Season of the Drifter, well, at least the first part of it is here and I’ve been playing it pretty often and for hours at a time trying to figure out what it’s all about.
This season itself focuses exclusively on the mysterious Drifter who runs the Gambit PvP event on his weird hauling ship. There’s a lot to make sense of with this season. My feelings so far are mixed.
THE FOCUS IS ON GAMBIT ONLY
This game focuses heavily on the Gambit PvP mode. In fact it’s all that this season is about. Know this going into this season. I love that Bungie is taking the time to expand on Gambit (which is a great PvP mode) the problem that I have is that, that’s all this is. While I personally enjoy playing Gambit, what about the people who don’t? What about the people who love the story and lore associated to Gambit but not so much Gambit? The moment you start Season of the Drifter you’re given a series of archived “Aunor” stories about the Drifter. So far there have been 4 stories. Where is the exclusive strike that’s relevant to the Drifter and his story line? Where does it go? Considering that the lore speaks to how the Drifter can’t be trusted why didn’t Bungie give us something to play in regards to that? Then there’s the Emissary. Where is the story and strike connecting these two mysterious figures? It’s possible that we’ll get that within the next content drop tomorrow but I’m only to speaking to my experience as of this point. There’s no story element of the game tying the Drifter or the Emissary to anything. WTF bro?
Gambit Prime is fun but while Gambit Prime is a cool addition to Gambit mode but with just one round it’s way more intense but just like it’s predecessor it relies on fireteam play in order for you really take advantage of it and be competitive, otherwise, you’re kind of wasting your time. It’s not like the Crucible whereas you can be successful playing solo and there’s benefit to it. Playing solo in Gambit is hard, Gambit Prime solo isn’t easier. It’s more likely than not that your randomly selected team isn’t using the same strategy you’re using to win. Someone will always be doing something else and more times than not you’re going to lose matches. Where does Season of the Drifter and Gambit Prime leave the solo player?
Invader spawns are far too frequent in Gambit Prime and they’re even worse because now they’re more covert than ever. The team that manages to grind out the motes to spawn a Primevil first should not have to be subject to a constant barrage of invasions. This tells the team that does it first that they’ll be bombarded and distracted until the other team catches up which is pretty much what has happened every time I played a Gambit Prime match. This ended up making Gambit Prime matches way longer than they should have been. What would have made Gambit Prime cooler to me is imposing a limit on invasions to the team that gets the Primevil first while the other team is subjected to invasions they way they are now as they try to continue to gather motes to bring out their Primevil. There should be some incentive to collecting your motes and bringing up the Primevil first. Give a limit of three invasions to the team that didn’t get there Primevil out first to where now they have to plan out how they invade. Opposing teams are also “tanking”.
When they are not able to collect more motes than the other side they stop collecting motes altogether and they wait until the other team summons a Primevil. What they do afterward is send a consistent stream of blockers and consistently invade to even out the game. THIS IS NOT FAIR. Bungie needs to limit invasions, period. This injects more strategy into Gambit Prime matches and shortens them. The way it is now, as much fun as it is makes it so frustrating.
Gambit Prime’s class job system with the new Reaper, Sentry, Invader and Collector class does give you something to grind for after you gain synths from playing matches and doing the Reckoning. I played Gambit Prime quite a bit, collected my synths and I now have a full set of Reaper gear for my Warlock and Sentry gear for my titan. So far, so good until I realized that my weak motes are giving me under powered armor and that isn’t good for a guardian starting out at 650 light and getting gear at 635. The Reckoning works in tiers with each tier significantly harder than the previous. The gear you get has a point system. Tier 1 has a 650 light level requirement and you can play for weak motes. Weak motes add a +1 element to your gear. A complete set gives you +5 armor in total. So the first perk of your armor is the only perk you can make use of since you’ll only have five pieces of gear and the next perk can only be accessed with 6 points. So essentially there is almost no point to grinding the reckoning for weak motes.
The second tier which has a 670 light requirement became available this past Friday and it’s more enticing since it grants +2 gear, so all 5 pieces will give you +10 points and you’ll have 3 perks for use in combat. There’s some incentive to play for middling motes but again, you’ll have to play a ton of Gambit Prime to get synths and even still there is Tier 3 that remains. Tier 3 will undoubtedly cap out at 700 light and it’ll be the hardest of all the Reckoning events but it’ll grant you +3 gear and +15 points in total for a complete set. This is the armor set you want so collecting synths for Tier 3 is all you should be really doing so why have the other tiers? What I took from this is basically Bungie saying the first two weeks of Gambit Prime will be bullshit so continue to do everything you’ve been doing already to raise your light level to as close to 700 as possible because Tier 3 Gambit Prime armor is the only armor that makes sense to play for. Again, I ask WTF bro?
MY FEELINGS ARE ALL OVER THE PLACE THIS SEASON
Destiny 2: Season of the Drifter/Jokers Wild whatever you want to call it at least right now needs a little more direction. What I don’t want to do right now is be overly critical and emotional while Bungie is still rolling out content but that doesn’t mean that things aren’t wrong with Season of the Drifter as it stands now. Tomorrow we have another installment for Season 2 and then the game will expand a little more and that’ll be a good thing. As of right now, I’m 50/50 on the Season of the Drifter. I need more. Not because I’m being a brat but because I need more. Good News. Tomorrow we have the new Gambit Prime Deep Six map, Thorn Quest, The Allegiance Quest and then on March 15th we have the Invitations of the Nine and The Reckoning Tier 3. We finish March off with two more Gambit Prime maps (Legion’s Folly and Emerald Coast). Season of the Drifter has more in store and I’ll be playing because I’m a guardian.
