If I’m lucky, 50 hours is just enough time for me to pick something to watch on Netflix. The past weeks, however, I spent that time grinding in Destiny 2’s newest expansion. It was a mind-numbing slog, but a part of me is almost glad I did it. Almost.
My armor is finally good enough to have over 100 in primary stats without needing to dump other attributes. My weapons drop with two enhanced perks on each column. My favorite builds just got even more powerful.
Now that high-quality loot is within my reach, The Edge of Fate is showing its potential at last. It’s a shame it’s locked behind a frustrating 50-hour buy-in.
When you start playing, all your drops will be tier one (T1), with the occasional T2. That is abysmal compared to what we had just a couple of weeks ago: T1 armor drops with 52 to 57 stat points, compared to the old standard of good armor being above 63-65 depending on who you ask. T1 weapons only have one perk in each column and can’t ever be enhanced, so there’s no way to upgrade them.
In the new expansion, you can only get higher-tier loot normally by raising both your power level and your Guardian Rank. In practice, this means you must grind what you need before you can grind what you want. That’s bad enough on its own, but in true Destiny fashion, Bungie will also reset your power level to 200 in December and your Unstable Cores will disappear in a few months. Talk about way too many obstacles.
Doing some napkin math here, it took me almost six hours to go from 330 to 350 with four-minute Solo Ops runs, which I did almost exclusively since other mission types weren’t nearly as rewarding, between steep bonus requirements and needlessly annoying modifiers.
Going off that number, the grind from 300 to 350 alone could take you 10 to 15 hours. The journey between 200 and 300 is more forgiving, so with two hours per 10 levels, that’s still another 15-20 hours. Add to that the time I spent doing the campaign and grinding to reach 200 in the first place, and that’s in the neighborhood of 50 hours, though the real number is probably much higher. That’s a pretty big time investment until my drops actually started to matter.
Grinding power is generally easy in Edge of Fate, but for the most part, it’s a very bureaucratic endeavor. Think of it as the world’s longest meeting that could have been an email. You’re doing mindless tasks that barely reward you, so that a few dozen hours from now, you can start chasing what actually matters, because we know that 54-stat armor won’t make your build come together. It’s like Sisyphus reaching the top of the hill and finding a second rock and a steeper mountain.
Sometimes, the pendulum swings the other way, and it becomes more annoying than actually engaging. Reaching certain breakpoints (approximately every 20 levels) requires a bigger reward score, so I had to fight enemies at a power delta while throwing in modifiers like no HUD or no starting ammo to advance. It’s just as much busywork as it was the last time, except I had to jump through more hoops to get there.
All that happens in the Portal, which is one sterile, restaurant menu-esque interface of most activities in the game. Kepler is basically irrelevant for grinding gear until you get at least to 350, when your drops start reaching T4 on Mythic, and two guaranteed T5s a week from missions, so the Portal is your one-stop shop for power leveling/gear farming needs.
Except the lion’s share of the Portal is old or reissued, so your long grind will take place in those activities you’ve been doing for months, if not years, like the 2021 Battlegrounds, Encore, or The Devils’ Lair.
Ironically, Caldera—which we’re probably all guilty of farming—is one of the few new activities there.
Even if your new gear is worse than what you’ve gathered throughout your playtime, you still need to save some of it. A select few activities require you to use new gear to advance your Guardian Rank and stay the course toward any gear that’s not a downgrade. Using new and featured gear also gives you a bigger reward score in the Portal, plus some boosts to firepower and damage reduction.
As much of a slog as it was, I did it. I pushed to 350. I bought the first Kepler tier upgrade, which means every drop on Mythic is a T4, and I get two guaranteed T5s a week from the featured missions. I could finally farm some high-level loot reliably to make my builds come together, and I only had to do more Caldera than advisable by the World Health Organization.
My drops got even better after I reached 400, which took another dozen or so hours. I probably wouldn’t have done it if not for the generous bonuses from Solstice. It’s incredible: every basic Solo Ops clear gets me at least one T4 item, plus a guaranteed T5 from the event. I’m having to take a chainsaw to my vault so I can save my good drops, which might be the best problem I’ve ever had in the game. It’s been years since playing D2 has felt so rewarding.
Yet I know that, not long from now, I’ll have to redo most of what got me here. With the Star Wars-inspired Renegades expansion in December, Bungie is resetting us back to 200, and we’ll have a host of other new gear to chase. The Kepler upgrade, thankfully, is permanent, but the new/featured gear bonuses are bound to make for another slog in a few months. Unstable Cores, too, are going away, for no apparent reason other than making us stockpile them again.
The bright side is, Bungie plans to tone down the grind starting in the next few weeks, but what shape that will take is still vague. One of its goals is to “generally increase the speed of progression for most players,” though that doesn’t inspire that much faith, seeing how the grind seems more like policy than accident. Going from, say, 60 hours to 30 is certainly faster, but it’s still one hell of an investment before you can get gear actually worth using.
The length of the grind isn’t the only problem, either. Many of the upgrades we received this season will go away with Renegades. While we’ll always have our gear, it may not be new or featured in a few months, and we’ll need to re-earn the permission to grind anything remotely worth keeping.
Yes, there have always been power level resets, but this is the first time we’ll go back to only earning low-quality gear—and the first time we’re actually being penalized for using “legacy” weapons and armor, even if they’re just six months old.
The Edge of Fate set up a new foundation of systems for D2, with gear tiers, armor 3.0, and the Portal, but power grind is the core of the content right now—and that’s unacceptable. The true gear chase doesn’t kick in until dozens of hours; until then, it’s all some extremely interactive red tape. I enjoy a reasonable, rewarding grind, but for the investment it requires, leveling in Edge of Fate is neither.
There’s still room for improvement, of course. Ash & Iron arrives in September, opening up more activities and softening the grind. But if it takes three months and a major update to make the content feel worthwhile, then that’s already a failure.
Luckily, Bungie has plenty of dials to shift until December. The most important, at least for me, is making higher-tier gear far more accessible across the board. I’d love to grind because I want to, not because I have to—and spending dozens of hours as a prelude to chasing weapons and armor is certainly in the latter category. I’d like to chase armor because of set bonuses and weapons that have unique perks or archetypes, and not because it’s just another step in the content treadmill. It’ll take a lot of incentive to ditch my current well-rolled gear.
The optimist in me likes to think they’ll eventually get it right, but the realist in me says it might take longer than I’d like it to. Just last month, the studio nerfed a popular farm and attempted to up the difficulty for raids and dungeons for the second time this year, getting enough backlash to quickly U-Turn it both times. There’s time to course-correct, but it doesn’t inspire much confidence considering the grind seems more calculated than collateral.
At least if that happens again, maybe I’ll finally find something to watch on Netflix.
