Bungie details Destiny: The Taken King’s weekly event tweaks, endgame activities

If you weren’t able to check out Bungie’s second Destiny: The Taken King livestream event, then you certainly missed out on some epic Strike the Dreadnaught action and a plethora of new game details and whatnot. Thankfully you can spend some time viewing the archived event to get yourself up to speed this week.

But wait, there’s more… In Bungie’s always-informative Weekly Update, we learned even more about the endgame activities and all the effort they’ve put into reconfiguring and refining the game’s weekly events, such as Nightfall, Heroic Strikes, PvP Quests, and of course, loot and rewards.

Also, did you know that wiping in a Nightfall event won’t send you back to orbit? Or that you’ll need approximately 18GB of free HDD space (PS4/XB1) to download The Taken King title update on/around September 8th?

Head on over to the official Bungie News Blog for the update, or check out some of the excerpted details directly below.

Embedded below is this week’s livestream archive for those who missed it.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aXiBBIBaxY”]

Escalation
Once you?ve completed the new story campaign, a whole new suite of endgame activities will beckon. That?s where Strikes get even more challenging. When you seek context for the Destiny endgame, look no further than the Creative Director for The Taken King – also known as the guy who led the construction of your Vault of Glass…

Luke Smith: In our Strike the Dreadnaught reveal earlier this week, we showed some and told some about how we wanted Strikes to move forward into Year 2.

• Strike replayability is augmented by variability.
• Bosses with more interested combat phases and less vitality.
• Strike-specific rewards.
  • E.g., Armor drops that look like trophies from the Strike boss
  • E.g., weapons that only drop from certain Strikes

But those aren’t the only changes coming to Strikes. We’ve also looked at the programming/Strike playlists and made some changes there, too.

Nightfall
Our desired Nightfall experience is the weekly ritual where you get together with your friends for a test of thumbskill and allow players to optimize for gear.

Burn skulls motivate weapon rotation and now the Burn resist talents found on chest pieces will rotate armor.

The death penalty of being kicked to orbit often leads to players feeling forced to play too safe, rather than running through the world as a monster killing machine.

Another thing we didn’t like about the Year 1 Nightfall was how players could feel forced to play Nightfall as early as possible in the week to maximize the benefit from the Nightfall buff. So, we’ve shelved that buff until we can reform it into something closer to its original intent – a mark of prestige for having achieved something challenging. We’ve adjusted sources of XP and Reputation up to account for its absence.

• Now Requires Level 40
• Wiping no longer returns Fireteams to Orbit
• Now uses 30 second time-out penalty for Death (same as Raid Normal)

Weekly Heroic Strikes
We’ve removed a dedicated Weekly Heroic Strike from the game this Fall. In its place we’ve added a new playlist: the Vanguard Heroic Playlist.

Each week players receive bonus Legendary Marks from the Weekly Heroic Playlist. These awards are received at the Account level rather than the character level – as was the case with Year One Weekly Heroic Rewards.

We made this change to enable players to focus on a single character more, or feel less pressure to gear three characters at once for Legendary Marks.

• Requires Level 40
• Removed the Weekly Heroic Strikes
• Instead, accounts receive Legendary Marks for completing the first three Weekly Strikes
• Removed the Weekly Cap on how many Legendary Marks can be earned.
• Guarantee a Legendary Engram drop from a character’s first clear of a Weekly Heroic Strike

Weekly PVP Ritual
Nightfall was built as a ritual experience for groups of three players in PVE. In Year 1, we didn’t have a good weekly ritual experience for PVP players.

Once players have completed the PVP Intro chain on Lord Shaxx, they receive access to the Weekly PVP quests on Lord Shaxx and the PVP Quartermaster.

Each week, Lord Shaxx has a Bounty called “The True Meaning of War.” Completing this Bounty each week (which requires completing the PVP weeklies) grants players Nightfall tier rewards.

Daily Heroic/Daily PVP
It’s important to us that Destiny remain compatible with real life. Playing multiple characters can sometimes feel like a job or a chore, the Daily Heroic and Daily PVP often felt that way. So we increased their rewards and made them an account completion. We want players to choose which characters they want to play on and earn Legendary Marks on.