Is Destiny 2’s Crafting A ‘Me’ Problem Or A Widespread Concern?

Games Is Destiny 2’s Crafting A ‘Me’ Problem Or A Widespread Concern? Paul Tassi Senior Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. News and opinion about video games, television, movies and the internet. New! Follow this author to improve your content experience.

Got it! Jun 30, 2022, 09:17am EDT | Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Destiny 2 Bungie I’ve said this before , and I’ll say it again, the introduction of crafting in Destiny 2 has kind of broken my brain. For two seasons now since The Witch Queen launched, Destiny 2 has had a new system that allows players to craft perfectly rolled weapons with enough of a time investment, which includes RNG battling for patterns, loads of kills for leveling, and material acquisition for perk selection. And yet I find that it has totally changed my relationship with loot and grinding in Destiny 2, which for me, has always been the core of the experience in the looter shooter.

What I can’t tell is if this is a “me” problem, or if this is something that is going to cause long term damage to the game if players don’t want to continue to engage with the system. How crafting is supposed to work on paper is to provide an end result where with enough time investment, you will eventually be guaranteed the perfect roll of the weapon you want. How crafting works in practice for me is that it creates a long list of mental chores and an interminable grind that makes me unsatisfied with effectively 100% of my craftable weapon drops.

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What this means in practice is: I dismantle every roll of every weapon that can be crafted when a season starts. I am only hunting for those red pattern drops, which seem like a 10-15% drop rate at most, making for a somewhat exhausting chase on its own. I complete the patterns, and shred those too.

Then I’m left with a level 1 crafted version of the weapon. I now need hundreds, if not thousands of kills and activity completions to get that weapon to its “max” of 20 for a final stat boost, and it may not get the perks I actually want to use until level 14-16. As I level it, I dismantle all other drops of the weapons, even those with the perks I want, because they will not contribute to leveling.

I either burn out trying to get the weapon to 20 because it takes so long after so much initial grinding for the pattern in the first place, or I get there. Most of the time, even when maxed, I will then not use the weapon, I will shelve it, then move to the next weapon on the list that must be crafted and leveled, because my brain will not let go of the idea that I must craft and max everything. But I’m realizing now that kind of time commitment feels pointless.

And yet, I’m still doing it, running suboptimal loadouts in most activities just to make sure I’m making progress in that direction. Again, in theory, I should be able to let go. If I get those patterns, great! If not, I find a roll I like and just use that.

But I can’t. I can’t do it. In addition to some seasonal triumphs that require all these weapons crafted, right now if I know that a weapon can be crafted into something perfect, I just cannot be satisfied with a good or even great randomly rolled version of it.

This has never been my relationship with the game before. I recognize the idea that some people did spend a hundred hours trying to get a 5/5 roll on weapons purely through RNG, which could be borderline impossible, but in that era, I knew it was down to so much luck that I’d be satisfied with my 3/5 or 4/5. Now? When the 5/5 is a fixed point at the end of a grind, I can’t relinquish it.

And it has created a weird situation where I am dismantling effectively 100% of these weapons when they drop in the wild. I don’t like it. I find myself much more satisfied with decent (but not perfect) drops of weapons that I know cannot be crafted (ie.

the new dungeon weapons, Trials weapons) than something I can craft. Maybe this is something I just have to get past. But if enough people feel this way, like crafting has done more harm than good, perhaps Bungie will change it.

Early modifications have included streamlining currencies and reducing the investment for enhanced perks, but the core of the system remains intact. So, is this a me and my broken brain problem, or are more people running into this? Follow me on Twitter , YouTube , Facebook and Instagram . Subscribe to my free weekly content round-up newsletter, God Rolls .

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