I swear, I play for an hour and I can make one cookie.

I don’t think so. Materials used to drop way more often.

I'm trying to finish up the six cookies I'd never made before so I can masterwork and reduce the Essence cost. Damn man, I really wanna enjoy playing Destiny but every time I log on I'm already tired. I just wanna finish the content.

I'm playing Genshin Impact right now, which is conceptually a much grindier game than Destiny, but I'm still happy to do so most days. I only need to spend like, 30 minutes a day tops of straightforward play in Genshin: Go do these four brief (5 min) commissions and do a few 5 min. dungeons. I'll play an hour plus of Destiny, having to figure out what activities to do to optimize my time/bounties, and feel like I barely scratched the surface of what I should be doing daily.

Run a 1250 Lost Sector. It’s like 17 Essence and takes something like 8 minutes, and there are ways to do them much faster (like under 3 minutes) depending on which one it is.

And if you’re just doing it for Essence instead of exotics, doing it solo doesn’t matter, so you can take a friend a knock a bunch of them out in a row pretty quickly.

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I'm trying to finish up the six cookies I'd never made before so I can masterwork and reduce the Essence cost. Damn man, I really wanna enjoy playing Destiny but every time I log on I'm already tired. I just wanna finish the content.

Seems like something's going wrong here. While I was having a hard time getting Cabal Oil the other day, once I just stopped trying to grind it out in Patrol and just ran some strikes/Gambit to work on Pinnacles/Bounties it all just took care of itself. I'd recommend just identifying which weapon-style ingredients you have the least of (solar, sword kills, etc.), working those into your playstyle, and just doing the stuff you want to do.

Also, things "seem" to drop more frequently for me the more I play (not sure if that's a thing or RNG is just blessing me). Strikes are a pretty good way to get a large variety of ingredients while also getting decent amounts of Essence.

I'm trying to finish up the six cookies I'd never made before so I can masterwork and reduce the Essence cost. Damn man, I really wanna enjoy playing Destiny but every time I log on I'm already tired. I just wanna finish the content.

I'm playing Genshin Impact right now, which is conceptually a much grindier game than Destiny, but I'm still happy to do so most days. I only need to spend like, 30 minutes a day tops of straightforward play in Genshin: Go do these four brief (5 min) commissions and do a few 5 min. dungeons. I'll play an hour plus of Destiny, having to figure out what activities to do to optimize my time/bounties, and feel like I barely scratched the surface of what I should be doing daily.

I was annoyed by lack of essence, at first, as well.

Then I found a post that suggested that the fastest way to earn it was Wrathborn hunts. I agreed that they were fast - from start to finish is a few minutes, max - but it was the buy-in (a Lure) that was killing me. This post, though, showed me how to get around that.

If you have just one lure, you're golden.

Start the hunt, make the first Wrathborn disappear. Find the post to continue the hunt, use it.

Once you're out of blackscreen, open your lure and reset it. (This will put the one lure, and whatever mods you added, back in your inventory.) It doesn't reset the current hunt, though. Finish the hunt, you get 15 essence (10 if you've masterworked your oven). You don't get any other rewards for killing the Wrathborn... but who cares?

I picked Xillox, because she's pretty close to where you start the whole process, so travel time is minimized. Xenophage makes really quick work of her (8 shots).

If you start to run out of ammo, plant a raid banner. Do this until you have enough essence for the cookies you need. (I did it for a couple of episodes of a TV show, and earned a couple of hundred essence - what I needed for whatever I was shooting for.)

The DEFINITION of grindy - but at least it's an efficient grind.

I guess I just don’t understand doing stuff like this based purely on efficiency. Just do the Wrathborn Hunt. Then go charge the lite with some strikes or Gambit or whatever and you’ll get even more Essence and materials. It might not be quite as efficient, but I won’t want to kill my self either.

I guess I just don’t understand doing stuff like this based purely on efficiency. Just do the Wrathborn Hunt. Then go charge the lite with some strikes or Gambit or whatever and you’ll get even more Essence and materials. It might not be quite as efficient, but I won’t want to kill my self either.

I was gonna watch those episodes anyway. It's the equivalent of my wife knitting while she watches.

That’s fair enough. Truly, no judgment. You engage with this game in a way that I just couldn’t. I won’t pretend I’ve never done my share of grinding. I did close to 30 runs of Perdition in a night to get Mask of Bakris. I did probably a similar number of Empire Hunts for Cloudstrike.

But when those materials drop from basically everything, I don’t think I could do the same activity for that long. Even when I’m playing mindlessly (which is fairly often), I need a bit more variety than that. I mean, I’ll definitely remember this if I need some Essence quickly, though.

On the other hand, the Hunts are quick enough that I can totally see doing this for an hour and then just being done with the event forever.

Thanks for that. I'd heard about a method involving having at least one other person so I hadn't tried that yet. Honestly, I'm so far behind in the season I've only done the one required hunt. :/

The other ingredients are fine; I have at least a few of each. Like I said, it's the essence. If I'm only able to bake one cookie an hour the other resources are going to pile. lol

I'm trying to finish up the six cookies I'd never made before so I can masterwork and reduce the Essence cost. Damn man, I really wanna enjoy playing Destiny but every time I log on I'm already tired. I just wanna finish the content.

Seems like something's going wrong here. While I was having a hard time getting Cabal Oil the other day, once I just stopped trying to grind it out in Patrol and just ran some strikes/Gambit to work on Pinnacles/Bounties it all just took care of itself. I'd recommend just identifying which weapon-style ingredients you have the least of (solar, sword kills, etc.), working those into your playstyle, and just doing the stuff you want to do.

I don't like Strikes and I don't like Gambit. I don't like playing with other people, really. I realize that's my issue but yeah. lol

I masterworked the over and finished the quest that gets you the ship at roughly the same time. When you finish that quest, you get a big bonus of Dawning spirit or whatever. Also you get a bonus from the ship that gives a chance to receive Dawning spirit whenever you get an ingredient through play.

So the combination of masterworking the oven (which means cost goes from 15 to 10 for each cookie), getting the bonus amount of Dawning for finishing the quest, and then getting even more Dawning from normal play for using the ship, it goes from super grindy to only mildly grindy.

On top of that, if you have the glimmer you should buy the bonus bounties and make those cookies because then you basically get a free ingredient and a negligible amount of bright dust for making cookies that you probably want to make anyways. I did this today for all 25 cookies to get this week's weekly bounty.

Slightly Less Grind mode engaged!

Triple your holiday spirit. https://t.co/XGkxycvgSk

— Cozmo (@Cozmo23) December 24, 2020

Slightly Less Grind mode engaged!

Triple your holiday spirit. https://t.co/XGkxycvgSk

— Cozmo (@Cozmo23) December 24, 2020

It’s actually not less grindy for the individuals who have been participating (especially if you’ve finished the individual Spirit goals). This is another instance of Bungie having “community goals” that can not possibly fail. This is the second time that they assume that player engagement will be higher than it actually ends up being, and they arbitrarily guarantee that the goal succeeds by dragging the goalposts to us.

It’s disappointing, honestly.
Let players fail, Bungle!

Perhaps that was obvious from context.

If you start to run out of ammo, plant a raid banner. Do this until you have enough essence for the cookies you need. (I did it for a couple of episodes of a TV show, and earned a couple of hundred essence - what I needed for whatever I was shooting for.)

I didn't understand what you meant here, I decided to gloss over it until yesterday when I unlocked this perk on the Season Pass. I've noticed lately how much folks seem to gear their advice toward people who are keeping up with seasonal content in online games (not just you and not just Destiny). I think this is another big problem with service games and their communities...folks looking for advice are also usually not keeping up and it is easy to lose sight of that.

This isn't a dig at you, just an observation across multiple games and communities.

I didn't understand what you meant here, I decided to gloss over it until yesterday when I unlocked this perk on the Season Pass.

Do you mean Raid Banners? They aren't a "perk" on the Season Pass, you can buy however many you can afford from Hawthorne (or Petra) at any time.

I didn't understand what you meant here, I decided to gloss over it until yesterday when I unlocked this perk on the Season Pass.

Do you mean Raid Banners? They aren't a "perk" on the Season Pass, you can buy however many you can afford from Hawthorne (or Petra) at any time.

Yeah, I was a little confused by this.

I suppose knowing what a raid banner is might be considered knowledge that should be passed on to new players... but as Squid points out here, you should run into them organically in the normal course of events (whether you buy them or not, they're on Hawthorne's main vendor screen, and if you're not exploring the vendors that are available in the tower, well... I'm not sure where the 'here are the basics of Destiny' should start).

As a general point, however, if I post something here that seems to imply knowledge that isn't common (or is in any way unclear), please... ask. I'm happy to clarify. Raid banners have been a thing since Last Wish launched, a bit over 2 years ago, and it never would have occurred to me to be clearer without a question.

You aren't able to use them in Wrathborn hunts until Season Pass level 52.

Oh wow, you're totally right, my bad. Point proven.

I don’t know how to solve this problem, but there definitely needs to be better direction for the small things like this.

Sure, you can buy raid banners, but how would you know what that is? The spots to place them only show up in high level activities (or Wrathborn Hunts, but they’re easy to overlook there). Does it even show the “Place Banner” pop up in those spots if you don’t have any?

Admittedly, I also don’t have a clue what the tool tip for banners in Hawthorne’s vender screen says—maybe it’s totally clear what they are and where they can be used.

Oh wow, you're totally right, my bad. Point proven.

It's not a dig at anyone, either. I edited my post a couple of times, but I'd gone back to highlight that this was also on the paid track, but I'd forgotten that Wrathborn hunts aren't available without being on the paid track already. I, too, forgot something by nature of it being commonplace.

Genshin Impact has had an event going on for only a week and someone gave me advice assuming I was caught up. I'm just remarking about the culture surrounding live games and how inaccessible it may appear to outsiders.

Oh wow, you're totally right, my bad. Point proven.

It's not a dig at anyone, either. I edited my post a couple of times, but I'd gone back to highlight that this was also on the paid track, but I'd forgotten that Wrathborn hunts aren't available without being on the paid track already. I, too, forgot something by nature of it being commonplace.

I didn't even do a Wrathborn hunt until I was above that point on the season pass; I actually had no clue that was a thing. When I did my first one, there was a circle, just like the circles I've seen in raids and dungeons, and put a banner down. I had no idea that that was something I'd earned!

Thanks for the bit of knowledge; I hadn't gotten a different one today, and my new one every day streak was at risk. ;)

I did some Wrathborn Hunts early. I just assumed I had missed the banner circle before.

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