I know I am in a very small minority here but to me the new strike medals pretty much killed strikes for me. What little team work you had with heroic strikes just went out the window as the focal point has shifted to accumulating points. No one is interested in team work anymore and not even interested in actually finishing it. Most just stay in the spawn areas and accumulate points plus people do not revive as they want all the point to themselves. I understand that it was a good way to renew interest in strikes but all they did was just turn them into another version of Prison of Elders.

What is your opinion on the new addition.

I'll bet they fix it. While it's not one to one, WoW had a similar problem with dailys that were in dungeons. Once people finished the quest they would just leave the dungeon and all the players that were doing the dungeon were left out.

They made an easy fix by requiring the kill of the final dungeon boss to finish the daily quest. Bungie should do something similar for the strikes in Destiny.

I think you have two things mixed up. Points are generated across the entire team. If you kill a Knight for 750 points, then your two teammates will also get 750 points even if they had nothing to do with the kill. The medals, however, are individual.

I haven't had people being assholes and not reviving happen to me, though I can see some people would think like that. People staying in the spawn area to rack up medals also doesn't seem to happen a lot, though it does happen and is a problem that will surely be addressed in the future. I think they'll only activate point and medal generation in Darkness zones in the future. I don't think it was an oversight necessarily, Bungie probably just used logic that some of their users can't seem to use. There is literally no reason to stay in the spawn to rack up medals because even without trying, you'll get the Gold medal at the end of the Strike anyway if you kill everything. If you try, you can actually get it like halfway through a Strike. These people are actively wasting their time, it's completely redundant.

All in all, I like the new system though. There are more bounties to complete and the Weekly ones give pretty cool rewards. If you have people that just play the game as intended, it's also more fun because people no longer try to skip every single section they can skip and actually try to kill everything in the Strike. They altered Strikes before by placing those traps, invisible walls and such in an attempt to get people to stop skipping shit. They seem to have fixed people skipping shit now by instead rewarding them for not skipping it. I like it.

EDIT: Also, if you want to run some Strikes I'm down for it. You can add me on PSN.

Yeah, while it would be hard for me to say one way or another because I kind of refuse to get on right now unless I have a fireteam already, and the only night I've played The Dawning I played with a group. But according to Reddit everyone is unilaterally loving the changes they made to Strikes. They felt incredibly rewarding in my playthroughs as well, at least in comparison to where they were before, as in I may actually touch them rather than ignoring they even exist in Destiny. Like @zevvion said the "points" are team based so to not res and stay in non Darkzone areas is dumb, but people are dumb, so I don't doubt those are both happening. But adding back my favorite Strike, The Nexus, and giving it back a little flavor is a ton of fun and the drastic and noticeable increase in Skeleton keys is great as well. I just wish they weren't sitting on a Weapon/Class balance until after The Dawning in a very obvious ploy to generate interest back after the event is over. Especially since many of the hardcore players that are still left playing day in and day out don't really care one way or another about The Dawning and anything they did here, even with all of the amazing QoL improvements they made. Heavy ammo wave off and Trials Coin purchase are the only things that fundamentally affected me in any way. Even if I think that every change they made will be awesome when the next major content drop comes along:

• Reduced Burn Effect to Guardians
• Fixed spawn location glitch that caused enemies to not leave their spawn location
• Automatic revival at the end of Strikes
• Xur sells Exotic Shards
• Xur sells 10 Heavy Ammo at a time
• All Ornaments sold separately and individually for Silver Dust
• Automatic conversion of Green Engrams to Armor/Weapon Parts
• Purchase of Wormspore
• Skeleton Key drop rates drastically increased and guaranteed on first Nightfall completion per account per week
• Repurchase-able Gunsmith Rank 2 weapons

That's a lot of great things in the longterm, but since none of that really effects an already level 400 maxed out character much, or someone who never destroyed their Gunsmith Weapons, I'm not getting much from these changes. Maybe I'll stop by Xur and buy some Exotic Shards. At the same time, I do think pretty much everything they did was good for the game. And this many community requested items being directly addressed is nothing but positive and gives me hope for future updates.

@zevvion: Thanks for clearing things up. We are already friends on psn too. Revisionism :)

@zevvion: I thought the whole staying in spawn area was for a specific bounty, the rainbow medal thingy is supposedly easier to get that way.

@hestilllives19:

The easiest way to get exotic shards is to simply buy a Truth, use motes of light to level it all the way up, (it takes about 10) and break it down. It gives you the shard you spent back, and an additional shard for leveling it all the way up.

@miamiredhawks: I am very well aware of the Exotic Shard strategy. But it takes time, a lot of Glimmer and Motes of Light. Typically I can spend the Glimmer pretty easily on that, but the Motes are harder to come by which only allows me to do that every once in awhile and even then you can only do about 10 at the most Exotic Shards before your Glimmer is gone. Considering I've had all the Exotics, about 200 3 of Coins that are useless, and no other reason to buy anything from Xur, using my hundreds of Strange Coins on some Exotic Shards is as good a reason as any, I just didn't want to waste 13 per Shard, so 7 is much more reasonable. I'll probably go buy 30-40 Exotic shards so I don't have to worry about them for awhile, which is only 280 or so Strange Coins. More or less nothing to me. Though I may hold back and use some of that on some Heavy Ammo synth's and fill back up on those.

@miamiredhawks: The 'Exotic Shard Cheat' is only useful for people who barely play the game or mess up by not using Three of Coins. Without trying, I have over 200 Exotic Shards right now. Granted, I play a lot, but I haven't used a Three of Coins in over a month. Motes of Light are far more tricky to come by and a lot more valuable.

@aktivity But what's the point? The only bounties with Rainbow Medals say: 'Get 10 Rainbow Medals'. That's across multiple Strikes if you want. There is no reason to stay in the spawn area. There is no reason to get it in one Strike either since you're stretching time. Someone who does it in 2 Strikes is probably done as quick as you and gets rewards for two Strikes in the same timeframe as well.

@mordukai Oh, is that you? You stealthy vandal.

@zevvion: The idea is to run around in circles killing low level adds with all three weapon types(for spree medals) to quickly get the rainbow bounty. If all you're targeting is that one specific bounty (Make a Rainbow), it's faster than going through entire strikes.

@aktivity: That's a bit nonsensical since Strikes dish out more enemies than regular Patrol does. I bet I'd get those medals quicker or at the very least just as quick by just participating in the Strike.

@zevvion: I agree with you on most medals, but this specific medal can be a pain if your teammates are also killing the mobs. Depending on the strike/nightfall you can literally move around the entire planet and choose a lonely spot or go to Court of Oryx. If it's the only weekly bounty you have left, It's a fast way to easily get the medal ten times without interruptions.

@zevvion: MWUHAHAHAH?!?!?!

@zevvion: @aktivity: I did the Rainbows on one character in just a couple strikes but I agree it was pretty painful, more specifically Special Streaks. Good thing is that the Rainbows stack indefinitely. In other words, get a Primary streak, kill ads, get a Special Streak, kill ads with whatever, then later get your Heavy Streak and it completes the Rainbow, just don't stack two of the same streak, once you hit a streak, switch weapons. I suggest Sidearms for the Special. I tried Snipers, the flinch they added sucks when there are a lot of ads and its actually really tough to land accurate shots with 4+ ads shooting at you. Shotguns make you get way too close, and can put you in real bad spots, especially with Arc burn this week in the Weeklies. Fusions can work well if you are good with them, but ammo is more of a concern. I'd suggest using Sidearms because they have great mid-close range, tons of ammo, are extremely fun to use, and most people rarely pull them out so this is a good time to play around with them for funsies.

Though I do agree that going into non Darkzones to ad farm is a bit silly and nonsensical. I was easily getting 5+ Rainbows per Strike in a group of highly competent friends. It's not that hard as long as you understand you have to switch weapons as soon as you get a killstreak. In other words you only need to kill 9 ads per Rainbow. When there are an average of 250-300 ads per strike, that isn't that hard to do, especially to string together in 2 Strikes.

@aktivity: Man, I don't know. I had no issue racking up those medals. On all three of my characters I got 8-9 Medals in the Nightfall and then a subsequent Heroic Strike finished it off. I'm having a hard time imagining how people can have a lot of trouble with it. Maybe they can't kill stuff quick enough?

@zevvion: I think it has a lot to do with how every time a new feature comes out the first videos you see on youtube are "Get (insert feature here) easily." People, especially early teen players, will naturally gravitate for the easy and seemingly quickest solution.

@mordukai: Do I sense some prejudice on your part? How do you know teens will do that and not busy lawyers who want to get stuff done quick? I guess because lawyers wouldn't like Destiny anyway since they hate fun. That's not prejudice by the way, that would be hypocritical of me.

I don't know many lawyers that play video games. In fact I do not know any lawyers that play video games. I do remember reading an article about lawyers that were playing Eve Online. However, I do have an 11 year old daughter and a friend with a 14 year boy and I do a lot of all ages shows with my band and I talk to a lot of them and I see that need for instantaneous gratifications. I am not saying all teens behave that way but a large portion does.

Though, I am sure a lot of those players are also older gamers too. I think my prejudice is more rooted in that "get your thing fast and easy" YouTube culture. It's something I have been working on my own daughter. She has been better the last year as far as taking things slow and not immediately going for the cheese.

I've read most but not all the replies in this thread, so maybe I missed the reply that addressed this query, but: I loved strikes in vanilla and initial expansions Destiny. I was almost always the kill leader, and when shit got hairy I was always the guy scrambling to revive teammates. During vanilla, House of Wolves and the other non-Taken King expansion, I played a few hours of patrols and strikes a day, and while I often led my team in deaths I also led it in revives and by a significant margin in kills. Does this new system reward that sort of behavior? I admit it's a bit selfish, but I felt like if I was being the most active (what was the Strike that had the giant rocket launcher dude in the ship launch bay at the end? Where people would just hide under the on ramp for 2 hours until the Big Bad died? I hated people who played soft like that) member of my thrown together Fireteam I should see some increased odds in drops for my trouble. Does this medal system generate that or is it more window dressing on all the familiar Destiny rigamarole?

Keep in mind I am one of the most rare cases of a hardcore, non-Raid, non-Crucible Destiny player who also found the Taken King expansion items too complicating and was quickly turned off from the whole experience after spending hundreds of hours playing solo vanilla Destiny and House of Wolves.

@nodima: I'll let our residents Destiny experts @zevvion and @hestilllives19 answer this.

People are still playing Destiny? Huh.

As a quick answer, Destiny's philosophy is to reward all players in the same fireteam for participating and it stays away from rewarding individual performance to prevent being an elitist-only experience. If you were to run a Strike and you got all the good stuff and your teammates did not simply because they are not as good as you are, that would totally suck for them and it isn't really fair considering it's a videogame where you're supposed to have fun. As you (should) do in life, just give a shit about the stuff you get. It shouldn't bother you if others also get stuff.

More specifically, there are new bounties associated with Strike scoring. There are Weekly Elite Bounties and regular Elite Bounties. They both require you to get a certain amount of points total across all your Strikes, get a certain amount of completion medals and/or get certain specific medals linked to certain actions. Completing the Weekly ones give you Legendary gear for each one that you can't get from any other source. Each one you complete also gives you a chance to get Ice Breaker. In that sense, you are being rewarded for your play. After you've completed them, there is no huge inclination to rack up medals or points that week. Except that getting a Gold Tier completion medal, which you get if you accumulate a certain amount of varied medals over the course of the Strike, increases your odds of getting a Skeleton Key drop. For someone like me, Skeleton Keys are not really useful anymore. I still use them to try and get a better roll on armor I already own. We're talking 4-5 stat differences in Intellect, Discipline or Strength here on a scale of 60, so I'm actually just being insane. But otherwise Skeleton Keys help you increase your Light Level and much of the Skeleton Chests actually contain great weapons and armor if you don't have them yet.

@dookierope I really fucking love Destiny. I honestly have never played a better, more enjoyable and fun shooter in my entire life. While I wish they would do more consistent updates, each time even a small one comes out I'm having a ton of fun with it.

@nodima: Yes and no. You don't get better rewards now within said Strike. That's not something that they will likely never do or honestly should ever. Though the point scoring does tend to encourage, at least in my experience, less of that "soft" game you called out because of the new bounty system. Honestly I've seen more reports of players on Reddit talking about how its changed the outlook of other Blueberries (a term for Blue random players) from being useless to being a bit overzealous because everyone is trying to get their bounties for the week done. Players in essence have wanted them back to being bad so they could more easily get their bounties done. It's all a joke at how much it's changed random players behavior, seemingly for the better under most circumstances.

But like @zevvion mentioned above you do get better rewards in the bounties that are personal and can reward up to LL 400 items, 3 per week. And completing those has a chance to unlock the Icebreaker. Unlocking all of your SRL and Strikes recordbook stuff can also allow you to unlock both the Nova Mortis and Abbadon Exotic Machine Guns, the Thunderlord's Void and Solar siblings. So honestly, for the players like you, this is the best event of the year to jump in and check out, because it plays particularly well with how you already play Destiny, way more so than Zevvion or myself do since we mainly Raid and play Trials.

Cool, maybe I'll re-install and check it out.

I wasn't really saying I want rewards for most kills, revives or whatever, but more that there was more incentive to just play the damn strike rather than find the cheesiest (and often most drawn out) way to complete the strike. It used to be so frustrating to cruise through a strike that had one of those camping positions (especially since I rarely played Nightfall so the burns were never god awful) and then two fireteam members die and the third guy NEVER leaves that spot. Especially since those weren't even 100% safe all the time, when that guy would die after you've sat watching the screen for a half hour hoping he'd realize things would go faster if we were both revived it was just excruciating.

Most of the reason I often led in kills when I played frequently was because I often took the roll of clearing out mobs while the other two randoms I played with would focus on whatever the boss of the given encounter was (for example, I'd be clearing out all the mobs on the map while the other two mostly focused on the legs of the spider tank in the Sepiks Prime strike) not because I was "playing better" anyway.

@nodima: Yeah, I totally understand that. I always felt like I was doing all of it, killing the ads, doing the boss DPS, while reviving dead teammates who I couldn't figure out how they died since I was killing everything for them. I would always end up with hundreds of kills and know that I emptied 2 full inventories of Sniper plus an inventory or two of Heavy into each Boss before he went down. Though the new Nexus strike is fun because it makes everyone concentrate on ads to pick up the Vault Relic, shoot boss, do 20% DPS, and then repeat. It's a fun little strike, and it allows players who have likely never seen Raid mechanics participate in some of them a bit. It's worth the try, especially now that Heroics can come with fun modifiers sometimes like Arc Burn and Catapult this week.

@hestilllives19: To be honest, the new Strikes are fantastic showcases of why the Raid should not have matchmaking. Destiny has been subject to some fair complaints over the years, but also a ton of invalid ones. This is clearly demonstrated in these new Strikes. These Strikes have the most minor Raid-like mechanics you can possibly ask for, and more often than not people do not understand it in the slightest. I've seen randoms shoot their entire reserve of Heavy at the Nexus while his immunity shield was up, as well as Taniks, then refuse to shoot the SIVA in the room and just keep emptying mags on him to do 0 damage.

I can honestly say that the thing I hate most about Destiny, is the people who complain about it while they have no idea what they are talking about.

@Zevvion I agree with the raid thing, I have personally joined a few pick up groups using communities on the Ps4 and tried to raid having not a clue what I was doing and quickly had to apologize and duck out. You have to know what is going on. However, I don't see a good reason why the night fall strikes have no matchmaking. That really bothers me. At this point I find the regular strikes to be too easy, even with the 350 light requirements.

@splodge: @zevvion: I've said it since the first time I heard that complaint here and on places like Reddit that Raid matchmaking would be complete bullocks and should never be added. As they have eased up on the overall difficulty of Nightfalls I can agree that it should probably be there. Though I know for a fact the Bungie forums would be full of complaints about it and as many people would get reported there as they do for Trials though. The average player you would matchmake with for Nightfalls is bad, just like those for Strikes, so while some weeks can be a cakewalk, sometimes those modifiers stack against us like that Solar Burn, Airbourne, and Juggler Shield Brothers a couple months ago. That strike was terrifying. I think I did it with @ll_exile_ll and I think it was @anthonywalkens (took me awhile to remember Counts name on GB). That's a pretty solid Destiny squad of 3, and it took us an hour to finish. Weeks like that would be insane for a matchmade group to even attempt for a Nightfall.

Note: I also think the 30 second res timer made some Nightfalls harder than the old boot to Orbit mechanic. If it's easy for the AI to one shot players, then making you wait 30 seconds after each one shot is especially grueling.

@hestilllives19: Amateur. That Nightfall was easy. Gjallarhorn the door when the message of reinforcements shows up and you're good.

@zevvion: It was far from easy, even using 3 Gjallarhorns. It would go quick if things went perfectly. Thing is literally zero other strategy besides Gjallarhorning ads as they spawn worked in that Nightfall, and even that left you wide open to a one hit area kill boss from halfway across the room if he wasn't instakilled before he could touch your team. Point is that Nightfall needed a plan set beforehand, to be executed near perfectly, and honestly have good luck in that you didn't have ads that delayed their spawns (something they supposedly fixed in the last patch), which happened a lot to us. There is a reason every post on Reddit that week was talking about how that Nightfall was harder than the Heroic Wrath of the Machine that launched the same day. It was extremely brutal, and probably the hardest Nightfall section we've ever had. It's probably not the absolute hardest mix of modifiers possible on a Nightfall either though, it's just the worst luck we've had so far. I think the Septics Reborn strike on Laser grid with Solar Burn, Exposure, Iron Clad, and Matchgame would be an absolute Nightmare as well. Both the locked room at the start and the Septics fight would be a Nightmare, but especially that room as there is nowhere to take cover, no health regen, and those Solar turrets are a killer. I think it would also spawn a lot of Shanks doing Solar and Witches doing Solar but with Void Shields. Hopefully something along those modifiers never exists. And that's why I think I still have a question mark about Matchamaking for Nightfalls, not that it shouldn't exist, but that some weeks it will literally be impossible for pickup groups of non communicating player to accomplish. Though that can sometimes be the case now for bad stacking modifiers on Heroic Strikes.

Speaking of Heroics, I noticed this week is Void Burn, might be time to knock out those bounties on my Voidwalker, ehh.

I honestly really love the new strike mechanics, but I am also not trying to get specific medals when I do them. They just seem to happen with play. My first strike was so much fun. We were working together, killing everything in sight, popping supers like crazy, rezzing each other. Maybe I just had a good random team, but I found it to be one of the best strike experiences I've ever had. Even with just normal playing, we got the gold medal completion at the halfway point.

I know the rainbow medal thing is a hard one to get if you're not understanding how it works, but it's really not so bad and can be accomplished through normal strike play. I watch people play on twitch when I am doing chores and what not, and I saw someone play through strikes without any different play style (no staying in a patrol zone and cheesing it, etc) and they were able to get them pretty easily. You just get one, say your primary, then you switch to your next weapon. You don't have to do them quickly right after the other, there can be time between them, but you just have to make sure you do them 1-2-3. There was a posting in the Destiny subreddit about it being not as time sensitive as people thought.

I tend to, if I am trying to cheese something that I know I can't do with another person, or don't want them to have to suffer through, play a nightfall by myself. For instance, when I was trying to get the fusion rifle kills for the Pocket Infinity exotic quest, I just loaded into the weekly nightfall by myself to grind the kills. I don't want to hold someone back or whatever to do something like that. The people trying to do rainbow medals in a patrol zone dragging people along with them is bunk. They could just load into a nightfall and grind them there and not have to ruin play time for anyone else.

But everyone I have had the luck of playing with has been very active and playing the strike as it should be played. I've been having a great time. The only solution would be playing with friends of a like mind or using a team up site/forum or something.

@jadegl: There are two active Giant Bomb clans. You can either join one of them or just add the active members to your list. I'm playing with people constantly.

@hestilllives19 You're taking it a bit personal, I was just joking. What I meant is that while a plan was clearly needed, everyone who isn't an amateur would have one.

Amateur.

@zevvion: How is clarifying my position taking things personally? Most of that post was talking about another combination of Nightfall modifier and why I understand the lack of Matchmaking for the Nightfall, whether I agree or disagree with that or not. Then I mentioned wanting to do the Strike playlist this week on a Voidwalker hinting at an Energy Drain built that would work well for those and would be fun. I am confused how that post could ever be construed that way.