I'm super guilty of two things:

1)not sending out invites to play - I'll work on this
2)falling asleep while loading into the tower and missing invites - dad gaming is hard sometimes.

As far as raiding goes, I miss it so much. But I just don't have the kind of freetime to slog for hours through a raid staying up until 2am.

I'm still shell-shocked from how bad D2 Year One was for the most part, my clan fell apart with Key members leaving the game.

It's me and like 15 other guys left when we used to be 40+ people.

Im pretty casual these days and I've had a ton of fun with forsaken so far. Me and hound have been progressing slowly, so blind raids are behind us realistically

I've been progressing so slowly. You guys may be higher light level than me

Are you two still Blind currently? If yes, then there may be almost enough of us to have a super late Blind Raid

That being said my favorite thing to do is to raid with a good group of people, if for nothing other than the banter. Group play is what keeps me online post max level. Hope to see more on so we can still pull those together! :)

Before XBox LFG, I did some of the D1 raids a few times but not all that often, and never on multiple characters. With D2 and XBox LFG I've done the raid and raid lairs frequently and on multiple characters. It's made it much easier to get into raiding with DBO folk as I was reaching the right LL faster and easier.

About 90% of my Destiny playtime is spent solo. I play A LOT lately, and I stay very much on top of the latest discoveries via Reddit and YouTube. So I’ve had a pretty good “leveling up” routine going over the past 6-7 weeks. Much of this I could also do on the PS4, save for 1 big difference; the Xbox LFG app. While I spend most of my time playing solo, I do make frequent use of the LFG app, and the specific activities that LFG has allowed me to do have been a big part of my Forsaken experience. Most of my Nightfalls, including plenty of high score runs and several “lets grind for X weapon” sessions (got my Warden’s Law and Masterworked Mindbender’s Ambition that way). My first complete run through the Shatered Throne dungeon, and parts of the Wish-Ender quest. The 6-man strike to get my Malfeasance. Several Ascendant Challenges before I was able to comfortably solo them all. Some Blind Well runs back when everyone was underlevelled to the point where you NEEDED 9 players to beat tier 2.

When I add all of this up, it’s a substantial portion of the road that lead to getting my characters up to 600 faster than I thought possible. And I’ve had a lot of fun with all of these experiences.

Now, there are plenty of LFG options out there. But the thing I like about the Xbox version is that it will run in the background while I’m playing. I don’t need to be checking/interacting with a separate device and a separate UI. I search for the activity that I want to do, reply to a bunch of posts, and then go back to playing while I wait for an invitation to come through. Sometimes the invite comes instantly, sometimes it doesn’t come at all, but either way I’m not sitting staring at a website. I’m playing the game, doing other activities.

Of everything that Sony and Microsoft boast about in the “console wars”, the LFG app integration on Xbox is, for me, by far the biggest difference between the 2 platforms, and a huge feather in Microsoft’s cap. I would be very hard pressed to switch back to Destiny on PlayStation now.

Sony... get on that LFG integration!

This would all be solved with cross platform saves or play. I guess the truth is just that Destiny is not as big or as influential as Fortnite.

Streamers absolutely do not want this. None of them who have spent years building up an audience and spend a lot of time grinding want to end up losing out on a milestone like that to a group of players that nobody knows.

The solution is 1/x. Difficulty to raid on the Y axis, and time to raid on the x axis.

Make raiding early very hard, but make it quickly get easier until it levels off. That way streamers can chase the world's first, but a few days later everyone can have a go without killing themselves.

Leveling up from 380 to 598 was maybe the best “grind” so far in Destiny. It felt like no matter what I did I was rewarded with higher and higher level gear. So I could do anything I wanted and was the middle of the pack of our Raid group. It was such a difference from things like D1 where I (and most people) got stuck be cause we couldn’t get the one piece of Raid gear we needed. Or some of the later D1 expansions where you practically had to do X to get Y so you could advance your level at all.

I just wish Bungie would set the timing so everyone could take part in the activities closer to the same time. A two month gap between the play all day streamers and our DBO team who was not lacking in dedication or skill is just crazy. Imagine if Last Wish had been a 500 level activity! The whole community could have been a part of the race instead of what? Six teams?

That is absolutely by design.

If Bungie was to prioritize giving the maximum number of players a chance to raid blind, or to participate in the race to do a world's first, they would delay even making the raid accessible until the fat part of their playerbase-level curve hit at least the minimum requirement for the raid.

Streamers absolutely do not want this. None of them who have spent years building up an audience and spend a lot of time grinding want to end up losing out on a milestone like that to a group of players that nobody knows.

I don't necessarily think that Bungie really cares that much, either individually or collectively, about what it is that streamers want-- except insofar as that many of them (and their fans) complain loudly when the game is not meeting their expectations, and while Bungie would perhaps please more players by delaying the raid, Bungie cannot derive a significant benefit for themselves by doing so because that approval is diffuse, while streamer disapproval is not.

Quite the ramble ahead, apparently I needed a brain dump. =)

I'm in an odd place with Forsaken. I really like it, but I can tell I'm being worn down even as I wear down the light level curve.

All of my destiny friends have moved on (or moved platforms) since before forsaken. My RL group of friends opted out, so I've mostly found myself devoid of a fireteam, let alone a raid team. And I'm a later evening MDT/MST player, meaning that mostly when I can actually do group things few are available. (I should note there is one friend who may read this that still plays sometimes. But not often. We should keep playing together here and there! :D )

So, solo it has been, for the most part.

It's been an interesting experience. Watching other groups obviously using voice in things like Gambit, Iron Banner, the Blind Well, Escalation protocol, and other places. And being the random blueberry that sometimes is very helpful and sometimes is the clueless wanderer. =)

Being solo doesn't lock you out of progression, but it's not really how the game has been designed around. Everything takes a little longer. PvP is hot and miss solo. PvE is streaky with many events being 540, 560 and 580. Activities like the nightfall are for a regular, consistent fireteam, and aren't really the same as a heroic strike.

Other than a week on vacation, I've played pretty much daily, despite being a functioning adult. I didn't look for leveling guides on the internet because IMO the game should tell me what I need to do... but it doesn't always do a very good job. Due to tips on this board I realized that there were tiers of powerful gear drops only a few weeks ago. I was struggling to get to 560 last week. side note: Horror Story was an amazing boon. I've jumped 20+ light levels this week because of it (and some extra play time I've found myself with).

https://chrisfried.github.io/secret-scrublandeux/guardian/2/4611686018434081936

I'm just now getting to a place where I can really do some of the "end game" content, and even some of that 580 stuff is hard to do solo. (Hello gambit exotic quest)

I like Gambit a lot, I've always thought that mixing PvP and PvE would be a good thing for Destiny, and it is.

I like that I'm still finding new things -- just today in the dreaming city I found a cat while ascendant and gave it an offering, no idea that was a thing. And no idea how I would know.

I like that some creepy skulls give me things in the dreaming city, though I wish I knew why and how that fit in more than just stumbling into it.

I wish I could use my ghost to open doors. The dreaming city reminds me a little of the moon in D1, with its twists and turns, and general layout. I do sometimes get frustrated with the many many doors that do not open, but add to the (sometimes obvious) illusion of space.

Until last week I never knew what to do with the oracle offering. Last week I also finally broke down and looked up how to do the ascendant challenge because I never found that on my own. It's super cool, and I've done that twice now -- last week I knew where to go and what to do because I looked it up, this week I found it on my own and competed it with no guide. I really like exploring and doing the new things organically. I don't love that the expectation is the internet at large is an addition to the game (you miss out on all sorts of helpful things via word of mouth on the net, rather than being guided in-game)

Today I stumbled into the Io taken event and went through the (now old) portal that I was never high enough light level to go in. Pretty amazing area, I made it through blind to just past the open/shut door in the cliffside before I ran out of time. (And thought of the vault, and how I hate heights, and cruel laughing at me in my head because of it. Good times) I am sad that stumbling into this doesn't open up a story mission or something so that I could try it again. I probably could, but it would have to be some luck and a dedicated evening or two.

And, now that I am nearing the 600 mark... I'm finding that destiny has become a game of inventory/bounty management, loading screens, and ticking off "daily" quests in ways that shape my playstyle away from how I'd prefer to play and instead how Bungie imagines I should play. I may or may not do the raid. I don't expect my friends to ever put in the time to get to raid light levels, even if they put in a considerable amount of time. So Forsaken has become my "alone in the crowd" game.

A little depressing when I write it all up like this. I really have enjoyed this expansion. That is tempered some by my playstyle being stretched thin in many ways. It reminds me of WoW's progression a little -- the more refined it gets, the more mathematical and predictable it becomes, with the occasional "WTF this is awesome!" moments. But you have to play the progression system, always, or you're often"wasting" your time.

I've really liked Forsaken in many ways. The end-game progression is almost a very stretched out version of TTK's progression, though much more spaced out with repeated events. It's interesting to me to look at the % of the playerbase who have hit some of the trophies, and what that might mean for content developed. It's obvious to me that forsaken is catering to the hardcore playerbase. I suspect this will continue until D3, where it will be much more casual friendly until it's own expansions.

In a nutshell, and back to the real topic, I think the hardcore component has spread out progression enough for few enough active players that it fizzled out before it could really get started. Which is a shame, because there is an awful lot of good gameplay here, mixed with the repeated events.

More interest garnered for a D1 throwback raid than D2 Last Wish...and it’s a shame because the new raid is great.

I wouldn't say that. Kermit just wanted to do an old raid with PS4 people since he wasn't leveled on PS4. Nothing wrong with that.

This^

For the record, I think the new raid is great, too, and I'd love to be able to play it with you all. And Vinny, most people playing last night couldn't play the new raid if we wanted to. We had enough interest in part because I beat the bushes asking people to play (some said no). I didn't know we'd have enough--at the time I logged on I knew only that Destroyo and Cyber were definite.

Kupkake and Destroyo can play the new raid, and I wouldn't presume they aren't interested. They were the first two people I invited and a big reason I scheduled the event. I raided with them nearly every week for years--I've raided more with those two than anyone else on any platform, and I don't want to stop.

Unfortunately, the streamers won the debate and the new raid is on the other side of a pretty significant grind. it's a shame there's only 24 hours in a day, but that's the crux of it.

I intend to play the new raid on the PS4, but it's going to take awhile to get there. In the meantime I intend to keep scheduling events because of friends I enjoy playing with. I understand your frustration because I've felt it too. If you see me on, and want to help me level up faster, I'd appreciate that!

some of the mechanics are pretty convoluted.

It could just be that I was with an especially good team this time around, but Last Wish has probably been the easiest blind raid I’ve done, at least in terms of figuring things out. I guess Leviathan was probably easier for the most part if I think about it. But King’s Fall felt harder, I think.

Shuro Chi was such a fun encounter blind. It was just a ridiculous endurance test, getting just a bit further climbing that tower every time.

I’m bummed you guys couldn’t do that blind. I’m eager to run the whole thing a few times again, see how it fun it is to repeat.

Unobstructive for you. For me it denied me the game’s best thing: blind raiding.

I'm actually with you on that. I finally gave in and raided (first two encounters) this week, totally non-blind (the group I went in with had all done it, or was willing to be walked through it). I still had fun - but I'm not convinced it wouldn't have been a better experience blind. (I'm not convinced that it would have been, either - some of the mechanics are pretty convoluted. But I won't actually ever know, and that makes me a little sad.)

That said - there's still a TON of stuff to do that's fun, including raiding. I'm with Cruel on this; the only major change between pre-600 and post-600 for me is allowing Powerful Engram events to remain unfinished when I run out of time. (I still do most of them, because I LIKE doing most of them - but I don't feel like I have to push to do those few events I run out of time for.)

I just wish Bungie would set the timing so everyone could take part in the activities closer to the same time. A two month gap between the play all day streamers and our DBO team who was not lacking in dedication or skill is just crazy. Imagine if Last Wish had been a 500 level activity! The whole community could have been a part of the race instead of what? Six teams?

The leveling was fine, in my opinion, it’s just the gear drops and insulting timing of the raid and those exclusive jackets that have been problematic.

Unobstructive for you. For me it denied me the game’s best thing: blind raiding.

I get that, truly. And I sympathize with how frustrating that must be.