The dream is dead. The Cave has been nerfed (Patch Notes)

Patch Notes: http://www.bungie.net/7_Hot-Fix---09252014/en/News/News?aid=12190

Activities

Missions

• Reduced drop rate of engrams following a hard wipe [fixed in 1.0.1.4]

Queen's Wrath Event

• Material rewards for dismantling Queen's Wrath gear will no longer provide ascendant materials, but missions will continue to drop Legendary items

WorldDestinations

• The Hive of the holy “Treasure Cave” have realized the futility of their endless assault on Skywatch and have retired to lick their wounds and plan their next attack.
• Respawn timers for monster caves in Skywatch have been normalized to 40 seconds (increased from 6)
• Respawn timers for monster caves in Forgotten Shore have been normalized to 40 seconds (increased from 10)
• Respawn timers for monster caves in Ember Caves have been normalized to 40 seconds (increased from 10)
• Respawn timers for monster caves in the Shattered Coast have been normalized to 40 seconds (increased from 10)
• Respawn timers for monster caves in the Barrens have been normalized to 40 seconds (increased from 20)

Dev Blog discussing this and planned future updates: http://www.bungie.net/7_Destiny-Dev-Notes/en/News/News?aid=12188

Some other notes include nerfing the Auto Rifle (right after I got a legendary one of course), voice chat, etc.

I'm gonna come off as very bitter, but fuck Bungie for this. Get rid of the one way you actually get...ya know...loot. Now I get to waste time on Strikes and get nothing to show for it. Wonderful. If they had, at least, buffed Strikes to give better rewards then fine, but NOPE. Yeah I mad.j

Thoughts?

• Material rewards for dismantling Queen's Wrath gear will no longer provide ascendant materials, but missions will continue to drop Legendary items

What? Why would they remove this. They keep removing things to help us upgrade our gear. What the fuck is wrong with them.

Just another one of many decisions that highlight Bungie's complete ignorance of what people actually find fun in loot driven games. I can only imagine they'll lower loot drop rates next because they'll want people to experience more of the amazing content they've cooked up in the form of pre-existing missions grafted with bounties and buffed up enemies - with no matchmaking and minimum level 25 bar to entry of course.

Fuck the treasure cave, reducing engram rates and removing the ability to get high level mats from Queen's Wrath items seems opposite to the sort of stuff they should be doing.

I understand them wanting to get rid of an exploit, but you're right, they should have at least increased the chance of getting loot from strikes. I hate to be so negative on a game I've hardly played, but Destiny has seemed like a huge bummer to me. The fact that the biggest buzz about the game since it came out is an exploit that allows people to have more fun with the game is kind of depressing in my opinion.

Did Gearbox ever fix the exploit in Borderlands 2 where you could get stuck in the air and use the Leviathan's bounding box to get into the treasure vault over and over again? Because pulling the one decent source of loot in a loot driven game just seems out of touch. Have a little faith that people will stick around to actually play and enjoy your content, Bungie.

"Material rewards for dismantling Queen's Wrath gear will no longer provide ascendant materials, but missions will continue to drop Legendary items"

Fuck,fucking fuck, I was hoarding this and pumping xp into them to get more ascendant materials. Now my 8 pieces of purple loot are nothing but a useless pile of flaming shit.

And a purple legendary drop can still end up not resulting in a legendary weapon, right? In fact, it's even more likely to NOT be a legendary, isn't it?

Yeah, you can take that DLC and shove it right up your ass, Bungie. You won't be getting any more money from me.

There is literally no other reliable way in the game to get good gear, even when doing strikes.

"People have overcome our shitty loot drops; this cannot stand!"

Yep. I'm out. Back to Final Fantasy XIV until Dragon Age decides to show up. I don't regret buying the game but fuck man, if Bungie wanted me to quit playing this was a fantastic way to accomplish that.

• Material rewards for dismantling Queen's Wrath gear will no longer provide ascendant materials, but missions will continue to drop Legendary item

What! Why? I've literally done 5 Queens bounties and gotten the same goddamn item every time. What's the point if I can't at least get ascendant materials from all the fucking copies you keep giving me.

This reminds me of GTA:Online.

It's like they're actively trying to get people to quit playing their game. It's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off for them.

SPOILER: it won't.

This sounds a lot like how Blizzard handled Diablo 3 for the first 2 years before finally accepting they fuckep up big time.

They didn't reduce engram drop rate, they reduced the rate at which it drops for a short time after you hard wipe in a mission, i.e., a death penalty.

Missions

• Reduced drop rate of engrams following a hard wipe [fixed in 1.0.1.4]

*Clarification: This effect only lasts for a short period of time immediately following a hard wipe

It's primarily to fend off one of the other popular loot spawns, friends of mine would do the mission where you find a dead Guardian on the moon, kill a bunch of enemies and then die on purpose, which would respawn them at the point before the enemies appeared and they could just farm them over and over.

Whatever, it was never worth it anyway. All the good stuff I have came from faction vendors, Xur, nightfall rewards, and exotic bounties. The cave may have dropped a ton of loot, but the majority were greens and blues with an occasion purple that would more often than not turn into blue junk. Farming the cave was a waste of time, and I'm glad they removed it.

Also, auto rifles haven't been nerfed yet, that was among things they are planning for future patches, which also includes adjusting the rate for purples to decrypt out of legendary engrams.

Man, nerfing the exploits that people have found to get around a crappy drop rate seems ill advised. Based on how poorly Bungie seems to be handling this game I am really glad I chose to wait. How cheap would this game have to get for ya'll to recommend it to someone who intends to play solo?

To me, this sends a very clear message from Bungie. They don't care that people like me complained about there being too much grinding in the game, and they don't have any intention of improving the game by making the grind less grindy. And I'm pretty much done with the game now, because of this. Not completely, I still have to give Xur a strange coin for my exotic bounty, and some people asked me to do the Vault of Glass with them, which I will, but I'm done playing this game night and day. I'm done obsessing over it and defending it.

It's too bad too, because I do really like parts of this game.

Have fun upgrading all that stuff

I couldn't care less about the cave, it was an overrated and unnecessary exploit, but not being able to get ascendant materials from queen's gear is definitely BS. All these extra legendaries are completely worthless now. At the very least there should be a chance to get them, if not guaranteed. Or just reduce the amount per item from 2 to 1. Now I really have no reason to continue doing those missions.

Whens 2.4 and muh Ninjas?

While I think these changes are probably a good thing (the loot cave was... pointless to say the least, as it was the most reliable way of getting loot all you were doing was grinding that cave for better loot to... grind the cave more) I find the language used and the other planned changes outlined in the dev notes to be pretty conceited and, quite frankly, rather insulting.

The suggestion that "the social experience of a cave farming run is amazing" is a ridiculous attempt to mollify players who were adamantly against the loot cave as well as suggest that it was an intentional design decision, as opposed to a blatant oversight in their poorly implemented loot system.

They go on to imply that the loot system is not only working as intended, but their design decisions are somehow adding depth to the game by giving the Cryptarch a "personality," instead of padding out a lack of actual content in the game. The idea that the biggest problem with their loot system is that they are doing a poor job of communicating what rewards players are actually getting is ridiculous.

Also, I think the excuse that there is some "issue" causing strikes to be harder than intended is a thinly veiled excuse for another poor design decision they made to artificially increase the amount of time spent playing the game without adding any actual content.

While I agree with many of the steps they seem to be making in terms of making the game less frustrating (such as increasing the odds of a reward for completing a strike) the way they are communicating it just makes me feel as though Bungie is telling me I'm wrong for feeling frustrated with the systems they currently have in place.

On the other hand they're buffing thorn so they're at least trying to get forgiveness for robbing me of like 12 ascension shards

Should be somewhat soon. No date given but speculation is next month I wanna say.

In the dev journal or whatever they do talk about improving Strikes. Who knows when these changes will take place though? I have to wonder just how many people were actually doing the cave. Couldn't have been THAT many.

I wanna say you can still farm Venus (the original method), but haven't tried myself.

@zeik: Also bad juju

Fuck, nevermind, thorn and bad juju WILL BE buffed. They aren't right now. Goddamnit bungie

On the other hand, they're nerfing the range of shotguns? What? How? You already have to be practically making out with someone to do any damage with them.

I'm now finally understanding that the real 10 year plan behind Destiny was that you'll have to grind for 10 years to hit the level cap.

They also reduced the range on the shotguns, as if they weren't completely useless already apart from literally point blank encounters.

They could have looked at the cave and drawn logical conclusions as to why people would rather shoot at a cave for hours instead of playing their missions, but somehow it sailed right past them.

Now I'm really curious what the DLC turns out to be. Either it will be something really good that adds a ton of content or it's going to be downright insulting.

@humanity: I'm going with insulting. And since I already paid for it like a buffoon I'll find out when it comes out.

@sterling: What are you doing!? Don't ever preorder games! Let alone DLC!!!

YOU'RE MURDERING GAMINGS SOOOUUUULLLLL!!!!

@spraynardtatum: I know. I'm a monster. And I apologize profusely.

But also just read this.

Looks like the are aware of the negative push back and will be making some changes in upcoming patches. How engrams are decoded for one. Meaning we should see more purples out of purples.

Bungie explained why they took the cave out (Kotaku link):

"The social experience of a cave farming run is amazing: the herding to get a team of Guardians all behind the line and firing in the right direction, the rush to grab the loot, the scramble when the panic wave starts, the beckoning glow from inside the cave. The speed at which the community organized around this activity was inspiring and humbling to us.

But shooting at a black hole for hours on end isn't our dream for how Destiny is played. Our hope is that social engagement in public spaces is only one part of the Destiny experience. Expect changes soon which decrease the efficiency of cave farming and correspondingly increase engram drops from completing activities."

Shooting at a black hole for hours on end is how I would metaphorically describe the entirety of my experience with Destiny, not just cave farming.

Why does Bungie seem so determined to remove anything that people that participate in the game find fun? :(

That wizard came from the ACTUAL MOON!!

@dannyhibiki: Do people actually think shooting at that cave for loot is fun? I understand why people do it, there are always people who search for the simplest and most mindless way to obtain loot in these types of games, but I refuse to believe people think the process itself is actually "fun". They just want the loot.

cave nerf i saw it coming, but queen's wrath gear? what.... now i got 6 mission tokens that are worthless now since I already have legendary helms and chests.

@zeik: I kinda did, I like finding weird exploits in games like that, and the drop rate in Destiny is that goddawful. It's cool to gather with a bunch of players and feel like you're getting one over on THE MAN.

Also, I'm weird.

Of course it got nerfed. It was stupid. How can you be upset about it/ It needed to be fixed as it was an obvious exploit that was unintended by the developers.

I get that farming for engrams sucks and that the content is lacking but don't blame Bungie for fixing something that NEEDED to be fixed.

I increasingly feel like I have no clue what Bungie's vision for this game is.

Nice, slowing player growth. Sounds like exactly what Destiny players want.

Just picked up GTA V for 360 to play with a friend. Haven't played GTA Online since October or November. Did they fuck it up?

Honestly this pisses me off so much. Right now I mostly play pvp but when I went on huge streaks of getting nothing or absolute trash from that I'd run to the cave for a bit. There was nothing wrong with it.

In my mind their should be a 100% drop rate in pvp. Every single match I should be getting something. When you lose you get 1 item, when you win you get 2. I don't care if it drops greens, I should at least be getting stuff to break down. Finishing first overall in a game and getting absolutely nothing while someone who finishes last gets a bue and a goddamn exotic is unacceptable in my mind.

@chaser324: e-sports

yea im done with this game now, destroying the loot cave is one thing, but i fucking hate that you cant get ascendant shards anymore from the queens wrath missions, those missions are completely worthless and pointless to me now. especially since its borderline impossible to get them from public events anymore.

im done till the dlc or (a pipe dream obviously) some actual story content comes out.

I know this is just one patch, but I'm not particualrly confident, as of now, that Bungie knows how to readjust their game to compensate for what the commnutiy wants. I knew they'd nerf the cave, and other popular farming explots, at some point. Although I was hoping they would understand why people were doing that and make a few changes, but instead they do the opposite. "Reduced the drop rate of engrams". The fuck?

I don't know. I just don't know.

@zeik: initially, yes it was very mindless, but after a while from shooting the cave, the spawn rate went into overload and just swarms and swarms of enemies started pumping out from the cave and from all sides, thats when it got fun at least for me..

Well, after two days of ascendant shards from the queen's wrath combined with about 12 dropped in the vault of glass, I was able to fully upgrade all my legendary and exotic armor.

Besides, the loot cave wouldn't be any help in upgrading legendary gear.