There is understandably some confusion around optimal leveling and other information around Destiny 2. This thread attempts to guide and expose the systems.

Curse of Osiris Changes

Curse of Osiris raises the character level cap to 25 from 20. This does nothing at all. You still earn Bright Engrams (renamed Illuminated Engrams) during this 5 level progress however. The Power Level is raised by 30, from 300 to 330. With mods you can reach 335.

It is unknown where the softcap lies exactly. It is somewhere at 310 - 320. Meaning you will not gain more Powerful gear beyond this, except from Powerful Rewards which are granted by Weekly Milestones, Raid drops and Trials drops. Both the new Raid Lair and the regular Calus Raid are viable for increasing in Power Level. You do not need to run the Lair to increase in Power, though you do have two Raids a week now on each character as opportunities to get better drops.

Locked Content

There is a lot of misinformation going around what content is no longer available to you if you did not purchase Curse of Osiris. Prestige activities have been brought up in Power Requirement, making them unavailable if you do not own the DLC. Similarly, any playlist that features content exclusive to Curse of Osiris is also locked.

As a result, the following is locked to non-Curse of Osiris owners which was previously available:

• Prestige Nightfall (Power Requirement above Vanilla)
• Prestige Calus Raid (Power Requirement above Vanilla)
• Trials of the Nine (Features Curse of Osiris multiplayer maps)

These issues can be solved by Bungie merely creating more playlists, such as a Vanilla Heroic Strike playlist, Vanilla Prestige Nightfall and Vanilla Prestige Calus Raid. Trials of the Nine can be changed by being unavailable if a Curse of Osiris map is currently in rotation, instead of being unavailable all the time. No word from Bungie so far.

Quality of Life Changes

On November 29th, Bungie addressed the community on what was next for Destiny beyond the upcoming expansion. In this they detailed several quality of life changes. Notably, you are able to purchase armor directly off almost all vendors with Tokens and Legendary Shards, and rewards for a lot of activities have increased. Armor from Factions, Raids and Trials will once again have Ornaments to earn as they did in D1. These are earned by completing a task, such as winning 25 matches in Crucible.

The only significant change seems to be the introduction of Masterworks. A Masterwork is an 'ascended' Legendary weapon that outperforms its regular counterpart slightly in one area such as increased reload speed and gives it some additional utility such as generating Orbs of Light on multikills. It will also surface how many enemies you have slain with this weapon. Masterworks drop from the Raid and Trials often, though they can drop from any source with a very small chance. Dismantling a Masterwork will allow you to upgrade any Legendary weapon of your choosing into a Masterwork. Seemingly, you'd want to upgrade your favorite weapons first and any others should take longer to get there.

Character Level and Power Level. How does it work?

Character Level

Character Level refers to your character's level attained through earning XP. The cap is Level 20. You unlock one Upgrade Point for each level you attain. Other than this, it merely exists to give you a sense of progression during the campaign. It doesn't affect anything else and is more of a throwaway number you can see going up steadily when you play for the first time.

You will automatically be boosted to Level 20 upon completing the final mission of the campaign. For any secondary tertiary characters, it is optimal to skip as much as possible and gain the ~5 Levels for 'free'.

Power Level

In Destiny 1 this was called 'Light'. It is a level assigned to each piece of gear you use. Your total Power is a value that is used to determine your Power Level. Depending on your Power Level you will take less damage from enemy attacks and deal more damage to enemies. Individual gear Power does not matter for this, only your total Power affects damage dealt and taken. For example, if you have a 200 Power Scout Rifle and your total Power is 250, you will deal equal damage as when your Scout Rifle is Power 300 and your total Power is 250.

Recommended Power Level

The amount of damage you deal and take goes up relatively up to 20 Power Level beyond the Recommended Power Level. For example, if the Raid has a Recommended Power Level of 270, you will deal more damage and receive less for each Power Level you are beyond 270, up to a maximum of 290. Anything past 290 does not matter, a 290 and a 330 will deal and receive identical damage in this case. Though anything below 270 does decrease your damage dealt and taken based on the difference relative to the Recommended Power Level, theoretically all the way down to 1 Power, though you would not have access to the activity if you were that low level.

Power drops

All gear you obtain up to 260 Power, will drop at a higher Power value than your current total possible Power. There are several things to take away from this: first, you don't need to have your highest Power gear equipped. You can have it in your inventory or even your vault. The game calculates what your highest possible Power is and bases loot drops off that. Secondly, if your total possible Power is 200 and your Kinetic weapon is currently 210, any non-exotic, non-quest, non-Luminous (explained later) kinetic drops you get will still be around ~201-206 because your total Power is 200.

This also means you can play any activity in the game until you are 260 and not worry about anything. Just play the campaign, do some patrol things, Lost Sectors, anything you want really. After 260 is when the systems become a little more complex.

Leveling Up

The Power leveling system has both a soft and hard cap. The soft cap starts when you reach 260, all Rare (blue) gear you obtain will be max 260. All Legendary (purple) gear you obtain will be max 265. Exotics (golden) gear doesn't adhere to this cap per se and can drop anywhere from your current max Power to ~10 points higher than that. But Exotics are not the only way to level past 260.

There are various weekly activities that have uncapped rewards known and marked in the game as Powerful Gear. These drop similarly like how you received drops before you reached 260: they are higher than your current max possible Power, except these can drop at even higher Power levels up to 10 points higher. The sources of Powerful Gear are:

• Nightfall
• Flashpoint
• Call to Arms
• Clan XP Contribution
• Raid drops (drops only, not the vendor gear)
• Trials of the Nine rewards at 3, 5, 7 wins and flawless
• Quest rewards (once per character)
• Decrypting Exotic engrams
• Cayde-6's loot chests (chance)

The Nightfall (extra challenging timed Strike), Flashpoint (Public Events on a specific location) and Call to Arms (defeating opponents and earning medals in the Crucible) all reward a Luminous Engram. This is basically two drops which are often Legendary but can be Exotic.

Once you have checked everything off this list, you'll either have to try your luck with Public Events or Crucible matches to get Exotic drops, otherwise you'll have to wait for next week to level further. It is for this reason that if your goal is to level as high as possible as fast as possible, you shouldn't do any of the above activities until you are nearly or at 260 Power. Before 260, anything will drop higher than your current Power level anyway, so you are 'wasting' the opportunity to get something above 260 once you reach it. That said, all of the above refreshes and resets weekly on Tuesday, so if it is Monday and you're 230, you might as well do as much on the list as you can before the next day. If you do not intend to level as fast as possible, you can disregard that advice.

As your maximum Power increases beyond 260, the soft cap will also go up. It levels dynamically as you level up further, staying approximately 5-10 levels below your current max possible Power. For example, if you are 290 Power, Rares will now drop around 280 instead of 260. You can ask what the purpose of this is and the answer would be infusion. If you have a rocket launcher that you really like using, you need another rocket launcher with higher Power to infuse into it so you can keep using it. Waiting to get lucky with a Powerful Reward that happens to be a rocket launcher so you can infuse it into the one you have is an ordeal that would realistically take weeks, since the supply of Powerful Rewards is only so much each week. So getting higher level drops from other sources will help a great deal in infusing the stuff you like to use without being completely dependent on weekly Powerful Rewards.

Gearing Up

As previously established, your character level is unimportant, Power Level only matters up to the point of the Recommended Power Level of the activity you want to do, but proper gear is very important and impacts your ability to be effective tremendously. You should of course always use gear and adopt a playstyle you feel comfortable with. That said, some things are just better than others. For the purposes of completing (Prestige) Nightfalls and Raids, you need proper gear to tackle those challenges. The last thing you want is to be dependent on your teammates and have them carry you through the activity while you hardly contribute. I've been in this position before a long time ago and it feels bad. On the flipside, holding your own or even pulling other people through feels great, so that's where you want to be and that requires some understanding of gear.

Proper gear can be broken down into three roles. Essentially you want gear that 1) allows you to clear a lot of adds efficiently and quickly, 2) be able to solo lieutenants (orange health bar enemies) and majors (yellow health bar enemies) and 3) deal good DPS when needed to a boss.

DPS

Dealing a lot of damage fast is great and/or essential for (Prestige) Nightfall and Raid bosses. During most tests conducted by the community, it appears that so far there are certain weapons that excel at this role. As a general rule of thumb, Power Weapons will always deal far superior damage to Kinetic and Energy weapons so you want to rely on those for DPS most. That said, sometimes you need more damage, so Kinetic and Energy can still be useful.

Both Kinetic and Energy weapons that deal the highest DPS seem to be Auto-Rifles. They deal so much sustained damage that it is basically 'any Auto-Rifle' that supports this, though some are better than others and the two that stands out the most are Sweet Business and Coldheart (essentially an Auto-Rifle). Sweet Business seems to be on top in this category according to most tests, though Coldheart is close behind it. Most Legendary Auto-Rifles that have high impact are also good at this however.

For Power Weapons, the answer is a bit more complex. In most tests, rocket launchers with the Cluster Bomb perk, specifically Sins of the Past, seem to deal the highest DPS ifall/most of the clusters hit the intended target. These can randomly miss however, and while it can be mitigated some by aiming in sweet spots it is not completely foolproof. This leads to these rocket launchers being both the best and most unreliable, which is interesting. A risky, but strong choice depending on the encounter. Because of this, stationary targets are best suited for this. // Sins of the Past: obtained from Leviathan Raid // Curtain Call: obtained from Zavala's packages.

In most tests, Hawthornes Field Forged Shotgun comes in second place. It being a shotgun means you have to be up close to use it effectively. Any sort of range between you and the target drastically reduces its DPS to the point of being useless. Therefor, Hawthornes is best used on targets without massive close range AoE's which bosses usually have. There are some boss-fights where this weapon shines however, which is why it is mentioned here. // Obtained from: Completing the campaign and speaking with Hawthorne.

Yet again in most tests, swords seem to be the third best weapon for dealing DPS, specifically It Stared Back for its damage increasing perk. To be clear, you use the R2 with such a weapon to deal optimal DPS. Due to the close range nature of swords, you once again do not want the target to have massive close range AoE. Very similar to Hawthornes in this regard, except it deals less damage quickly but more over a longer period of time. // Obtained from: Leviathan Raid.

For most boss fights, Merciless is usually not the most optimal weapon in terms of DPS, yet it deals enough to make it useful, while also being very versatile. It can be used outside of close AoE range or up close and personal. It doesn't require precision hits either making it easier to put the max possible damage on a target. All these qualities make it a strong choice in most situations. It won't allow you to kill certain bosses as fast as a Cluster Bomb rocket launcher, but it will get the job done reliably more often than not. // Obtained from: Exotic Engrams.

Lastly worthy of mention are Linear Fusion Rifles. They require critical hits to be effective at dealing DPS, but if you manage to lock them in, they excel at dealing high damage even from long range. They fire slow but deal massive damage, meaning any shot you miss or doesn't critically hit drastically reduces your potential DPS. Due to the precision requirement they are best used on stationary targets with clearly visible and easy to hit critical spots. // Obtained from completing the Quest chain on Io; Packages from Io vendor.

Lieutenant and Major Clearing

Imagine this part just read 'The Wardcliff Coil'. That pretty much would have summed it up.

The Wardcliff Coil is best at this role because it deals high damage to these types of enemies (often requiring one shot to kill them), while simultaneously allowing you to be jumping around dodging attacks or hiding behind cover and popping out quickly to annihilate something without having to be hyper-accurate. The Wardcliff Coil gets the job done no matter how much you're getting flinched by enemy attacks, no matter if you don't have the time to be very accurate and no matter if you're currently airborne racing at max speed. Its consistency makes it even better than its raw damage output to these types of enemies. // Obtained from: Exotic Engrams.

That said, other weapons fill this role nicely as well. Mostly Merciless, Hawthornes Field Forged Shotgun, It Stared Back or Cluster Bomb rocket launchers. Depending on the type of enemy you are intending to kill and assuming The Wardcliff Coil is not an option you have or want, Merciless probably wins this out due to not being restricted to very close range and being more consistent than rocket launchers.

Add Clearing

The thing you will be doing most of the time should fit your playstyle. But there are certain thing to know here. Almost any weapon type can be used for this job, but not every individual weapon in a certain class is worth using as their effectiveness varies wildly based on their stats and perks. It is a very long discussion to have where we'd have to look at impact, stability, range and all the different statistics. But that discussion isn't worth having if you're the type of person just looking for some tips, so I'll just try to be as simple as possible.

Clearing adds fast is necessarily in most endgame activities to secure your survival. Keeping it very simple, you want as high impact on your weapon as possible, since that directly affects the amount of damage it deals. More damage is faster dying adds. It can make the difference on Hand Cannons for instance, between a single shot to the head or up to three shots to the head to kill something. All statistics are important, you want stability to be able to hit consistently, you want reload speed so you are 'out' of the fight less and so on and so forth. But impact is one that should never be compromised on, at least not in PvE.

There are also some perks that drastically increase your effectiveness. Explosive Payload (as well as Timed Payload) makes your weapon deal AoE damage, stagger the enemy hit (making them miss or not attack you) and have less damage falloff at range. These are three massive bonuses that make Explosive Payload currently so strong in PvE that pretty much everyone uses it. High Caliber Rounds are also good, staggering your enemy a bit more consistently than Explosive Payload does, but it doesn't have the other two bonuses.

Dragonfly is another perk that increases your effectiveness, making enemies explode upon death when killed by a precision hit. This will stagger nearby enemies (again, rendering them unable to attack you for a second) and deal damage to them. The use case for this is greater than it seems at first. To give an example, in the Raid I hold one door that spawns adds consistently by myself. When switching from a weapon with Dragonfly to one that doesn't have it, I cannot hold the door anymore by myself without the adds cycling to other parts of the space. Proccing Dragonfly makes them stay in that doorway in place long enough for me to kill another enemy which then recycles that effect until I have killed them all, while rendering them unable to move out.

Weapon Tips

Which brings me to recommending some weapons that are effective. Note I am not going to write all the weapons down, these are just some weapons that we know are effective through using them ourselves, seeing streamers use them, compare their effectiveness and having them be discussed at length on top of that.

The easiest recommendation to make after taking the previous paragraph into account is Sunshot. As explained both Explosive Payload and Dragonfly are some of the most useful perks in PvE. Sunshot not only has both of them, it has a strictly better version of Dragonfly, which procs even on non-precision kills and has increased damage and blast radius of those exploding. It is truly a very powerful weapon.

Nameless Midnight is a good Kinetic Scout Rifle with Explosive Payload making it good at range and at giving you breathing room (obtained from Zavala's packages or as a reward from him after completing two Strikes). The same can be said for the Manannan SR4 Scout Rifle (obtained from Banshee-44's packages) except in the Energy slot. Better Devils is essentially similar to Nameless Midnight in this regard except it is a Hand Cannon if you prefer this weapon class (obtained from Shaxx's packages). You can't really go wrong with its Future War Cult variation: True Prophecy either. Taking perks into account, Tone Patrol is also easy to recommend as it has both High Caliber Rounds and Dragonfly and is a good archetype for Scout Rifles in terms of stats on top of that (obtained from Banshee-44's packages). Similar to the previous weapons, there is also a Hand Cannon worth recommending that has the same perks, High Caliber Rounds and Dragonfly, and that is Imset HC4 (obtained from Banshee-44's packages). It has less range and slightly less impact than most viable Hand Cannons do, but the combination of its perks do make it stand out nevertheless. Finally, most Auto-Rifles seem to do reasonable as an entire weapon class, but Uriel's Gift seems to stick out above the others by a hair. It has High Caliber Rounds, making it effective at staggering where the other Auto's generally do not (obtained from Failsafe's packages).

Pretty much all the Raid weapons are at least decent for their Ambitious Assassin perk. Specifically the rocket launcher, Sins of the Past is worth chasing because of this. It has Cluster Bomb for bosses, but it can be switched to Ambitious Assassin, giving it 2 rockets in the magazine after a kill. It also has Auto-Loading Holster, giving it the versatility to be used and swapped without much worry.

That is all the weapons I am naming now, but keep in mind there are a lot more weapons that are viable options.

Armor Tips

There are three stats found on armor:

• Resilience - Increases your maximum health
• Recovery - Reduces the delay for your health and shields to recharge
• Mobility - Increases movement (not sprint) speed, jump (not ability jump) height, sneaking speed and slide distance

Based on your playstyle, the activity you are doing or the class you play as, you may want to focus on different stats. Though all classes can invest in all stats, Titans can get higher Resilience, Warlocks can get higher Recovery and Hunters can get higher Mobility. Each armor piece has one inherent stat that cannot be changed and one option between two. For example, you can get armor with Resilience and a choice between Recovery or more Resilience. Each stat perk increases that stat by +1. Titans can max out their Resilience to 10, where Warlocks can only get that to 9, but they can get Recovery at 10 and so on.

In addition to this, armor can be outfitted with a mod that boosts its stats in a certain area. The current available mods for armor are:

• Grenade Mod - Reduces the grenade cooldown by 9%
• Melee Mod - Reduces the melee cooldown by 9%
• Class Mod - Reduces your class ability (barricade, rift or dodge respectively for each class) by 9%
• Kinetic Reload Mod - Reduces reload speed of your kinetic weapon by 12%
• Power Reload Mod- Reduces reload speed of your power weapon by 9%
• Kinetic Counterbalance Mod - Changes recoil direction on your kinetic weapon to be more vertical
• Energy Counterbalance Mod - Changes recoil direction on your energy weapon to be more vertical
• Energy Handling Mod - Increases handling on the energy weapon by 15%
• Power Handling Mod - Increases handling on the power weapon by 15%
• Resilience Mod - Increases Resilience by 1.
• Recovery Mod - Increases Recovery by 1.
• Mobility Mod - Increases Mobility by 1.

All these mods can stack, meaning you can equip two grenade mods for a 18% cooldown reduction on your grenade.

Resilience adds around 2 health with each stat. For reference, 0 Resilience gives you 186 health whereas 10 Resilience nets you 201 health. The difference between one additional Resilience is not noticeable in regular play, but the more it stacks, the more it makes a difference. This goes for all the stats: Recovery decreases the time to regenerate your health by 0.3 seconds with each stat meaning 0 and 10 Recovery have a regeneration delay difference of 3 seconds (which is very noticeable). The same works for Mobility, incrementally increasing movement speed and slide distance with each stat that matter more in large stat additions.

Not all mods can be socketed in each armor slot. They take specific slots. Below is a graph that shows which mod goes where, so you can decide which one you want to chase for each of your armor sets. Note that the Mark is the Titan class item, Cloak is Hunter's class item and Bond Warlock's. This means that each class can get additional benefits the others can't. For example, Titans can spec for more Resilience and reload speed whereas Warlocks can spec for more Recovery and weapon handling. Strangely, Titans can also get further decreased class ability cooldown for Striker, Warlocks for Dawnblade and Hunters for Nightstalker, but not any other subclasses.

Last Few Tips

Destiny 2 actually has a very complex 'under the hood' thing going on, which people are always trying to figure out. It would take too long to list all of it, but here are some things you might want to know.

Leaving Power Weapons out of the equation, Kinetic weapons get a boost to precision damage dealt, while Energy weapons get a boost to damage dealt to shields. Any Energy weapon rapidly deplete shields of any element, though matching elements (for example a Void damage weapon to a Void shield) depletes it the fastest. Using matching elements will also detonate the shield once depleted, causing damage to nearby enemies and staggering them.

In the Crucible, Energy weapons deal increased damage to opponents who are in their Super.

Supers in PvE are best used for killing adds and generating Orbs of Light. Your teammates can gain Super energy by picking up the Orbs you have created. If you time things right, you can chain Supers together often getting your Super back very quickly. Supers deal respectable damage on bosses, but it often isn't worth the effort as it generates 0 Orbs of Light so everyone has to wait for their Super for a long time afterwards. Power Weapons still deal more damage across the board and adds are almost always an issue. Proper use of Supers can truly make the difference in challenging encounters to either be near-unbeatable, or almost easy.

Public Events have hidden mechanics that can activate a harder version of the event called a herioc public event. These give increased rewards and have increased chance to drop Exotic engrams.

You didn't see any new weapon classes? Did you miss the grenade launchers and the mini-guns? I wanna say they also added SMGs but they could just be specific Auto Rifles (there's a new manufacturer, Veist). It also looks like each class gets a third ability to go along with their Grenades/Melee. In the intro gameplay the Warlock put down a little circle called Empowering Rift I think it was and a few times we saw a Titan throw down a little barrier ability. Couldn't tell what the Rift did but still, a third ability is new. They also showed brief snippets of the Arc Titan subclass and what looked like a Nova Bomb but they didn't go into detail about either so its hard to say.

@zevvion: Yeah Zev, I wanted to get with you sometime to talk about Clans for Giantbomb before Destiny 2 launches. With the current restriction of 100 players per clan it makes it pretty difficult around here as we always have a lot of interest but players drops very quickly. So my idea is to keep our Clan Alliance and create several 100 player Clans as they fill up. I know you already have Cerberus Wolves and I run both BatmanBatmanBatman PS4 and BatmanBatmanBatman Xbox. I will probably do a Clan cleanup of inactive players soon for PS4 but I'd love to have some other players come forward to create clans. My only stipulations would be that Giantbomb Clans should be open to join that way we don't have another situation where Clans die due to an inactive leader and players not being able to join the group. Another big thing will be Clan Leaders designating other Admins so that if something does happen one of the other active players can administer the Clan while the leader is on a break. I know my clan has 7 other Admins that are players I trust whom I've been playing with for the past couple years.

@two_socks: Yeah, they added SMG's, which we already knew about since it's been in the API for 6 months and they had already talked about them and showed them today, Grenade Launchers, Mini Gun, and a few other weapons that may have just been updates guns like Pulse Rifles that work differently. Another note I've seen via twitter are that Console is 30fps, and PC is 60fps confirmed by DrLupo who is at the event playing it right now. There was also the bit about Dungeons with Boss encounters on Patrol with Unique loot I didn't see Zev talk about that was actually in the stream.

Couple of inventory screens. Looks like a new currency in the top right and also weapon mods will be in the game.

Disappointed with the evolution of Destiny's art-style. The first game originally looked so good I almost wanted to play it and endure everything else I disliked about it just from the way characters, weapons and environments looked. But now it feels like a blend between Warhammer's style and Blizzard's with just some sprinkles of original Destiny's style. Kinda looks like another bland online game instead of standing out like I felt the first one did. But I hope I'm wrong and this game turns out to be good despite how it looks.

Looks amazing. I'm very torn about where to play it. I have both an Xbox and a PC. I want PC for the higher framerate but I feel I will be at a disadvantage because I would be using a gamepad. Hmmmmmm.

Very disappointed to see light levels again...

We can mantle now.

Also, I'm very excited for Destiny 2 and simultaneously worried since they're starting from scratch again, we'll hit another content drought.

I'm not sure the moves they made were enough to bring me back in......I suppose ill wait till more info and gameplay pop up.

Huh, the biggest surprise for me was that they're going to sell it through Blizzard, or rather that Blizzard will sell it through their app, exclusively no less.

Whoa, available through Battle.net/Blizzard? Since when does Blizzard host games that aren't their own?

It sounds like the game is focusing more on improving the problem areas of the first game rather than doing much of anything new; but considering how solid the core gameplay always was, that may be enough. And I'm really looking forward to playing on PC (so long as Bungie has learned something about PC development since Halo 2).

If I can make a suggestion on PS4, I would really like to see one of you two create a PS4 community that unites all Giant Bomb Destiny 2 PS4 clans. Perhaps there could even be two separate communities, one for players interested in PVE activities, and another for PVP. I've read that communities can hold up to 10,000 members, so that could be a good way to unite several groups of 100.

And of course, you can also use communities to schedule game events.

@spaceinsomniac: Hesti already made one a year or so back. We're both part of it (Cerberus Wolves and BatmanBatmanBatman). It hasn't taken hold though.

I'd kind of been hoping they'd try to realize the Destiny vision they promised when they first revealed the game, but it looks like they mostly try to fix the stuff that was fundamentally stupid in the original. Seems ok, but nothing ground-breaking or innovative, yet if they can expand on the ground work they laid with the Taken King and offer enough stuff to do, it should be fun.

@zevvion: @spaceinsomniac: Actually I was going to make one but another community member built one before I could while I was at work when Communities launched. Here is a link to that Community. It is a Stickied post over at the Destiny forum. Myself and a bunch of my Clanmates are a part of that Community as well though. I do have a community just for my clan, but it was almost never used. I probably should just delete it and direct everyone over to the other one.

So more of the same? Meh, pass. They couldn't even be bothered to add more classes?

Seeing as the person running the current PS4 Destiny community hasn't posted here in 9 months, I'd suggest you just make a new one for Destiny 2 once it's released.

Unless you're bothered by there not being a new article of clothing--cape, robe, or sash--the sub-classes in Destiny pretty much ARE the classes, and there are at least three new ones. From a gameplay perspective, hunters didn't do anything differently than a warlock or titan, other than their sub-classes. Even your basic jump type was dependent on your sub-class, not your class.

Wait, so the structure is exactly the same?

Also I'm surprised there is no LFG type of thing just built into the game. That was always so easy to use and consistently useful for me and my friends playing the game.

Seems like more of the same with a handful of tweaks and a PC version. Sounds good but I am not really excited. I'll probably play it if I have a good enough PC during the fall, but I doubt it I will have that kind of money so...who knows.

Don't forget there's Lincoln Force dot RU also as a GB related clan.

Until you actually see how the environments are there is no saying.

Sounds like it will be a better game at launch than the first one, but i know most the content will be overpriced dlc again so i will pass.

@dan_citi: There is an in-game LFG system though. They call it Guided Games. Pretty sure they mentioned it'll be there for Trials, Raids and Nightfall, all the stuff that originally didn't have matchmaking.

Gamespot just put up this thing confirming that strikers are back but this time with more grounpounds.

@darkjohnny477: I never forget about RU, but I always leave them out of conversations like this unless @ll_exile_ll brings it up because you guys are smaller and I know you like to keep it mostly just your main Raid group in RU.

@spaceinsomniac: We'll see, if @daltaaan isn't back around to keep facilitating that group then we might create a new one, but it currently has a lot of Destiny Giantbomb guys in it already so I'd ideally like to just utilize it if we can.

I ran a clan for a beta once, and when the full game arrived, I found you could never see other community members playing from the main "what's new" type screen. Even changing the active game from the beta to the full version didn't seem to work. For that reason alone, I'd think it'd be best to just make a new community once Destiny 2 is available.

The Striker Titan class seems nicely reworked. They're like electric freight trains running you down now.

Okay, these all sound like good and necessary tweaks or improvements. Obviously, I'm still a little "wait and see" on how everything will pan out, but it turns out it doesn't exactly take much for me to be interested in a new Destiny. If I do end up getting this game around launch, I'll definitely give the GB clans a shot.

A terrible idea for matchmaking from who's point of view? Who is "us"? Because there are seemingly thousands of people asking for it. And what does it hurt? Besides the fact that eventually people will be proven wrong and it would be beaten by matchmaking. Like I'm serious, what does it hurt? Throw a huge disclaimer in there either at the menu or as you click to match make "hey this thing is difficult and is designed for a group of people that preferably know each other and all have mics to communicate. Without mics you're probably going to fail"

I can't wait! I loved the original, flaws and all.

I updated this with more info. I'm trying to scrounge like a madman to find more stuff, but I also have other things to do. If you have any additional info, drop it in this thread. I'll read it and add it to the OP.

I'm a little bit concerned they are only launching with 4 planets again. Makes me dubious that they aren't just doing the same thing as Destiny 1 and nickle-and-diming players for content that should have been in the base game. Should I wait for the equivalent of an "Taken King" expansion and save myself ~£100 buying the game with all the content then?

I'm surprised Bungie won't take a lesson from Blizzard (you'd think they could mention in one of the talks where they sorted out this arrangement) and implement something like the Find Group feature from WoW. Not the automatic dungeon matchmaking, but the manual searching that you have to do for Mythic+ dungeons.

@zevvion: Here is the Gameplay reveal Trailer and a few of the things I've found at that you didn't have listed.

• Console confirmed to be 30fps by Luke Smith.
• NO Cross-Save between PS4/PC (even though a lot of leaks talked about it earlier this week).
• They are still working on the Matchmaking tech and determining the Tick Rate (a huge area of contention for Destiny), though Luke Smith claims it will be better.
• Intellect, Dicipline, and Strength have been removed from Destiny. Now all Supers, Grenades, Melees, and new Abilities are on distinct times for each player that do not change.
• In their place, Armor pieces now grant Armor, Agility, and Recovery that were previously relegated to Subclass nodes.
• Power Ammo spawns in PvP are set to 30 second timers. Similar to Special Ammo currently. Also, all Fusion Rifles are also considered Power Weapons, and Sidearms are Primaries.
• In PvP, TTK is even higher for Primary Weapons than Destiny, but Supers and Res are not granted extra health like in Destiny.
• Every Super now appear to be a Roaming Super.
• Both Energy and Power Weapon do bonus damage to Supers that match their Element type, Arc/Solar/Void. Unknown the % amount but it was noticeable.
• Power Ammo is lost upon death in PvP.
• Shotgun, Snipers, and Fusions appear to be given 6 Shots per Power Ammo Pickup; Rockets only get 1; Grenade Launcher get 4, but the blast radius is described as very small.
• All Sticky Grenades now do NOT OHK in PvP, rather take off about 75-80% health.
• Lightning Grenades now take significantly longer to proc once stuck to a surface.
• Movement Speed has been drastically reduced compared to Destiny, removing abilities such as Titan Skating, Bones Control jumping, and Warlock Skating. This slows the pace of the game down quite a bit, but also removes player elusiveness. Makes PvP both feel slower and faster paced at the same time (finding engagements is slower, but they end quicker, or more predictably).
• HUD in PvP now displays other players Super status and whether or not that have Power Ammo currently.
• Melee ranges have been tightened between classes more, and all Melee's in PvP require 3 Melee's to kill.
• Campaign is called The Red War, first strike shown is called The Inverted Spire (many, like Datto, claim it's the best Strike ever in Destiny by a wide margin), and there will be only 1 Raid at launch (some of this I'm sure you already know but it isn't up in the info thread yet).
• Patrol Zones now include choosable landing zones, hidden treasure maps, and hidden dungeons called "Lost Sectors" that each have Unique Boss's with Unique Loot (treasure cache)..
• Earth's location, The European Dead Zone, a location talked about before Destiny's launch, is twice the size of any of the current play spaces.
• Sprint Cooldown has been removed as well as Sprint Lock. Likely due to the massive use of Memory of Jolder Artifact from Rise of Iron.
• There is a Guardian driven Tank vehicle somewhere in Destiny 2.

There is some other stuff I've seen, but I'm headed to lunch, I'll update this latter this afternoon. You can add whatever you want Zev.

I'm surprised there isn't even a 60 FPS mode for the PS4 Pro.

That's what I was about to say. Seems like a no-brainer to add a 60fps option for the Pro while probably tuning down some of the visuals. I would do that in a heartbeat if I entered the Crucible at least. Would probably leave it to increased visuals for PvE.

Well for PVP on consoles, everyone would have to be running at the same frame rate. That's probably a reason why it's locked to 30 across the board. People running at 60 fps would have a slight advantage due to input latency.

I know that Luke Smith was caught commenting about 30fps on consoles that PS4/XOne just weren't powerful enough to handle Destiny 2 at 60fps. It was purely technical limitations. I'm sure @mike is correct that doing so just for PS4 Pro would fragment the playerbase in a way they just do not want, and cause all kinds of issues because the tickrate would have to be static so Pro players would see a lot of janky trades in PvP that wouldn't feel fair (granted this happened frequently in Destiny, but it's hopefully something they plan on improving).

I can understand the technical decision there. But there are ways around such issues. Such as simply locking the campaign and PvE at 30 and locking Crucible at 60 for everyone, no options. I do see the appeal of having everything the same across all modes from a design perspective though.

A lot of quality of life changes that are for the better. I still need more information to how the gameplay loop is going to work. It ultimately looks like Destiny 1.5 so far. Luckily, there is still plenty of time for them to convince me (they have a beta again).

If I can play Titanfall 2 at 60fps with six players on my team, six players on the opposing team, and as many as 12 Titans on the same map--some being controlled directly, and others operating as AI--all the while playing in environments that are considerably larger than the PVP maps you'll find in Destiny 2, with player counts higher than you'll find in Destiny 2, then not having 60fps is a failure of the developers at Bungie. It isn't "technical limitations."

As is, I'm sure the game could not run at 60fps. But the developers had a choice, and they chose pretty pictures over gameplay. 60fps is ALWAYS better for gameplay. It is the standard for console FPS titles, and Bungie is ignoring that fact. In 2017, literally a decade after COD4 ran at 60fps on an Xbox 360, Bungie is releasing a game that runs at 30fps. And it's not because they're stupid, or inept, or lazy, or any of that. It's because they're focused on the wrong priorities, and their game is going to suffer for that.

But hey, it'll look pretty, right?

Still buying it day one, and it's still going to be loads of fun, but I'm definitely disappointed.

This all sounds like the same exact game. While not really a bad thing, I was hoping for some dramatic changes.

So still the same 3 subclasses of fire, lightning and dark magic? No 4th one like ice or something is a let down. No dual wield of handguns still? And once again ships are nothing more than loading screen eye candy? I guess there is still time to announce more new things though.

I like one of the top posts on Reddit right now. It's the kind of sarcasm towards the way some of you guys feel about this reveal that I can totally get behind. Sequel looks the same! I was hoping for a turned based JRPG murder mystery\math teaching walking simulator!

so a normal mmo then ? Big deal ,nothing to die for .

I love that, but really, some things are staying the same that really should have more additions or changes. Using the exact same elements and keeping many of the sub-classes come to mind. A lot of enemies look very similar as well. Still, it's really hard to judge the game, based on what little has been seen.

But yeah, more of the same but better is kind of what sequels are. I don't know what crazy changes some people were expecting.

@spaceinsomniac: Yeah, there are a lot of things I was hoping to see as well. And honestly, they changed far more than I even wanted. I really dislike the changes to Primary/Secondary/Heavy to Kinetic/Energy/Power Weapons. I also hate the extremely slow TTK of Primaries, drastically reduced movement speed, and the removal of Intellect/Dicipline/Strength to manipulate ability cooldowns. I'm sure all of those were done in the interest of balance, but in my opinion it drastically reduces the speed of the Crucible and therefor the fun and ability to create Clips/Montage plays and watch the game be played on Twitch. But those are all observations based on the few multiplayer matches we've seen so far, and all of those things are still subject to change. Long story short, I honestly feel like it's looking like a bigger departure from the things I love about Destiny than I wanted it to be, which is kind of funny compared to the talk of many around here. But I love Destiny, and I'm far from writing it off yet, so I'm happily going to take a wait and see approach to what develops over the next few months before launch.

tbh I don't think Destiny 2 is a true sequel given the many problems Destiny 1 had especially with the engine D2 is more a soft reboot. D2 does feel very samey however assuming under the hood works better we should see more frequent meaningful updates and with PVE/PVP structured better from the outset we shouldn't see such drastic changes with each patch, it might not be a true sequel but its the game Bungie probably had to make and its hard to say no to more content.

I really like the idea of having two primary weapons in PVP, but yeah, not sure about getting rid of special weapons in PVE. I'm also thinking that they're going to start with a slow TTK, so they can gradually introduce better weapons over the next couple of years. It gives them a lot more room to work with. I just wish we could see how the changes are going to work in PVP with a game mode people are actually used to. I hope the beta at least includes Control.

Speaking of PVP, I wasn't aware of the radar changes until I saw this video. I also love that they're going to include official map call-outs this time.

Will the campaign give any actual context for the various races, state of the world, or general nonsense introduced in the first game? The way they talked about these things in the announcement videos didn't sound promising. Luke Smith emphasised this would be a new beginning for all players, old and new. My hope is they apply this to the story as well.

I spent hundreds of hours playing story missions and couldn't tell you a single thing about The Vex or The Traveller (what they are, where they come from, what they do). Hiding these details from players did the game a huge disservice.