One of the things I wished for from Destiny 2 was more things for solo players to do. My wish was granted, I just need to be better about making wishes. I should have wished for more things to do AND a good reason to do them.
You see, I’m kind of stuck in Destiny 2. I’m at power level 265 and I can’t seem to get any higher. Drops (aside from those rare exotic drops) seem to cap out at 260 for rare (blue) and 265 for legendary (purple). Rewards from NPCs also seem to cap at those levels.
The accepted way to push past 265 is by doing the weekly Milestones, but I’ve done those for the week. Or at least I’ve done the ones I’m comfortable doing. I have PvP ones I could do but PvP in Destiny makes me angry. Like, it enrages me and I carry that anger out of the game and have it with me for the rest of the day a lot of the time. Basically if my only option is PvP I’m better off not playing.
There’s also the Nightfall strike and I might be able to do that in another week. It’s a Strike with a time limit. Having a time limit makes me sloppy, and this week the strike is the Inverted Spire which has lots of laser beams to try to pass through and I just know I’d screw that up. Maybe next week.
So I was looking forward to Xur to come and sell me gear to get past 265, but ultimately I screwed that up. Everyone said the gun he was selling was great so I bought it without even looking at it…and it was a gun I was already using! LOL That one is definitely on me. I bought the exotic arms he was selling because I was wearing pretty low arms (260) but when I tried to infuse the 270 exotic arms into my 260 legendary arms, I was told the power level was too low. I don’t understand that one at all. I couldn’t use the new exotic arms because I was wearing an exotic helm that I really dug.
In desperation I decided to infuse my exotic 270 helm into a 265 legendary helm. That worked but it only pushed the legendary to 266, a net loss of 4 power. And the legendary helm sucks aesthetically. But now I’m wearing the exotic arms (270) and the legendary helm (266) but it wasn’t enough to push my overall power level past 265.
So my Xur experience was, spend all my shards, wind up with a duplicate rifle (my fault), a much uglier helm and no additional power to speak of. I haz a sad.
Circling back to my wish, though. There’s a TON of stuff to do on the maps as a solo player, and that’s good. There’s just not very much reason to do any of it, aside from the minute-to-minute fun of shooting something in the face/juicebox. I’ll get rewards that I’ll just deconstruct into glimmer (and I’m capped on glimmer) or shards. I guess I could stand to build up my shard reserves, not that I have much to do with them right now.
What I miss is the reputation grind, of all things. In D1 every time you turned something in to an NPC your reputation went up. At certain milestones you’d get a goody but you’d also gradually unlock the ability to buy better gear. In D2 you still turn in things to get that goody but when you do, the meter just resets. And the goody you get is junk if you’re at 265 already.
Basically there’s nothing for me to do in Destiny 2 this weekend. I just need to sit tight and wait for the reset on Tuesday and then do the milestones I can do, which takes a few hours. Or I guess I could start a new character but the campaign sucked so much I don’t really want to run through it again.
Maybe I’m done with Destiny 2 until Bungie adds more stuff to do, which I know they will eventually. I mean if I’d played a single player game for 10 days I’d feel satisfied, so it’s not like I feel the game owes me anything else. I’m just a little disappointed, I guess. All those Adventures and Hidden Sectors are out there ready to reward me with the equivalent of vendor trash. What a shame!