Destiny 2 fans have long bemoaned how a majority of endgame activities feel “useless” in the sense that the range of potential gear levels they can drop fluxuates drastically, often resulting in gear rewards that are less powerful than what they already have. In Destiny 2’s upcoming Forsaken expansion, Bungie will be taking measures to ensure that players are always on an upwards trajectory when it comes to powerful gear upgrades, and that reaching the maximum Power Level cap will feel more meaningful.
In the most recent This Week at Bungie blog post, Bungie specifically addressed players’ acquisition of power, saying that one of its big goals with the Forsaken expansion is to make the process of powering up your Guardian via gear upgrades feel more satisfying and meaningful. Bungie has already spoken in the past about how it will be tweaking weekly activity refresh rates and milestone gear rewards to incentivize more consistent play, and its new outline on powerful gear rewards builds on those previous comments.
Specifically, Bungie wants to ensure that a powerful gear reward always provides a boost to the player’s current Power Level, even if it’s a miniscule one and even if the player vastly outlevels the activity from which they earned the reward:
“When players earn powerful rewards, these items should never scale down to where they do not give an increase in Power. Even if your Power is 100 over an activity’s recommended level, it should still grant a reward at least one Power level above your current average. This means that players should still benefit when grouping with teammates who haven’t accomplished as much as they have.”
On the opposite end of the gear rewards spectrum, the new system will also properly reward players who manage to complete difficult activities that are above their current Power Level recommendations. As an example, if a player completes a raid while being 40 under the recommended Power Level for that raid, they can expect to earn some suitably high-power gear for their efforts.
Since Bungie also wants to make reaching the maximum Power Level cap feel more meaningful, it won’t always be obvious which activities grant the best rewards, and not every activity will award guaranteed powerful gear. It will be up to players to figure out the optimal routes for reaching the upper echelons of Destiny 2’s new Power Level cap.
As one final note, Bungie also confirmed that, in Forsaken, Exotic tier gear will always be at or above a player’s Power Level when they receive the Exotic, ensuring that the joy of finding a new Exotic gear piece won’t be soured by the fact that it’s drastically underleveled when compared to the player’s current gear.