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If you watched any of the Destiny 2: Edge of Fate raid race over the weekend, you know just how brutal the Contest mode version of the activity felt, even to the best players in the world. Barely anyone has cleared The Desert Perpetual on Contest mode, partly due to disruptive bugs but largely due to obscene boss DPS checks, and new comments from Bungie indicate that this extreme spike in difficulty – like many of the issues with the expansion – may have been unintentional.
In a new post, the Destiny 2 Team Reddit account says "we are tracking feedback items and issue reports that have been coming in from the community." Those issues include, on the high-priority end, impossibly tanky bosses.
"Power Deltas for the Contest Raid difficulty," Bungie begins. "We're seeing reports of enemies being at a higher delta than what the activity advertises – ex: enemies have a skull icon next to them instead of a sword. We will investigate."
In an updated version of the post, Bungie adds: "Skull appears at -40? And the activity advertises -25. This is bleeding into some very loud discussions on difficulty."
Elsewhere, Bungie says "Some players are concerned that clearing this content required loadout swapping, lengthy ad-clear phases to stockpile ammo, and near perfect execution. Related: Some players feel contest difficulty may have been tuned too high for this Raid, so that only an incredibly small portion of the community could have a shot at completing it."
This reflects the downright grueling experience that Contest raiders ran into over the weekend, with multiple teams spending upwards of 12 hours on a single raid boss without even getting the kill. It certainly didn't help, as Bungie flagged, that raid rally flags were "not fully refreshing ammo and abilities consistently," forcing additional resets or extending fights even further.
Bungie's initial response here suggests its investigation may very well find fault with the new Power system, which has been such a mess across a range of activities that I don't have space to fully cover it here. In short: we're back to plinking away at bosses from a mile away. Which, it turns out, doesn't really work in raids.
"Initial note: While we absolutely wish for contest mode to challenge your loadouts, your teamwork, and your puzzle solving abilities," Bungie says, "the highest end of damage has been reported to feel that is [sic] requires far more than expected."
On top of that, the reward for clearing the raid, even on normal, has been skewered as underwhelming. The premier endgame activity is dropping worse loot than some of the easiest stuff you can do in the new Portal activity hub. The updated version of the post confirms this: "Rewards: normal mode is dropping T1 items and -1 power. Players not understanding why 'easier' Portal content gives better quality rewards."
As players explode over the new raid awarding Tier 1 gear (of the new Tier 5 system) with abysmal stats, Bungie says, "We are looking into reward quality – what tiers rewards within the raid are dropping at within Contest difficulty, and their power in relation to yours. There are ways to increase your reward quality in Normal difficulty via Raid Feats, and we will be watching feedback around these systems as players get deeper into them."
Additionally, Bungie says it's "looking into" those bugged rally flags as well as "PC Crashes after 5+ hours with certain hardware configurations." My team and I have personally experienced both of these issues – not in Contest mode, because we dislike pain – so it's good to see some acknowledgement.
I don't know if this investigation will be validating for the raiders who struggled all weekend – proof they were right and it looks like something is wrong – or if it will just stick the boot in further.
"This is not an exhaustive list of all the feedback or issues we have seen come through, but we wanted to let you know we are monitoring the conversation. Please share what other thoughts you have below, and we will keep an eye on this thread as we start digging into these items," Bungie concludes.
So far, the other thoughts shared by players amount to, in so many words: fix your game. I had a lot of fun with the Edge of Fate campaign, but after playing more of the expansion proper, it is hard to disagree.
