The armor synthesis transmog system coming to Destiny 2 in Season 14 will limit how many armor pieces players can convert to universal ornaments each season, and the only way to get around this cap will be to spend real money at the Eververse store.
Bungie outlined the system in its latest blog post. Through armor synthesis, players will be able to turn any armor piece in their collection into a universal armor ornament, which can be applied to any Legendary armor, using a new currency called Synthweave. To get it, you'll first need to earn Synthstrand by killing enemies anywhere in the game, and then spend it on bounties sold by Ada-1 that award Synthcord. Once you finish a bounty and earn some Synthcord, you'll need to convert it into Synthweave through a new Tower kiosk… for some reason. The exact conversion rates remain to be seen.
There will be Vanguard, Crucible, Gambit, destination, and pinnacle (raid and dungeon) Synthcord bounties, so transmog won't be tied to one activity. However, the feature will be kept on a fairly short leash by a seasonal ornament cap.
To jump-start everyone's ornament collection, Season 14 will allow players to make up to 20 ornaments per class. However, in future seasons, only 10 ornaments will be earnable per class. Seasons are around three months long and a full armor set has five pieces, so in other words, Destiny 2 will only let players transmog two armor sets for each class every three months – for free, at least.
If you want to make more than 10 custom universal ornaments for any class in a given season, you'll need to visit the Eververse store and purchase one Synthweave for $3 or five for $10 worth of Silver, Destiny 2's premium currency. Again, that's $10 for one armor set worth of ornaments. For comparison, Eververse-exclusive armor ornaments are $15 a set.
This system has been met with immediate backlash, with many in the game's community drawing unfavorable comparisons to the transmog systems in MMOs like Final Fantasy 14 and World of Warcraft, which treat transmog as a no-strings-attached quality of life option and an end-game pursuit. The official Reddit thread covering Bungie's blog post is awash with criticisms of the seasonal ornament cap, the position and price of the Eververse options, and other elements of armor synthesis.
The restrictions don't end there, either. With few exceptions, armor ornaments from the first year of Destiny 2 won't be available when transmog arrives (though Bungie is "working on solutions for a future season"), and the armor glows for the 2018 and 2019 Solstice of Heroes armor sets won't work with the new transmog system. The glows for the 2020 Solstice armor sets, however, will show up correctly because they "were developed with the Guardian appearance system in mind."
With the release of transmog, Destiny 2 will also do away with disposable shaders, hence Bungie's previous PSA to delete all the shaders you have before the end of the season. Beginning in Season 14, shaders will be permanent cosmetics that can be applied to armor via the same interface as ornaments.
Many players were relieved to hear this since juggling shaders is needlessly fussy, but today were less relieved to hear that the Bright Dust cost of shaders sold by Eververse is also being increased from 40 to 300. This seems to be a function of their newfound permanence, but it doesn't currently cost any additional Bright Dust to purchase more copies of Eververse shaders once you unlock them, so the math doesn't really add up and this has proven to be one more sticking point amongst the community. At the very least, Season 14 will see a year-one Eververse shader bundle that only costs Glimmer, which everyone can get heaps of for free.
Former Bungie and Respawn veterans are working on a new game to be published by PlayStation.
