YMMV / Destiny 2

Tropes A-E

• Abridged Arena Array: If you're looking for quick Strike completions, whether it's for Vanguard Tokens or some objective requiring a set number of completions not exclusive to the Strike Playlist, look no further than the Lake of Shadows; because the level lacks a room that requires killing waves of enemies or holding a point in order to progress, you can run past most enemies and proceed all the way to the boss, only killing a couple of elite enemies along the way to open the path forward. One quick run-through takes no longer than 5 minutes and can even be shortened to a little over 3 minutes.
• Accidental Aesop: It's probably unintended, but the Vanguard's collective reaction to the Lucent Brood in The Witch Queen is essentially: "They don't deserve the Light, they all must die, including the Ghosts allied with them." Compared to the regular themes of hope, unity, and heroism, it's a humongous contrast, and it carries the unfortunate implication that the current breed of humanity's Guardians are akin to the Imperium of Man in Warhammer 40K: aliens do not deserve godly powers like humans do, and they deserve to be snuffed out while humanity continues. The one mitigating factor to this is that the seasonal lore tabs have the Hive Ghosts egg on their Lightbearers to kill Guardians and destroy their ghosts, implying their was never a chance for coexistence to begin with.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • The Spider in Season of the Hunt. Did he really take Crow, an amnesiac and resurrected Uldren Sov, under his wing out of the kindness of his heart as he says? Or was he doing it because he wanted a Guardian to work for him with no strings attached? Knowing Spider, it was probably the latter, since he states outright that he rigged Crow's Ghost to explode if he ever strayed too far from Spider's reach.
  • Season of the Lost has the long-awaited meeting between Mara and Crow, and suffice to say, fans are very confused. Is she trying to reconnect with her brother in spite of the fact that Uldren is now a Guardian, whom she views with disdain, or is she trying to subtly nudge him back to being his former self? Further confused by her speech explaining how she herself had once planned to "wield Uldren Sov, Lightbearer", implying that he would have been a Guardian in all but name.
  • Speaking of Season of the Lost, how much can you trust Savathun's words? Given her reputation among the Guardians and relationship with the Hive, there's ample reason to take whatever she says with a grain of salt. Of particular note is Savathun's relationship with Crow while posing as Osiris. Was she really stringing him along as part of a long-term plan? Or was she being sincere, perhaps due to her exposure to humanity? While there is some evidence of the latter, given how she played a role in the Vanguard and the Young Wolf welcoming Crow in their ranks despite his past as Uldren Sov, there's also Savathun's other actions to consider, such as wanting to bring the Crown of Sorrows into the City and wanting to (re)capture Quria, later expressing some disbelief and displeasure when the Guardians destroy Quria.
  • In Season of Plunder, some have interpreted the main story's ending (where the player and the House of Light spare Eramis despite centuries of unforgiven atrocities at her hands) as the player not taking Eramis seriously as an individual due to her lack of general accomplishment on Sol and preferring to let her stew in her self-conflict, utter failure, and guilt than put her out of her misery. Season of the Seraph seems to at least partially run with this, as the Witness and Xivu Arath have since given Eramis her just desserts by melting down all of her remaining Europan forces into Wrathborn.
• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • The final boss of the Warmind expansion, Xol, Voice of the Thousands and one of the Worm Gods is brought down in a single battle. Some players felt that the epic score and intensity of the battle made it worthwhile, but others felt that it was a letdown for a battle against one of the Darkness's chief lieutenants. The final bosses of the other expansions tend to be a more grueling, sprawling encounter that takes up an entire level. Xol, on the other hand, is faced only at the tail end of the mission and has a rather dull fight pattern; in fact, the mission to defeat him ends up repurposed as a regular strike in the same expansion. The 1.2.3 update expanded on Xol being a pushover by revealing that he's Not Quite Dead and built himself the Whisper of the Worm (a darkness-infused Black Spindle with the original Year 1 White Nail perk) to revel in the chaos the Guardian and the Taken bring across the system.
  • Siviks is made out to be the main antagonist of the Black Armory expansion, stalking the player throughout their quest to reclaim the forges and even setting up the extremely controversial puzzle in Niobe Labs. Then he goes down like a punk at the end of the exotic questline for Izanagi's Burden, where you kill him in the Bergusia forge without much fanfare. Even Ada-1 moves on to inquiring about further Black Armory mysteries instead of making an eulogy on him.
  • Ikora makes a big deal of defeating the Undying Mind across multiple realities, and spends several weeks building a portal that would directly connect to it during the Season of the Undying, which goes along with Bungie's new approach of an evolving world for Shadowkeep and subsequent seasons. Then when we get to Final Offensive proper, it's the exact same activity players have been grinding for the entire season, with the only change being the Gatekeeper getting replaced by the Undying Mind, a Hydra with even less HP than the Minotaur before it. To say the fandom wasn't amused would be putting it lightly.
• Arc Fatigue: After The Witness is revealed in The Witch Queen as the Greater-Scope Villain, year five seasons were used to build up the threat via multiple enemy factions swearing allegiance to them and leading to a major confrontation between the Darkness and the Traveler. When Lightfall dropped there was considerable player backlash because it only introduced new wrinkles to the story without answering hardly anything, neither the motivations of The Witness or what The Veil is, resulting in a Gainax Ending. Four months after release and a month into Season of the Deep a cutscene was released that provides some clarity on both, but the randomness of dropping key discoveries of the Destiny setting during a mid-year seasonal story at the expense of the main expansion was seen as exhausting rather than enticing. Most did agree that the information revealed was very exciting from a story standpoint, but took issue with the method of presentation.
• Audience Awareness Advantage: Because of how much information about the game's characters is given to the player and not the Player Character in an organic fashion, lore discussions are often privy to judging certain scenes based on said summative knowledge rather than what the Young Wolf or the people around them actually know about. For example, Drifter insults the Young Wolf if they continue the Invitation of the Nine storyline, claiming there's nothing to learn, but the lorebook "Ecdysis" obtained from it (which the Young Wolf doesn't read, but rather the player) speaks otherwise. From the player's perspective, Drifter seems like he's at the center of a laughably fruitless cover-up, but from the Young Wolf's perspective, odds are they probably have way more questions than answers given the vagueness of each scene.
• Author's Saving Throw:
  • When Warmind's main story campaign was done and gone, many criticized Xol being defeated right then and there in a single battle to be fairly anticlimactic, given the character's standing in the overall setting. Since then, Bungie subtly remedied this by adding secrets that explain that no, Xol isn't "dead" and lives on through our kills in the form of a powerful Exotic weapon, and Forsaken even has Toland bring into question whether or not the Worm you fought over Mars really was Xol, adding to the mystery]].
  • Destiny 2 was highly criticized during its first year for the large amount of characters cracking jokes when it was unnecessary, as well as the fairly low stakes; the story essentially didn't have a personal feel to it, making it hard to care for it. Come Forsaken, things take a dark turn, less jokes are being cracked, and the story is more personal, as your Guardian slowly starts slipping into unsavory behavior while on a quest to avenge Cayde's death.
  • The announcement of the Destiny Content Vault was highly disliked, as it involved removing large portions of the game and that gear would be "Sunset" after a certain amount of time after their original drop^note Which means Sunset armor and weapons can no longer be upgraded to the current seasonal cap, preventing it from being viable in high level activities and still only mediocre in regular play despite potentially once being pinnacle weapons for their time. This was largely an attempt to avoid the Power Creep that had gotten out of control, with some weapons like Mountaintop and Recluse near impossible to either Nerf or one-up realistically.. It should be evident that no matter how they spun the information it amounted to locking out about half of the gear acquired in the game with only a promise of "We'll give you new gear to grind for." A few months after the launch of Beyond Light there were extensive struggles trying to fill the gap lost by so much gear that was no longer useable (Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors, Character Builds and content challenges meant you may need, say, a solar scout rifle with explosive rounds and the only ones available were removed). Bungie eventually said they would no longer Sunset gear or mods, so your favorite gun can remain your favorite gun. They also eventually introduced an Armor Synthesis feature so you can change the look of any non-exotic armor, so your cosmetic appearance is no longer tied to armor that was sunset or had good stats. In addition, taking away entire campaigns mean new players will never play it, effectively enforcing a Continuity Lockout just because they joined after Season of Arrivals. Season of the Lost tried to mitigate this with a special timeline section in the Director that gives a summary of both past and present events in the game's story, making it easier to keep track of the overall plot, though players still no longer have access to vaulted events.
    • This was furthered in the Lightfall showcase where Bungie announced that, due to behind-the-scenes improvements to their engine, they would no longer be sunsetting Expansion content, and that every expansion starting with Shadowkeep would remain in the game as a permanent addition. Season of the Witch would further address the issue by adding in Timeline Recollections that allowed players to replay certain missions from previous expansions, which pleasantly included the first mission of Forsakn.
  • Ever since their introduction, Champions are a highly contested element of endgame PvE, pigeonholing players into loadouts just to deal with them and at difficulties that disproportionately increase their resilience. So it comes as a pleasant surprise when the Legend difficulty version to The Witch Queen's features no Champions while remaining challenging on its own right.
  • Whenever a new season launches, players are usually dumped right into it as soon as they are logged in, even if players are using a new character with a low Power level. Season of the Risen requires you to have progressed through the Witch Queen campaign to access it, and its first "mission" is a cutscene in the hangar that takes you to the HELM.
  • The Vow of the Disciple raid has its primary mechanics involve calling out symbols throughout the raid, kind of like Last Wish. However, this time, the symbols in Vow have official names you can see via the puzzle room before the first encounter, making it much easier to determine which is which in the midst of firefights. Last Wish did not have this, forcing players to come up with their own names, which aren't always universal.
  • Following the introduction of Weapon Crafting in Witch Queen, Crafting has become quite the Scrappy Mechanic, with various complaints being leveled against it. Common criticisms included that it made the chase for good rolls on weapons pointless and also that it has completely consumed the endgame grind. In a State of the Game blog post by Joe Blackburn prior to Lightfall, Joe outlined various changes coming to crafting, namely, that going forward, not every Seasonal/Raid weapon would be craftable (a highly requested change), and that unlocking patterns for craftable weapons would be easier. It was also announced that Crafting would no longer use its own currencies, but would now use regular materials such as Glimmer, Legendary Shards, and Enhancement Cores.
• Awesome Ego:
  • Emperor Calus is insanely arrogant, self-obsessed, and decadent... but with all the incredible accomplishments he’s pulled off and his remarkable charisma, one can’t help but feel he’s completely earned the right to be so full of himself.
  • Rhulk is similarly arrogant as the first Chosen One of the Witness and is universally condescending to everything and anyone that doesn't follow his twisted morals and philosophies. However, his genuinely intimidating figure and mannerisms (even if his master doesn't always agree with them), the sheer cadence by which he fights in the Vow of the Disciple raid, and the way he's livened up a place as drab as the inside of a Pyramid gives him plenty of Rule of Cool points for his personality and actions where he lacks in Calus's charisma.
• Best Level Ever:
  • Most of the raids in this game are the absolute highlight of the Destiny experience. Specific examples include:
    • Year One's Leviathan, a tournament-style rotating gameshow where the raiders need to compete in a series of challenges in order to appease Calus, a corrupt and insane Cabal emperor. The aesthetic is impressive, the challenges are awesome and creative, and it ends in a fantastic Final Boss against the emperor himself that sees the party split between dealing with his body in the physical world and dealing with his incredible psychic capabilities in his personal pocket dimension. Later came the six-player 'raid lite' experience of the The Menagerie, so players can get even more of Calus' radiant personality. Alas shelved, as Calus disappeared into a Negative Space Wedgie.
    • Year Two's Last Wish is the climax of the Forsaken story arc, and sees the party venturing into the Dreaming City to finally kill Riven, the legendary ahamkara. What follows is an absolute gauntlet of difficult challenges and incredible sights, requiring party members to cooperate clearly and concisely just to progress. The Final Boss is a massive and extremely impressive fight against Riven herself, with the party requiring an extremely complicated process just to take her down, and even then she's still not dead! After killing her the party must drag her ascendant realm back to Kalli and Shuro Chi to purify her heart from Taken energy, ending in a triumphant slam dunk into the cauldron.
    • Year Four's Deep Stone Crypt garnered immense praise right out the gate, with it's striking setpieces and scenery (including a bonafide space walk, the first in Destiny's history) tight encounter design and engaging mechanics all being high points. It's also one of the most plot-heavy raids in the series, with a number of plot twists that qualify it as a Wham Episode where Raids usually serve as epilogues to the expansion's main story. In particular, the reveals of Atraks becoming the first Fallen Exo, the revival of Taniks, and the Halfway Plot Switch of stopping House Salvation from raiding the crypt to stopping Taniks from destroying Europa with a nuclear-equipped space station are sights to behold for sure.
  • Some strikes go above and beyond what they are meant for and are seen as some of the more engaging missions you can do in the game.
    • "The Corrupted" is a lore heavy strike that takes you really deep into the Dreaming City, with some mechanics that border on being like a Raid. The high enemy count also makes it a great slugfest, though the Nightfall Grandmaster Harder Than Hard mode also made it one of the most difficult.
    • "The Glassway" is a strike that only gets crazier and more difficult the further you go. This culminates in what is considered one of the best boss arenas in the game, with you having to surprisingly defeat two separate Vex bosses while surrounded by an army. Like "The Corrupted," it's also considered one of the more nightmarish strikes on higher difficulties.
  • Dungeons are also amongst the best of the content in the game, essentially being long mini-raids with their own encounters and mechanics.
    • "Grasp of Avarice", added with the 30th Anniversary, is a long adventure full of traps and loot starting at the mythical Loot Cave of Destiny 1 fame, with a rollicking soundtrack loosely reminiscent of a certain piratically-themed movie series, and does an excellent job of intuitively introducing the core dungeon mechanics to players without doing too much handholding. It's also required to earn several returning weapons, including fan-favourites like Eyasluna and Gjallarhorn.
• Bile Fascination: Most of the views for the incredibly lazy "Keeping Track" commercial are from trying to see how bad it really is.^note If you don't want to watch, most complaints involve the low-effort CG characters inserted into actual gameplay footage, along with some dry dialogue. In fact, the subreddit says that the only thing one would need to do to fix the commercial is to re-do it as a three-person machinima.
• Breather Boss:
  • After the absolute pain in the ass that is Vorgeth, what with an immunity barrier and annoying Eye Beam that pushes you back, Dûl Incaru, the final boss of the "Shattered Throne" bonus dungeon, is easily manageable despite the Power Level difficulty, and if done correctly, goes down fairly quickly with the right damage stack, to the point that certain builds can outright oneshot her.
  • After struggling through the two hellish phases of the Bergusia Forge ignition (Vandals sniping you with incredible precision, Exploder Shanks going Zerg Rush on you, and Overcharged Shanks slowing down your movement), the Forge Warden boss is nothing more than a Fallen Walker with a lot of health, lacking the phase shields or other gimmicks (like constantly teleporting you around) that make the other Forge Wardens extra tough to take down.
  • Zulmak, the final boss of the "Pit of Heresy" dungeon, is even easier than Dûl Incaru, as his boss arena is wide with a lot of obstacles blocking his line of sight, and you are given no limit as to the number of times you can attempt to bring him into damage phase. This is a blessing for those who got into trouble in the Pariah Ogres maze and the Chamber of Suffering, moreso if they were attempting to do it alone and without dying for the "Crimson Echoes" emblem.
• Broken Base:
  • The revamped Crucible. Some like it for the more grounded approach and increased focus on gunplay and teamwork, while others dislike it for restricting mode choices ^note All Crucible modes at launch are in a 4v4 format and alternate randomly between game types; Clash, Control and Supremacy for Quickplay, and Countdown and Survival for Competitive. Doubles (2v2) and Iron Banner (to be tested in 6v6 come March 2018) are limited-time only., nerfing ability cooldowns and generally increasing the time it takes to kill a single Guardian, making the aforementioned grounded playstyle bland and uninspired. Even months into the game, most question whether Bungie meant to make the Crucible appeal to a more casual playerbase, or turn it into an e-sport; the latter option being something that puzzles many even more due to the game's inherent contradictions to a competitive e-sports/MLG environment ^note The lack of dedicated servers and ranked matches, poor framerate on consoles, infrequent balance patches and inconsequential rewards, to name a few.
  • Exotic quests that require Crucible play to complete. One side says that the Crucible is just as much a part of the game as the rest of the content, and that it's not unreasonable for the developers to expect their players to participate in every aspect of the game if they want to get the best guns. The other side says that they don't have any interest in the PvP side of the game and as such they don't engage in it. Due to that, they're very low-skilled players who end up having to spend hours slogging it out in the Crucible against players with a far higher degree of skill. The Last Word was probably the worst of this, as getting killed would cause the players to lose progress in the quest. See also other quests, and those that require Gambit instead.
  • The Year 2 Annual Pass, mainly with its lack of campaigns, new Strikes and new PvP maps. Some like the idea of more frequent, but less substantial, content updates, and point out that out of all the smaller Downloadable Content (Dark Below, House of Wolves, Curse of Osiris, and Warmind), all of them have been pretty underwhelming at best, especially with regards to their campaigns. They see the smaller Downloadable Content as Bungie cutting out the fluff to deliver more endgame content on a more regular schedule. The other side argues that Bungie is just charging the same amount of money for less content, and that they threw the baby out with the bathwater by just dropping the Campaigns instead of improving them or altering the way that they were told, such as using them to tell a multi-part story over several DLC installments.
  • Should there be a Destiny 3? This is a debate that began around the announcement of Shadowkeep and has split the community in half, especially after Bungie announced that Destiny 2 would have year 4, year 5, and year 6 DLC. Some argue against the idea of a third game, stating that they don't want another reset and want to keep all their gear and progress that they've accumulated over the years of playing the game. The other side argues that continuing to update and support Destiny 2 isn't worth it in the long run, especially considering all the steps that Bungie is taking in order to make it possible, such as Content Vaulting and Gear Sunsetting (both of which are very much Base Breakers in and of themselves).
  • Stasis in the Crucible has become a main point of contention in the fandom. The Hardcore PvP fandom actively wish for Bungie to remove the subclass entirely, or make a gun-only crucible mode with no abilities. On the flip side, others seem to enjoy the challenge Stasis brings as it means players are now required to think outside the box and learn effective counters to it.
  • Vault space has been a near constant argument among the Destiny 2 fandom that flares up periodically, especially when a new expansion is on the horizon. ever since being increased to 500 slots in Forsaken, the Vault has not seen any storage space increases, in spite of constant requests from players to increase the amount of storage space. One side argues that 500 spaces is more than enough and that the people complaining about a lack of Vault Space simply need to be more discerning about what they do and do not keep in there and to stop holding onto Sunset weapons (for sentimental reasons) and underpowered weapons. The other side argues that, as a loot-based game, players should gain a degree of attachment to their gear and that Bungie themselves have even said so in the past. They also argue that, since things get buffed and rebalanced all the time, holding onto underpowered weapons can be worth it because a balance patch might result in a perk or weapon archetype becoming incredibly powerful, such as what happened with the Adrenaline Junkie perk. There's also a third crowd that argues that Vault Space increases would be pointless and that a better long-term solution (such as allowing players to "save" a particular roll) is needed.
  • Skill Based Matchmaking in the Crucible is the newest war the PvP community has decided to engage in (See: They Changed It, Now It Sucks! for more information). One side, mostly comprised of streamers and top tier crucible players, has long derided the change, complaining of long queue times, terrible connections, and being punished for wanting to try anything outside of the meta, while also arguing that SBMM doesn't encourage people to improve as they're not playing against stronger competition that would fuel this improvement. The other side's argument is that the more competitive side misses out on curbstomping and statpadding against opponents not even half their skill level while SBMM provides those newer players an even foothold to learn the ropes, loadouts, etc., then progress in getting stronger.
  • Cross-play. What was a highly anticipated feature that greatly increased accessibility between platforms instead gave rise to conflicts between high-end users being annoyed at players with inferior specs^note Basically, if your platform uses a Solid State Drive (SSD) and you connect with players that use a Hard Drive Disk (HDD), expect loading times to be excruciatingly long from your perspective due to the sheer difference in data transmission speed between the two drive types; and more often than not, console players make up a large percent of HDD users as Xbox Series X and Playstation 5, which use SSD, are nowhere as prevalent as their earlier counterparts (Xbox One and Playstation 4) bogging the loading times down to a crawl, and console players being introduced to PC hackers and sweatlords. The problems are predictably most felt in the Crucible, where a good mouse-and-keyboard player (something only PC users can use) can utterly trounce controller players (while compatible with PC, console players are limited to this input), with the latter category having very few ways to overcome the immense gap in skill.
• Casual-Competitive Conflict:
  • The main reason why the fandom is in such a splintered state. A good amount of Destiny 1 veterans regard Destiny 2 as a dumbed-down game that caters way too much to the casual by making the story lighter in tone, oversimplifying gameplay mechanics, and disincentivizing individual plays and loot; in essence, this sequel doesn't have much in the way of keeping anyone's attention on the game once they obtain everything, let alone offering appealing rewards. As a result, controversies arose and the playerbase dwindled much faster than it ever did with Destiny 1 over its entire game cycle. It's not until nearly half a year into the game's cycle that Bungie started addressing core problems with concise suggestions and increased their communications with the fragmented fandom.
  • By The Witch Queen, The fandom had fractured itself again, with the PvP side embroiled in a civil war over hot button issues like Airborne Effectiveness, the Trials Flawless Pool, Iron Banner Modes, and Skill Based Matchmaking. Then you have the PvE side warring with PvP over Bungie's odd obsession with balancing weapons for both modes rather than separately (most notable in Season of the Seraph with PvP calling for nerfs on Titan barricades and PvE arguing back that it could kill Titans altogether in harder content) and the general idea of if the game even needs PvP anymore given Bungie's lack of updates for the mode and tone-deaf approach to balancing, a new PvP IP in the works, and the overall toxic nature of the PvP community has devolved into.
• Catharsis Factor: After almost nine years of harassment by Knights with Hive Boomers and a year and a half of the same with Lucent Moths, the introduction of Ex Diris creates a very satisfying gunplay loop that turns the Boomer's Bottomless Magazines of grenades, the Knight's rage mechanic, and the Lucent Moth's relentless tracking & high explosive damage on your enemies tenfold. The moths also work with any mods that affect your grenades on impact for maximum satisfaction.
• The Chris Carter Effect: The game as a whole has been better received for the story campaigns than the first game, but a recurring problem was how the strict story unfolding in front of the players is so broadly told and barely conveys the tons of lore material that sets things up. This created a greater fracture between the players who just want a good looter shooter and those who obsess over the Worldbuilding materials and what every small clue is hinting towards, somehow hitting BOTH Play the Game, Skip the Story and Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game. Destiny 2 has managed to push the setting forward and resolve storylines that were developed long in advance, from finally meeting Osiris and making contact with a revived Rasputin, Forsaken even resolves lingering questions about the events of The Taken King two years earlier. But it can still be not enough as the DLC in between the bigger fall expansions are often criticized for not having enough story, which came to a head in Year Three's Season of the Worthy (The Almighty is sent on a collision course to Earth and you have to help charge Rasputin's weapons systems... in the midst of this they had the Olympics-esque Guardian Games competition that killed all story momentum).
• Cheese Strategy:
  • Kalli, the first boss of the Last Wish raid, is your introduction to the intricate symbol puzzles found throughout the raid. Yet the encounter itself is trivialized if you manage to damage Kalli with a sticky projectile that ticks (Anarchy or Witherhoard are good candidates) before she teleports away from her starting spot, only for her next appearance to leave her trapped and unable to move away from her position, making her easy pickings and eschewing the raid mechanics altogether.
  • Riven used to be a challenging boss requiring knowledge of her puzzles during the opening weeks of the Last Wish raid, but as the Light Levels kept going up with each Annual Pass expansion, most fireteams started eschewing those puzzles and go straight to destroying her entire health bar in one go with a combination of buffs like Well of Radiance and debuffs like Hammer Strike or Flawless Execution, as well as high DPS weapons like Rocket Launchers with Cluster Bombs or Aggressive-type Grenade Launchers with Spike Grenades. What was once the most elaborate boss fight in the entire game devolved into simply feeding her mouth with enough dakka. After the nerf to instant reload perks, this strategy became much less effective, but constantly slashing Riven's right paw with Swords became a good substitute.
• Common Knowledge:
  • Solar, Arc, Void, and Stasis are not fire, lightning, traditional dark magic, or ice respectively. While this is a common assumption for players and viewers who haven't read much into the game's lore, the first three elements are actually meant to represent fusion, fission, and the Casimir effect^note the presence of force in empty vacuums respectively, while Stasis is a type of absence of entropy connected to various scientific models for motion without energy and perfect structure.
  • Although the game is accused of Writing by the Seat of Your Pants quite often, Lightfall's story and its continuation in the following seasons (outside of the Black Heart being connnected to the Veil) is not a case of that trope despite impressions. Bungie has confirmed the fragmented narrative was an attempt to prevent stagnancy after the first few weeks of a season, although this has obviously been met with mixed results.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • During the first weekend of Trials of the Nine, the MIDA Multi-Tool exotic Scout Rifle was used by at least one player in ninety-eight percent of all matches, and accounted for thirty-five percent of all kills ^note For context, the next most common gun, Uriel's Gift, was used in fifty-eight percent of matches, and accounted for eight percent of all kills.. This is due to the MIDA Multi-Tool being a top-tier Scout Rifle, and the Eternity map used for the first week of Trials had a lot of long sight lines that favored Scout Rifles; not to mention that the MIDA was given as a quest reward rather than subject to random drops, so a lot of people had one - and if you didn't already it was pretty easy to acquire anyway.
  • The Explosive Payload weapon perk for many experienced players, until its bonus damage nerf in August 2018. It makes the weapon's projectile create a small area-of-effect detonation on impact that also avoids a large chunk of damage falloff penalty, making weapons with this perk such as the Better Devils and Sunshot hand-cannons or the Nameless Midnight scout rifle much sought after in the community. Following their range adjustments in Shadowkeep, Explosive Payload resurged in PvP on hand cannons due to its aforementioned ability to mitigate damage falloff.
  • High-Caliber Rounds was the other must-have weapon perk, being one of the big reasons the MIDA Multi-Tool was so prevalent in the Crucible alongside Uriel's Gift. It more reliably causes enemies to stagger, or in the case of players, suffer from more flinch/knockback upon being shot, throwing off their aim. (Both points also apply to Explosive Payload above.)
    • Most egregiously, the MIDA Multi-Tool had High-Caliber Rounds in the original Destiny, was Nerfed by having that specific perk removed, and brought it back for the sequel, with predictable results.
  • If it was not Uriel's Gift being loaded into someone's Energy slot in Season 1 Crucible, it's Last Hope - a sidearm with maxed-out stability, high impact for its archetype, three-round bursts, and ultimately the fastest time to kill at short range that isn't a Power Weapon or the bugged Prometheus Lens in the Curse of Osiris launch week. The Last Dance is a close second as a sidearm with similar overall properties and different perks, but more recoil than Last Hope.
  • Swords tend to be surprisingly popular in the Power slot due to the fact that even a single light swing will be a One-Hit Kill, you get plenty of ammo per box spawn, and the fact that you get a third-person camera when using it and thus gain a massive situational awareness advantage over first-person players with guns. This means that players can corner-camp with impunity and become a massive annoyance to their opponents if they can't be flushed out effectively via grenades or flanking. The biggest offender is the Hunter exclusive Quickfang, which boosts movement speed and has the fastest swing time of any swords, all while still able to One-Hit Kill enemy Guardians. Year 2 moved away from this trend in Heavy weapons due to shotguns being moved to the Special slot and therefore a much more accessible close-range OKHO weapon than swords. Season of the Lost applied some additional nerfs, like no longer allowing you to draw your Sword in certain PvP modes if you have no ammo for it — preventing players from using the third-person view to peek around corners.
  • For boss battles and especially the Leviathan Raid, players were expected to wield one of their following as their boss-melting DPS weapon of choice in Year 1: the Coldheart Exotic Trace Rifle (itself a Pre-Order Bonus and thus commonly owned), the Merciless Exotic Fusion Rifle, and any Rocket Launcher with the Cluster Bomb perk such as the Curtain Call or Sins of the Past (earned via encounters from the very same Raid). Used in conjunction with Rally Barricades for instant reloads, the total DPS output on Calus with over 100 Force of Will stacks could kill him in just one damage phase. Sweet Business with Actium War Rig is also exceptional at DPS and skull-farming, but its low ammo capacity means it runs out of ammo far too quickly to be used for both. Eventually most instant/free reload tricks were removed, leaving Hunters (particularly those using certain Stasis builds) the only ones able to really throw out that kind of rapid firepower.
  • Following the "Go Fast" update, the Vigilance Wing, a five-round burst pulse rifle, had become the weapon of choice amongst PvP players due to the extremely low time to kill it has. It can kill an enemy player in two to three bursts.
  • The Graviton Lance followed suit in Warmind, becoming a makeshift hard-hitting Scout Rifle with a fast rate of fire and laser precision, with the added bonus of making headshots a deterrent against tightly grouped enemy teams.
  • The hardest waves of Escalation Protocol almost always required multiple Guardians with the ability to deal a Damage-Increasing Debuff, be it the Tractor Cannon, a Nightstalker's Shadowshot coupled with the Orpheus Rig, or a Sunbreaker's Hammer Strike. Stacking those debuffs is much more preferable than most damage-dealing Supers, though the Voidwalker's Nova Bomb is also a desirable option due to its synergy with Tractor Cannon at the time. Given the sheer difficulty of the last two Escalation Protocol waves, however, it was generally agreed that using all the above (some normally considered as game breakers) was the strict minimum, and straying from that strategy was bound to fail. After Forsaken, Escalation Protocol's difficulty no longer had such a high barrier for completion.
  • After Gambit launched, the Sleeper Simulant quickly became the go-to gun for the game mode, due to its ability to one-shot a Guardian with a body shot even while that guardian was using their Super. It also had very generous Aim Assist, making for a high-damage weapon that was very easy to use. It was the go-to weapon for Invaders and was excellent at clearing blockers and damaging the Primeval Taken that spawned when your team banked enough motes.
    • Following Sleeper Simulant's nerf, The Queenbreaker took over as the go-to invader weapon due to its faster charge time as well as being bugged to where it had double the amount of intended aim assist. This continued until its nerf at the start of Season 6. The Black Armory Hammerhead Machinegun was also popular for a long while due to its accuracy and firepower whilst also having potential for good PvE rolls, though it was eventually sunset.
  • Following the weapons slot changes in Patch 2.0, using a shotgun, any shotgun, is bound to get you decent results in the Crucible, given that it's a oneshot with little to no preparation, and closing the distance against Guardians that try to stop you with their puny Primary weapons is incredibly easy. It's got to the point that players have had enough of "shotgun apes" roaming in the Crucible and avoid PvP altogether.
  • Well of Radiance became a must-have super for endgame PvE content shortly after it was released, due to its healing, overshield, and massive 35% damage output increase, as well Bottomless Magazines if Lunafaction Boots are equipped (change to faster reloading as of Shadowkeep). It's worth nothing that Bungie removed Blessing of Light and Weapons of Light from Ward of Dawn in Destiny 2 to avoid this situation, but created a super ability better than the original Ward of Dawn in almost every way with very predictable results.
  • For random weapon rolls, you can never go wrong in PvE with the combination of a reload speed perk ^note Outlaw, Feeding Frenzy, Rapid Hit and a damage-boosting perk ^note Rampage, (Multi)Kill Clip, Surrounded, Swashbuckler. Any weapon that rolls with that combo usually steamrolls over the rest unless you are aiming for a specific weapon's unique perk combinations (which appear more often with each expansion in the Annual Pass), or are tuning for a more specific purpose like the Crucible (where Kill Clip ^note Bonus damage when quickly reloading after a kill is usually a superior choice to Rampage due to a larger short-lived damage boost and the difficulty in getting 3 stacks of Rampage in PvP). It's just that the combination of getting a large damage increase on top of being able to quickly reload your weapon to keep the stacks going is one of the most appealing options when considering a weapon's strengths and weaknesses.
  • Celestial Nighthawk is an exotic Hunter helmet that condenses all Golden Gun shots into one, but with a 6x damage output. Since Crucible or Strikes rarely need that much damage it became a go-to for Raids and Dungeons, while using other buffs provided by allies they can sometimes deal 15 percent of the damage to the boss health in one shot, and straight up oneshot some Dungeon bosses. If a Hunter isn't using Celestial Nighthawk they had better be using Orpheus Rigs and Shadowshot. It surged back in the limelight during Season of the Wish as the new artifact gave it new toys in the form of Heart of the Flame^note Casting your Solar Super grants nearby allies Radiant and increases the damage of your Super for each nearby ally. and Revitalizing Blast^note Causing damage with a Solar ability weakens Champions and bosses for a short duration..
    • As of the Void 3.0 rework for The Witch Queen, the Moebius Quiver variant of Shadowshot took over as the number one damage super for Hunters, outpacing even Golden Gun. This is on top of the arrows having slight homing capabilities and allowing for multiple volleys, so that it's not totally wasted if you missed the first shot. Compare to Golden Gun, which requires you to be pinpoint accurate, and will be completely nullified if you're off by a hair's breadth.
  • Black Armory introduced us to what is unequivocally the most common cookie-cutter weapon loadout ever due to its extreme versatility: the Blast Furnace pulse rifle for the kinetic slot, the Exotic fusion rifle Jötunn for the energy slot, and the Hammerhead heavy machine gun. All for these weapons boast the highest range and stability in their class, with the Jötunn boasting nigh-unlimited range (with an added bonus of slight homing) and ridiculous stopping power (enough to oneshot regular Guardians in the Crucible and critically injure roaming supers), and the Hammerhead essentially being a Heavy scout rifle in disguise due to its predictable recoil pattern. This unholy trinity is sometimes referred to as the "Dad loadout", mocking low-skill, non-hardcore players that use these weapons to outrange the competition. With the Armory weapons Sunset and Forges vaulted, however, only Jötunn remains.
  • Possessing the Anarchy was the new "Must have Gjallarhorn or get kicked" mandate in stingy raid teams that feel entitled to maximize their DPS. On PC and bosses that don't put a large distance between you and them (Vault of Glass's Templar and Deep Stone Crypt's final boss), you'll also get looked down on if you don't run double slug shotguns and know how to quickly swap them to make them fire far faster than intended.
  • Speaking of Gjallarhorn, the gun itself is back thanks to the 30th Anniversary Update, and it's easily as monstrous as it was, if not perhaps moreso, for better or worse. By Season 19, however, nerfs to its destructive power reduced it to being little more than a support weapon to bolster other, more powerful legendary rocket launchers with its Wolfpack Rounds; which is still a viable strategy against bosses allergic to crit spots, all things considered.
  • If you have Cuirass of the Falling Star, consider yourself set for farming key bosses in the Deep Stone Crypt raid, seeing how Atraks-1's copies die pretty quickly against at least three powered Thundercrashes and Taniks hardly fares better.
  • By Season of the Seraph, it's clear that Iron Banner's rank progression is horrendous in the face of Bungie's adamant decision to double down on Skill Based Matchmaking, with each earnest match becoming a struggle full of oppressive team strategies (read: stacking Ward of Dawn to abuse the capture points in the seasonal variant to the game mode, Fortress). Getting at most 300 rank points for winning and with maximum rank modifiers^note A 11.0x multiplier after completing all four pinnacle challenges, which amounts to a total of 18 Iron Banner matches, and equipping 5 Iron Banner armour pieces (ornaments count as one piece) as well as an emblem related to Iron Banner, on top of the maximum match streak of 5 in the playlist is hardly worth the pain to constantly sweat through a full 10 minutes per match, so many players started revolting against the system by purposely throwing matches instead, given a loss with the same modifiers gives about 200; whether you win or lose, you'll be at it for hours —if not days— just for a single rank reset that requires 10,000 points, so taking the easy way out and farming losses by getting mercy ruled 3 minutes into the match doesn't seem so bad an option for many.
  • Lightfall brought in a highly sought after combo of a Rangefinder and Target Lock on a Submachine gun. Rangefinder would boots the gun's range beyond normal SMGs while Target Lock would grant you increased damage simply for sustaining fire on an enemy. The most infamous of these was The Immortal, which was only obtainable from Trials of Osiris and had an Adept version that could gain even more range through the Adept mods. Those who could obtain The Immortal were able to find a substitute in No Survivors from the Ghosts of the Deep Dungeon. Bungie has tried to curb their power by nerfing Rangefinder's effectiveness, but this has allowed other Target Lock SMGs to enter the fray, like the Unending Tempest, which could be focused at Lord Shaxx.
• Complete Monster:
  • Dominus Ghaul is the commander of the Red Legion who usurped Emperor Calus as leader of the The Cabal. Envious of the Guardian’s capabilities to wield the Traveler’s Light, Ghaul invades the Last City on Earth and deploys a ship that severs the Guardians' connection to the Traveler, while his forces slaughter helpless civilians and Guardians. Ghaul would also interrogate the Speaker to learn more about the Light by torturing him until he dies and murders his closest ally, the Consul, when the latter berated him for his efforts. Ghaul would then plan to strip the Light from the Traveler before attempting to destroy the Solar System with the Almighty, a cataclysmic weapon Ghaul had already used to conquer and destroy dozens of worlds.
  • Forsaken: Riven of a Thousand Voices is a sadistic Ahamkara who was sealed inside the Dreaming City for her deceitful nature. Found by Oryx, The Taken King, Riven makes a deal to maintain her free will by letting Oryx forcibly turn everyone in the Dreaming City into Taken, allowing Riven to rule over the city. Riven would then disguise herself as Mara Sov, to corrupt and manipulate Uldren Sov into committing atrocities for her, having Uldren create the undead Scorn and free the Solar System's most notorious criminals, leading to massive bloodshed throughout the galaxy before Riven devours Uldren alive after he frees her. When a Guardian raid team was sent to kill Riven, she would make sure the Dreaming City would be kept in a time loop and remain under Taken influence to forever subject those in the city to constant suffering.
  • The Witch Queen: Rhulk was a bloodthirsty Lubrean whose brutally horrified his own parents so much that they tried to kill him. When Rhulk survived their attempt, Rhulk retaliates by slaughtering them along with everyone else in his clan, children included, before destroying his own planet. Found by The Witness, Rhulk becomes their First Disciple, where he would commit countless atrocities on their behalf, which include manipulating the Ahslid into fighting each other leading to their extinction, and making Xita, the Nurturing Worm, his Breeding Slave, while threatening her life to force her children to do his bidding; Rhulk would use the worms he had Xita mass produce to transform the Krill into the undead Hive. Sent by the Witness to supervise Savathûn and kill her if she goes against them, Rhulk would gain control of The Scorn and use them against Savathûn and her forces after she seals him inside his own Pyramid where Rhulk would attempt to kill a Guardian raid team when they enter it.
  • Season of Plunder & Lightfall: Nezarec, Herald of the First Collapse, and the Final God of Pain, was the true mastermind of the Eliksni's Start of Darkness on Sol and the collapse of humanity's Golden Age, kick-starting the game's post-apocalyptic setting. Using the Darkness to attain an Abstract Apotheosis billions of years ago, Nezarec has abused his immortality and domain to inflict suffering on billions of lives across the universe For the Evulz, killing many and feeding off of the torment endured by those who remained. Not content with watching the remains of civilization eke out painful existences, Nezarec would also use a Religion of Evil to personally torture and corrupt several individuals he took an interest in, aware that any and all resistance or resentment of him only gives him more power and fealty. When he finally reawakens physically in the present during Lightfall, Nezarec's only concerns are missed opportunities to inflict more pain and make it personal with the Young Wolf, knowing that killing or isolating him again is useless when the Darkness will continue providing him more servants, eternal life beyond the material plane, and the ability to continue exercising his power through the psychic matrix that gives Strand its form.
• Contested Sequel: The main point of contention is how much of an "improvement" the game is over the original Destiny. Generally, reviewers and fans alike agree that the game is a major improvement over the first game, when it first released; the contention kicks in when many veterans feel that Destiny 2 takes significant steps back compared to the game that D1 became as a result of its patches and expansions. The biggest problem is that Destiny 2 feels very content-light compared to Destiny 1 with all the expansions added on - but then some point out that of course it does because it hasn't been expanded yet, while others then respond with wondering why everything had to be thrown overboard for D2, and so on. The latter sentiment became more intense after Season 2/Curse of Osiris expansion and the various controversies that arose. As of Forsaken onwards however, many former detractors have warmed up to the game or feel the issues they had have been addressed, and the game is generally agreed to have finally Grown The Beard.
  • On a grander scale, a big sticking point with a lot of Destiny 1 players is why it needed a sequel at all, considering that Bungie had announced that Destiny had a "10 year plan", but everything players had done in the original was promptly thrown out and they were forced to buy an entirely new game to continue with the story only 3 years after the original launched. In a sense, Destiny 2 is contested on the very basis of its existence.
• Continuity Lock-Out:
  • A rapidly pressing issue with the Destiny Content Vault introduced in Beyond Light and the loss of no less than four locations (along with most of their associated activities) is the concern that Destiny 2 is essentially on the way to cannibalize itself for the sake of saving disk space, and this comes at the cost of the story progress becoming unfriendly to new players wanting to get into the game, only to be disoriented by the seasonal content and fading relevance of older expansions. Things hit a new low in Season 15 with the announcement of both the Tangled Shore and Forsaken's campaign being vaulted to make way for The Witch Queen, with the backlash denouncing Bungie's terrible treatment of the game's content that will inevitably create more plotholes for new players.
  • The same problem would arise when the new seasons post-Beyond Light would automatically launch the seasonal prelude mission even for new players who only finished the New Light tutorial. This predictably leads to a disorienting and uncohesive storytelling from a newbie's perspective; e.g., you're fresh off from escaping a bunch of angry Fallens from the Cosmodrome, and then you're suddenly put in the Dreaming City running errands for a Reef Queen no newbie ever heard of (Season of the Lost). Bungie's 30th anniversary update was particularly bad, as it automatically forced all players who log in for the first time since said update to play the Dares of Eternity, an endgame activity full of elite enemies and mechanics no sane newbie would have the knowledge nor equipment to tackle. The results are predictable: confused fresh players (or ones returning from a long break) suddenly finding themselves in an activity they can't reliably complete with underleveled gear, leading to them quitting the game. Sure, going back to the directory mitigates the issue, but for someone completely new to Destiny 2 and who isn't familiar with the menus, this is a massive oversight from the development team. This was mitigated in the 2.38 (1.033) Update, which lowered Dares of Eternity's difficulty considerably, and new/returning players are no longer dragged into it automatically.
  • The issues have come to a head with the events of Lightfall and its accompanying seasons - in particular, Season of the Deep contains crucial details regarding the origins of the Witness and the Black Fleet, as well as the true nature of the Final Shape. All of these are locked behind Week 5 of the seasonal story, meaning these will never be fully explained to anyone who misses them. Fans have outright stated this content should've been part of Lightfall's base game due to how important they are to the plot.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • In a meta sense, the Prometheus Lens, upon the Curse of Osiris release, was a Game-Breaker due to a bug, but since Bungie needed time to implement a fix it remained overpowered until then, and the Trials of the Nine for that week was not suspended/cancelled. So how did they mitigate the unfairness of having stacked fireteams of Lenses all aiming for flawless runs? Why, have Xûr sell it for everyone, of course! Players who took part in PvP during this time also received an exclusive thematic emblem for their trouble.
  • Uldren Sov's murder of Cayde-6 is meant to be one of the game's most tragic moments, and a major turning point in the story. That doesn't stop Bungie from introducing the "Silencing Shot" finisher, which allows the guardian to recreate and parody the event with their target, complete with Ace of Spades' model and firing sound.
• Demonic Spiders: Has its own page.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: The Mysterious Logbook initially led some to believe Clovis Bray I is autistic, as some of his behaviors are rather bizarre and punctual even by the standards of his Utopia Justifies the Means mindset and crippling egotism. However, this was quickly shot down by the Logbook's author, Seth J. Dickinson; while Clovis does seem to be genuinely mentally ill^note His health scans indicate part of his decline is caused by being so thoroughly in denial about his ability to feel compassion that he feels the need to block it out, damaging his physical and mental health in the process while also being compromised by both the Darkness and the Vex, whatever he has is explicitly not autism to prevent any association between the condition and his malicious actions (and also, you know, framing it as a mental illness.)
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Of the new cast members, Failsafe is generally the most popular, due to her Woobie status and hilarious mood swinging between Friendly and Helpful to Deadpan Snarker.
  • While Cayde-6 is still the most beloved member of the Vanguard, Ikora Rey has steadily grown to rival him in popularity as the game progresses, as many have taken notice of her fascinating Hidden Depths and strong Character Development. Her supporting the Young Wolf’s hunt for Uldren Sov in Forsaken (while Zavala did nothing) also greatly endeared her to players.
  • Sagira, the Ghost of Osiris, mainly due to her unique design from other Ghosts and being the first non-player ghost to be voiced.
  • Emperor Calus, thanks to how awesome and Affably Evil he manages to be, as well as a being the source of some great Raids. His desire to convince the Guardians to join him is also seen as a very unique and interesting villain motive, and some players wish you could actually do so. Some non-player Guardians evidently were swayed to his side, judging by the events of the Presage quest.
  • Mithrax the Forsaken, a Fallen Captain, started as a minor character in the Rat King questline who earned sympathy both in and out of universe when he allowed the player to walk away with the item he was coveting after the latter saved him from a Hive Knight. He ended up becoming so beloved by fans that he’s become an Ascended Extra, taking Varik’s spot as the Token Heroic Fallen and effectively becoming a non-Lightbearing Guardian like Hawthorne. Joker's Wild made him even more popular by directly involving him in a very well designed and memorable secret mission. It finally came full circle in Season of the Splicer as Mithrax and House Light have become a central focus in helping take down the Vex.
  • Hiraks The Mindbender seems to be the most popular of the Scorned Barons from Forsaken due to his interesting gimmick of being a Hive worshipping Fallen, along with having a cool design and fun boss battle.
  • The Drifter has endeared himself to many thanks to his laidback personality, fascinatingly unconventional views on the Traveler and Darkness, and insanely memorable Gambit dialogue.
  • The Zero Hour mission features TR3-VR, a nightmarish security robot that sweeps through vents killing you with a combination of whirling electric buzzsaws and electric discharge with a terrifying clattering noise and bright red floodlights. Naturally, the community loved him. The week hadn't ended before Bungie released merch based on the psycho roomba.
  • The Crow. Despite Uldren being almost universally hated by everyone, in and out of universe, for killing Cayde-6, his post-resurrected self has received near universal warm reception from the fanbase. His dramatic lines of how he wished he met the Young Wolf earlier probably helped.
  • After being properly introduced in Season of Plunder, Eido has gone on to become a massively popular character with the fanbase, mostly due to her Adorkable optimism and enthusiasm balancing out the more stoic, cynical personas of the other Plunder focus characters, namely Mithrax, Drifter, and Spider.
  • Moss-2, the New Meat Warlock sent in with Cogburn and Earp to clean up after the Young Wolf just after the events of the Spire of the Watcher dungeon, has gained a disproportionate amount of popularity for a lore-only character because of his ability to share his body with his Ghost No-Name. Comparisons to Johnny Silverhand, Ratatouille, and Kamen Rider W have all ensued.

Tropes F-R

• Fan-Disliked Explanation:
  • The official explanation for why the Titan, Mercury, Io and Mars maps for Crucible and Gambit can still be played on despite canonically getting vanished back in Arrivals is given a Hand Wave via Vex simulations... yet, when maps for the Tangled Shored and Dreaming City also got vaulted, not only are the locations still accessible at least in lore, there hasn't been an actual explanation for why players can't go there anymore. Alongside the "Vex simulations" thing only coming up in lore tabs, fans have regarded this explanation as a hamfisted attempt at justifying those pieces of content still existing and being clear Gameplay and Story Segregation.
    • For Crucible in particular, it also completely negates the whole concept of Crucible as established in the Grimoire - claiming patches of enemy territory and having Guardians constantly train there, so that in case enemy forces make a move, there's already Guardians nearby who can respond quickly. Fighting in simulations removes this explanation, and as a consequences, it removes the actual point of fighting on those maps.
  • There are numerous attempts by Bungie to integrate the continued use of reskinned or downsized content (usually enemies and weapons) into the lore, ranging from "Banshee trying to cope with his memory loss" (Something New's lore) to "they're refurbished antiques" (Neomuna's weapons) to "the enemies are folding into each other because you've made them that desperate" (the Vex and Fallen.) Reception is often lukewarm at best, since some have taken it as Bungie using the writing team to cover for inadequacies on the teams responsible for actual content.
• Fandom Rivalry:
  • As with its predecessor, the Destiny 2 fandom has an intense rivalry with the Warframe fandom due to broadly similar gameplay styles, setting, and players hawking Warframe to unhappy Destiny fans.
  • Anthem (2019) began to garner a fair amount of attention from players for many of the same reasons as Warframe, being a shared world shooter-RPG set in a post-apocalyptic future, but with development indefinitely shelved it's unlikely to present any competition.
• Fan Nickname: Has its own page.
• Franchise Original Sin:
  • Back in the first game, the boss stomping mechanic, while criticized for being unoriginal, was largely glossed over since most of the gunplay happened at a distance and the knockback effect of the boss stomp was moderate. In Destiny 2, the Shockwave Stomp ends up overused for most story and endgame bosses, including some bosses that don't have feet, and the increased knockback and radius have gone to the point where you can get propelled at the speed where you can die if you hit a wall (in a similar manner to a Phalanx's wonky shield bash). Naturally, this got a lot of flak from the fandom, who wishes the developers at least took some time to make a different, less obnoxious close-range combat animation for bosses.
  • Similarly, the Drop-In-Drop-Out Multiplayer nature of matchmaking has had its shortcomings pointed out in D1, but here it's even worse. Any endgame activity that Bungie tries to incorporate as a public event in a patrol zone inevitably ends up blowing in their face due to the unrealistic expectations of matchmaking ^note One instance of a patrol zone can only accomodate five separate fireteams and up to a total of nine players, and that's only if matchmaking even decides to be aggressive in searching for other players, as well assuming those additional Guardians are even interested in tackling the public event; Escalation Protocol was impossible to fully complete during Warmind's first weeks unless you filled the instance with nine players all equipped with outright broken setups, the Blind Well was equally difficult to do without tricking matchmaking into filling the instance with full fireteams during Forsaken's launch; and the Seraph Tower from Season of the Worthy, particularly with the increased difficulty following the fix for the "Hardcoded Victory" Triumph, is a bad case of overwhelming odds for so little incentive.
  • Power Level. When Destiny 1 first launched, the "Light Level" system was a major Scrappy Mechanic, and received a significant overhaul in Year 2 of Destiny 1. The revamped system was transferred into Destiny 2 and was renamed "Power Level." Essentially, it's a weighted average of the attack and defense values on your currently equipped weapons and armor. Whule this system was well-liked enough in Destiny 1, as the years have gone by in Destiny 2, this system has received more and more criticism. Part of the problem is a perceived lack of depth, as for the most part the damage you take and deal is determined by a single stat. However, the main criticism against it is how often it increases, by how much, and how to reach the new cap. In Destiny 1, Light Level increases were infrequent, and typically quite small when they happened. In Year 2, Max Light Level was 320 when Taken King launched and was later bumped up to 335 after about six months. Wrath of the Machine introduced Light Level 385, eventually raised to 400. In Destiny 2, not only are Power Level increases more frequent, but they're much larger when they do happen. The Max Power level in the base game was 300 on launch, and then it was bumped up to 330 when the first expansion launched, and then up to 380 for the second expansion (and was even later raised to 400). When Forsaken launched, the Power Cap was again raised, to 600, and was then increased three more times throughout the year, increasing by 50 each time. Additionally, with the shift to focus on Weekly Powerful Rewards, it became much more frustrating to raise one's Power Level. In Destiny 1, you could get to Max Light Level relatively quickly by grinding Nightfalls or Iron Banner. In Destiny 2, there's a hard cap imposed on the number of Powerful or Pinnacle Rewards you can get per week, preventing players from simply grinding those activities to get to max Power Level. In later post-Beyond Light seasons, the caps and increases per-season were throttled down to reduce the amount of grinding required to catch up.
  • The player Guardian regularly suffers from Cutscene Incompetence, never having an impact on the story other than to point a weapon at somebody and maybe drop one or two lines, rendering them a Flat Character outside of cutscenes since they don't say a word. In the early days of the franchise this was more or less glossed over, as the universe was still being set up, there was a decent amount of dialogue in cutscenes to give the player Guardian just enough personality to make them stand out, and after Halo Bungie was known for making their lead characters very dry and straightforward. Starting with Destiny 2, however, Bungie seemed to suddenly grow afraid of the player doing anything more than that as they became a straight up Heroic Mime. In Forsaken they are given some more complex motivations that continues from Shadowkeep onward, but that's only in regards to dialogue - cutscenes became predominantly about other characters in the setting or otherwise trying to expand on the setting. In Bungie's attempt to not invalidate whatever personality or powerset a player may have in mind for their character, they end up accidentally making the player Guardian feel like a mindless attack dog that someone can just order around.
    • The issue came to a head in Season of Plunder, where the final storyline cutscene has Mithrax and Eramis engage in a sword duel in front of Eido who pleads with them to stop. The player Guardian has to initiate the cutscene by entering the enclosure to rescue Eido and should by all rights have all the incentive to intervene and stop both... but instead, they just stand back and does absolutely nothing. When Eramis escapes it's as though they had no investment in the outcome.
  • From Destiny 1 players have come to understand that the franchise is based mostly on an open world setting with environments and game modes you play repeatedly for more gear, with the story campaign more of a Framing Device that helps you become attached to these environments and characters but with the bulk of the storytelling rooted in the lore books and in game visuals and dialogue with vague references that are never explained in detail. Bungie has taken feedback from players and done a lot of experimenting across the seasons and major expansions to get the storytelling content within the game itself and not rely too much on cutscenes, which achieved a fairly high water mark in The Witch Queen by using the prior years seasonal content to complement the expansions' story. Bungie themselves declared for The Witch Queen that they were putting more of the story in the game rather than in the lore books. Come Lightfall, players felt slighted at the lack of explanation for near everything in the campaign (containing some of the harshest reviews the game has ever had from a full expansion), being told to find and protect conflicting MacGuffins' that are either explained far too long after being first introduced or not at all, culminating in a Gainax Ending. As with much of the life of Destiny, players were underwhelmed with being left out of the loop on all relevant story details.
  • Shadowkeep introduced champions as a new enemy type across all factions, which only show up in particular gametypes and difficulty levels. Their main quirk is being exceptionally tough and near impossible to kill (overload champions Teleport Spam and barrier champions will put up an immunity shield and both with recharge health if ignored for too long, while unstoppable champions just never stopping rushing at you), forcing the player to spec into the right counter-champion weapon mods which rotate every season. At the start this was seen as a refreshing change of pace and a new gameplay wrinkle that evolves season to season, but it became evident after a couple years that overreliance on champions as a status of difficulty level started to stagnate introducing other updated enemy types. The Witch Queen started leaning away from champions in everything while Lightfall modified champions to be weak to specific guardian abilities, alleviating the sense of players being forced into one particular playstyle.
  • After a very rocky Year One of the game with the base campaign and DLC with sparse content, Year Two started with a highly praised DLC in Forsaken and then went on to introduce smaller DLC in what was described as seasonal stories. Rather than including a new destination to explore with a full campaign, Black Armory, Jokers Wild and Penumbra were more modestly priced DLC that included new game modes in diverse locales with new gear to chase, along with the raids Scourge of the Past and Crown of Sorrow. There were stories associated with each DLC but was kept significantly more low stakes, making each come across a Breather Episode with a bit of Worldbuilding on the side rather than trying to include a Big Bad who threatens all of existence. Some of the content of each DLC was time gated, where it wasn't available for players to discover until so many weeks after release, but since expectations for the content was low this was seen as a casual boost to Replay Value. Year Three and Shadowkeep began in earnest the seasonal model, four this time, and each season would progress a story week to week and came with a tier based leveling system that would reset with each season. While this was something different and interesting, a good portion of the actual content for the season was now time gated and it was trying to tell a full mini-campaign through each weekly installment. This made the reception of each season heavily dependent on the quality of the mini-camapign, but also the flood of content and weekly progression gave rise to gamer FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out, often discussed with the controversial Live Service models). Not helped is that each new season would remove content from the prior season (year two content remained permanent at the time), and then with the approach of Beyond Light came the announcement of "sunsetting" where the year one campaign content as well as year two seasonal DLC's were also to be removed. The subsequent four years would adjust that format according to criticisms (the seasonal content remained in the game up until the next expansion) but would follow similar struggles where a particular season is lacking in compelling development as it was hard to tell a smaller, personal story inside the Myth Arc when each season lasted three months. This continued up to The Final Shape where Bungie announced the seasonal model was being dropped in favor of more concrete "episodes."
• Gameplay Derailment:
  • Trials of the Nine is meant to be a serious confrontation between two premade fireteams, but as time went on and the population dwindled, it has become common practice to cheese the game mode by trading wins with teams that constantly pair with each other (this is very dependent on the fireteam hosts' geolocation). This is much easier to pull off on PC due to multiple factors ^note PC has the smallest player population, they can choose different Blizzard servers, and have access to various IP-reading software. leaving little room for error when matching up with the desired team.
    • With Trials of Osiris, the strategy has now become what is known as the "Hakke/China Casino," which abuses the rejoin function Bungie implemented in to allow players to rejoin after a disconnect. ^note (The way it works is two players have a "Burner Guardian" wearing the Hakke Upgrade Emblem and one player doesn't wear the emblem and acts as the messenger. When matching, the two messengers converse and determine a winner through a steam command. Winners swaps their burner guardians over to their actual Trials Guardian and take the victory. If you lose, you keep the burner guardians and try again.) It got so bad that Bungie disabled Trials for 2 weeks, and when it returned, so did the Casino. It's now to the point where basic accounts (ones that are too new or haven't purchased certain content) are not allowed to take part in Trials, and win-trading can earn you an account ban.
  • Competitive mode works similarly, though it's a much longer cheese if you're going for Redrix's Claymore (not to mention there is a higher chance you might run into different teams due to the Glory system factoring who you can pair up against). What's worse is that this obvious matchmaking flaw is totally on Bungie, and there's literally nothing they can do about it, despite threatening to take action against players that exploit the game mode in such a way in the months leading up to Forsaken.
  • The weapon quest "A Gift for the Worthy" required players to rack up 1500 grenade launcher final blows and 500 grenade launcher multikills running Vanguard Strikes. Since its release, you can encounter groups of players who launch the strike "The Corrupted", then run right out of the strike to the nearby Blind Well to farm the waves of enemies while still technically running the strike and thus earning quest progress.
  • Back during the period where Black Armory Forges were playable, there was once an exploit to quickly rack up tons of planetary materials and glimmer. It involved using the lowest power gear possible (often pulled from collections) to trick the matchmaking into grouping you with similarly low level players. Once you load in, you could AFK for hours on end, even setting the game up overnight. Since the Forge missions restarted from the beginning on a failure and always rewarded some materials even if it's not a win, this meant Forges became a very good way to farm materials while you did other things. Bungie eventually patched this out, and with the Forges' removal in Beyond Light, it's completely dead.
  • Shaped weapons take forever to level normally, as they only get major progress bumps by completing activities, and otherwise only level up via kills. Normally it would take an eternity to get every weapon to at least level 20 as Bungie intends... unless you decide to use the checkpoint for Shuro Chi. The encounter spawns a ton of Taken enemies right off the bat, giving you plenty of targets to destroy. Combine it with Nightstalker Hunter, whose Shadowshot super (specifically the Deadfall variation) lets you get a ton of kills attributed to your weapon at once by applying its damage to all tethered enemies before instantly killing them. You can rack up a whole lot of levels over the course of a few hours by constantly clearing the enemies, wiping, and restarting the encounter. Turn off the game's sound, put on some music or a podcast, and enjoy. The only caveat is that you have to put in the code in the Wall of Wishes every week to get the checkpoint, but otherwise it's very easy to do. It remains to be seen if Bungie wises up to this and nerfs it, or lets it be.
    • Shuro Chi is also perfect for grinding out Exotic catalysts, especially the more aggravating ones that aren't just "get kills with this weapon". These include Polaris Lance (Perfect Fifth kills), Graviton Lance (Cosmology orb kills), and Outbreak Perfected (precision kills in general).
  • On paper, Commendations are a great way to highlight and praise teammates for good things they do, whether it's for staying calm under pressure or being particularly helpful in certain modes, without being expected. In practice this gets thrown out the window as there's a Pinnacle reward for giving Commendations throughout the week, alongside triumphs. As a result, what could have been a great passive system to encourage the community to bond ended up twisted into yet another exploited system for grinding imaginary points that Bungie didn't foresee.
• Genius Bonus:
  • The glowing Vex motes that move in right angles during spawn in and in other places are tracing out a Hilbert curve.
  • On a similar note, most of the apparent Techno Babble that Asher throws around during the Pyramidion and Inverted Spire strikes is at least somewhat based in real science. Although sometimes it really just is Techno Babble.
  • A large amount of the exposition regarding Savathun's grand plan with the Distributary, a black hole, is grounded in Real Life research regarding black holes, including the part where you are told the only way to truly safekeep your secrets is to cast them into a black hole, where they will be recorded as information and be among the very last of the universe's objects to disappear completely.
  • A throwaway gag in Season of the Seraph has Clovis Bray I dismiss the Hive's use of Void crystals in their magic as simply a "Casimir field." This fully confirms a long-standing fan theory that Void Light is actually an exaggeration of the Casimir effect, a real phenomenon in quantum physics where forces occur in what should be empty vaccums.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • The Cabal War Beasts; they're lightning fast, constantly Zerg Rush you, and can tear through your shields in seconds if you can't get out of their reach. However, they are very squishy and can be killed with a few shots or a single normal melee attack.
  • Fallen Scorch Cannon Vandals and Dregs. The firepower of the Scorch Cannon Captains with about half to a quarter the health of one, and no shields.
  • Taken Psions. Individually weak, but they possess Self-Duplication; Psions will periodically split in two (often right as they're about to die) and can quickly overwhelm you with sheer numbers, flanking shenanigans, and painful precision shots. To make matters worse, the new Psion spawns with full health.
  • Taken Hobgoblins. Whilst they lack the invulnerability+regeneration power of their pre-Taken counterparts, they instead periodically generate homing explosive projectiles for retaliation - they'll constantly snipe at you and if you dare to shoot back, expect a volley of missiles in return. This can easily be fatal if you're not careful.
  • Taken Goblins are the epitome of aggravation, as they have an unnerving tendency to shield tough enemies like Taken Knights and Taken Minotaurs when you thought you had a window of opportunity to kill them. To make matters worse, they often come in packs, and more often than not you'll see a pair of Taken Goblins shielding each other just to provide you with two invulnerable enemies that contribute nothing to the fight (except maybe to distract you from the bigger threats).
  • Fallen Servitors don't dish out a lot of damage with their inaccurate, sporadic void bolts, but they're much more durable than they look, and will usually project a barrier that renders nearby allies invulnerable unless you kill the Servitor first or power through with a Super. The larger Servitors go straight into Demonic Spiders territory, though, as they gain a drain attack that depletes your health in seconds if you dare get into melee range with them.
  • Screeb are little Action Bomb critters that accompany the Scorn. They're kamikaze units akin to a Cursed Thrall, that rapidly scuttle toward their foes on all six limbs and detonate themselves. They are dangerously fast, low to the ground, prone to running around behind cover until they can pop out at you, and tend to swarm you while you're also dealing with tougher opponents. Arc Burn can put them into Demonic Spiders territory; just one can kill you, and they come by the dozen. They're fairly easy to kill, at least; like the Cursed Thralls, a few hits makes them explode, and one exploding Screeb can set off a chain reaction.
  • Deathtongue Choristers, Ultra-tier Hive Acolytes that glow white with the purpose of boosting nearby Hive units if they complete their ritual, are exclusive to Heist Battlegrounds and only one spawns per activity, but boy do they make your life miserable if don't take them out quickly. While they don't deal much damage with their standard-issue Acolyte weapon, they have nearly as much health as an actual boss, unflinchingly sprint towards the totem they spawn very close to, and are surrounded by lots of baddies that will become even more hellish once they're coated in overshields and your Super is disabled for as long as the Chorister is alive.
• Goddamned Boss:
  • While INSURRECTION PRIME was widely praised to be an innovative boss, it did have a couple of caveats that annoyed raiders to no end: it frequently rotated its torso around and rarely stood still, making it tricky to disable the shield generators scattered around its body; if stunned, it also had a chance of kneeling down in the wrong direction and in front of a building, leaving little space for your fireteam to spread apart and still deal effective damage when the phase radiance puzzlewas activated.
  • Most strike bosses—even those that go invulnerable after losing a certain amount of health—are able to be killed in the blink of an eye, depending on the scale of the content and a fireteam's coordination. The one exception to the rule is Fikrul's incarnation as the boss of "The Hollowed Lair;" he goes immune practically the moment he loses a third of his health. After that, he leaves the arena and sends several large waves of enemies at the fireteam. Clear the waves out and he'll come back (still immune, mind you) and begin a cycle of shooting at players before drawing them in with a tether. This tether cycle takes about 30 seconds each time, and he'll do it 3 times before finally being damageable again, with absolutely no way to cut it short^note Most strike bosses that go immune work by having guardians disable the immunity, making them both quicker and more involved. . While he can be damaged while tethering the fireteam and for a few seconds after, players first have to deplete a shield that's too big to deplete with primary weapons if you want to have any decent time to damage him, forcing players to waste precious ammo. And he does this again when he's down to a third of his health! What made Fikrul particularly aggravating was that barely any of the enemies he summoned counted for bounties, completely nullifying what could be great incentive to farm that strike in particular. They still procced on-kill effects like Dragonfly and Rampage, so why they didn't provide progress for bounties is anyone's guess.
  • Akelous, the Siren's Current is not a hard boss by any means, as it is an oversized Harpy without any lethal weapons (bar the occasional Tele-Frag if you're unfortunate enough). However, its health pool is massive, and you have to go through a lot of setup to trigger the damage phase, pitting you against scores of Goblins, Harpies and Conduit Minotaurs in passing. And once the damage phase is triggered, you're forced to waste some time to destroy all of its eyes to really make it vulnerable to damage, and the damage phase will end unless you manage to extend it by dealing enough damage to pass one of its health thresholds, which is almost impossible on your own. And that's not getting started with the Goblins that might get between you and Akelous as it reteats to the center of the map, potentially soaking some damage that might have gone into Akelous's health bar. Unless your timing is impeccable and you apply buffs and debuffs everytime, prepare to go through several cycles of making Akelous vulnerable.
• Growing the Beard:
  • Forsaken is generally seen as the point where Bungie hit their stride with the game and began addressing complaints. This sentiment only increased after the announcement of Shadowkeep and Free-to-Play, which led to a massive spike in player count.
  • Seasonal content has usually been a hit-and-miss, be it for seasonal gameplay activities or the story. Two of the stand-out Seasons in the game are regarded as the high-point, both in terms of gameplay and story content:
    • Season of Arrivals is widely seen as the high-point after a mixed reception to the extra grindy feel most of the seasons had been to that point. The seasonal activity was regarded as one of the more enjoyable events, being more or less a PvE version of Gambit but played out as a public event. The story was also some of the best seen in the game at that point as well, with planets being evacuated in response to the Darkness' growing presence on several planets and leading to the disappearances of four.
    • Season of the Chosen is seen as the Seasonal Content Model that Destiny 2 has been following ever since Shadowkeep. The Season took everything that worked in Season of Arrivals and either expanded on it or improved it. The Proving Grounds seasonal activity is widely regarded as the best seasonal activity in a good long while, if not the best ever, and the storytelling in Season of the Chosen is widely considered the best that has ever been present in the entire franchise up until this point, mostly due to the greater emphasis on in-game storytelling.
  • The Witch Queen came in with a bang compared to Beyond Light, having not only a decently lengthy campaign (including a Legendary difficulty that doesn't rely on cramming Champions into it), but also a far more engaging story and an antagonist that we got to spend time with in the previous season, giving us significantly more incentive to engage in the story, compared to Eramis who only got slight foreshadowing. Witch Queen also came in with Void 3.0, starting the process of reworking the Light subclasses to bring them in line with the Aspects and Fragments system that Stasis introduced. On top of this, the new raid, Vow of the Disciple, is regarded as another contender for Best Level Ever, especially where the final boss is concerned. It was seen as a humongous step up for both the ongoing story to that point as well as Destiny in general.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • A lot of Cayde-6's lines in the "Rally the Troops" trailer turn into Black Humor once you play the game and realize just how bad the situation actually is.
    • When he says "You're a bunch of dirty misfits, but you're all that's left so you'll have to do", it's because they literally are some of the only Guardians left, and their best chance of retaking the City and the Traveler.
    • He pokes fun at the idea of them dying, which wouldn't be a big deal under normal circumstances. However, with the Traveler captured and their Light gone, anyone who dies now is Killed Off for Real.
    • It becomes even harsher in hindsight with the trailer for "Forsaken", in which Uldren kills Cayde.
  • Likewise "Insecure men tend to surround themselves with others like them." "Cayde? Anything to add?" "Nope, she's totally right. Which is why I work alone."... if only he were a tad less secure.
  • When the trailer for Season of the Hunt dropped, many fans made fun of the scene where Osiris is attacked and overpowered by a single Hive Knight while barely putting up a fight. This scene becomes significantly less funny following the reveal that Sagira is dead and Osiris has lost his light]].
    • Also in Season of the Hunt, everything about Crow. Nearly all of his lines are referencing how he would have loved to have met us in a previous life, which, considering he was Uldren Sov before dying and being resurrected, just pours the guilt and irony on like you wouldn't believe.
  • Every single thing Osiris does or says in Year 7 after he's confirmed to have been controlled by Savathûn in Season of the Lost.
  • The Exo Stranger's vision of the Bad Future where Ikora is the last member of the Vanguard left alive became eerily prophetic when Zavala's voice actor, Lance Reddick, passed away in March 2023.
  • At the end of the first mission of Forsaken, Zavala mourns Cayde-6 and says he refuses to bury anymore friends as to why he won't mobilize the City against Ulden Sov and the Scorn. Six years later, Amanda Holliday dies during a mission against the Shadow Legion in Season of Defiance and Zavala attends her funeral at the Farm kneeling at her bier. Highlighting the parallel is Amanda's body being draped in the same shroud that had covered Cayde's body years earlier. For some, the impact of the scene was made all the more poignant in that it came only a few days after Lance Reddick passed away.
  • Season of the Deep has a nautical theme to it involved diving deep into the methane oceans of Titan, with a recurring gameplay system about the wide variety of ways Guardians can die to liquid pressure. Past the halfway point of the season came the news event of the Titan submersible implosion while taking a group to see the wreckage of the Titanic. In fact it incited discussion of the real-life craft being a Flawed Prototype while an Eververse jumpship simply called the Prototype Submersible had the description "Someone's tested this thing under pressure... right?" and was made available for Bright Dust the same week the incident happened.
• High-Tier Scrappy:
  • During the launch months, many players were fed up with the general overuse of the MIDA Multi-Tool, Uriel's Gift and Last Hope in the Crucible due to most other weapons not being viable enough and the latter two being purely subject to Randomly Drops instead of being guaranteed quest rewards. It doesn't help that weapons have to be balanced for both PvE and PvP use.
  • For nearly two years since its introduction, the Recluse has reigned supreme in the Energy Primary weapon category due to its unparalleled perks combination and overall versatility, showcasing the perverse side of the power creep happening in weapon rolls. It gets to the point where players started getting fed up with bots running the SMG in PvE even when the situation doesn't call for it (especially in activities where the Match Game modifier is active and there aren't any Void shields to break). The problem was partly addressed with a slight nerf to its perks and the advent of sunsetting, which puts the Recluse's power cap at 1060 and thus makes it useless for higher power content starting in Season 12.
  • Season of the Seraph has shone the light on a new terror in the crucible; The Titan barricade. With the light 3.0 subclasses, it became easier than ever for Titans to have a wall to throw up at any time. Combine that with the Citan's Ramparts exotic and Dead Man's Tale or No Time To Explain and you get a guardian that likes to hang back and pick people off from afar while hunkered down behind an impregnable fortress.
  • With Iron Banner: Fortress coming in the same season, Titans were back under the microscope again, this time for their Ward of Dawn super. Given that it has one of the fastest cooldown rates in the game and also provided overshields and a brief weapon buff, and that Saladin's quest require you to play with a Void or Stasis subclass, lobbies were instantly filled to the brim with bubble Titans with the Cabal Zone becoming a purple glowing Thuderdome as opposing Titans duked it out in multiple stacked bubbles.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • For Forsaken, Nathan Fillion could not do voiceover for Cayde-6 because he was instead working on a fan film on Uncharted as protagonist Nathan Drake, so who did they call in to replace him in the DLC? Why, the actual voice actor for Nathan Drake in the games, Nolan North! What’s even crazier is that North's performance sounds very similar to Fillion, to the point that some people never even noticed the change until it was pointed out.
  • The teaser trailer for Shadowkeep revived the infamous "Moon's haunted" tweet and turned it into a Destiny meme. Not even a week after the reveal, CNN tweeted out new information on the Moon's south pole, revealing that there's something massive beneath its surface. The highest rated reply?
    Bungie: Don't say we didn't warn you.
  • Crow was rebuked by Osiris for not wearing his mask during the Season of the Chosen, which was released during the COVID-2019 pandemic.
• Ho Yay: The lore entries involving Saint-14 and Osiris. In the book "Quintessence", for example, Saint relates a story of what happened when Osiris accidentally broke one of Saint's teacups by knocking it off the shelf during an argument; "The argument stops. We both feel bad. Osiris apologizes, I apologize. Then... Then, he touches my cheek. His eyes say things that words cannot. He leaves. I sweep up the shards and..." Saint also waits by the returned Osiris' side, waiting for him to come out of an apparent coma, and "would give anything to have Osiris by his side, to have something as simple as the touch of a hand on a cheek." Some of the entries approach Tear Jerker territory.
• I Knew It!:
  • Since its introduction and especially picking up in Season of the Splicer, fans and some reporters noted that The H.E.L.M. quest hub looked like the bridge of a ship and speculated that it would eventually detach itself from the Tower. Come Season of the Haunted, it's revealed to be a fully independent ship, taking off to investigate the Leviathan on the Moon.
  • The reveal that Savathun had been impersonating Osiris for the entirety of year four was quickly deduced from a lore tab implying a traitor in their midst.
  • Nezarec was an extremely obscure bit of lore from the Collapse that saw a resurgence of importance in year five with references and expansions of who he was in Season of the Haunted (Nezarec's Whisper Glaive) and Season of Plunder (Pieces of Nezarec as a MacGuffin), a former Disciple of the Witness and in fact the one who controlled the Lunar Pyramid. This lead to speculation he would return in importance somehow, and with the Root of Nightmares raid reveal (Nightmares are connected to the Lunar Pyramid) most everyone knew he would be the final boss.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!:
  • It's widely acknowledged that it gets a little too easy to reach maximum Power Level and getting most of the good weapons and armor; by the time one does reach that milestone, the small amount of endgame content and lack of variance in gear becomes detrimental to the game's replayability. This has been partially addressed in Warmind, which has made reaching max LL harder and has added plenty of grind, though that hasn't come without new complaints. Player Level would eventually be removed after Shadowkeep, as players' levels are now determined by the Power Level of their equipment.
  • More broadly speaking, many players feel as though Destiny 2 is too easy overall. Part of the issue is Power Creep. Compared to when the game launched, players are drastically more powerful in multiple ways, and activities (especially ones from Years 1 and 2) don't feel like they've been balanced to compensate for this new level of power. Strikes are the worst offender in this regard, suffering from a lack of enemy density, and featuring bosses that are either artificially prolonged with damage-gating and immune phases, or get killed in a matter of seconds before the fight can even properly start.
  • The Root of Nightmares Raid from Lightfall is a more specific example. With the World's First clear coming just two and a half hours after the raid was released (only beaten by Wrath of the Machine from Destiny 1's Rise of Iron expansion), and it was a much, much higher amount of fireteams managing a Day 1 clear than normal (for context, about 45,000 fireteams cleared Root of Nightmares Day 1, the next-highest amount of Day 1 clears was King's Fall, a reprised Raid from Destiny 1 with about 8000 day 1 clears). Many players complained about the Raid being far too mechanically simple compared to other raids from Destiny, with three of the four encounters revolving almost entirely around a single, very simple, mechanic. Even within the 48-hour Contest Mode period, players were already posting videos of themselves soloing entire encounters with the forced -20 power delta.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: In a dichotomy that somehow coexists with It's Easy, So It Sucks!, endgame PvE content has been widely decried as an unfair Difficulty Spike compared to core activities, especially with the Champion system introduced in Shadowkeep. Bungie's philosophy from that season an onwards has essentially been all about cramming as many Champions as possible while you deal paltry damage against them, and this is compounded by the reliance on seasonal mods to stun the Champions; tough luck if the active season gives you crappy options against a Champion type that repeatedly appears in one activity. Master difficulty raids are among the most blatant examples of this philosophy, as there are so many overleveled enemies to deal with while simultaneously tackling each encounter's mechanics. It's regularly observed that Master raids have far too much pain and suffering for so little reward (a shader and maybe rolls of weapons with two perks in a column).
  • Lightfall received major criticism for the abrupt increase in difficulty in a way that feels nonsensical. Neomuna, for example, has a perpetual power delta, meaning you will forever be under powered no matter what your current power level is. This is despite the fact that it's a patrol destination, not a high difficulty instance like a dungeon. Lost Sectors also got slammed for being very difficult to grind up to, with the forced power delta reeking of Fake Difficulty that requires tons of grinding just to get to the point where you can have full combat efficiency... on Legend. It'd take even longer to get to full power for Master. Given that Solo Legend/Master Lost Sectors are one of the few ways to get new exotics (the Legend campaign gives them as a reward on completion), the pain is felt even more.
• It Was His Sled: With how long the franchise has been running for, this trope was inevitable, especially with certain story beats still heavily influencing future expansions and seasons. In particular, Cayde-6 dying at Uldren Sov's hand, four planets disappearing after Arrivals, Uldren returning as a Guardian named Crow, and the Witness coming to instigate a second Collapse were huge plot points that are now very well known both in universe and out.
  • On a smaller scale, weekly seasonal story beats are treated like this. Any time the main seasonal story quest is progressed in the latest week, discussion of it gets relegated to spoiler territory, while past story beats tend to be regarded as free to discuss without needing to hide them.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Fikrul, the Fanatic. He may lead the twisted and corrupted Scorn to kill off all the regular Fallen to immortalize them, he genuinely cares for the entire Fallen race. When confronted in the final mission, he is enraged that the Young Wolf has murdered all of his fellow Barons, who he even calls his friends. He will even take his own steps in avenging them, much like we did with Cayde.
  • For all his selfishness and cruelty, Uldren Sov was ultimately just doing what he thought he has to to save his sister, unaware that Riven was playing him for a fool and the real Mara had no desire to be “rescued”, making his entire quest and all his crimes pointless.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • During the launch months, many players were fed up with the general overuse of the MIDA Multi-Tool, Uriel's Gift and Last Hope in the Crucible due to most other weapons not being viable enough and the latter two being purely subject to Randomly Drops instead of being guaranteed quest rewards. It doesn't help that weapons have to be balanced for both PvE and PvP use.
  • Scout Rifles in general don't deal enough damage at range to compete with Snipers and don't fire fast enough to compete at precision mid-range with Hand Cannons and Pulse Rifles. They got a modest buff in season ten and artifact mods, but they required a faster rate of fire making them more like Pulse Rifles.
  • Trace Rifles only have a handful of exotics, they are fun in a general sense for being death beams and can clear small enemies but eat up ammo and don't deal enough damage to really justify the special ammo slot. In year three they did manage to get a big bump with the introduction of Divinity and Ruinous Effigy by thinking more laterally with their perks (continuous fire from Divinity debuffs an enemy and provides a critical spot, giving allied players a massive bonus at the expense of personal DPS, and Ruinous Effigy creates orbs you and allies can pick up and use for massive melee damage or damage-dealing/health-regenerating guarding auras). They were further redeemed starting with Season of the Lost with Ager's Scepter being a Stasis rifle that paired really well with Revenant Hunter; the 30th Anniversary, where a Legendary Solar Trace Rifle was finally presented in the form of Retraced Path, finally giving the weapon type potential for god rolls; and then again in Season of the Haunted, where a Void rifle was also dropped via Hollow Denial.
  • Arcstriders are generally regarded as having one of the worst Supers to use in the Crucible ^note Note that this is for PvP only, as Arcstriders equipped with Raiden Flux are fantastic in clearing many PvE scenarios, mainly because of how painfully slow it is compared to the rest and requiring to get up close and personal to be worthwhile; at least the other melee-focused Supers have something to compensate for (Strikers deal AoE damage and have accelerated movement while Fists of Havoc is active, Sentinels can throw shields and block attacks, and Stormcallers have a long reach with their Stormtrance). This has somewhat been mitigated by the "Go Fast" update, where the higher movement speed greatly works in the Arc Staff's favor and you suddenly have a fairly monstrous killstreak machine if you time your dodges right.
  • Dawnblades are the least used of the three Warlock subclasses due to their easily-depleted Super and unrewarding aerial gameplay; to add insult to injury, that last bit was cemented by Bungie intentionally making vertical plays bad to limit advantages over low skill players, so Dawnblades, whose top ability tree builds on aerial combat, were gimped from the start. As a result, there is hardly a situation where using this subclass over the others is an optimal choice, as the Voidwalkers and Stormcallers have more desirable perks and Supers going for them. Much like the Arcstrider, this turned on its head with the Go Fast update, where Daybreak got buffed to compete with other roaming Supers. Forsaken also introduced the Attunement of Grace, which became a staple for most PvE fireteams given its undeniably potent healing abilities.
    • Fast forward to Season of Dawn, the Dawnblade's Burst Glide got nerfed to give some focus on the previously-unviable Attunement of Sky, giving the subclass branch a new lease in life with a fantastic aerial playstyle. However, this change had the side effect of leaving the Attunement of Flame in the dust, given the lack of hyper-mobility once provided by Burst Glide now greatly hampers the branch's neutral game and Daybreak super. Combined with the nerf to super regen abilities, it won't be long before you realize that getting to throw two or three more Daybreak projectiles doesn't make up for the awful aerial game when compared to the Attunement of Sky.
  • While nearly all of the subclass branches introduced in Forsaken received near-unanimous praise for their versatility in both PvE and PvP environments, the same can't be said for the Arcstrider's Way of the Current. While the modified super by itself is quite potent and allows for creative plays, the branch's perks greatly suffer from a lack of synergy, which is mind-boggling when you put it next to other subclasses that are outright broken.
  • Titans through Forsaken were this. While they could be very difficult to kill in PvP, their lack of utility affected their usefulness in high-level PvE content. The main issue is that almost anything that a Titan could do, a Warlock or Hunter can do just as well, if not better. Titans were good for Melting Point against bosses (a melee attack), but their supers are focused on clearing smaller enemies at close range and not dealing raw damage from a distance like Hunters Golden Gun or Warlocks Nova Bomb. They also lacked a strong support Super, as Well of Radiance doesn't require that the Warlock hold up a shield and forgo dealing damage, and Shadowshot can lock down significantly more enemies much more easily than Ward of Dawn with Helm of Saint-14, with another issue being the lack of activities where total damage immunity was desired over massive healing + overshield. A problem that isn't helped by the fact that Titans don't have an Exotic like Orpheus Rig, Skull of Dire Ahamkara, or Phoenix Protocol which easily regenerated Hunter and Warlock supers. Comparable exotics like Ursa Furiosa and Doomfang Pauldrons were too situational to the point of being regressive (Ursa Furiosa required you to defend allies and forgo dealing damage yourself, Doomfang Pauldrons required killing large groups of enemies). In Season 7, super-regenerating exotics were nerfed, which hit Orpheus Rig, Skull of Dire Ahamkara, and Phoenix Protocol much harder than Ursa Furiosa, and Ward of Dawn gained a niche in Heroic Menagerie and the Crown of Sorrow Raid, as area control and total damage protection were more important in those activities and Well of Radiance wasn't strong enough. Come Shadowkeep, Ward of Dawn regained Weapons of Light, Bottomless Magazines effects were removed across the board along with damage mod changes (you can't stack all buffs together like before, making Hammer Strike vital as a debuff), and Well of Radiance's damage buff got reduced, causing Titans to become valuable in PvE endgame.
• Magnificent Bastard: The Witch Queen, Savathûn's machinations bear their fruits in this game, with sweeping changes to the status quo. Her mistrust of The Witness's endgame leads her to backstab Nezarec and hide away the Veil prior to the story, stalling the Witness long enough for humanity to recover from the Collapse. In Forsaken, she has Riven curse the Dreaming City into a timeloop so that her forces may reach the Distributary and repeatedly massacre the Awoken there, potentially setting her free from her Worm-feeding if she succeeds even once. When her interference with the Guardians' communion with the Pyramids exposes her treachery to The Witness, she finds refuge by possessing Osiris throughout Year 4, mentoring Crow while testing the Vanguard's budding alliances with the Cabal and the Fallen. Upon revealing herself, Savathûn strikes a deal with Mara Sov to exorcise her Worm in exchange of releasing the real Osiris, keeping true to her word once the ritual is over. In Year 5, Savathûn returns with powers over the Light, unsealing Mars and beating back First Disciple Rhulk. With The Reveal that the Traveler gave the Light to the Hive and resurrected Savathûn despite the latter knowing it wasn't guaranteed, Savathûn regains the memories she lost upon revival and intends to seal the Traveler away from The Witness. Despite the Guardians foiling her, she's content that they are ready to stand against The Witness.
• Memetic Badass:
  • The Niobe Labs puzzle gained infamy for taking longer to solve than any Day 1 raid clear in the franchise (in fact, it's still unsolved, forcing Bungie to skip that Day 1 completion and open up Bergusia Forge one day after the fiasco). With the subsequent bombshell that Bungie would end their contract with Activision earlier than the 10-year mark and gain full publishing rights to the Destiny franchise, fans joked that Activision Rage Quit over the puzzle.
  • If there's something that can inspire fear in Guardians, it's not Oryx, not Riven, not some Worm God; no, it's TR3-VR, the most dangerous sweeping bot in the Tower.
• Memetic Bystander: The sweeper bot featured the "Last Call" trailer, who has to listen to Cayde's monologue in the middle of the Cabal assault. Fans often joke about they will riot if the bot isn't featured in the series of "Meet [X character]" trailers. Hilariously enough, one of these sweeper bots does end up being a key character in post-story content as Calus's emissary.
• Memetic Mutation: Now on its own subpage!
• Misaimed Fandom: A Vocal Minority among the fandom is under the impression that the franchise is full of constant victories for humanity, and that there hasn't been many losses. They clamor for darker storylines with lots of characters biting it, and Despair Event Horizon moments... except those have already happened before. Forsaken began with Cayde-6's death, sparking a long campaign of revenge leading to the Dreaming City becoming permanently locked into a three-week time loop; Season of Arrivals was all about the Black Fleet finally catching up with the Traveler, and by the end, it's been mostly warded off when the Traveler revived itself... at the cost of four planets vanishing in the process. Meanwhile, Season of the Splicer put a spotlight on species tensions between humanity and eliksni while they formed an uneasy alliance to combat the Endless night, resulting in the three City factions disappearing after Override: Last City and crippling the Consensus even more; Season of the Lost was all about the Deal with the Devil that Savathun placed upon Mara and company by holding Osiris hostage in exchange for excising her worm, and when it's done, she manages to escape completely unscathed. Hell, the very concept of the series is a dark moment, with humanity reduced to a single safe city on Earth, having to rely on the Guardians for protection, while having to fight against numerous alien factions that want them dead. All in all, this part of the fandom makes it apparent they either don't pay attention to the overall story, or don't care for its Central Theme of holding onto hope even when all seems bleak, in favor of pushing for something in the vein of Warhammer 40K.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Uldren Sov had always been antagonistic to the Guardians since his first cutscene, but he had never done anything actually evil. Come the Forsaken DLC, he fully cements that he's a bad guy by murdering Cayde-6 with the Ace of Spades, Cayde's own Hand Cannon.
  • Eramis in the Season of the Seraph finale. She activates the ABHORRENT IMPERATIVE protocol in order to destroy the Traveler using the Warsats. Granted, the Witness may be forcing her to do it, and Ana managed to take Rasputin offline at his request in order to prevent the Warsats from firing, but had she succeeded, Eramis would've doomed masses of innocent people on Earth to extinction by the Witness, and humanity would be hopeless to stop the Pyramids from launching another Collapse.
• Most Wonderful Sound: A lot of love has gone into making each subclass' sound effects come across differently from each other, even if there's a full fireteam of Guardians with the same element, especially regarding Supers. Some examples:
  • The "shewwww-GONG!" of a Sunbreaker's Burning Maul, or the harsh metallic "CLANG" when readying Hammer of Sol.
  • The short, sharp warble as a Sentinel places a Ward of Dawn, or a reverberating "ding" of metal as they manifest a Sentinel Shield.
  • A warble of energy before a Gunslinger manifests their knives and launches a Blade Barrage, followed by the multiple explosions. Also, the sharp, fiery burst, like lighting a big candle, when a Gunslinger summons a Golden Gun.
  • The almost electronic distortion of a Shadebinder as they conjure up their staff for Winter's Wrath.
  • The comforting sound of a Well of Radiance involving the Dawnblade performing a Sword Plant and producing a save haven for friendlies.
• Narm:
  • In cutscenes, sometimes your character will lift whatever weapon's in their kinetic slot to ready it and point it at a target one-handed. It looks perfectly fine with hand cannons, sidearms, and submachine guns, kind of okay with auto/scout/pulse rifles, and utterly ridiculous with sniper rifles, grenade launchers, trace rifles, and bows. At least power weapons are avoided so it doesn't look even more ridiculous.
  • The epilogue to Season of Plunder involves improving the Eliksni Quarter with all the treasure gathered over the course of the season. While a great idea, it ends up falling totally flat, as the Eliksni Quarter is barely changed at all - the most that gets given to them is a metal staircase, some guards, and some benches and a podium in front of the body of INSURRECTION PRIME. Despite Mithrax singing the praises of the Guardians for what has been given to them, it ends up coming across as very insulting and out of character for him, with how insubstantial the additions actually are, while also causing humanity's capacity for compassion and generosity towards the Eliksni to be scrutinized quite heavily. Realistically, Mithrax ought to be offended by such paltry offerings, but instead he's all too happy to be given the bare minimum, it would seem.
    • Similarly, the ending scene of Plunder has Mithrax reawaken a comatose Osiris by... using the Darkness within the gathered Relics to make tea for him to drink. While the part where Osiris wakes up and kisses Saint was well received, the "Nezcafe" part received tons of mockery, as many felt it was a rather silly and Glurge-y way of using the Relices for a good purpose.
  • Amanda's death in the Season of Defiance is almost impossible to take seriously due to how out of nowhere it is. There is nothing that so much as hinted that the prison ship was about to explode, or even why it does so, making it come off as incredibly jarring and as if it just spontaneously happened purely to get Amanda out of the story. The fact that everyone afterwards treats it as this massive, emotional choice and sacrifice Amanda made despite, again, nothing even hinting it was coming was just icing on the cake.
• Narm Charm:
  • The Witness has an odd, cartoonish-looking design that looks jarringly out of place compared to the rest of the game's characters, complete with oversized anime-style eyes - which makes them look creepy and adds a terrifying, fever dream-like quality to their introductory cutscene at the end of The Witch Queen.
  • While Amanda's death in Season of Defiance certainly comes off as contrived, the reactions of Crow, Zavala, and Mara (with the former two being absolutely crushed), still manages to sell the moment. It also had the unfortunate timing to happen shortly after the death of Zavala's voice actor, Lance Reddick, which made many feel as if they were mourning him in the aftermath of the mission.
  • Nezarec is a character that plays almost every single Darker and Edgier trope completely straight, being a "God of Pain" who spreads nightmares, has control of both Light and Dark, and even runs around with a massive scythe as his main weapon. He spends half of his time interacting with the player making direct promises of bring pain and death wherever he goes. All of this would normally combine into a character too edgy to take seriously, but not only does Nezarec prove to actually be very entertaining villain who provides a refreshing Obviously Evil counterpart to the likes of Rhulk and Calus, his lore shows that he's more than earned his reputation.
• Overshadowed by Controversy:
  • Initially, the game's content drought, lack of endgame content, heavy focus on microtransactions, incidents such as secretly throttling earned XP, and what was seen as a lack of communication between Bungie and the players had Destiny 2 take a critical drubbing from both players and reviewers. This greatly affected Forsaken's sales despite its praise and a marked increase in returning players. Fortunately, by Shadowkeep's release, the game sparked a massive Newbie Boom thanks to cross-save, the migration to Steam and the shift to a free-to-play model.
  • To a lesser degree, Stasis. Whoa, the Darkness being harnessed by the Guardians in the form of ice powers? Sounds pretty awesome! ... at least, it did, until Crucible players realized it was a complete mess. Stasis was essentially an instant "I win" subclass, with how freezing means your victims are sitting ducks, and even if they managed to break free, they still took a massive hit to their health that would likely kill them anyway if they took damage before getting frozen. The concept of wielding the Darkness took a backseat to Crucible players expressing outrage over getting killed over and over and being unable to do anything about it. It took a good deal of nerfs before the outrage settled, where Stasis is now regarded as substantially more balanced to play with and against.
  • Lightfall, meanwhile, the opposite effect happen for Strand. While it was met with a far warmer reception for being much more balanced to fight against, and providing fantastic mobility options with the Grapple, it all got lost in the noise of every other issue plaguing the expansion. Lightfall was derided as one of the worst expansions in the history of the franchise, with a plot seen by many as filler (alongside a borderline Gainax Ending), a raid regarded as way too easy (to the point that it can be soloed feasibly), Fake Difficulty in many areas, and the increasing usage of reused weapon designs finally reaching a new low with the Neomuna and Root of Nightmares arsenals, enraging fans who have gotten tired of using yet another variation of a previous model for a supposedly new gun. Not to mention that the main story treated the Veil, a powerful artifact, as just a Macguffin, only ever getting explained in Season of the Deep... a season that will be inevitably vaulted when the year has finished, commonly met with the complaint of "Why wasn't this in the campaign?" All in all, Lightfall is seen as a very unimpressive expansion, comparing unfavorably to the much more warmly received The Witch Queen. The result was a massive (45%) revenue drop that lead to massive layoffs at Bungie, making fans severely worried over how The Final Shape would turn out.
• Padding: A very common criticism of the game is that Bungie doesn't respect your playtime nor sees any need to, and will quickly patch exploits that shorten grind times while leaving out other, more pressing issues for months on end. Unbalanced bounties objectives and uneven playlist rank rewards are just the tip of the iceberg in a game that just wants you to grind an inordinate amount of time to get a good random roll on any given piece of equipment. It gets even worse with Shadowkeep and onwards with the seasonal artifact system, pressuring players into grinding bounties and core activities rather than tackle endgame content in earnest.
• Paranoia Fuel: Year 3 onwards introduces several plot points that describe in loving detail how the Darkness and its agents have always been in the system since the Golden Age, and didn't just roll up to Sol one day to cause the Collapse out of nowhere. First the Pyramid on the Moon is found, then it's revealed Clovis Bray only got as far as he dead because of an artifact on Europa, and then a throwaway Flavor Text very strongly implies Nezarec, a vaguely-described God of Evil that was worshipped before the Golden Age, is a Disciple of the Witness too! Makes you wonder if anything in the system was ever truly safe from the Darkness...
• Player Punch: For over a year since his introduction, Crow's belief that the enemies he faces can change for the better was taken to be one of his more endearing and sympathetic traits despite it driving him to recklessness, especially since that actually does come to pass with the Cabal and Eliksni. Which makes his actions in Season of the Risen so much more hurtful when this leads him to try the same on the Hive and winds up committing a completely preventable but very grave mistake with permanent ramifications for the player's allies. Many players have discussed wanting to forgive him, but just can't even as he turns to them for solace because of such a severe lapse in judgement, making it sting even more.
• Polished Port: The PC port is greatly optimized, allowing for uncapped framerate and ultra graphics settings so long as your PC specs allow it. The smooth framerate and control over FOV in particular make for a fantastic experience that's simply not possible on console, and controls with a mouse and keyboard are very precise, in true competitive FPS fashion.
• Porting Disaster:
  • There is one area the PC port falls flat on, and that's in regards to anti-aliasing, where the "best" options still have jaggies visible even on high-end machines. Despite the game being several years old, Bungie hasn't improved the AA options at all, meaning you're forced to increase the native resolution of the game to make things smoother (or alter the settings of your GPU via its manufacturer's control panel software). Naturally this can cause problems for machines that may not be able to handle rendering that much at above 60 FPS.
  • As time went on and more seasons came by, Bungie's lack of competent support tech for the PC side following their break from Activision-Blizzard became apparent, as server-side issues that cause more error codes than on consoles arose frequently. By the time of The Witch Queen, the PC version has become a very power-hungry game that sees lots of crashes and lags for no other reason than it being very poorly optimized and having to accomodate crossplay with lower-spec machines and consoles, with unreasonable public space load times in between; unjustified load times that straight up invalidate the purpose of the Destiny Content Vault (which was implemented to avoid those problems in the first place).
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
  • Zavala is generally disliked due to coming across as overly stern, cautious and indecisive on important matters, starting with his ineffectual involvement with Rasputin and Xol's revival on Mars and reaching the apex in his firm refusal to raid Scorn territory in the Tangled Shore to avenge Cayde's death. In the Season of the Worthy he reiterates his apprehension of using Rasputin, but once the Io Warmind bunker was uncovered Rasputin shows that he is tracking the incoming Pyramid ships and shares audio files of the chaos and death that occurred during the Collapse. Zavala is humbled by the reveal, musing that Rasputin remembers the Collapse and was helpless to stop it, and he promises to work WITH Rasputin rather than just see him as a weapon. Many fans found it to be vital character growth that Zavala had been lacking. His later willingness to cast aside any hatred he might have felt towards Uldren Sov to accept The Crow, to work with Mithrax and the House of Light despite the Fallen having a long and bloody history with humankind, and to work with Caiatl and her loyal Cabal despite the still fresh events of the Red War, have also helped grow his character significantly.
  • Hawkmoon was a beloved and despised exotic hand cannon from the original game that heavily revolved around its RNG-based Perk: every time Hawkmoon was reloaded, three damage bonuses were given to random bullets within the gun, sometimes stacking two bonuses on one bullet, and very rarely, all three on one, the latter of which allowed a One-Hit Kill headshot in the Crucible^note This was removed in September 2015, where the gun was patched to never allow all 3 damage bonuses to roll on the same bullet. As a result, Hawkmoon was a Crucible killing machine, with many despising how Hawkmoon could win you engagements semi-randomly with a lucky shot. Hawkmoon was not carried over into Destiny 2 until Season of the Hunt, where the gun saw a substantial rebalancing including a new Perk. Hawkmoon's new Perk now causes the gun to charge itself up with every critical hit and finishing blow dealt, releasing the stored charge with the final round. Not only does the gun do respectable damage for a Kinetic Handcannon, but the maxed out final shot is actually quite strong and the gun can be a decent DPS weapon thanks to its small clip size allowing a healthy number of the maximum charged shots to be fired every damage phase. It's certainly no Xenophage or Anarchy for sure, but those are Power weapons, meaning they will likely run out of ammo where Hawkmoon won't. The gun retains the RNG mechanics of its original iteration by being the first exotic to have random perk rolls, meaning every Hawkmoon drop can be slightly different. Overall, many are pleased with the weapon's reintroduction into the franchise, and feel that moving it away from being yet another exotic Hand Cannon focused entirely on Crucible play was a good move.
  • The Crow. Uldren Sov was an antagonistic asshole towards the Guardians through the first game and into the second, with a lot of Forsaken's plot culminating almost entirely because he missed his big sister Mara Sov and got duped by Savathun/Riven. Then he gets offed by the Guardian. Then he gets picked up by local The Woobie Ghost Pulled Pork (now Glint), and brought back as the Crow in a Wham Episode cutscene, much to Mara's displeasure. Forced into servitude by The Spider (partially to protect his identity, because every Guardian from Mercury to the Reef would be lining up to take turns at kicking the snot out of him for what happened in Forsaken) he ends up lost and confused, and latches onto one of the first people to show him any kind of true kindness or support - You. Mara reveals that it's a tragic echo of what he was (when the Awoken first emerged, Uldren required her help and thus latched on to her for support), something that only gets worse when Savathun eventually restores his memories to him when he wants to understand exactly why the man he was is so loathed in the City. Nonetheless, he saves Zavala's life (twice, no less) and whilst Zavala visibly pauses on seeing Crow's face, he ends up being accepted by the Vanguard leader despite everything that happened. He's still a hopelessly naïve and oft-clueless rookie at the best of times (for example, thinking that he has a special connection to Savathun and might be able to get trustworthy information out of her, and worrying about whether the captured Hive Lieutenants feel pain during the psychic interrogations Caiatl's psions are subjecting them to), but many now have a much more protective attitude towards him and insist on treating him as a whole different person to who he was before.

Tropes S-T

• The Scrappy:
  • Zavala has become this over the course of the game. Despite being the leader of the Vanguard, he often comes off as The Ditherer who never takes action, which really started to rub players the wrong way after his refusal to act after the murder of Cayde-6. He’s also Overshadowed by Awesome, as many feel he’s too straight-laced and boring, while also lacking the strong Character Development that Cayde-6 and Ikora Rey have gone through. As of Season of the Worthy, he's since been Rescued from the Scrappy Heap.
  • Uldren Sov has been getting this, due to being Cayde-6's killer and then pulling a Karma Houdini by becoming a Guardian himself. On the other hand, many fans changed their tune when they started to interact with a post-resurrected Uldren, now named Crow by the Spider. It's gotten to the point that both in and out of universe, Crow and Uldren are treated as two separate characters.
  • With the release of Beyond Light, fans almost immediately took to hating on Shaw Han, the new Guardian who appears in the Cosmodrome. Since he was mostly written to act as a guide for new players, he treats every player as if they just learned what a Guardian is, causing most veterans to hate having to interact with him. His laughably generic personality, irrelevance to the overall lore, and perceived weakness certainly don't help him, either (he was nearly Killed Off for Real by a random Wizard).
  • Another Beyond Light character that isn't regarded favorably is Eramis. Initially, her presentation as the fearsome Kell of House Salvation, wielding Stasis and seeking revenge on the Traveler for abandoning the Eliksni ages ago, did have potential... but then come the actual campaign, and her empire falling apart in days, as well as constantly throwing shade at the "machine-spawn" for killing Eliksni over the years got old very fast. Season of Plunder made it even worse, as almost every line of dialogue she says involves some biting criticism or venomous barb while she constantly throws blame upon the Guardians for her current state. She also regularly tries to paint Mithrax as a villain for what he's done in the past, while casually sweeping her own numerous atrocities under the rug. Very few of her lines involve anything resembling compassion, making it that much harder to care for her. As soon as she made the decision to initiate ABHORRENT IMPERATIVE and potentially doom countless innocents while trying to kill the Traveler, numerous fans believed her to have catapulted across the Moral Event Horizon. It doesn't help that the writers seem really insistent on trying to make her pitiable, but their efforts are hard to swallow given everything that's been described.
  • Upon introduction, Nimbus became viewed as one of the most unlikeable characters in the Destiny saga. After so much effort trying to build up the epic legacy of the Cloudstriders, they came across as a Talkative Loon with no functional contribution to the story beyond superficial action sequences. After Rohans' Heroic Sacrifice they remained blissfully jovial despite the weight it should have and they continue as the location vendor and Mission Control, constantly in your ear. When Calus is finally Killed Off for Real, Nimbus immediately chimes in with a tone-deaf joke in front of Calus's own daughter, further sullying people's perception of them. Lightfall already being one of the worst reviewed expansions of the game didn't help them out, either. Though the mission for Deterministic Chaos does manage to bring some seriousness to the character.
• Scrappy Weapon:
  • The Fighting Lion Exotic grenade launcher, which has a small blast radius, odd bouncing pattern, difficulty in triggering its reload proc against non-shielded enemies, and doesn't deal enough damage to justify its single-shot magazine size in either PvP or PvE gameplay. Most of the fandom agrees that there are more efficient ways to deal with shielded enemies, let alone one worth the Exotic slot, and that it needs a damage buff to justify its single round in the magazine.
    • Part of the problem is that Grenade Launchers are generally a Power Weapon type, except for the Fighting Lion being an Energy Weapon with primary ammo and thus having its damage nerfed to compensate, especially in PvP.
  • The D.A.R.C.I gets flak for having what is perceived to be a useless exotic perk: highlighting enemy targets and show the distance between the player and the target. Coupled with its low damage and high rate of fire, the sniper's categorizing as a Heavy weapon was tenuous at best. Several updates buffed its perks to be able to solidly stay in the Heavy slot, even with a bunch of other powerful Heavy Exotics like the gamebreaking Whisper of the Worm, another Heavy sniper. After spending all of Year 2 being a solid DPS contender, though, the D.A.R.C.I. (along with the Whisper) has been put back into irrelevance with the blanket nerf to snipers in Season of the Worthy, moreso with Beyond Light's addition of Cloudstrike, which deals as much DPS and is significantly more useful in add-clearing while staying in the Special weapon category. Even with an update that let it Jolt enemies when aiming down the scope, it's still obscenely outclassed just about every other sniper rifle.
  • Some weapon archetypes are considered by the community to be garbage no matter how good their perks are, simply because they aren't competitive enough. High impact weapons have it worst, as their slow rate of fire stretches out the time-to-kill to inefficient levels compared to faster-firing ones; in contrast, the fastest-firing archetypes aren't nearly as punishing as the slow-firing ones, but still overshadowed by the middle pack. Bungie spent all of early-to-mid 2018 to balance things out and lower overall time-to-kill on all weapon archetypes, and by the time Patch 2.0 rolled out, nearly everything became viable; it's now become a matter of chasing that "god roll" on weapon archetypes and perks.
  • The Tarrabah is considered to be a downgrade to top tier SMGs due to a large amount of factors, chief amongst them being the fact that it's an Exotic Energy SMG that appeared during the Recluse's reign of terror, and as such gets unfavourably compared to the latter. Its Ravenous Beast perk takes longer to activate, and the buildup is immediately disrupted if you do so much as swap to another weapon of even pull your Ghost out; this is mind-boggling, considering the Symmetry from Season 9 is able to conserve its buff charges even when stowed. While it boasts the highest burst damage of any Primary weapon in the game with its perk, it's still a Primary, and it will run out of ammo really fast with Ravenous Beast active. It's little wonder players have taken to calling it "Tarrabahl" as a pun on the word "terrible". With the change to ammo economy making all primary weapons have infinite ammo, however, the Tarrabah has carved a niche for itself and can become a terrifying weapon to face against in the Crucible, though players still have to deal with the buff loss when swapping weapons.
  • Swords are not looked upon kindly post-Patch 2.0; with shotguns being relegated to Special ammo and thus becoming much more accessible high-damage, close-range weapons, swords are essentially left to rot in the Heavy slot, where they have to compete with significantly more powerful weapon types that also have a lot of range. The combination of being unable to outfight shotguns in the Crucible most of the time, middling ammo count in PvE, and the fact that boss DPS is outright suicidal due to the overuse of stomp mechanics; makes swords one of the least appealing weapons, with parts of the fandom calling for relegating them to the Special category of weapons. Year Three's seasons would see a general buff in sword damage and the introduction of many useful seasonal mods related them, with Season of Arrivals introducing more inventive archetypes to mitigate the problem.
  • Scout Rifles in general, especially in PvP. At the ranges that they're supposed to be played at, they get outperformed by pulse rifles and hand cannons, and at shorter ranges they get outperformed by auto rifles and SMGs. The only decent exotic Scout Rifle, the MIDA Multi-Tool, is due to having above average stats and boosting movement speed rather than any "exotic" bonuses.
  • The Xenophage is reviled as the worst weapon to come out of Shadowkeep's initial launch, mainly due to its pathetic ammo reserves compounding the relatively mediocre damage per shot, which can't be improved given the lack of crit modifier (it's 100% explosive damage); in essence, the weapon suffers from an identity crisis between staying as a machine gun or becoming a grenade launcher, and ultimately gets the worst of both worlds. Season 9 gave it a breath of fresh air with a 50% damage increase in PvE; while it's not going to top established boss-killing weapons, it's effectively become a competitive choice in Gambit, where a versatile Heavy weapon to deal with both hardened mobs and opposing players is always appreciated. Then Season 15 came and its RPM got nerfed from 120 to 90, neutering its DPS potential and making its utility questionable once more, only to have its RPM returned to 120 in Season 17.
  • Since Patch 2.0 launched, Rocket Launchers got relegated to the bottom tier of heavy weapons; with multiple instant-reload abilities being removed in Shadowkeep, they became grossly outdone both in DPS races and mob-clearing ability by other heavy weapons. One rocket before needing to reload^note You'd have to either get Ambitious Assassin or Clown Cartridge to increase that number, or use Truth, which has 3 in the chamber by default really hurts when dealing reliable damage on bosses, and having only 6 to 8 rockets to play with means that you're forced to decide when it's worth firing one round, in contrast to other heavy weapons that you can shoot with reckless abandon. It says something when the Argent Ordnance mod from Season of Arrivals ^note Gives you 20% bonus damage when being buffed with "Charged with Light" up until you deal damage with rockets, can stack up to 45% is decried for being too much mod slot energy spent into a weapon type that should have that kind of damage by default.
  • Linear Fusion Rifles as a weapon archetype have struggled with any consistent relevance in the game. They are basically overclocked snipers with a charge time, but are still reliant on headshots, and since they are mostly heavy weapons, ammo economy can be difficult, missed shots hurt badly, and they are often outperformed by regular snipers. Even after snipers got nerfed in Season of the Worthy, Linear Fusion Rifles still get overlooked in favour of more versatile heavy weapons; heck, even Swords ended up seeing more usage thanks to their revamp in the same season. The only ones that see use tend to be exotics, which add some form of extra damage with Sleeper Simulant, added bullet magnetism with Queensbreaker or a kinetic shieldbreaker with Arbalest. Only one legendary Linear Fusion Rifle (Line in the Sand from Season of Dawn) has gravitated to top tier for a while, but that's only because of its incredibly specialized perk pool. The mid-season update for Season of the Lost gave an overall damage buff for them, making them better suited for use as heavy weapons and good competitors for sustained damage against bosses.
  • Salvation's Grip is the butt of many jokes due to being a heavy grenade launcher with literally nothing going for it in the damage-dealing department, being relegated to destroying Entropic Shards for a triumph, unconventional Crucible tactics (if you even obtain heavy ammo at all) and out-of-bounds experiments.
  • Barring a few oversights that were eventually patched out, Glaives simply feel bad to play with compared to other special weapons, and suffer from a design philosophy that completely goes against how they were advertised. Your Glaive melee deals less damage than your uncharged barehanded punch in the Crucible and doesn't synergize with melee-related weapon perks and class abilities, your combos can randomly stop chaining (leaving you awkwardly doing nothing with your Glaive before you can swipe again), and the projectiles are weak and slow. The only saving grace is the directional shield, though that means that you have to store energy by hitting targets with the aforementioned projectiles.
  • The trio of class-specific Exotic Glaives is unanimously mocked by the community as underwhelming for the effort spent in acquiring them; after several days of farming Wellspring-exclusive weapons in hopes of getting enough Deepsight Resonances to craft the required Throne World weapons to proceed through all Report Board quests and acquire the "REVERSE-LURE" report, players are understandably upset to find that not only are the Glaives' abilities inferior to other alternatives ^note All three weapons have the innate flaw of requiring a full charge to activate their ability, wasting any opportunity to use the weapon class's intrinsic shield; Edge of Concurrence's wave is easily trumped by normal Wave-Frame grenade launchers, while Edge of Action and Edge of Intent's defensive abilities hardly replace the Titan and Warlock's respective subclass abilities., but subsequent Glaives patterns are incredibly rare drops in the Wellspring activity, making for a very tedious farming cycle.
  • Some randomly rolled weapons become this due to their possible perk combinations being very lacking in synergy or otherwise completely going against the point of the weapon. One example is Dimensional Hypotrochoid, found on Neomuna. It's a power weapon version of the Wave Frame Grenade Launchers with the Stasis element... and its potential rolls are almost all lackluster. No Chill Clip so it can't slow or freeze enemies; Shot Swap is useless; Genesis and Disruption Break try to make it a utility weapon when that's not what it's meant for... the list goes on. About the only use it may have is using a Field Prep / Vorpal Weapon roll to shred Riven's health in Last Wish, but anywhere else is of dubious use.
    • Another weapon that has perks that go against its nature is Naeem's Lance, a Strand element Rapid-Fire Frame Sniper Rifle from Warlord's Ruin. About the only worthwhile perks on it are Reconstruction and Precision Instrument. The rest are either useless in most cases (Deconstruct, Demolitionist) or try to make it a utility weapon when Snipers just aren't meant for it (Slice, Hatchling, Attrition Orbs). Not to mention its Origin Trait, Sundering, barely gets any time to shine, due to being only active against vehicles and constructs, and the only surefire way to encounter them is in Crucible... where its options for PvP are still lackluster.
• Seasonal Rot: The game format since the first game centered around big expansion content drops, with smaller DLC drops peppered through the rest of the year. While the large expansions were consistently well received, over time fans began to notice that slightly past the mid-point between the expansions was the time period where content was either nonexistent, running very thin or started showing some technical oversights, while Bungie was still trying to generate hype for what IS being released. But, like clockwork, once the expansion was revealed and the game started up a mid-summer activity to help lead into that player response started turning around.
  • In year one the bigger expansions received a more tepid response, as a declining playerbase made public spaces more sparse and the Warmind centerpiece public event Escalation Protocol became very difficult to do.
  • Year two changed the expansion formula to focus on what they called seasonal content, smaller expansions with new gear and gametypes but no overt campaign mission, which was slightly better received due content being spread out more evenly and lower expectations.
  • Year three made the seasonal content isolated to that season, forcing a heavier Level Grinding of one activity than players wanted because it would be gone shortly. The Vex Offensive of Season of Undying was building towards a grand assault against a major Vex enemy (the Undying Mind, which lives up to its name and had several iterations in the first game) but proved to be less of a challenge than hyped. This culminated in Season of the Worthy and, again, a public event in Seraph Towers that was hampered by a reduced playerbase preventing you from completing it. A lot of content was also restricted to the reintroduced Trials of Osiris, an elite PvP gametype only a select group of players could achieve anyway, which exaggerated all the issues with the format. Year four addressed this by maintaining the seasonal activities and gear drops for the remainder of the year, so completionists could finish off certain triumphs without the pressure of the three-month turnaround.
  • Year Four "Season of the Chosen" gave us the "3x7 Upgrade Grid" for the Hammer of Proving and later the Splicer Gauntlet and Wayfarer's Compass. Its implementation shows how cookie cutter a lot of the Beyond Light seasons were, with each tied to the seasonal activity forcing you to grind in order to complete it for the seasonal title which couldn't be done in one go at the start as the majority of them were time gated. It also highlighted how every subsequent season was practically done by Bungie like an assembly line. By "Season of Plunder" in Year Five, it's clear that this seasonal format has worn down even the most hardcore players, with the unfriendly weapon crafting system having completely overtaken the loot chase^note To acquire patterns and gain crafting resources you need to get random weapon drops with a red border, which will fill up after killing so many enemies. If the weapon is craftable, it will provide resources and 1 pattern segment, most require 3-5 patterns before it is unlocked for crafting. Non-craftable weapons will provide resources but no pattern. Once crafted a weapon then needs to be leveled up through killing enemies and progressively unlock more optional perks, usually around level 25 will net you all possible perks but that requires, depending on the weapon and bonus progress for events, over 3,000 kills. After several seasons craftable weapons across the different weapon types quickly totaled close to one hundred. Bungie made a few changes to alleviate the grind and allow some resources to be gained by dismantling red border weapons without any kills. and the core playlists not receiving the necessary updates to bring them back from being a complete chore.
    • Season of Plunder in particular has been criticized as being an especially weak season, with some claiming it to be worse than Worthy. In spite of having a strong start and being a welcome Breather Episode after the harrowing events of Risen and Haunted, it ended up petering out partway through, due to issues with post-Ketchcrash/Expedition dialogues not playing correctly no matter how far in the story you were, questionable story beats (like the relics' power never being explained beyond just maybe influencing people's dark impulses), and a community event coming in the final two weeks that came across as incredibly lackluster at best and downright insulting at worst, given how little changes in the Eliksni Quarter when it's finished. On top of this, the final cutscene has gained criticism for the Narm potential of Mithrax using the relics' Darkness power to make tea to reawaken Osiris, seen by some as an incredibly weak ending that gives no answers to questions it raised and gives the impression it was phoned in.
  • Year Six ended up being viewed as one of the weakest overall years for the seasonal story model, primarily due to the lackluster reception of Lightfall and the year spent entirely around one Driving Question regarding the Gainax Ending: How to follow the Witness through the portal in the Traveler. Season of Defiance had almost no progress since it was designed as happening concurrently with the Lightfall story, but "Season of the Deep," "Season of the Witch" and "Season of the Wish" was only small incremental progress and not a whole lot of actual story between them as discovering Savathun knows how to follow the Witness, Savathun had prepared an Ahamkara wish and bartering with Riven to fulfill that wish. In many ways it was frustrating for players because the deeper lore reveals were pretty great and individually the playlist activities were more consistently well-received compared to past years, just that the story threads were much more sparse.
• Shocking Moments:
  • Lightfall had been consistently teased as the beginning of an apocalyptic event from various hints in the game's story. So the actual reveal trailer showing its main setting to be a pristine, thriving Cyberpunk civilization that had enforced The Masquerade until the Darkness revealed it to the outside came as a massive curveball, even without the Used Future setting of the main story.
  • The reveal trailer for The Final Shape managed to one up that of Lightfall with something no one saw coming: the return of Cayde-6!
• Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: Easily one of the most favored activities of Season of the Deep is fishing. Not only does it help you grind for armor, which helps raising your Power Level for your underleveled characters, but continuing to fish with others increases a meter that boosts the quality of the fish you catch and increases the chance of getting an exotic fish, which can be turned in for a free Exotic outside of Raid-exclusive Exotics.
• Tainted by the Preview:
  • Titan mains were unhappy with the reveal of the Strand Subclass for Titans, the Berserker. The chief complaint was that it was yet another Titan subclass with a strong focus on melee and a roaming super that emphasized close-range combat, like almost every single other Titan Subclass. Bungie's tone-deaf response in which they basically told Titan mains that "Titans are the punch stuff class" didn't exactly help matters, making it come across that they don't even know what their own class is capable of.
  • In the lead up to The Final Shape, Bungie enraged the fan base by announcing that, despite claims to the contrary, they would have to lay off several employees, which ended up delaying the expansion by several months. Worse still, one of those laid off was Michael Salvatore, whose soundtracks are the one part of every expansion thus far that is universally praised. Combined with multiple other issues (among them a drop in Crucible quality due to shuffling some of its team to work on the upcoming Marathon game), many fans that were previously losing interest in the game have finally decided to jump ship, while others have compared the upcoming expansion to the maligned ending of Game of Thrones. Things managed to get worse in a matter of hours when it was revealed that the art and sounds teams were among those gutted by the lay offs.
• That One Achievement: Has its own page.
• That One Attack:
  • Cabal Phalanxes are some of the easier enemies to fight given their passive nature... until you get into melee range with them. Their shield bash has a very high chance of turning you into a victim of Bungie's wacky physics as you get propelled towards a wall at breackneck speeds. It's usually recommended to simply keep your distance with them and neutralize their shield or use weapons that can pierce through them.
  • Some enemy grenades are just plain stinky, especially if the activity sports a modifier that increases the frequency at which they throw them (and said modifier happens to be a staple of endgame activities like Nightfall Strikes).
    • The Hive Acolyte's grenade explodes immediately upon impact and leaves a trail of fire where it landed; on activities with the Acute Solar Burn, this can very quickly ruin your health bar if you don't immediately step out of the blast zone to avoid dealing with the residual fire.
    • The Cabal Legionary's wrist blade can be fired like a fragmentation grenade that sticks to you like glue, and you'll be lucky if you don't get oneshotted by the detonation in endgame content.
    • The Scorn Stalker's Void grenade not only leaves a large trail of fire that gradually damages you, but the flames keep sticking to you for a little while even after you moved out of the blast radius!
  • The release of The Witch Queen turned every crossbow-wielding Scorn enemy into a nightmare that can oneshot you at the correct angle due to a bug that amplifies the damage received. Even in normal patrols, you'll find yourself having more trouble against run-of-the-mill Raiders than bosses just because of those damn crossbows. The following season mercifully nerfed those troublesome buggers.
  • During the launch week of the Vow of the Disciple raid, Rhulk's Suns of Lubrae suffered from a heavy desync^note Meaning that Rhulk's cross-shaped firing pattern is established when he lunges into position and you step out of the telegraphed zone, only for the beam to hit you anyway because the server registered you as within the firing zone even though you visually weren't; being in Contest Mode also meant that the beams were highly damaging, leaving you next to no time to move away from them that resulted more often than not in a death that should never have have happened. Even though Bungie fixed the issue, the damage was already done to teams that wiped repeatedly to Rhulk and had to abandon the Day 1 race due to that.
• That One Boss:
  • Thaviks, the Depraved of the "Exodus Crash" strike. The boss itself has very simple mechanics, but the fight is still filled with annoyances. For starters, electrified exploding Shanks constantly appear throughout the room, all of which create an electric field that reduces the player's movement, disables jumping and does damage over time, all while the dozens of enemies flooding the room tear them apart. Then when it comes to the boss itself, Thaviks, since he's a bigger Marauder, starts out invisible, moves very fast and shoots his Shrapnel Launcher fast and aggressively, making it very hard to get away from him if he sets his sights on you with how quickly he closes the gap between himself and the player and making facing him in close range a death sentence. If you do manage to get a bead on him, Thaviks will throw a smoke bomb and teleport away after taking little damage. And after getting most of his health down, he'll switch to using swords that'll kill you in 2-3 swings. Finally, almost everyone agrees that this boss has too much health and takes forever to bring down. Combined with his "Get Back Here!" Boss tendencies, and you've got a huge time waster. Naturally this only makes him even worse on Nightfall given the increased difficulty. The boss's notoriety is so bad that it has become commonplace for players to go back to orbit right as they start the strike, and Bungie even took it out of the Heroic Strikes playlist rotation in late May 2018. Several nerfs to his durability (and buffs to some supers and power weapons) have made him much more tolerable at least.
  • Brakion, Genesis Mind from "The Pyramidion" strike lacked the regeneration abilities of its lesser hobgoblin bretheren, but it got a ton of nasty abilities in return. Its line rifle hit incredibly hard and bordered on Always Accurate Attack, and it could spew flames over a wide area that would absolutely melt a guardian's health. Both of these attacks were compounded by the boss's first phase, which consisted of standing on a total of four plates to lower a pair of shields—the plates were small, forcing guardians to rely on meager cover to avoid the line rifle and keep the flames from engulfing the entire plate. Once the second shield lowered, most of the cover in the arena went down and got replaced by tons of lesser vex, which could quickly swamp an unprepared team and distract from Brakion, who would still be picking off guardians one at a time. After getting its health bar down, Brakion then proceeded to lose its head and charge at the player, spamming its line rifle with little accuracy drop. This led to it frequently getting right in your face and boss stomping; this isn't a problem in most boss arenas, but Brakion's was a series of thin platforms above a Bottomless Pit, making the massive knockback of the stomp a death sentence.
    • After Warmind and especially beginning in Year 2, power creep led to guardians dealing enough damage that most strike bosses would get killed right out of the gate, or at least spend most of their time during the immune phases of their fight. Brakion was no exception, except that if a fireteam did enough damage to knock off Brakion's head but not kill him before the shields came up, it'd leave the shield and charge the fireteam. This had all the fun about his headless phase stated above, except that Brakion was still immune to all damage despite being outside the shield.
  • Of all the trials presented in the Leviathan raid, none are more aggravating than the Pleasure Gardens, where you have to kill the six Royal Beasts. Its main problem stems from being heavily reliant on team communication as to indicate where to move your fireteam towards power buffs while remaining undetected. Not only do you need to slip past the Beasts' patrol pattern, but your beam users need to position themselves efficiently and lead you the way, while also having to jump across platforms without being detected themselves. Without a significant damage boost, each of the Beasts takes forever to kill, and eliminating them one by one is not an option, as the surviving Beasts will be more likely to trigger the damage phase without the slightest provocation from players. Then comes the Prestige Mode, where two more Royal Beasts are added to the equation, and their patrol patterns have completely changed as a result, throwing even experienced raiders in for a loop.
  • If the Royal Pools of the Leviathan Raid weren't hard enough to your taste on normal difficulty, they definitely are in Prestige Mode. Every enemy is beefier and more deadly than before, and it's not helped by the fact that a good part of the encounter is spent standing on stationary plates, meaning you're sitting ducks for those hardened Gladiator-type Royal Bathers (which conveniently happen to debuff you if you kill them, making for an even harder task to stay still on your plate); anyone who's not running a Recovery-heavy build will be hard pressed to survive the entire encounter.
  • Sedia, the boss of "The Corrupted" strike, is what happens when you put a boss who has the same moves as two raid bosses into a strike and give her the ideal arena to abuse her powers. The area you're fighting her in has extremely precarious footing and very little cover, overwhelming amounts of Taken spawns (many of which are Taken Knights whose incendiary spit limits safe space even further), and large debris that start appearing midway through the fight, adding a hazard that can kill you if you're not careful while jumping between islands. Her Eviscerating Hex has a chance of killing you in one hit if it directly hits you ^note While it initially seems to be a single high speed bullet thrown at you, getting the full brunt of the attack reveals that it's a multi-hit projectile that deals heavy damage per tick in an insanely short timespan of fractions of seconds, and her double repulsion can juggle you around, lifting you off the ground then knocking you back a fair distance. Given the aforementioned precarious footing, the aerial push is usally a death sentence if you don't have the means to recover from the knockback; no cover will save you from that move either, as the knockback from the second push bypasses walls. To top it off, staying close to her is ill-advised, since she also has a Shockwave Stomp that propels you even farther than many obnoxious bosses that use the Scrappy Mechanic. On scenarios where you have to enter the fight underleveled like Ordeal Nightfalls, this fight is usually considered as one of the most unfair ones next to Thaviks'.
  • Zevious-3, the Forge Warden of the Gofannon Forge on Nessus, keeps you on the edge by constantly teleporting itself away, cutting your fireteam's firepower by warping one Guardian at a time, and being flanked by numerous reinforcements. If one of the lesser Servitors even get close to the boss, it and Zevious-3 can mutually shield each other, making for a really frustrating situation where you have to pop your Super to destroy the smaller Servitor and get back to damaging the boss, who can choose to either relocate itself or randomly teleport you.
  • Belmon, Transcendent Mind on the highest difficulties of The Ordeal. Being a super Hydra, Belmon can casually oneshot you with its Aeon Maul projectiles if it so much glances at you, and you will have to deal with multiple Champions and Wyverns that swarm your position, forcing you to to play peek-a-boo inside tight corridors and bottlenecking the onrushing enemies. It's telling when the Transcendent Hydra that tries to snuff you out from inside the cubicles is the least of your worries in the fight, despite it technically being one of the two bosses required to end the strike.
  • Atraks-1 was the bane of many fireteams hoping to clear the Deep Stone Crypt raid during its launch day. You are constantly under homing fire from the multiple copies of the boss while you scramble to obtain the augments needed to operate the elevators and identify which Atraks-1 copy you should attack; failure to deal enough damage to the correct target when Atraks-1 initiates Extinction Protocol will wipe the entire team. And when you deal enough damage to stop her, you have to quickly travel between the orbital station and the laboratory below to prevent another boss duplicate from initiating Extinction Protocol while simultaneously getting rid of the debuff left behind by the defeated duplicate via airlock, otherwise the debuff turns into yet another Atraks-1 copy that wipes the fireteam. The back-and-forth nature of the encounter coupled with Contest Mode was hell for inexperienced raiders and tried the patience of the more seasoned ones.
  • While "Battlegrounds: Foothold" is a fun arena mission with continuous waves of Cabal and Hive, the fight against Val Ma'rag at the end is a little too hectic to fully enjoy. Not only do you have to deal with dozens of Legionaries and Phalanxes with Slug Throwers, but also the occasional Hive Shrieker or Ogre that decides to exclusively target you even in the middle of a Mêlée à Trois. Ma'rag himself is a pain the ass to fight up close, as he can repel you with either the standard Incendior compression burst, or a good ol' physics-shattering stomp.
  • The Caretaker in Vow of the Disciple requires rather tight coordination for multiple teams of two. One pair needs to go into the back room to retrieve Knowledge, another pair needs to clear adds and keep them off the totem, and the remaining two have to constantly stun the Caretaker by shooting its face and opened sarcophagus to give the first team time to do what they need for damage phase. The second and third floors produce much more empty space to fall into, especially the Knowledge rooms there, where it's very easy to miscalculate a jump and waste time needing to be rezzed while the Caretaker keeps coming. On top of all this is having to remember what symbols you picked up for the totems, AND staying in the active platforms for damage phase and trying to aim properly while the Caretaker keeps blasting you. Not to mention the Scorn from the previous encounter also trying to attack the totem and force a wipe. There may also be the occasion of a platform not granting the damage buff, resulting in wasted DPS. It's very easy to screw up and wipe if the Knowledge team or the stunning team flub things.
  • The Warpriest from the reprised King's Fall raid stood as a roadblock to many players attempting the raid on Contest Mode as well as Challenge Mode on the raid launch day, messily cutting the 158,034 players that cleared the Totems encounter down to 63,648 who could best him. Much of the difficulty stems from how your team positions itself to damage the Warpriest while also refreshing the timer on the Brand holder, which involves killing a particularly beefy Taken Knight that sometimes spawns far away from where you are shooting the Warpriest. The Warpriest himself is also extremely resilient, and his constant barrage of attacks very much requires you to bring a Well of Radiance to keep blasting him without worrying too much on his retaliatory fire.
  • The Warwatcher is a carbon copy of Savathûn's Song, being a massive Shrieker with a massive health bar divided in two sections. What makes it frustrating to fight compared to other boss-tier Shriekers is the fact that the Seraph Bunker you're fighting in has very little cover, and all hiding spots are easily snuffed out by the ridiculous amounts of Hive and Wrathborn Fallen that spawn to reinforce the boss. The Warwatcher also fires homing explosives not unlike the last stretch of Savathûn's Song, which makes the search for cover even more fruitless. The Heist Battlegrounds playlist also has the rule of always making enemies 5 levels stronger than you no matter what, so your runs will never get easier. Hope you have a consistent way to heal yourself through all the chaos.
  • Persys, Primordial Ruin is a contender for the hardest dungeon boss. It's a very deadly Wyvern that doesn't hesitate to spam Warp Lance projectiles whenever you're in plain sight, and the boss arena is pretty small, forcing you to simultaneously keep track of Persys and the various Vex units (especially the Supplicants in the core room) while juggling around with the Arctrician buff to complete two Arc circuits in the core room. You will actually need to bring out some of your strongest game breakers to reliably damage Persys, otherwise you'll be spending several damage cycles doing Scratch Damage to it while it bombards you nonstop with attacks that nearly oneshot you.
  • Calus, Disciple of The Witness is the Final Boss of the Lightfall campaign and he has gained quite a reputation for being nearly impossible on Legendary Difficulty. While his health bar is not that difficult to whittle down, a second phase of the fight pulls you into the center of the room and forces you to fight him in a vicious close-range battle with very little cover. Even worse if you die in the second phase you have to do the first phase all over again, and if you nuke his first phase health bar up front with a super attack without clearing out the Tormentors they will follow you into the second phase.
• That One Level: Has its own page.
• That One Sidequest:
  • Getting the Legend of Acrius (Exotic Shotgun) is a fairly painful process that requires you to randomly get the quest item in the first place, randomly get 5 collectibles by killing Cabal enemies, then complete the Leviathan raid (you can technically skim down to just beating the final boss, which is still a monumental task in itself). Then, you have to complete a 300 Power quest, which turns out to be a Nightfall Strike on Prestige difficulty; completing this will reward you with the Exotic shotgun minus most of its perks, and you'll be tasked with using it to kill more Cabal in particular circumstances. Then, you'll have to come back to the Leviathan and raid several more times to get Emperor Seals ^note This step was initially bugged in that the number of seals obtained per raid encounter and counting towards the quest, was different from what's displayed in-game; this was later fixed to only gathering 10 Seals. Finally, if you want the ornament, you have to complete the raid on Prestige difficulty. It's by far the longest and most grueling Exotic weapon quest upon the game's launch.
    • And as of the release of Curse of Osiris, while the map requirement for the "End The Arms Dealer" Quest is still listed as 300 Power, the actual quest has been silently raised to the current hard cap of 330 Power, which you only find out after you start it, and is now unplayable for those who do not own the DLC due to its Prestige difficulty. The fans were not pleased to find out that this weapon and sidequest are ultimately gated off behind a paywall post-release.
  • Acquiring the Whisper of the Worm is essentially the Black Spindle quest from Destiny cranked up to eleven, as you have to really push your platforming abilities to the fullest on a Timed Mission that also includes brutal waves of Taken. This is on top of actually finding the mission, which is found on Io at a very specific location and time.
  • If you dislike the PvP side of the game, the advent of 'Forsaken' looks to be a solid stream of sidequests to grind your teeth by; whether it's getting a large, yet unspecified number of pulse rifle kills in the Crucible (the progress bar is a percentage, not a number, and the scoreboard doesn't track your Final Blows statistic), or killing invading Guardians with a hand cannon in Gambit (where you show up as a bright dot on the invader's radar, but the invader is just one among a horde of PvE enemies on radar until you spot them directly). At least one quest has multiple PvP stages.
    • Similarly, Exotic catalysts that demand Crucible kills only. An especially bad offender is Vigilance Wing, who, on top of requiring 250 Guardian kills, also demands you get five "Blood for Blood" medals (kill an enemy Guardian after they just killed your teammate). It's up to completely random chance on whether you nail the kill or you get offed first.
  • Just when everyone thought the Iron Burden fiasco from Season 6 was bad, Season 7's Iron Banner introduces a mind-numbingly tedious questline which requires dozens of matches, if not hundreds, to fully complete, with each step getting progressively grindier requirements like melee and grenade kills (in a metagame that's flat out punishing to abilities other than supers) and kills with weapons that simply aren't competitive. What's worse is that armour pieces for that season will not drop in the loot pool until you've completed each quest step, which essentially forces you to sit through the entire slog if you want the whole armour set. Compound that with Lord of Wolves being busted during the same season, and you have a recipe for a very unenjoyable Iron Banner experience.
  • Season 9's Iron Banner's quest keeps the same frustrating armour restrictions from previous seasons, but the last step will make you ragequit in a hurry; you had to kill ten Guardians with a Rocket Launcher. Given how laughably sparse Heavy ammo spawns each match, a lot of players spent many matches without ever touching a Heavy ammo brick, and some even did nothing but wait for it to appear through an entire match. The Gameplay Derailment got so bad that Bungie had to apologize and autocomplete that dreaded last step to avoid repeated criticism about it.
  • Obtaining the Divinity is a major hassle even for players who know the Garden of Salvation raid in and out, given that you have to solve seven complicated node connection puzzles throughout the raid and complete the final encounter. Carrying one fireteam member is completely out of the question since the puzzles are made so that a full fireteam of six must coordinate their placement well, meaning that clueless pick up groups are in for a very bad time.
  • The "Revision Zero" exotic pulse rifle is not hard to obtain; running the "Operation: Seraph's Shield" mission nets it for you. Getting the first catalyst (it has 4), on the other hand, means running the same mission over, but on Legendary difficulty. This would also be pretty simple, were it not for the "Brig Room", where you face 3 Fallen brigs along with a ton of adds in a Darkness Zone. The "Chaff" modifier disables your radar, invisible melee Marauders roam the room in groups which can stack up to a dozen, and Dregs Grenade Spam you with ungodly accuracy from halfway across the arena. Not to mention the extra-tough Captains and the deadly tracer shanks that turn up for the party. And get used to it, because the quest for the catalysts keeps sending you back.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • The shader system is one of the most negative changes in the jump from D1 to D2; what once was an unlimited-once-acquired and free aesthetic, is now severely limited in quantity and costs glimmer to even apply. Thankfully Patch 2.0 changed it so you could retrieve any acquired shader from the Collections tab at a very meager price.
  • The shift in weapon categories is also a case of "if it ain't broken, don't fix it", as Kinetic and Energy weapons are essentially letting you equip two Primaries from the first game's weapon system, while most Special Weapons (sans Sidearms) are moved to the Power Weapon slot, traditionally occupied by D1's Heavy Weapons; this induces redundancy for having two similar weapons out of three, and causes problems for the Power Weapon slot (e.g., why use a shotgun when you can always wield a rocket launcher). This also translates into making players feel a lot less powerful than in the previous game. Patch 2.0 remedied this by changing back to a Primary-Special-Heavy trinity system, but also went beyond by letting you equip up to two Specials based on whether they're Kinetic or Energy-based, making the best out of the old D1 system and D2's weapon typing.
  • The increase in ability cooldowns from D1 to D2. Bungie wanted players to think strategically before using these abilities and make the moment when you do use them thoroughly satisfying and pivotal, but since these abilities are roughly of the same effectiveness as the first game and are just as easily counteracted, the magic is lost, and players feel bitter about the slow pacing ^note You'd have to be performing exceptionally well in a Crucible match to earn more than two Supers before the match's end. It's telling when Mayhem Clash, a limited-time Crucible mode, is widely praised for decreasing ability cooldowns to ludicrous speeds. It took until months into the cesspool of controversies that is Curse of Osiris for Bungie to acknowledge that the slow pacing of ability use was a mistake, and they promptly regulated cooldowns at a reasonable recharge rate afterwards.
  • Rift's introduction to D2 was given a complete overhaul from D1, and for the worse; scoring now happens on dunking, and the teams are reset at spawn after each dunk, killing any semblance of momentum you might have gained; there's a long 10-second respawn timer with the option to have a teammate revive, and you can respawn in enemy territory even if you're defending your Rift. And this is not even getting started with the bugs that can make the game mode unplayable ^note The Spark can fall through the floor and never reappear, leaving the match objective-less until you're forced into sudden death; and the game can repeatedly transmat everyone out until the match breaks if you happen to dunk at inopportune timings. Being tied in Season 17 to Iron Banner, a mode only available during one week of any given month, compounds a shitshow nobody asked for. Backlash from the PvP community was swift and escalated to threatening community managers. What made it worse is that because of it being so disliked, pretty much everyone avoided it... everyone, that is, except for Griefer teams that infest the mode, relying on cheese-filled loadouts, deliberately bad connections (where you could land what should be a killing blow only for it to come far later or not register at all, while they can one-shot you with impunity), and the like to make their opponents suffer even more in an already terrible mode.
  • In a move that screams "They Changed It, Now It Sucks Even More", Season of Plunder revamped the Crucible matchmaking into one with a loose skill-based matchmaking in Control in hopes of making it more fair for players of all skills... except it threw out latency checks out of the window, resulting in a massive increase of matches where you're matched against players from regions you shouldn't even match against and have horrible internet connection. This predictably had the PvP community up in arms about Bungie's tone-deaf approach to solving Crucible issues.
  • At the start of Year 6 (Lightfall), Bungie refreshed two of the older Strikes in the game to bring them up to Parity with, specifically, the Arms Dealer Strike and the Lake of Shadows Strike. While reactions to the former have been somewhat mixed, no particularly strong feelings have emerged one way or the other. The Latter on the other hand has been met with overwhelming disdain, with many criticizing Bungie for taking a Strike that was beloved specifically because of how fast it could be completed, and turning it into a lengthy slog that requires players to escort a Resonant Splinter twice over the course of the strike.
    • On a related note, the Inverted Spire Strike was also given a minor change at the same time, adding health gates to the Final Boss so that players can no longer nuke the boss on the first level and skip phases 2 and 3 of the fight.
  • The Destiny Content Vault and sunsetting are both heavily loathed by fans. While the former has some justification due to the need to update the old content to run on newer engines, fans were widely unhappy with the removal of all campaign content up to Forsaken, particularly since this meant if you wanted to play any of the game's story content, you had to buy an expansion pack. Attempts to address this issue have been mixed at best, with the Timeline Recollections added in Season of the Witch, clearly intended to fix the issue, instead enraging fans because of how it was handled. In particular, many felt the version of Last Call in the recollection was too short and truncated too much of the campaign. There's also been criticism over how few Timeline Recollections there are, with many wishing that the entirety of the Red War campaign be added back later.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: A criticism of this nature has been launched at the Lucent Brood of The Witch Queen. Despite being hyped up as being Hive with their own Light-based powers and Ghosts that can go toe to toe with humanity's Guardians, Bungie hasn't actually developed them much beyond that. There are a few nods here and there in lorebook entries, but otherwise they aren't developed culturally or characteristically. In essence, they're an entire Flat Character faction apart from Savathun, Immaru, and Fynch.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Lightfall. The Expansion starts with The Witness and the Black Fleet arriving on Earth and attacking the Traveler, and then proceeds to go to Neptune for what has been described as a Filler Arc focused on us unlocking Strand, and stopping Calus from getting to The Veil without ever explaining what The Veil is or why The Witness wants it, or ever explaining what Strand is. The Witness barely features in the Campaign, and its plans for the Traveler are never elaborated upon.
    • This also applies to the way in which the player finds themselves acquiring Strand. Unlike Beyond Light, where the powers of Stasis were essentially "gifted" to them by the Ziggurat after seeing it in use by Eramis and House Salvation, Lightfall sees you finding Strand literally sitting in the street, with the power itself being offered very little explanation besides it being something that the Guardian is able to harness.
  • Going back before the above, Bungie has failed to actually show why players should care about defending humanity, giving next to no interactions with regular Lightless outside of maybe Hawthorne and Devrim. On top of that, they don't do anything to show the population of the Last City reacting to monumental events like the Factions bailing out after Lakshmi's failed coup, the Traveler temporarily disappearing into Savathun's Throne World, or the Traveler moving further away from Earth to face the Witness' fleet. No matter how many times Bungie keeps trying to insist on evolving the world of Destiny, they continually fail to actually make that world feel evolved due to the people we're supposedly fighting for never once reacting to what are ostensibly world-shattering events.
• Tough Act to Follow: It's generally agreed that Season of Arrivals is considered the best season in Destiny 2, both for finally bringing The Black Fleet into the picture and having an enjoyable seasonal activity that is essentially a game of gambit in PvE format. While many seasons afterward were generally well-received, with Season of the Chosen being one of the standouts, many felt the seasonal activities weren't as enjoyable as Arrival's was.
  • When it was released, The Witch Queen was quickly considered to be one of the best expansions in the series history. This is thanks in part to it's campaign that greatly expands on the setting with a compelling villain and sub-faction in the form of Savathun and The Lucent Brood respectfully. Savathun's Throne World was also well liked for the art direction of it's maps and the world building it brought with them. It also introduced the Legendary mode that offers a challenge many players have been seeking. In comparison the following expansion, Lightfall recieved a much colder reception, with it's plot, setting of Neomuna, and even it's own Legendary mode being seen as a drop in quality in comparison to The Witch Queen.

Tropes U-Z

• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • The Infinite Forest from the "Curse of Osiris" DLC. For all the hype regarding its unique Procedural Generation, the area ultimately served as nothing more than a glorified passage from one objective to another, without any meaningful events going on as you sprinted through the "randomly" generated platforms of which there were so few the layouts would become tiresomely familiar in no time at all; the exceptions are locked gates requiring you to kill one or more yellow health enemies to proceed forward, but even then, it's treated as unnecessary padding. It got a marginally better reception with the Haunted Forest and Verdant Forest seasonal game types, being focused on speed runs instead of story development. Now pretty much completely retired, as the halloween event for Year Four sent Guardians to special versions of Lost Sectors across the system in search of "Headless Ones" instead.
  • Weapon Telemetry was universally agreed to be the most redundant resource in the game, since you could only use them to get rank up packages with Banshee, who also accepted Gunsmith Materials that are worth more individually towards rank ups and are much more easily acquired via dismantling any unwanted piece of equipment (this being a looter shooter game, you'll come across a lot of these); in contrast, Weapon Telemetry only hasda chance at being generated through special means (Ghost Telemetry perks and Pure Matterglass Lens). Ultimately, both Telemetries and Gunsmith Materials were retired with Year Five; now disassembling weapons or armour just immediately rewards you with Gunsmith Reputation, and the entire telemetry system is gone along with the matterglass lenses and ghost perks.
  • Airborne Effectiveness has the dubious honour of being a stat that's very unrewarding to build on, despite the sandbox team's efforts to capitalize on it during Season of Plunder. Prior to that season, for PvE, the stat was practically redundant since mobs and bosses don't require complicated aerobatics to defeat. It's only in Crucible where the need to land your shots while airborne becomes a necessity, and even then, being airborne isn't all that much of an advantage against seasoned players. That the sandbox team is doubling down on buffing the Airborne Effectiveness of weapons that nobody in their right minds would use while airborne (like Whisper of the Worm and D.A.R.C.I., which are sniper rifles with perks that have nothing to do aerial combat) is mind-boggling, to say the least.
• Unexpected Character: The very heavy implications that Nezarec is the Lunar Pyramid's Disciple, and most likely left their ranks sometime in the distant past in Season of the Haunted came as a massive shock to the lore community, as he had only been mentioned as a myth twice in the span of four years. The implications of his roles (along with various theories suggesting that the Void is not his only elemental domain, but Arc as well) have very quickly caused him to replace Savathun as the community's go-to mysterious figure for speculation, most likely out of how absolutely left-field his return to the lore and the Connected All Along reveals that came with it have been.
• Unfortunate Character Design: The Reveal of The Witness was almost immediately met with a handful of derisive comparisons to Megamind, seeing as how both are blue Lean and Mean aliens in black suits. The issue is that the Witness represents some of the darkest parts of the game's story, while Megamind enjoys a very memetic reputation, making the easy comparison jarring.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: While Eramis's character arc in Year 5 tries to convince the player that she should be forgiven and redeemed, the actual community is hesitant to take that message at face value. As Eramis is a House of Devils elite, she has committed atrocities just as bad if not worse than what she accuses Mithrax and the Guardians of doing for centuries, and this is never addressed in any scene that tries to portray her in a sympathetic light. It doesn't help that she is likely impossible to get rid of even through death, so Eramis instead comes off as a complete tool for both sides at best and a well-deserved Asshole Victim at worst. This disconnect has even led to the Alternate Character Interpretation that sparing her in Season of Plunder was done so that we could intentionally prolong her suffering as a more suitable punishment, since killing her would remove her ability to feel the burden of guilt for her path of destruction and death.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: Part of what makes the Witness's appearance so disturbing is their semblance to humans, which wasn't seen before in any other alien species in Destiny.
• Win Back the Crowd:
  • After several months where the player base gradually moved away from the game due to multiple PR disasters and a weak expansion in the form of Curse of Osiris, the combination of the "Go Fast" sandbox update and the release of the Warmind expansion actually brought back a fair number of disgruntled fans, even though said DLC has its share of flaws. For this, Bungie added a few legendary weapons that actually felt unique and worth the grind, offered an intense gameplay mechanic in Escalation Protocol, and increased communications with the community regarding various feedback on making the game better.
  • After a couple of months following Warmind's mild success, Solstice of Heroes, coupled with the discovery of the Whisper of the Worm, catalysts for literally every Exotic weapon and the slew of previews of Forsaken, all helped bring back another portion of the disillusioned fanbase, if just for getting up to speed with the final weeks of Year 1 and getting ready for Year 2 starting in Fall 2018. This happens to come along with Bungie's renewed philosophy of actually making players feel powerful and moving further away from the grounded gameplay that made the core of Destiny 2's gameplay so contentious.
  • Forsaken completely revamps the game's mechanics to fall more in line with The Taken King DLC from the first game. Randomized stats are back, Exotics are rarer and have more unique effects, shotguns and sniper rifles can be used as secondary weapons again, cooldowns for ultimates are shortened, PvP is back to 6 vs 6 with the new Gambit mode added, there's more incentives to perform daily quests and explore the open world areas, and so much more. Many fans have declared that Forsaken should be considered the point where Destiny 2 finally became a true sequel to Destiny 1. This sentiment increased even more after the three Seasons (The Black Armory, Joker’s Wild, Penumbra) and the announcement of Shadowkeep and the jump to Free-to-Play, all of which led to the game’s player count soaring to new heights, as well as praise from gamers and professional critics alike.
  • Year Three had some disappointment in general with their seasonal approach, which introduced new gametypes that would be cycled out after a few months. The problem was it forced players to grind this new gametype to accomplish all materials and triumphs far more than the playerbase was interested in. The quality of the different gametypes varied and there was a slump in the pacing of the story, which made the Season of the Worthy (March-June 2020) especially disliked because a declining playerbase made the gametype much more difficult than it should have been. At one of the more pessimistic points in the games' lifespan, Season of Arrivals came in very strong alongside the reveal of the fall DLC Beyond Light. Some players were hesitant based on being burned before, but within a few weeks it came to be seen as the strongest in storytelling, pacing and gameplay, making it the highlight of Year three.
  • After Joe Blackurn took over as the Lead Director of Destiny 2, he released a massive update that contained a ton of news that the playerbase took extremely positively. First and foremost: Sunsetting, or the act of imposing a Power cap on weapons and armor, is gone. Second: it was announced that The Witch Queen expansion was being delayed until early 2022. Considering the reception that Beyond Light had, many are hopeful that this will mean more content (such as Strikes and PvP maps) will be added to the expansion. Third: The seasonal Power Grind is being massively reduced. Due to Sunsetting, the Power Cap was raised by 50 each season. Now it's going down to 10 per season, eliminating a grind that virtually all players found boring and unengaging. Fourth: PvP Adjustments including A fix for "3-peeking," or the act of using third-person weapons or emotes to look around corners that you otherwise shouldn't be able to, an adjustment to Stasis subclasses to make them more balanced in PvP, and the announcement of weapon archetype rebalancing in PvP. Fifth: Shaders are back to being unlocks, solving a minor, but persistent, inventory management issue that has persisted ever since the start of the game. Sixth and last: Bungie preemptively addressed a concern with crossplay in PvP, informing players that, unless PC players deliberately invite a console player into their group, console and PC players would not play together in PvP.
  • Last but certainly not least in the minds of those who suffer through the Crucible, there was the news that Bungie, along with Riot, had filed a joint lawsuit against a notorious cheating software company, demanding damages along with the software code so that the companies could effectively block and ban cheaters who used them. Such a move was seen as long overdue.
  • Following the disatorous State of the Game post weeks before The Final Shape Showcase, Joe Blackburn released a sixteen minute video in which he talked about the formation of a PvP Strike Team, a Crucible map pack in 2024, a set of Eververse Armor being made earnable in activites in Season 22, a renewed focus on communication from the Community Managers, and Joe himself streaming Destiny 2 in order to talk more directly to the community.
  • After years of having Supers and abilities themed almost entirely around punching enemies, Titan players were ecstatic when the new Super for The Final Shape, Twilight Arsenal, and the accompanying aspect were both support themed, feeling that not only was it a nice change of pace, but also felt more evocative of older Titan lore entries.