Yesterday, Destiny 2 received a new update whose main highlight was the reworking of certain Exotic armor pieces, the first sweep in an ongoing effort to make the game’s Exotic armor feel more exciting to use. The update contained plenty of other tweaks and fixes as well, including a welcome change to heroic strikes which should make them more appealing to solo endgame players.
Back when Destiny 2’s Warmind expansion first launched, players were disheartened to discover that it had a serious endgame leveling problem. Dedicated raiders had little trouble in reaching the game’s new Power Level cap of 385, but for more casual and/or solo players, the grind was much more arduous. Finishing Warmind’s story campaign only put the average player at around 340-345 PL, a far cry from the new cap. Worse, the only way solo players could earn gear that was guaranteed to bump up their PL was via the small number of weekly milestones, meaning those who weren’t willing to raid were forced to make minimal amounts of progress each week.
Now, Bungie has implemented a fix of sorts which doesn’t entirely fix the endgame leveling issue, but does at least make it a bit less frustrating. Yesterday’s 1.2.1 update now makes it so that, for every 3-5 heroic strikes a player finishes, they’ll earn a guaranteed powerful engram which can decrypt into gear up to 360 PL (365 with a legendary mod). This means that casual/solo players can make some serious headway towards the current PL cap simply by running Heroic Strikes, and they can make even more headway by utilizing weekly milestones as well.
Even better, the infamous Exodus Crash strike has been taken out of the current heroic strike pool so that Bungie can retool its final boss encounter, an encounter that was so frustrating that many matchmade players would often just leave as soon as they loaded into the strike. Of course, with the Warmind launch, heroic strikes in general are a lot tougher than they used to be, but it’s still nice that solo/casual players now have a guaranteed method for getting better gear aside from weekly milestones.