Destiny 2 will streamline and expedite its armor transmog system in Season 15 by removing the synthstrand currency entirely.
Until now, you'd need to collect 150 synthstrand to purchase one bounty for synthcord which you can then use to craft the synthweave needed to transmog gear. Going forward, synthcord bounties will just cost 10,000 glimmer instead. Since most players can essentially get infinite glimmer from the Forsaken vendor Spider, this means that the transmog grind now boils down to however long it takes you to complete the bounties themselves.
"Our hope is that this change reduces the time needed to earn your 10 synthweave tokens per class each season," Bungie explained in its latest blog post. "Removing this currency also frees up a slot in the Consumables inventory bucket – a bucket that could be full for those of you carrying around a large quantity of items. Finally, we hope this change reduces the complexity of the Armor Synthesis system, with only one remaining currency for each class that can be immediately turned in at Ada-1’s Loom for a synthweave token."
The initial three-stage crafting process was immediately unpopular with many players when Destiny 2's transmog system was unveiled earlier this year, with plenty (including myself) calling it needlessly complicated. However, synthstrand didn't truly wind up in the hot seat until players deduced that there's a hard cap on how quickly you can earn them – one for every two minutes of combat, regardless of how many dudes you kill in that time. This made transmog feel like even more of a slog, and after this discovery, calls for a change intensified.
This update will make it much easier to get synthweave, but players will still run into the seasonal wall of 10 synthweave per class. Bungie says it will "continue to monitor the conversation and use of Armor Synthesis as Season 15 rolls out," and it'll be interesting to see if this cap is ever lifted or otherwise adjusted. I wouldn't expect any other changes to arrive until Season 16 at the earliest, but for the time being, it is good to see Bungie respond to player feedback on transmog.
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