This week i dove back into destiny. I hadn't played it in months and wanted to give it another go. when i left off, i had a level 28 titan and a level 26 hunter and maybe a half dozen exotics between the 2 characters. First thing i realized was the reason i stopped playing all my gear for my level 28 titan required upgrade materials that i hadn't wanted to grind for. Seeing Relic Iron was needed for several items, i headed to mars to do the old relic iron loop. After about 30-45 minutes of running that loop i had enough to bump up a few upgrades and then for the first time ever, i got an exotic bounty (Depleted Hand Cannon). Proceeded i started to tackle daily missions to grind out requirements for that exotic bointy and now i reach the 3rd tier of that challenge. it involves killing guardians in the crucible with void damage weapons. Great. Now the problems come in because all my void damage weapons i have are special weapons. Wouldn't be a problem but from what i understand they recently nerfed the amount of special ammo that spawns on the map to be more in line with Heavy weapon ammo spawns. This is gonna take forever and to top it off, i lose progress toward the number of kills each time i die. So what else can i focus on while i work toward crucible kills? Well my exotics require exotic shards to hit their final upgrade tier so i had to look up how to get those. Great i can only get those from Xur on the weekend for 7 strange coins. I need 2 shards and only have 8 coins, guess i can go grind for more strange coins in the weekly strike. Oh, it's DLC only this week guess i can't do that without paying $20-35 more on this game i'm already disappointed with. Sigh...

In a lot of ways i really like destiny. i think it's beautiful to look at, the shooting is solid, even the loot and character skill mechanics are a good idea even if they're poorly implemented. The thing i can't overlook and still can't get past to this day, is how punishing of a grind the game is with very little reward. It comes off as the worst kind of Free to play grinding mechanics crammed into a retail game that i paid $60 for and then later i'm being expected to give them more money to continue down this shitty treadmill.

I bought the digital version so there's no getting rid of Destiny for me but i find it interesting to check in on it to see where it goes from here every once in a while. Could have been a great game but was hampered by some really poor design choices.

Upgrading would reset your progress wait until the DLC hits next week it'll save you having to upgrading the same items again. Oxymoron complaining about grinding in Destiny HoW will make the experience more rewarding and easier but Destiny will always be a grind fest.

I think HoW from the previews at least shows that destiny is moving the right direction on the time invested to reward ratio

There are definitely two seemingly bottomless grinding pits in this game. The one between level 20-24/25, and level 30-32. They exist for different reasons. The former is because to have a higher chance of getting light equipped armour you need to complete higher level content that you're locked out of. The latter is because the Crota economy forces grinding for a very specific set of stuff that takes a while to accumulate. Both poor design decisions.

I had more fun with the Crota stuff since I was playing with friends once a week and I'm a fairly happy level 32 who took a break for a month before HoW releases, but I remember getting a little bored at level 20-22 being stuck waiting for luck to nudge me upward. I'm pretty sure I was level 21 for a while and then suddenly bumped to level 24, which set me up for the future. Not a well designed progression scheme.

It seriously blows my mind that people are going to flock back to this game for the smallest bump in content, there is literally so little to do I don't understand how anyone can stand to still be playing it. I got my money out of it had some fun and had to move on due to a complete lack of anything to do but play the same shitty "Press X to proceed" missions over and over since the crucible is a one hit kill fest. The expansion has one strike, a few weapons, a few MP maps, a horde mode, and...a way to upgrade the pointless gear you grind to level up for no reason.

Seriously how in the hell have you not gone insane if you have been playing this since launch? How many times can you repeat such a small amount of vapid pointless missions, after playing Halo 1-4 on coop again and seeing how great it was to play something with an actual story and Real set pieces it seriously depresses me that so many people are sending the message that there is enough to do in this game to play it for that long and Buy JUST a LITTLE BIT MORE, ONE MORE BUMP MAN WHOO!

That crucible part of the Thorn bounty was a pain in the ass. It made me play the crucible in ways I wasn't entirely proud of.

My solution was to stop playing Crucible because it's a broken piece of shit.