Destiny 2: Season of Dawn Closing Thoughts and Recap

Hello everyone,

season

9 is about to conclude in about a week, so it's time for my final

thoughts

and a

recap

of this

season

. I won't cover too much news about season 10 and the director's cut in this video; Check out my other videos to get my take on it. The season started with some work to unlock the Obelisks and the Saint-14 story quests, which I thought was fine. I thought the obelisk investment system was pretty interesting, but simple, although once I got to 11th in all obelisks, I didn't care for them in the slightest until Empyrean Restoration.

The Saint-14 story missions were really cool, I like the Saint-14 character in the game, I didn't really have many problems with him and I don't think many people did either. While I know the community wasn't crazy about turning story missions into raids during the Warmind days, given how often we see raids implemented in the game these days, maybe it's time to do that again, although I can see how that might interfere. with the seasonal monetization model. Then we have the seasonal activity in the Sundial, which is essentially a derivative of the Menagerie. I grew tired of this style of activity and outgrew it in a couple of runs.

The encounters weren't bad at all, I liked the bomb throwing more, I thought it was cool, definitely a family vibe compared to Menagerie, but it's not really doing much for me and never did to begin with. After doing each encounter a couple of times, I was pretty prepared. Very rewarding, absolutely, but... personally, I'm past the very rewarding part. Bungie has also realized that this content delivery format is not really sustainable in the long term. While I'm not sure how the content for season 10 will be delivered - I don't know if it will follow the format of seasons 8 and 9 or not as it was probably already in development - I want to see what season 11 and 12 will have in store for us in terms of combining seasonal offers and the main in-game activities.

Seasonal content right now is the only thing that matters and I use the word matters liberally. Bungie is basically only using 20% ​​of their game right now and luckily they realized this and are working to fix it. The end game in Season of Dawn was... reaching 10 power levels and searching for even more divine weapons. I'm tired of stockpiling weapons as my main ambition for this game, partly because I already have 100 god rolls in my vault that I don't use, partly because the buff meta in PvE hasn't changed in years, partly because legendaries in raid are nothing special at all and I haven't been for a while, and partly because god tier loot is the easiest you'll ever get, and I use the word "earned" liberally.

How many more god rolls do I need to make? How many more must gather dust in my vault? How much easier do we need to do this? How long can this be maintained? Over time we will run out of archetypes and possible benefit combinations. So what's up? Pinnacles and rituals get most of my playtime anyway, although if you can't get pinnacles or rituals then you definitely need other options. But the fact that raid loot is garbage and better items can be obtained by clicking a button on the tower, to me, is annoying, because it basically makes raid loot useless, when it used to be quite sought after.

But, since seasonal content is only available for a limited time, things NEED to be somewhat accessible, i.e. easy to get, so that people don't get upset that they didn't have time to look for said items, like us. We will discuss it briefly later. I had a section in this script dedicated to weapons removal in relation to the experience of receiving constant loot this season, but now that Luke Smith's director's cut covered it and basically lived up to what I expected, that section is being rewritten in another video on its own, where I really want to get to the heart of the issues.

Season 9's ritual weapons were Buzzard, Python, and Komodo. Buzzard and Komodo landed with a thud, not really because of their perk set but because of their archetypes. Python, on the other hand, is a very good addition to the ritual weapon collection, being the only shotgun with Overflow, although I don't think Overflow is strong enough to put Python in the top omega tier, but it is a good one. option. We had 2 exotic quests in Devil's Ruin and Bastion. Devil's Ruin was about a 30-minute excursion, with some interesting dialogue between Osiris, Saint-14, and Shaxx, which I thought was really fun to listen to.

Otherwise, the search was unremarkable. Both exotic quests were quite stale in their completion compared to Deathbringer and Xenophage. I guess the reason is because those exotics were tied to Shadowkeep, which doesn't have as much of a time limit, while these new ones were tied to Season of Dawn, have a time limit, and therefore need to be accessible. When I say Bastion was stale, I mean post-puzzle completion. Bastion ended up leaving a bit of a sour taste in the community's mouth because he was linked to the secret community puzzle that was released in mid-January. I've already given my opinion on the community puzzle if you want to watch Bastion's video, but in summary: I liked it, but as someone who wasn't part of the team directly involved in solving the second, more important part of solving the puzzle , I was disappointed that all I could really contribute were a couple of screenshots.

I wish there was a way the average person could contribute a little more. The reason people were disappointed with the reward was because it was thought that since the puzzle was a secret, the reward would have been too. Instead, when the puzzle was solved, we found ourselves with about 90 minutes of intense grinding to get the weapon, plus patrols, public events, and lost sectors. I don't think the intense work was really necessary because it caused the ending of the event to fail. The reward should have come upon completing the path, but if you missed the opportunity to go through the Corridors of Time, since they were eliminated, THEN you could do the busy work of the exotic.

That being said, I can't emphasize how much I enjoy and think the community enjoys secret puzzles like this. It's cool, it's amazing to see the community come together to do cool things like this. But, just a hunch, I think more people would prefer the 20 minute combat and platforming sequences a la Outbreak and Whisper instead of the 5 day data entry, "we 100% definitely don't want you to brute force this" , experience that. happened. For me, the fun part is figuring out what you have to do to solve the puzzle. Once the code is cracked, having to wait 5 days to see how it pays out wasn't the most exciting and I say this as someone who was only able to participate on the first day.

The Charged With Light seasonal mod mechanic was definitely interesting from a gameplay perspective. The problem is that I never really cared because the amount of effort it would take to build an entirely new set of armor based on those mods wouldn't equal the payoff of how much stronger I would feel as a result. You can make some pretty crazy things happen if you choose to put that much effort into the build and play around with it, there is an interesting shotgun build you can make. But anyway, in Season 9, you could ALSO take on most things in the game with the same 2 charges and it didn't seem like the average person would be willing to go that extra mile on a Charged With Light build.

Despite the huge nerfs we suffered with the release of Shadowkeep, we're still very powerful and the jump from uncharged versions to charged versions wasn't enough for me to worry about using mods. Again, an interesting concept, but the value of carrying it out was low. That said, season mods are opening up some of their restrictions, you can put season mods on 3 season armor now which is cool, elemental affinities will be changeable for a cost, also cool. Snipers and grenade launchers will be nerfed in Season 10 to try to bridge the gap between snipers and everything else. But after running a Master Nightfall with a Sunspot shotgun-based build, let's just say I won't be in a big rush to run a shotgun unless my entire team is running them and even then... boss damage will be an experience. to say the least.

In the end, the season ended with Inotam as the final boss of the Sundial and the Empyrean Restoration. Inotam was definitely a much better final boss experience compared to Undying Mind because... something changed, mainly the arena and the boss fight itself. It's not dramatically different from the other 3 fights and the 3 mini-bosses you have to fight during the Inotam fight just melt instantly, at least in normal mode, but at least it was something. Then we had the Empyrean Restoration, in which players donated literally billions of Fractaline to the effort that brought back the Trials, although, let's be honest, the Trials would have returned anyway.

However, a little trick you can do is to buy a bunch of weapon rewards, donate Fractaline, and complete those rewards after donating a certain amount. So for just 400 fractalines, plus 10 per reward you can collect, you can farm items for gods. I was farming 7 Perfect Paradox Shotguns per minute by standing on the tower and pressing a button. If you had a bunch of spare legendary shards, then you were probably part of the crowd that could farm tons of fractaline by investing resources in the exotic level material in the tower obelisk, which you would use to level the obelisks on your planet, which you would then use.

I would grant you fractaline weekly. This required nothing more than visiting the Spider several times. Let me make this very clear in case it's not clear enough: the best way to farm weapons for gods during the month of February was to stand on the tower, click on buttons in a menu. It is the best method of cultivating divine weapons we have ever had. This is part of the reason why the game is becoming obsolete. These aren't dumb weapons either, there were 13 potential weapons to get. To revisit the weapon pickup for just a second, I don't know how much easier Bungie can make for you to try out different divine weapons beyond just giving them away.

If this couldn't get you to try something new, then nothing will. At the same time, this is the kind of thing that finally leads me to not giving a damn about loot hunting in this game anymore, in addition to all the other things I mentioned before. Who the hell cares when you're literally giving it away? Why bother? Ultimately, this season didn't hold my attention as well and that's mostly because of how everything was handed to me. I didn't really have to work that hard and I didn't really have to try that hard. The only difficult part of winning the title this season was getting the ritual weapons that could be obtained during a quiet weekend.

It seems like Bungie is basically forced to make everything simple or easy to win so as not to invoke the ire of the community because they don't want to piss off the people who paid 10 bucks for the season by making people have to do it. TRY to get things. If Trials hadn't already existed, I'd LOVE to see what people would think about having to be flawless to get items in this loot-soaked era of Destiny. I almost completely disconnected from the game the moment the Empyrean Restoration event started, basically farming 980 for exotics most of the time. Season 10 is set to have some hype solely due to Trials, but we still have no idea what the PvE side of the game will be like.

If it's anything like season 9, I'll probably have the same reaction. And that was Season of Dawn, those are my final

thoughts

on the season. Let me know how you feel. Thanks for watching, see you next time.