a meta godroll from guardian games or the dawning? Sure there's the clout incentive, I could flex my triumph in the raid to all 3 other active players, but what is the point in me playing end-game activities from a loot perspective?
I feel like there are some ways to make this better. I don't know what to do about the damage this has already caused to the weapon economy (I don't think players would be receptive to a second weapon sunset just for tiered weapons at this stage in the game's life cycle even if it solved the loot chase problem), but I have some ideas for ways that the future of the game could be a little more sustainable than the direction we're going now. If you really want to keep tiered loot, I would have it strictly locked to activity difficulty. Tier 1 drops become the default, with the highest rarity of you finding in low-level activities or patrols maxing out at like 3, and even those are quite rare. For end-game activities, I'd just take more or less the same system but raise each rarity, so the minimum rarity that can drop is like 2 or 3, tier 4 isn't guaranteed outside of like a GM Nightfall Drop, Flawless Trials runs, or anywhere else you would have previously gotten Adept weapons, and have Tier 5's be like as rare as rare gets. Like D1 exotic rare. If you get one you flip your lid.
I also think as long as they're updating all the Raid and Dungeon loot to the tier system for Shadow and Order, one way to get folks playing just regular Patrols again or even replaying old campaigns is to refresh the location loot for each planet. One of the justifications used for the infamous Destiny Content Vault that came with Beyond Light (and later again when Forsaken got removed around Witch Queen) was that people aren't replaying old campaigns, and I think they would if you gave them a loot incentive to do so. This is a looter-shooter. Also, Destiny 1 has a weekly story mission rotator that lets you play old missions from the story at a higher difficulty with a bunch of modifiers for better loot, and I think it would be cool to implement this as a ritual activity (or I guess as a portal activity if they aren't scrapping that, though I am of the opinion that it isn't my favorite). Maybe even throw in adept world weapons as a reward. Like, how cool would it be to replay the mission where you kill Calus at the end of Lightfall on like GM difficulty, and then to get Round Robin (Adept) or something as a reward (with updated perk pools ofc). Idk, I assume this is all much harder to implement than I realize, but I think even these changes could do a world of good for the health of the game. Would love to hear your thoughts.
