@zevvion: The best part of the video is the end where you can't even pick up your loot due to all of the Uncommon's, haha. That is so annoying right now.

The new light level for weekly strikes and daily missions pretty much bugged my ability to get legendary marks down to a crawl. It really should be lowered to 320-330 because the 350 is just too much for me. Granted I might not be the most dedicated of players and I don't do raids or pvp but it's just too frustrating.

I really hope Bungie will address this as I'm sure I'm not the only player with this issue.

End of rant.

Overall, I've enjoyed the expansion, although I am starting to exhaust the content already, but that's more of a symptom of how much I've been playing over the last couple of weeks.

The new raid is great, feels like a good length although the light level jump on the final boss feels a little artificial. I can see that they had to ditch the old consoles to make some of the new encounters work, as the occasional frame rate dips are testament to.

I have mixed feelings about the new levelling systems; it's preferable to always be getting gear at same or higher level, but the lack of communication from Bungie on the changes led to some frustration and confusion about what to do to get ready for the raid. The low drop rate for skeleton keys from the strike playlists needed to be addressed, and the Archons Forge pop item drop rate also, but it seems as though they are listening to the community on this.

The new PVP mode has been fun (as someone who doesn't play a lot of PVP) as it focuses more on team play rather than boosting your K/D, which is what is enjoyable for me about the gameplay.

Overall, I've had a good time with the expansion so far, but I would like to see the road map for the rest of the year until Destiny 2.

@mordukai: If the endgame content was 80 light below the max, that would be super boring though. Especially if that endgame content is even lower level than the max was in the last expansion. If you've been playing Destiny semi-actively, you would have gone into this expansion being at least 330, and you would reach 350+ on the first day with relative ease. I don't think they can/should design higher level content for people who rarely play the game. That doesn't make much sense. As an active player, I finished all the content of this new expansion in the first week. That means if they did it your way, I would have exhausted all content on day of release. This expansion is supposed to last a few months.

If you were somehow below 300 light, I guess you just had to play catch up. You can't really fault a game for progressing faster than you'd like when you don't/barely play the things it puts in front of you.

@zevvion: Yes and no, the leveling between 350-365 is a bit harsh right now. I personally wish they ease it up on that as well. Hopefully they will when Hard WotM launches.

Would be better if they made more use of difficulty options. Have tiers almost like Diablo 3, reducing/increasing rewards for things like the raids or weekly and daily stuff without completely locking players out. You know, actually be user-friendly.

@theht: I would agree on having difficulty options. But you're not locked out of any content are you? If you were lower light, you still have some older content to do. I guess what I'm trying to say is, maybe it's a bit too much to expect you're endgame ready as quick as someone who has been playing the game with each update.

@mordukai: After rereading your original comment I realized you were talking about Marks. If you only have 1 character and zero Marks, you are still able to accumulate 30 Marks per day (Daily Crucible and Public Event) plus 30 per week for the Weekly Crucible. You are locked out of 15 Marks per day and another 30 per week from the Heroics though. That is still 240 Marks per week. Using 1 weeks worth of Marks and hopefully having a few strange coins, you should easily be able to hit 350 from buying both Xur's inventory and Vendor gear to make up the rest. If you have multiple characters you can just run and do an extra Public event on each character for up to another 30 Marks per day as well. You can do all of those things at any Level, much less Light Level. So if you are having a problem with that you are doing something wrong or didn't know Public Events now grant 15 Marks per day on each character. If you need some help leveling go check out my post about how to level efficiently in Rise of Iron.

@theht: @zevvion: Personally I think the difficulty options are fine in Destiny of Heroic or non Heroic. The Weekly lockouts are actually a very positive thing in my book. It keeps the hardcore players that are on Destiny 16 hours a day on a leash to an extent, gives those of us who play a lot, 2 hours a day on average, a bit of breathing room feeling like we have to finish everything every week, and wouldn't be finished more often than the lockout by casual players anyways. If you do everything once that can even give you a boost to 365+ boost for 3 characters, your already talking about roughly 20 hours of gameplay and like it is now it makes you play a diverse set of activities to accomplish. That's better than spending 20 hours grinding, say the Nightfall, during the week rather than finishing Dailies, Public Events, 3 Raids, 3 Trials runs, 3 Iron Banner Rank 5 (this week), 3 Nightfalls, 3 Heroic Strikes, 4 weekly Shiro bounties (only way to proc the Thorn quest), and enough PvP to finish the weekly Crucible bounty.

That said, I think Bungie introduced some problem's with the Light Leveling system when they tried to artificially slow down progression during the 350-365 Levels by only allowing drops a 50% chance to be 1-2 levels higher than your current Light Level. The system outside of that for both 335-349 and 366-385 (387 is actually the cap right now, likely unintentionally) is actually fine, so why they changed that LL range is just silly. It only screwed the prepared players who didn't look up how to level properly on Day 1 (made me waste 20+ Exotic Engrams and about 1,200 Heavy ammo synthesis). I also, as I've talked to a lot of the RU guys (@pyrodactyl@ll_exile_ll@veggiesbro don't want to speak for you guys, I just know we've talked a lot about this in party chat) and they seem to mostly agree, think it was pretty dumb that they locked players away from the recommended Light Level of 370 by having a soft cap (365) that was near impossible to get over on Week 1 without extreme play and preparedness (like all of the streamers did and hit 385 before Wrath of the Machine), and also allowed those same players with those resources to start Wrath of the Machine being 5 Levels over the hardest encounter. Not that those guys wouldn't have beat it in similar times, because they are arguably some of the best Destiny players there are, but it honestly made the World's First race a lot easier than it should/could have been. Now, how they could have fixed that issue I'm not sure, as capping Factions at 375 would be awful now after the fact, as it is one of the primary ways to Level up past 365. But I'm sure that there was a better solution to that problem than what we ended up with.

@hestilllives19: My other character is level 9 and being the gamer I am I do not do any crucible, well, anything. That's ok. I get that being a semi regular player with only one character has it's disadvantages but I would have liked it if they took a more adaptive approach to difficulty based on your content and light level.

A little update. I've now completed the raid multiple times on my titan, hunter and warlock, and it's by far the best raid in Destiny. It hits the sweet spot between length and difficulty, while also having a ton of cool little secrets, like the monitors. The fact that every chest is exotic is also a very player friendly move, so go on Bungie. Can't wait till hard mode drops later this month, and hopefully challenge mode somewhere down the line. I've completed around 75% of the challenge book, and it's a very neat way to reward people for playing the game. I've gotten the much talked-about Outbreak Prime, and it is a very good weapon with a fun quest associated. Trials of Osiris was on this weekend, and was as hectic and fun as ever, with better and more drops. The same will be true for Iron Banner whenever that drops (possibly tomorrow). In short, it's a buy.

Edit: Titan is 385, Hunter is 380 and Warlock is 380. Pro tip: Get good gear with your main character (in this case my titan) and transfer whatever you don't use to your secondary characters.

@mordukai: Gotcha, yeah, you have to hit level 40 before you can acquire Legendary Marks on your other characters. Did you already use your Spark of Light? You could use that on your 2nd character to boost him to Level 40 with 280 gear. It would help with with Legendary Mark accumulation some, giving you access to an easy 15 extra Marks per day. I think they are kind of fine on progression honestly, it's just a semi hard to understand system for casual players to get sometimes. For reference if you didn't know, all of the Heroic strikes from the director map, at 320, also drop 365 capable gear, so you could, above 320 find the fastest to complete Strike and just grind that over and over until you hit 365 with Rare drops. Just in case you were unaware. It shouldn't take that much effort to hit the 350 mark just from starting at a brand new Spark of Light player at 280. You just have to know how to Level correctly, which on your own is hard to understand and a bit convoluted. I updated my guide as of today, so you should check it out if you haven't already. It should help you out a lot and give you an idea of what is best worth your time to spend doing right now. I could probably Level my Xbox character who is at 319 to 350 in under 3 hours of gameplay. Just saying, it's not that bad right now to hit 350. The grind from 350-365, is another story altogether though, as the changes they made to that area of progression are terrible and should be revoked in my opinion.

@hestilllives19: Have Thorn already, so it doesn't matter to me. I am one of the few people (if not the only one) that really liked that gun in vanilla, when it still had the slowest reload speed in the game and only 6 rounds in the mag. Unlike everyone else yet again, I also use it in PvE. It's just a really fun weapon to use.

@bojackhorseman: Iron Banner is confirmed for tomorrow and Challenge Mode has been confirmed as well, though no release date.

@hestilllives19: A lot of things should be revoked, like their way of designing boss battles for example. I just hope for the second game they will take a of lessons from this one. but oh well. I am really only playing this to kill time before Space Hulk: Deathwing comes out. I have a feeling once that game comes out, Destiny won't get much play after.

I should also add that I was coming back after almost a year gone so I had a lot of ground to cover. If it wasn't for a friend of mine who picked it up specifically to play with me I would have probably dropped out again by now.

Thanks for the tips, btw. They are always welcome.

Overall I've enjoyed the content in Rise of Iron. Most of the content is great, though I am super interested to see what the hard mode raid looks like. At this point my biggest gripe has to be with the weapon balancing and it has been since the taken king.

I'm not sure what year 3 looks like from now till whenever Destiny 2 comes out, but they need to do more than they did with year 2 (which was next to nothing). I am really hoping they get their content pipeline stuff sorted for Destiny 2

@mordukai: Completely agree on the boss battles. Having an instakill melee for literally every boss if you get within 10ft is super lame. Though I feel like the guys that actually know what they are doing are on the Raid teams, as those are pretty fantastic compared to the rest of the game. The story missions and Strikes seem to be thrown together by their less experienced guys, although Strikes have been getting better and better since House of Wolves in my opinion, outside of the April Update Strike, that thing is pretty abysmal. I just watched the trailer for Space Hulk: Deathwing, that actually looks really good. Looks like what I would want out of a Doom style shooter. I think I stay too tuned into Destiny news sometimes, I hadn't even heard of that game before.

@veggiesbro: This is my single biggest fear as well. I feel like The Taken King held out until about November last year before it started becoming far too long in the tooth. I don't think Rise of Iron will even make it that long. They desperately need something early next year, and I'm afraid all we are going to get in Y3 is a Halloween Event, SRL in December that is larger but still a joke, Crimson Days at Valentines, and Remade Vault of Glass and Crota's End for the April Update. If that is the Y3 Destiny plan, I'll probably stop playing as well. Bungie/Activision can't seriously expect that to suffice for content this year... again... right?

@hestilllives19: They've talked about doing SRL and other events again. Nothing on additional content so I wouldn't count on it or even hope for anything more than what you said. They're putting all their eggs in the Destiny 2 basket

@pyrodactyl@hestilllives19: I am hopeful for more, but like Pyro I am not expecting anything significant beyond the dumb events they had last year. Which to be honest were mediocre at best. Time will tell, I guess

@hestilllives19: I'm pretty sure they are giving up on Destiny aside from an obligation to put something out there. Which will be exactly what you said, if not less than that. If they are going to increase challenge of older content I honestly see it being just Vault of Glass. They'll make a thing about 'ending where they started' or some shit like that. They are rehashing old shit already.

I really hope they have a better plan for Destiny 2. I very much dislike Exotics being left behind in light level, only to return where you have to get the new version. They are literally doing remasters of content within their own game. They should either leave Exotics behind (for good reason), or let you keep using them. Not this dumb rehash mentality to get people to grind again for the shit they already obtained.

@zevvion: I don't know. I love the mentality they had at first with Suros Regime. A reimagining of what they originally intended the gun to be. But, that just didn't hold true for more than a few select weapons. If they do what they are doing, they need to lean hard into THAT mentality. To rediscover a gun as new with slightly new perks and a redesigned look. Use that as an opportunity to "fix" those weapons and balance them appropriately, making both positive and negative changes, but overall changes that make stuff more fun to use. But taking the lazy way out, like they mostly did, I agree is not cool.

@hestilllives19: My issues with bosses is more in the design of the battle itself. Just relies too much on adds. The real problem has to do with Bungie's stance with what is "hard" or what makes a fight difficult in Destiny. I get that they are there for ammo replenishment but it's more of a side effect from them making bosses into bullet sponge version of regular enemies. I think the only boss I actually enjoyed was the one Vex boss where you have to more the orb so you can actually hurt it. That is one that actually relies on team work in order to achieve the goal, but again there's adds cause I guess whom ever was responsible for designing the bosses is really liking that feature.

I really hope going forward that Bungie will drop that philosophy.

I'm 100% sure the adds aren't there to refill your ammo. Jeff is just wrong about that completely. First, you gain ammo if you don't have any automatically. Second, it's pretty apparent from the design and subsequent patches, including patch notes that adds are there for the challenge and to promote teamwork. A boss without adds is fine by me, but they'd have to build mechanics to make it challenging as no current boss poses a real challenge without adds. And I dare bet very few people here can actually think of a well balanced boss without adds that would be a challenge too.

@hestilllives19 Yes, Suros REGIME was a very well handled return of an old Exotic, I admit. Though that is the only gun that received that treatment. Dragon's Breath gained a reworked ability that was indeed cool, but no visual make over. That is about it as far as I can tell. Most Exotic armor from Vanilla was changed, though only with slightly added abilities. In my opinion, Suros REGIME was the absolute bare acceptable minimum where I'd have no real complaints. And it was the only weapon they did it for.

At the moment I kind of feel stuck in the 330's for light. I'm at 339 right now but everything in the 320 strikes kind of plateaus at 340. Got my Gjallarhorn as well. The wall of 350 light for getting any legendary marks (pve-wise) is really frustrating.

If I'm probably not going to be able to play the raid (for a a couple of reasons), is this still worth the money? I still have no idea what to think of Rise of Iron....

@zevvion: @mordukai: I think they are doing the right things as far as that goes for Strikes. More Septik's Perfected type battles is definitely welcomed in that regard and I think Wretched Eye was pretty good as well. I only played the new Phoegoth Strike once and we burned him so fast I didn't see if there were or were not mechanics in that or not, it kind of didn't matter. I don't think controlling ads is a problem in Boss fights, it's more about using them effectively. Look at pretty much every Boss Raid encounter. They are easily the top encounters in the game from their respective DLC's. All of those follow the kind of principles you are talking about, it's just those kind of fights in Destiny are reserved for that space, not Strikes. This is primarily why when people talk about Destiny's Raids they talk so favorably. They are an extremely well made series of Boss encounters that generally require 6 people to complete. It's pretty obvious they could do better for Strikes, but to an extent, I don't think they want to because they don't want the new Strike overshadowing the big encounters they build for the Raids.

@colonel_pockets: The Raids are the best part of any Destiny DLC. If you cannot complete them it obviously puts a damper to the value you are getting back on Destiny content. If the same holds true for all group activities like Trials then Destiny 1 might not be the game for you. Hopefully Destiny 2 will do a better job of being able to be a single player game, but Destiny 1 just isn't really that game. I hate that for players like that, but it's kind of where Destiny is. If you don't play Coop, it's a great shooting game that doesn't do much more than that. But as a Coop game and PvP game, in my opinion at least, it's still the best out there at the moment.

@hestilllives19: Yeah, I really like Destiny. I just don't have the time to invest for the raid. I liked running through the story and strikes to level up because it's a great podcast game. Another aspect of it is that I don't know anyone that plays on Xbox One. It sucks, but I guess I'll pass on this one. I bought TTK, but probably only played half of the activities due to not being able to find a group to play with. Destiny 2 needs to find a way for players to group up in the tower or something. It's so close to being incredible.

@colonel_pockets: Yeah, I agree. They did put a Clan Roster in game, which helps, so you should check out the Xbox One side of our clan that I'm trying to push all of the Xbox guys over to here. Right now there are only 12 guys there but they all joined within the past week so they should be pretty active in Destiny. Hopefully that can be a place, finally, for Xbox players here at Giantbomb to get together for Destiny because this community is pretty PS4 focused for the most part. When things start to dry up I might jump on my Xbox character more, but right now he's only 319 compared to my 3 384's on PS4.

Edit: There are also still 10 guys in the PS4 clan that need to move over, so if all of them did that brings it up to 22 guys, which is a pretty solid start to a clan.

@hestilllives19: Thanks, I just joined the clan. Hopefully we can get something going.

I bought this expansion against my better judgement and have already blazed through the "story missions," most of which took place in a slightly reskinned addition to a map I've already explored thoroughly, fighting against slightly reskinned enemies who I'm pretty sure didn't behave any differently from their regular counterparts. It's definitely a stopgap, to say the least. At least the shooting is still Destiny, right? And I'm glad that all my gear that I got when I played a decent amount of Taken King still can be infused, so I can run around with the Sleeper Simulant or Plan C for a little while longer.

I figure the only way I'm going to get anywhere near my money's worth for this expansion is to try and grind my Hunter (currently around 330 light) for the raid. I guess that means I'll actually have to try and play Destiny with other humans in a coordinated effort too, so I guess I'll check and see what Giant Bomb clans are still operating. I'm pretty busy this week, but I imagine the die-hards will still be playing by the time I get to 370 light.

@zevvion: I don't know what Jeff has said because in all honesty, I haven't listened to the bombcast since 2012, but by your comment I'm sure he said pretty much the same thing. Now, I did not say don't use adds, but if you made your mind up to use then at least find a smart way of using them instead of just throwing waves of enemies at you because that's what bungie decided "challenging" is. I will admit that I have not done a single raid. It looks interesting but the lack of people of my list who actively play Destiny mixed in with my utter distain for random players (yes I know not all are bad) has kept me from even wanting to try one out.

Back to my point. As far as strikes and the main game, it's clear to me bungie settled on a certain design philosophy that to me doesn't come off as very creative. Yes, it's easy to say and critique it from the outside, but bad design is just is, bad design.

Making bosses bullet sponges coupled with the rinse and repeat nature of adds every time you take a third of the health down just makes boss encounters boring and not something I look forward to.

I am guessing that the troubled development this game had was a major factor. I just hope that for the next game bungie will get those creative juices going.

@mordukai: I don't think I agree bullet sponge bosses are bad design. This is an MMO shooter, at least the set up and design is such. Having bosses that take the same amount of damage as normal enemies is not fun. The grind for gear and light level approves damage potential to be a valid approach of design I think. Having bosses being entirely dependent on mechanics, thus removing the 'bullet sponge' nature of them, is also not a good approach as we've seen in the King's Fall Raid. It was cool at first for it's unique nature, but Oryx has quickly become the most boring and hated boss to fight because you can't damage him yourself and are completely constrained by mechanics (not just my opinion, this one is shared across the community).

Perhaps this game is less so a full on shooter than some people might expect. It does have significant MMO design and that is actually a lot of fun in Raids and when playing with people you know. I have used DestinyLFG for years and still use it from time to time. The reason I created a clan was precisely because you are correct about it: random people can spoil a lot of the fun. A lot of them are impatient and unkind. Even more are the biggest complainers while lacking the most skill out of anyone, a bunch of them are just real assholes and some of them are actually racist dicks. I have also met my fair share of fantastic human beings on there though. Just last night I grouped up with a guy for Trials, which is the sweatiest of PvP sweat game modes, and when things went wrong, no blame was ever thrown in a negative way. Everyone remained calm and relaxed and talked about fun stuff. We also ended up going flawless, but that was after a couple of failed attempts. Unfortunately, guys like that are not often found.

I've surrounded myself exclusively with good natured people through my clan. It actually consists of 95% Giant Bomb forum goers. Which also means that because you definitely need to see the Raiding experience, you should join us for one sometime. Everyone is totally relaxed in our group and I think you'd enjoy the experience.

@zevvion: Yeah LFG is crazy. Some of the guys I play with the most came from LFG for Trials. But I did a lot of LFG Trials for awhile and that was NOT the norm. Sometimes, like what happened to me the last couple weeks ago, guys are awesome on a clean Lighthouse run and so you add them. Then you play the next week with a friend you play with often as the third, and when they make a mistake and are corrected politely, they go on a tirade about how they won't take advice from a scrub (my friend who was far outperforming them BTW) because he has a slightly lower overall K/D in Trials (even though his win % and Elo was higher than the guy's). It was so bad I had to kick him from the group and remove him from my friends list after the game in the middle of a Trials run. My best experiences though have been the two or three times I've done this... we demolish a team, but they have one or two good players, or in one case a player dropped and they still held their own. I sent kind messages after the win, and after talking to the guys ended up doing a Trials run with 2 of them later that night. Two of the times I've done this we went directly to the Lighthouse and those guys ended up on my friends list. One of them was taking a LH virgin there. That's a great feeling, especially with Y2-3 Trials matchmaking setup. One of those times we beat a couple top tier streaming player teams in a row, which was fantastic. We 5-0'd PokeTheCareBear (got a sick point blank no scope on him, one of my favorite clips), scrapped together a win vs. QCRalphRoseQC, and beat a small time streamer named Jefferey6985 rather handily. Generally I prefer to play with GB guys though, I just wish there were more of us that were at that level that were into Trials, because I usually get my flawless, but it can be a royal pain some weeks. Even this week, which went relatively smooth had one night where I had 3 8-1 runs in a row. Just how it goes sometimes. And when you are doing that with LFG guys, it usually takes a turn for the worse.

@zevvion: Cool. I might take you up on your offer next time you do a raid fest. Though I am only 352 and won't be able to do those high level raids.

I'm actually setting up a Raid for people from my clan who haven't done Vault of Glass yet (the first one). We'll be overleveled for it, but it will still be fun. Interested in that one? I will explain every encounter though.