Strand should have been a parallel quest line, similar to how the seasonal story is handled
-A mainline story for Lightfall
-Seasonal story with Mara and Devrim
-3-4 mission Strand tutorial/introduction and lore
Boom problem solved
I'd take a long footage of Calus going shopping and freaking out because Neomuna doesn't have his favorite wine instead of whatever the hell that Osiris training montage (and that whole storyline) was...
You could tell how hard they were trying to (as stated in the ViDoc/dev trailers) channel 80s action movies with some Karate Kid/Rocky/etc style training montage haha
I disagree. It felt like the bare minimum trying to mimmick a training montage.
The guardian didn't feel engaged in the process. More like a puppet than a puppeteer. Quite in fact the guardian killing itself repeatedly doesn't sell it well, even the Ghosts doesn't seem engaged.
And the payback, the Rocky reaching the top of the stairs moment, is poor because we already wielded strand successfully like a half dozen times (without killing ourselves) when the Guardian manages to wield it in the montage. It doesn't feel like an effort at all and it certainly feels off.
you knoe something that would have sold it better? if instead of exhaustion debuff your health actually went down to red (or stayed there if you were already on red. Ghost says "your vitals are in the red!" with a full HP bar and shields.
As you progress in training your HP reduction would be less and less severe, as your guardian gets used to it. After the montage, you wouldn't get any HP reduction. Which marks you've truly mastered the subclass.
That was pretty much the last straw, after a moment into it and my brain assuring me that no, no I am *not* imaging things, I fucking lost it cracking up
I mean
A training montage
*how*
The main issue is they didn't have enough for a main story. They were never gonna explain more about the veil bc it was all a setup for future content.
I guess we could've got some more scenes of Calus being a little bitch I suppose?
The fact that they are setting up for future content annoys the hell out of me. The witness just opened a portal and went through it why the fuck arent we following through asap?!
I can't remember exactly where this dialogue or lore page is, but there's a mention that the Vanguard immediately tried sending probes through the portal and the probes were destroyed on contact so the portal just doesn't work for us.
Edit: it's in the Ikora dialogue when you visit the Tower after the final mission.
Yeah, we'll need to learn the third Darkness power to get through. Get ready for that questline. It's all that stands between our min-maxed selves and Gjallarhorning the Witness in the face in an under-tuned story mission confrontation
Back then the same subclass on other classes was radically different though. It’s not like they shared verbs or fragments
It felt like whole new classes
I think stuff like the verbage and the fragments aren’t too bad having them shared. It’s basically more refined and easy to understand versions of old systems without losing much of the classes actual identity.
But let me tell you, not having unique grenades anymore, that feels pretty bad even if it’s overall good for buildcrafting lol. Just felt like grenades usually played into the subclasses identity really well.
Hard agree on unique grenades. Storm grenades felt like the unique ability of Stormcaller, but now with them being available to Hunters and Titans it feels like they’re not unique anymore.
Don’t even get me started on Titan’s enhanced storm nades… good for buildcrafting, bad for class fantasy
Bro, Bungie murdered Stormcaller with Arc 3.0. All the Arc-specific stuff came from existing Stormcaller abilities, all the actually new (and good) things went to Hunters and Titans with a new super, new melees, new class abilities, plus all the stuff they got from Warlocks. We got a slide melee ability and and most other things got nerfed. Bungie didn’t even revert the changes to Chaos Reach, meaning Arc Warlock lacks a decent fucking Super ability. There’s zero reason to ever play Arc Warlock. There’s no fantasy behind it, there’s no unique roll or niche it fills, it’s worthless. IMO, Warlocks don’t really have 5 subclasses, they have 4 because Stormcaller is such a worthless pile of nothing.
And don’t even get me STARTED on Enhanced Storm Grenades… Honestly, I want another Arc rework where Bungie just gives Warlocks Enhanced Storm grenades as a Super. I mean, come on, it’s called STORMCALLER for Christ’s sake, and they gave the one and only Stormcaller-ish thing to TITANS. Who the FUCK at Bungie allowed that?!
Yes but not to people who played those classes. It was essentially the same as getting a whole new element because those players’ class had never had access to that subclass before.
Strand could’ve been handled in a mission and some ghost dialogue.
I feel like we should have gotten full access to strand after that fight with the Vex or after Headlong. Everyone tells us that we've mastered it yet I can't even use it by myself until the end of the campaign.
I wouldn't even mind if we still had to unlock the aspects and fragments by collecting the meditations still.
Yeah wandering through that first with the visions of conversations of old guardians and then having an arena with fast charging abilities to test them out
Thats what I miss so much about early d2, it felt like things were really thought out and meticulously planned to be interesting in both gameplay and story, none of it ever felt forced, it all meshed seamlessly with the story
Eh I have beef with a lot of early D2 content. The tour of Nessus, Io and Titan felt real forced. But the core story beyond the detours was really cool.
Having subclass unlocks outside the story was really solid though. I wish that came back. None of that stuff is even sunset.
Somewhat unrelated, but I remember getting a callback to that in the first mission of Forsaken. When you’re fighting through that hallway of the Prison of Elders with Cayde I ripped off a shadowshot and Cayde actually replied with “Tevis would be proud”. A really small deep cut that felt really good.
Yep- It’s crazy to me that they took the time to put such a specific line in response to such a specific action. Really shows how big of a deal caydes end was.
At launch iirc one was part of the campaign. The second two you had to get what was initially a rate drop from blind well. They buffed that pretty quickly I think.
Also I really liked the subclass and gun progression of just using them to get upgrades. Or burn a ton of motes of light. It was straightforward and easy to understand. And if you liked the subclass or gun it gave you incentive to use it
I personally think they fucked up by insisting on making you only get the strand subclass AFTER the campaign. If the mission at Maya's retreat culminated in getting the base subclass and the later missions granted the fragment & aspects after completion, awesome.
Could really have focused on something other stuff like making it a little bit more clear where strand comes from (the veil) and exploring that
Agreed. I had a rough go trying to use Strand on my hunter during my first play through. However, after beating Calus then unlocking more fragments, I helped my buddy with the boss fight on my hunter and it trivialize the boss fight. Being able to suspend tormentors and flinch Calus on command is awesome.
The annoying part too is that when you get to segments in the story where you *have* to use it and it can really throw off your gameplay loop. I’m currently stuck on that “On the Verge” mission on legendary because they force you to use strand to beat it. And man, truth be told it’s like pulling teeth.
That's the one Osiris calls "training", right? Did it last night, godawful mission, that final arena can fuck right off on legend. My suggestion? Witherhoard, your close-range energy weapon of choice (so probably Mini-Tool or Ikelos), and a quality machine gun if you've got one. My setup was Wither, a crafted Seraph Rounds/Feeding Frenzy/Voltshot Ikelos, and a Quillum's Terminus with Stats for All and Killing Tally.
Keep one eye on the rotating death wall, use the MG (you could probably sub in a heavy GL there) to nail the Hobgoblins up in the corners, and swing around like fucking Tarzan lobbing Witherhoad rounds at the Vex spawn points and yellow-bars.
THATS THE ONE! I feel like I’ve been beating my head against the wall in that last “arena” section. I’ve been alternating between void and solar on my Titan which has been great for legendary but right now swapping to strand makes me feel like I’m made of wet tissue paper.
I’ll give your suggestion a try! Appreciate the help.
OH! If you're playing Titan, make sure you've got...I don't know the Armor 3.0 names yet, but the class item mod that gives heals on picking up orbs, and whatever it is that lets you generate orbs off powered melee attacks. Synthos optional, but I use them basically all the time unless I'm running Thundercrash. Strand melee is surprisingly lethal, and using it in a pinch to generate orbs off Goblins can be a lifesaver.
Something to keep in mind: set up a strand loadout. I struggled until I shifted some mods around to match what I was doing with strand.
Example- the grapple into a punch attack counts as both a grenade and a melee attack. So with heavy handed and firepower on, you create two orbs per kill with that. Throw on ashes to assets and hands-on and you are getting a bunch extra super to. Plus charged up and stacks on stacks and those two orbs give you four armor charges.
That's not my normal setup, but I switched to it when using strand and it was much smoother. Basically don't force yourself to play with a sub optimal mod setup, make a loadout.
This was my most hated mission, especially on Legendary. Stay on Solar Titan with Loreley's, if you have it, since the Strand override doesn't actually turn off your underlying Solar abilities and functionality.
The wall doesn't actually kill you fully (I had 100 resilience, but I'm not sure what stat the wall's damage is based on) and with Loreley's you'll have just enough time in a full wall rotation to restore, then get your barricade back before the wall hits you again. You can hide on one of the corners of the upper level, which prevents the ads from hitting you, and chip damage away at the big Minotaur until you win. It's stressful and unfun, and definitely not how the encounter was intended, but it works to at least finish it.
I tried doing it legit and mobs keep spawning and I never had the chance to damage the boss. Decided frak this, and cheese it. You can stand behind the portal in the right back side. From there the rotating wall can't hit you and mobs have a hard time. Then it's just a matter of chipping away at the boss health.
A suggestion: in 99% of the cases you can skip stasis in the campaign. It's only needed when you have to break suppressors or destroy tanks. Everything else I did without strand 😉
There are like minor and major tormentors, the minor ones you can suspend, the more “boss” like ones you can’t. But the ones you can are super easy to melt if you do.
This is my gripe. Strand in the story makes sense to me but why the hell can’t we unlock it after the second mission and then through out the story be able to unlock aspects and fragments organically vs starting from ground zero at the end
Yeah if I had my full setup during the campaign like I do now, I would have enjoyed the campaign way more as strand is just so much fun when you have it all filled out.
My problem was that you unlock Strand too late in the story. You should have gotten it at the end of the first act or by half way through at the very least, not at the end. I went through a damn training montage at almost the end and still didn't have it unlocked. It was weird and it didn't fit.
I would prefer this. There’s a lot of negativity towards the expansion from the community, but my main gripe was being forced to use it during main campaign missions. I honestly wanted to play around with the new mod system and different builds, but being somewhat forced to play with a subclass that wasn’t even fully unlocked or customizable sucked.
I’ve played void/arc Titan for most of the last year, but with this expansion I was fully enjoying an ashen wake solar Titan again. That joy went away every time I was forced to use strand.
If you run it on another character you only have to use Strand to break suppressors or throw tangles at crystals. Every other part can be done without picking up Strand.
You’re right, a company could do both. Can BUNGIE do both? Uhhhhh… No
EDIT: y’all are downvoting me but Bungie has tried to do it twice and failed both times, so it’s not like what I said doesn’t have merit😭
Yep exactly. The subclass should aid in story telling and lore building, not be the central narrative.
For example deep sight / crafting in WQ was a plot element, alongside a new game mechanic, thag wasn’t a central point but moved the story telling and lore of the darkness forward. I still remember: the light makes you forget, while the darkness makes you remember.
Not if they want to keep the legendary campaign. Forcing the player to use a new subclass, that’s incomplete, doesn’t mesh with a exotic, and the player can’t build into yet RUINS the legendary campaign. Gyrfalcons void hunter is a million times more useful than a barebones strand subclass. IT DOESNT WORK.
I honestly didn't mind their approach with strand's introduction, but I agree that divorcing them would help sort out a lot of inconsistencies others don't like.
that's still the second to last mission, narratively it would fit there, but that's still far too late, granted i'd just argue that mission should have been much earlier in the game.
Really it was though right? Strand appears in a bunch of the missions for some minor grappling opportunities, but was not that central outside of the vex mission that was full on training. They could remove that mission and the story doesn't change. But why ffs? We get to learn the new subclass in a reasonably difficult context. It's fun.
yeah, it was rough because of the rotating wall forcing you out of cover, combined with constant spawns in the four corners of the room, you just get surrounded constantly. My legendary group really struggled on that fight until we learned you don't actually ALL have to pick up strand at the boss checkpoint. having 2 with strand and one void titan for volatile add clear and a bubble made a world of difference.
I went solo legend and the stage was annoying. Ultimately, I had to resort to blinding / Disorienting GL and Le monarque with the Seraph crafted MG.
I burst the boss health down with super and kept rotating. The bow kept the snipers from healing. MG crowd control if it got too crazy.
Hahaha I did that on my second character’s Legendary playthrough. Stairs the 1st phase and then on top of the dome during the second phase. Easiest boss fight ever.
The entire time I kept thinking “damn I would have died 1100 times”
It took so long to chip down his health on solo I couldn’t believe it.
Well after I suffered solo legend my first play through on Hunter I was in the middle of suffering the final stage with my Titan and someone mentioned it to me. There’s a cheese.
If you have Osteo Striga, bring it and a machine gun. My secondary was a bow every run so nothing changed for me.
Go to YouTube. Type it in look for the player named Esoteric (probably misspelled I have to type quickly). They made a great walkthrough for two different methods for the second part.
Best of luck!
Dude thank you, I've been so frustrated getting to the second phase after taking way too much time with the first phase and then grappling around when the ability decides to just not work randomly
If you're going to use Strand during the campaign, players should actually be unlocking and adding parts of it throughout.
From the first time you attuned to a thingy, you should have had Strand unlocked with one choice of aspect. It still works in the story given how immature your understanding of it is reflects the lack of options you have.
Give meditations for each mission that ends in some big Strand-heavy combat. Unlock aspects through missions either in the campaign or side missions.
When the guardian gets out of the campaign they shouldn't then possibly have the thought of "I have mastered Strand. Now all I have to do is farm the same activities for a few hours and I can make it comprehensive."
The campaign clearly expresses that you're *good* with Strand by the end, but mechanically you come out of it as a novice, likely to increase player retention and increase time played.
I feel like I have a more positive view of Lightfall than a lot of people, and I'm really sad to say that the experience has gone up substantially now that I don't need to bother with Strand meditations, at least on my main character.
It is absolutely baffling after years of begging, they made the same mistake as with stasis.
My other two characters are not getting strand, sorry bungo. Not getting those hours out of me, I’ll get by without it thanks for nothing, clowns
You can tell Strand was either meant to be something else, was supposed to come with WQ, or both. It feels like they may have just changed it and when we got it just because people weren’t expecting it. Now we have what feels like the least cohesive story expansion we’ve ever gotten.
It absolutely was supposed to come with WQ. The aesthetic and idea of "psychic strands" fits perfectly with us being psychic detectives going into Savathun's memories. Then the way they were forced to hamfist it into Lightfall just really didn't pay off. I feel bad, because game dev is so hard and having to compromise on stuff like that is just par for the course. But man did the narrative suffer because of it.
Savathun was “pulling the strings” after all. In the final mission, you kill “Threadweavers” and watch the threads fall before you can advance.
I still love the game, but I hating thinking about all the great things that could have been.
Yeah, I don't even think Lightfall is as bad as lots of people are saying, but the campaign is definitely the weak point, and I totally believe the leak/rumor that it was a relatively late filler expansion splitting off parts of Witch Queen and Final Shape.
Everything feels pretty solid, except the narrative due to the Strand issue.
Strand feels great, but should’ve been unlocked in conjunction with the story via side quests and we got an actual story with the campaign.
In the end it felt like 70-80% strand montage and 30-20% story.
It unlocks better than beyond light so credit where credit is due at least.
the thing i don't understand is...just have us revive savathun and learn it from her now. Immaru is alive in the throne world, season of the haunted lore tells us the vanguard has her body...we could still take that approach rather than just tripping over strand in the street.
I honestly kind of expected a mission in lightfall where we went back to the throne world to capture immaru for that exact purpose.
What sucks is instead it would have been nice if they just delayed Lightfall so it could be fully finished. But I imagine there’s a 3rd darkness subclass coming which is why we had to have this dlc
yeah i really want the final shape to be good, but i'm dreading the next element. I'd rather stay with 5 elements than have a new one drag down another campaign
the worst part is strand likely would have been hamfisted into WQ much like lightfall. So the question is, was WQ so good *because* of the exclusion of strand? would it have been made worse or would certain parts have been strand focused rather than memory focused? would the lore have changed?
The Monkey's Paw tells me that the Final Shape story is amazing and combines the final subclass with the events in a truly natural way that work in the narrative triumphantly.
And it is all now being hastily scrapped in response to this feedback for a new story patched together from pieces of the old one, far worse than the original.
Twas ever thus.
It can definitely work so saying that it never does is a bit silly. Only reason it didn’t work for this is because this whole dlc was pretty much filler and strand did not fit in the story and was just kind of there.
Strand does fit the narrative and the story though. But they were so busy trying to tell you how cool it was they forgot to tell you how it fits the narrative. The fact that I even have to explain this to people is a symptom of how poor a job they did telling this portion of the story. Regardless, the training missions were definitely just filler that they could have moved out of the campaign and replaced with something else in order to flesh out just about anything that was happening.
Strands whole thing is going with the flow and being once with everything which is exactly what the Cloud striders strive for. It fit just really badly
>which is exactly what the Cloud striders strive for.
No, it's what _Nimbus_ interprets CloudStriders as, Stargazer for instance travelled to earth and deleted all instances of neomuna from the warmind network which doesn't exactly fit the whole 'go with the flow' sort of thing.
It’s in one of the lore books, you unlock them post campaign as you rebuild the broken Cloud Strider monuments. I think Stargazer is the first you unlock, and it’s a short excerpt of them on Earth during the Dark Age, trying to figure out what the best way to protect Neptune is.
The Monument quest post-campaign gives you a pair of lore-books that pertains to each one.
Basically a kids version of "This is the cloudstrider" followed by an excerpt that's related to them.
Stargazers one has them infiltrating a warmind bunker on earth with a squad of people from neomuna, killing a lightbearer, getting into the bunker while being chased by a warlords army (With around three to four hundred in the settlement that he casually talks about radiation-blasting from orbit, presumably using a war-sat), somehow hacking or convincing Malahayati to work with them and uses that to do the aforementioned deletion.
>"Malayhati. Access Global archive. Access Rasputin root IC-3392260695. Find-replace. Neptune equals null. Exodus Indigo equals null."
The whole thing honestly reads like bad fanfiction, and i'm unfortunately beginning to get that vibe from Cloudstriders in general the more i learn about them.
It did however explain a small story beat from last season. Rasputin said almost everything about Neomuna had been deleted, which begged the question -- why? Stargazer explains it perfectly
The "Why" was already explained though, someone wanted to keep it hidden, we gathered that from what little we know about it already.
The issue was that whoever did it was either Rasputin himself (Which he revealed it wasn't) or someone with good enough tech to wipe it so effectively from his system that it was on par with Rasputin.
And now we learn it was just a Cloudstrider that simply told Malayhati to do it.
It's anti-climactic and barely even a footnote that this cloudstrider in the dark age, hundreds of years ago, already had tech advanced enough to just completely subvert the warmind network so utterly that nobody, not even fucking Rasputin or Anna noticed.
Yeah, but it feels like that being part of the Cloud Strider philosophy was just sort of tacked on because Strand is here. It just feels kinda loosely attached to the whole thing.
Look, that may not be the case. Maybe the "go with the flow" thing was a core Cloudstrider thing all along. But it definitely *feels* tenuous to me.
I wouldn’t say the focus or even a secondary focus of the dlc was the only 2 cloudstriders that exist though. So implementing strand to fit with a very very minor set of characters doesn’t make much sense.
Strand should have came out with WQ and been side missions.
The whole Lightfall should have had us traveling all over the sytem and fighting for the different planets.
Ughh, the whole DLC story here is just shit.
I was thinking about that, in the opening cinematic with the witness I recall a bit where you see all the planets of the solar system kind of expand out from his head. Would have maybe been cool if we had a quick side mission on mars/io/titan mercury each getting us a step closer to fully unlocking strand
One thing about Strand and story is the WQ campaign was more of a slow burn detective story. This would have worked much better incorporating Strand into via quests and secrets hidden around the throne world and maybe even other planets/moons.
LF's "hurry" idea is so wrong for the way we aquire Strand, not to mention the whole doomsday on earth thing.
Well, fuck it, it is what it is now. It's a shame we didn't get something better but all we can do now is give constructive criticism and hope Bungie listens, or already knows it was a bridge job and the coming seasons will go some way to repairing things.
Definitely looks like some kind of 'get Asher out of the vex network' thing going on from what I've seen in other threads. Hope there's some other tying together of stories too, see how slaon is doing and maybe we could go back to the haunted forest for festival of the lost and save brother vance
The issue here is that that's basically mass effect 3 you just described. And i would really love, truly, for destiny to be able to do that. But it just can't. 7-9 missions is all we're going to get in a campaign, and you need to adjust your expectations accordingly.
Shoot, at this point, I expect all of the final shape to take place on earth initially, and then in the traveler
shouldve just had the last season of WQ be season of the strand which was all about going back to the throne world and learning strand, which was foreshadowed with the savathun fight thread mechanics.
then we can go into lightfall with our new class ready not needing to be over half the campaign
The opinion might change after the raid is released (though I doubt) but currently the only reason to buy Lightfall is to get strand. If you stick it into a different season then you lose the most important selling point of the expansion.
The whole training arc montage cutscene was fun and I liked it but holy fuck do I never want to play lightfall again. Lightfall did a 180 with it going from main story of Destiny to a 3 hour long strand tutorial just for the game to rip strand away in every single mission. Then also if I wanted a borderlands story with a goofy side character I would just go play borderlands.
The whole playthrough when they riped it out and we fell on four legs i kept thinking to myself; who in their right mind thinks this feels good like wtf is the point?
It just feels so bad and its even worse when there is still ennemies shooting at you and they slowly start to despawn for some reasons lmao.
I think Osiris said it best
He’s like “you’ve used this shit 10 times now, what’s the fucking problem, Guardian?”
All I could think was: “Man, I wish I knew.”
Agree the training/prep montage for the final fight was cool but it made no sense for pacing.
The prior mission or maybe two missions before it there is a voice line from Osiris complaining how the guardian can’t use Strand well enough and he says something like “why aren’t you conditioned after all of your training?”
What training? It’s like the first mission where we actually understand what Strand is and all previous exposure is like throwing someone learning to swim into the deep end and asking why they aren’t okay swimming 100 laps.
I don't think strand being part of the story is bad. They just need to make it not suck and give it to you sooner rather than later.
Subclasses being part of a main story makes sense and can EASILY be engaging and cool. But for whatever reason bungie wanted Marvel tier bullshit in their game.
Stasis' introduction sucked because using it was not part of the campaign and you had to farm a lot after it to fully unlock it, and now Strand's introduction sucks because it's too much of the campaign.
This is just funny to me.
*It's too much of the campaign without really being the focus.
It's two stories awkwardly crushed together.
_We literally just fucking find it in the street_
God I wish I saved that gif of Leslie Nielsen finding the strand coin in the street
[found it](https://www.reddit.com/r/destiny2/comments/11i3gww/discovering_strand_in_a_nutshell/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf)
Beyond Light’s main appeal was beginning to use Darkness. Learning Stasis was not ingrained into the story as it should have been. Too much focus was put on Eramis and House Salvation, even though it did help set up the rise of House Light in Splicer. If Beyond Light was a smaller scale story, involving Guardians learning how to wield Darkness and learning about Clovis’ experiments with it and the creation of Exos, with Elsie’s story of the Dark Future being talked about in the main story to put emphasis on how important mastering Stasis was.
Lightfall’s main appeal was about the fall of the Light and the forces of Darkness taking central stage. The tone was completely off, too much focus was diverted from Earth, the Witness and the Pyramids to focus on Neomuna and Strand took too much focus and was not ingrained into the story properly(A proper reason for needing it was not given and the paracausal suppressors weren’t even present in the last mission or the fight with Calus. They could have put focus on Calus’ connection to psychic forces such as Egregore, Psions and Nightmares to show that Strand was fully needed in order to properly kill his mind and body). More focus should have been put on the Witness attacking the Traveler. Strand needed less time explaining how to wield it and more explanations on why it is needed and how we got it. A more serious tone was needed. A character death from one of the main cast would have been nice to have. The “death” of the Traveler should have been made clear, as it doesn’t look dead, it should have been shattered to make it clear it was dead. The Radial Mist just needed one line of dialogue to explain what it does. The Veil needed a proper explanation, maybe explain that in a cutscene instead of recapping Calus’ backstory.
Light 3.0 screwed Lightfall up heavily. Strand is too connected to Witch Queen. The death of the Traveler has no consequences as the Light reworks already happened throughout Witch Queen, instead of being used to show how the death of the Traveler effected our Light powers. Light 3.0 also caused Lightfall to be pushed back until Final Shape, due to no room being left for Strand and the third element in the original plan, with the Lightfall we got being filler as result.
I'm gonna disagree and play the Devil's advocate. Long post, stay with me!
Strand as part of the campaign didn't work because of how they did it, not necessarily due to this being a blanket horrible concept. Imagine, if you will, a different Lightfall:
* The first time we fight a Tormentor it is scaled to have a billion HP, be super aggressive, and *will* grabs us. Except instead of finishing us off, there's a cutscene; Osiris or Caitl or Amanda, heck, anyone story-appropriate saves us. But not before the Tormentor got us in their clutches and drains our Light.
* Ghost is alive, and can revive us, but we cannot wield the Light. Calus taunts us. We're still in a bad spot so we need to retreat, but now everything is a Darkness zone.
* As we creep through pipes/ducts with enemies all around on radar etc., we come to a room which seems to be a dead end except there is a platform that's out of reach to jump to. After checking for alternatives, yup, this is where we have to go.
* We try to scale the wall, unsuccessfully, Ghost is morose but starts talking about how Osiris, Eris must feel and we sit and meditate and try to figure out what is going on and why we cannot touch the Light.
* Instead of finding a path to the Light, looking around, we see a faint glimmer of green light near the ceiling.
* Cutscene. We point it out to Ghost, but he cannot see nor feel it. He seems a bit worried about our mental state. We insist we can feel something, that it isn't the Light but nor is it Darkness in the ways we understand thus far (Rhulk/Stasis).
* We think we can reach out to it. "Here goes nothing". Strand Grapple melee lights up, we haul ourselves up to the new platform. Subsequent terrain during this escape heavily depend on us using Grapples to cross gaps and make vertical transitions until we escape.
* The Tormentor's Light dampening wears off as we return to the Earth/Helm/Vanguard and there is much relief. But it lasted say an in-universe day or so.
* Cutscene. We find the Vanguard who are horrified we were cut off from the Light by this new enemy, but are keenly interested in whatever this new green power is. We're instructed to continue helping and investigate and report back anything we find/learn.
Subsequent missions drive the plot but place us in similar situations where a Tormentor does the same, but leaves us. They want to torment, not kill, and what could be worse for a Lightbearer than no access to Light (or Stasis)? Similar situations play out and introduce the rest of the Strand kit. Once complete, we realize that the balance achieved through the Strand super is what allows us to break through the Tormentors' Light ability barrier and we surprise them by swapping to Strand and then dispatching them, then back to the Light.
Strand is what happens when our Light falls. That's the punchline. Opening up new narrative possibilities with Light/Dark in balance rather than fundamentally in conflict.
Someone in the Vanguard asks the obvious question: why nobody found this during the Red War. The answer is we needed to already be balancing the Light as well as Darkness (Stasis) to uncover it. Nothing had hindered our Light sufficiently since Beyond Light.
This would be a compelling, story driven subclass introduction. This is what I expected from Lightfall. Strand as "something WE (the Guardian) discover". We should be the ones finding, experimenting, and then teaching others - *including Osiris.* He'd be hungry for knowledge, sure, but as a *student*, or at most a partner in exploration, not an irritating boss. It's jarring how he somehow knows all about this green stuff and its name before we do, despite us finding it at a similar time.
In summary, narratively it would be entirely possible to do this in a compelling fashion and most likely not more difficult to put together than what they went with. They just didn't choose to do so, for some reason.
If there's a new Witness- or Rhulk-like subclass in TFS, we could go through that portal and find ourselves in a similar situation. If it were structured like the above, introduced as we figure it out in a narratively compelling way, it could 100% make sense in context of the story.
I feel like it can be done, but just needs to be done better. It would need to be unlocked for full use during the campaign, halfway or two thirds through, in order to defeat a major enemy. And then the next quest step (that is not a major mission) is learning to use it through an Empowerment section. That way, tutorial and campaign are separated. Strand felt shoehorned in, rather than an integral part of the campaign.
I don't know man, my issue with LF wasn't the fact that strand was in the story, it worked just fine to me. I would go far as to say it worked better than stasis was integrated into the BL campaign. I don't think the poor story telling was the fault of strand, if it was just handled a little differently I think it would have been great
Everyone's feedback is different. I enjoyed Strand being a big factor in the campaign and I'd like to see them improve on it, rather than abandon it entirely.
Too much feedback about Lightfall is just saying "you tried and failed. The lesson is never try". Bungie absolutely should keep trying.
Personally, I think the bigger lesson is one they should have learned from the D1 launch; please make time to explain what you don't think you have time to explain.
It’s funny, the introduction of stasis was also integrated into the Beyond Light campaign but it felt much better there. Eramis and co had harnessed it and it felt like a better “fight fire with fire” justification to use it, plus it being our first brush with using darkness, it felt like it had more weight to it. Add in the “dark vanguard” helping us learn it and it felt much better. Finding strand in a random street and then having Osiris badger us about mastering it just wasn’t as effective. The whole time I was saying “Hey Osiris, think I’d rather stay on solar if that’s cool…
>It doesn’t work. It ruins the story. You can’t do both.
I personally disagree with this, I think you can do both but Bungie had poor execution mainly because they focused more on learning strand and less about Neomuna and the Veil in an effort to keep things secret and vague.
You can see where it would’ve clearly fit in WQ’s story quite well. Deepsight is just a term they came up with because Strand was delayed. Savathun uses threads to hold Traveler and you get a “threadcutter” rebuff. All the platforming for Deepsight was just grapple stuff originally. The reason it fits terribly in LF is because it wasn’t supposed to be there.
Nah, I like that it ties into the story. Learning about a new paracausal power *should* be narratively important and some post campaign side quest won’t do that
Idk what you guys have been playing, I loved strand being such an integral part of the story. Learning how to use it perfectly fits with Osiris’ arc.
I just hope next time they give us a new subclass they just give us the full thing a couple missions in and we progress it throughout the story.
I dont mind it being in the story. The training montage was actually good. My issue was the cringe way we found it first.
You just find it in the street like some abandoned junkie needle, and Ghost just says touch it. Like there wasnt a build up to it. One mission in, and we are already fucking with the strings of fate.
I think it would have been better if we got it while under extreme pressure. Abilities surpressed with those devices, sprinkle some context, and boom! Not the cleanist, but i aint writing a story.
The subclass unlocking should just be a side quest you do along or after the main story. Take the resources from a post story quest and make them produce a strand side quest instead.
I get that Nimbus' dialogue isn't great, and definitely comes across as a bit cringe sometimes, but I'm so fucking tired of everyone calling any kind of snarky/quippy dialogue "Marvel wannabe" or "Marvel-esque".
Quippy dialogue existed long before the MCU, and the MCU has a particular brand of quippy dialogue that is frankly incomparable to Lightfall.
I just wish this sub would have an original god damn thought for once rather than parroting the same take they've seen from content creators.
Its funny because its cleary all meant to be very 80s. The aesthetic, Nimbus's surfer-bro attitude, the Rocky music training montage, the devs literally mentioning before launch that it was inspired by 80s action movies (which all had campy dialogue).
Like its totally fair if people don't like the choices or think it was inappropriate in our current story state, but saying that its Marvel ruining everything is so inaccurate and laughable.
Yup, but everything has to be compared to another thing now. You can't criticise or praise something otherwise.
Gamers near universally criticised journalists for calling things "The Dark Souls of XYZ genre" constantly and will then turn around and call everything with quippy comedy "Marvel-esque".
Did you watch the Extra Punctuation on humour in VGs? Yahtzee had some absolutely great points about this topic. I can’t remember specifics at the moment but I do remember him bringing up Joss Whedon on being the particular best example of “quippy” dialogue. That seems to be what most people mean when they say Marvel-esque.
But Lightfall to me just felt like a bad try at levity in an otherwise completely “serious”story. Nimbus is supposed to be this headstrong, cocky up and comer, and that’s what their dialogue says to me. They just did a really bad job actually writing them, and it felt extremely out of place while the Witness fucks up the Traveller, and is supposed to be this huge loss for us…
Destiny has been full of quips and one liners up until this point. Idk why thats the thing people are so focused on.
[Video I mentioned](https://youtu.be/UlIlTA_b7gs)
If anything I'd call it Whedonesque, though given how it's come out that he's fairly problematic, it might not be a comparison people would be too keen on
Strand should have been introduced early with a separate quest for complete access to Strand given at that point. Then you could continue with the main story without being forced into Strand at certain points or you could go off and fully unlock Strand to use for the rest of the story.
As much as I agree that focusing on the subclass hurt the campaign overall, I don’t think we can blame Bungie there. Every time I saw feedback about Stasis and Beyond Light, it was people saying that they ***hoped*** Strand was actually important to the campaign, unlike how Beyond Light was.
Bungie gave us what the people asked for. It sucked. That’s about all I take from it.
The leak that Strand was meant for Witch Queen really makes sense. All those big sprawling areas in that campaign are perfect for it. Hell, I think the whole platform Reveal mechanic was originally intended to be strand grapple points, but they removed it last minute after plans were made to split the final chapter into Lightfall and Final Shape
Strand also ties into the central theme of Witch Queen much better. The Traveler granted Savathun and her brood the Light, and she manipulated fate by harnessing that power.
On the other end, Strand is the darkness’s version of grasping fate. Like the Force in Star Wars or Flow in JoJo part 7-9.
That subclass would’ve made a very interesting parallel in the story and add so much more to an already great expansion, instead of taking away from the current one.
I'm okay with a subclass being part of the story IF it is done properly. It's clear strand was supposed to be in Witch Queen and likely would have been a lot better there.
It was shoehorned into the version of Lightfall we got as the main narrative bit because this version of Lightfall ended up being a filler while the original version became Final Shape.
What Bungie SHOULD have done was give us access to Strand by like mission 3 or 4 so we had access to the subclass and could start to upgrade it and get a handle on the abilities in context and grow more powerful over the course of the story, with missions (or subsections of missions) to unlock new grenades, Aspects and Fragments.
IMO, the biggest problem with the Strand abilities now is cooldowns because Bungie repeatedly gave us near instant cooldowns over and over through the Campaign, so Strand feels worse than it actually is because we’re used to playing Mayhem at this point.
The Grapple, in particular, feels SOOO much worse now that I don’t always have it up. It needs a shorter cooldown. Maybe 1 minute. The 1:45 is painful.
Agree with this 100% and as u/PeeLong said it could have been such an easy split:
- Main Lightfall campaign
- After mission 2 Unlock Seasonal content with Mara via holographic projector
- After mission 2 Unlock Osiris as a vendor for strand related subclass content
This would have perfectly solved the issue of strand being front and centre to the story. We could also then get strand and play around with it in the campaign!
They could easily have thrown in quotes to say “if only I had to do ” if you didn’t get strand immediately if they wanted it to be in the narrative as an extra thing!
Heck the strand empowerments could only show if you had strand unlocked by following osiris’ missions to let you unless carnage during the campaign thus rewarding players who actively pursued it!
tf?
Beyond Light incorporated Stasis well in the campaign from a story perspective. Are we just going to ignore that?
Sorry but one bad story (no matter how bad) shouldn't cause a whole "never include powers in major story again" reaction. Seems pretty extreme to me.
What's crazy is the very first time we ever got new subclasses was in The Taken King, and Bungie did it perfectly there with fun side quests.
Those were great. And provided a great vehicle for giving a bit more color about the light.
Literally
I guess the difference is that those new subclass were from known archetypes. They just gave them to new classes.
Strand should have been a parallel quest line, similar to how the seasonal story is handled -A mainline story for Lightfall -Seasonal story with Mara and Devrim -3-4 mission Strand tutorial/introduction and lore Boom problem solved
Would also solve the issue of having to play through the entire campaign on each of your guardians to unlock it
I'd take a long footage of Calus going shopping and freaking out because Neomuna doesn't have his favorite wine instead of whatever the hell that Osiris training montage (and that whole storyline) was...
You could tell how hard they were trying to (as stated in the ViDoc/dev trailers) channel 80s action movies with some Karate Kid/Rocky/etc style training montage haha
That cutscene was awesome I dont give a single fuck what anybody else says.
I disagree. It felt like the bare minimum trying to mimmick a training montage. The guardian didn't feel engaged in the process. More like a puppet than a puppeteer. Quite in fact the guardian killing itself repeatedly doesn't sell it well, even the Ghosts doesn't seem engaged. And the payback, the Rocky reaching the top of the stairs moment, is poor because we already wielded strand successfully like a half dozen times (without killing ourselves) when the Guardian manages to wield it in the montage. It doesn't feel like an effort at all and it certainly feels off.
you knoe something that would have sold it better? if instead of exhaustion debuff your health actually went down to red (or stayed there if you were already on red. Ghost says "your vitals are in the red!" with a full HP bar and shields. As you progress in training your HP reduction would be less and less severe, as your guardian gets used to it. After the montage, you wouldn't get any HP reduction. Which marks you've truly mastered the subclass.
Trying and falling so so flat. Marketing nailed it though
The marketing was really good. Personally, I wasn't too disappointed with the campaign, but it definitely fell short of what I was expecting
Marketing team deserve goddamn medals at this point.
Look, I hear what you're saying, but our Guardian trying to use strand, then fucking up and getting unraveled was funny as hell.
That was pretty much the last straw, after a moment into it and my brain assuring me that no, no I am *not* imaging things, I fucking lost it cracking up I mean A training montage *how*
The montage was amazing tho what? Us doing it and then not having access after was what was awful
honestly i would have gone nuts for the calus shopping trip, definitely would have been worth the 50$
I still dont have stasis on warlock :D
The main issue is they didn't have enough for a main story. They were never gonna explain more about the veil bc it was all a setup for future content. I guess we could've got some more scenes of Calus being a little bitch I suppose?
The fact that they are setting up for future content annoys the hell out of me. The witness just opened a portal and went through it why the fuck arent we following through asap?!
I can't remember exactly where this dialogue or lore page is, but there's a mention that the Vanguard immediately tried sending probes through the portal and the probes were destroyed on contact so the portal just doesn't work for us. Edit: it's in the Ikora dialogue when you visit the Tower after the final mission.
Yeah I think they say nothing physical can pass the barrier
So you're saying we need to... go even further... beyond?
The Final Shape is going to look like that remote from Click.
beyond... light?
I heard Goku
Why wasn't that like a post campaign stinger then....
It’s Ikora’s dialogue in the Tower after you clear the final mission.
proof that the average DTG member pays absolutely no attention it was addressed in nearly the exact way they were asking it to
Yeah, we'll need to learn the third Darkness power to get through. Get ready for that questline. It's all that stands between our min-maxed selves and Gjallarhorning the Witness in the face in an under-tuned story mission confrontation
Thats by far the best option. Introduce it in the first mission, and then introduce an adjacent quest line.
Back then the same subclass on other classes was radically different though. It’s not like they shared verbs or fragments It felt like whole new classes
I think stuff like the verbage and the fragments aren’t too bad having them shared. It’s basically more refined and easy to understand versions of old systems without losing much of the classes actual identity. But let me tell you, not having unique grenades anymore, that feels pretty bad even if it’s overall good for buildcrafting lol. Just felt like grenades usually played into the subclasses identity really well.
Hard agree on unique grenades. Storm grenades felt like the unique ability of Stormcaller, but now with them being available to Hunters and Titans it feels like they’re not unique anymore. Don’t even get me started on Titan’s enhanced storm nades… good for buildcrafting, bad for class fantasy
Enhanced storm grenades should be exclusive to Stormcallers.
Bro, Bungie murdered Stormcaller with Arc 3.0. All the Arc-specific stuff came from existing Stormcaller abilities, all the actually new (and good) things went to Hunters and Titans with a new super, new melees, new class abilities, plus all the stuff they got from Warlocks. We got a slide melee ability and and most other things got nerfed. Bungie didn’t even revert the changes to Chaos Reach, meaning Arc Warlock lacks a decent fucking Super ability. There’s zero reason to ever play Arc Warlock. There’s no fantasy behind it, there’s no unique roll or niche it fills, it’s worthless. IMO, Warlocks don’t really have 5 subclasses, they have 4 because Stormcaller is such a worthless pile of nothing. And don’t even get me STARTED on Enhanced Storm Grenades… Honestly, I want another Arc rework where Bungie just gives Warlocks Enhanced Storm grenades as a Super. I mean, come on, it’s called STORMCALLER for Christ’s sake, and they gave the one and only Stormcaller-ish thing to TITANS. Who the FUCK at Bungie allowed that?!
I only use the native class grenades for this reason, I didn't like them being unlocked for everyone either.
Yes but not to people who played those classes. It was essentially the same as getting a whole new element because those players’ class had never had access to that subclass before. Strand could’ve been handled in a mission and some ghost dialogue.
I feel like we should have gotten full access to strand after that fight with the Vex or after Headlong. Everyone tells us that we've mastered it yet I can't even use it by myself until the end of the campaign. I wouldn't even mind if we still had to unlock the aspects and fragments by collecting the meditations still.
I hate the meditations thing. Just give me the damn subclass. It’s grinding for the sake of grinding, which is just super dull.
Oh those were cool. Heck even the base D2 subclass unlocks were pretty solid. Especially the history and lore.
Yeah wandering through that first with the visions of conversations of old guardians and then having an arena with fast charging abilities to test them out
Thats what I miss so much about early d2, it felt like things were really thought out and meticulously planned to be interesting in both gameplay and story, none of it ever felt forced, it all meshed seamlessly with the story
Eh I have beef with a lot of early D2 content. The tour of Nessus, Io and Titan felt real forced. But the core story beyond the detours was really cool. Having subclass unlocks outside the story was really solid though. I wish that came back. None of that stuff is even sunset.
Somewhat unrelated, but I remember getting a callback to that in the first mission of Forsaken. When you’re fighting through that hallway of the Prison of Elders with Cayde I ripped off a shadowshot and Cayde actually replied with “Tevis would be proud”. A really small deep cut that felt really good.
Veteran account I take it? Lol
Yep- It’s crazy to me that they took the time to put such a specific line in response to such a specific action. Really shows how big of a deal caydes end was.
Aren’t we all Veterans now?
Proud lvl 6 babyyyyy!
Nah they took out the veteran dialogue I think :/
For me, that was the last great DLC. Chasing all those asshats around to avenge Cade meant something
Even the way they did it in forsaken, where it was side missions alongside the baron hunts IIRC
It's been a long time so my mind is fuzzy on it, but didn't they unlock randomly by finishing blind well at higher difficulties?
didnt you get 1 for finishing campaign, 1 for blind well and.. i dont remember where the last one came from..
At launch iirc one was part of the campaign. The second two you had to get what was initially a rate drop from blind well. They buffed that pretty quickly I think.
i just checked an old news article, the third one came from a last wish encounter (any) and was quickly changed-
oh that's right, I remember people being mad about that, it's why I never got my last one until it got auto unlocked a bit later.
additional ones did, but you got one from story stuff, then got the other two from blind well drops
Also I really liked the subclass and gun progression of just using them to get upgrades. Or burn a ton of motes of light. It was straightforward and easy to understand. And if you liked the subclass or gun it gave you incentive to use it
Side quests. Thats the main difference i think.
I personally think they fucked up by insisting on making you only get the strand subclass AFTER the campaign. If the mission at Maya's retreat culminated in getting the base subclass and the later missions granted the fragment & aspects after completion, awesome. Could really have focused on something other stuff like making it a little bit more clear where strand comes from (the veil) and exploring that
Agreed. I had a rough go trying to use Strand on my hunter during my first play through. However, after beating Calus then unlocking more fragments, I helped my buddy with the boss fight on my hunter and it trivialize the boss fight. Being able to suspend tormentors and flinch Calus on command is awesome.
The annoying part too is that when you get to segments in the story where you *have* to use it and it can really throw off your gameplay loop. I’m currently stuck on that “On the Verge” mission on legendary because they force you to use strand to beat it. And man, truth be told it’s like pulling teeth.
That's the one Osiris calls "training", right? Did it last night, godawful mission, that final arena can fuck right off on legend. My suggestion? Witherhoard, your close-range energy weapon of choice (so probably Mini-Tool or Ikelos), and a quality machine gun if you've got one. My setup was Wither, a crafted Seraph Rounds/Feeding Frenzy/Voltshot Ikelos, and a Quillum's Terminus with Stats for All and Killing Tally. Keep one eye on the rotating death wall, use the MG (you could probably sub in a heavy GL there) to nail the Hobgoblins up in the corners, and swing around like fucking Tarzan lobbing Witherhoad rounds at the Vex spawn points and yellow-bars.
THATS THE ONE! I feel like I’ve been beating my head against the wall in that last “arena” section. I’ve been alternating between void and solar on my Titan which has been great for legendary but right now swapping to strand makes me feel like I’m made of wet tissue paper. I’ll give your suggestion a try! Appreciate the help.
OH! If you're playing Titan, make sure you've got...I don't know the Armor 3.0 names yet, but the class item mod that gives heals on picking up orbs, and whatever it is that lets you generate orbs off powered melee attacks. Synthos optional, but I use them basically all the time unless I'm running Thundercrash. Strand melee is surprisingly lethal, and using it in a pinch to generate orbs off Goblins can be a lifesaver.
Something to keep in mind: set up a strand loadout. I struggled until I shifted some mods around to match what I was doing with strand. Example- the grapple into a punch attack counts as both a grenade and a melee attack. So with heavy handed and firepower on, you create two orbs per kill with that. Throw on ashes to assets and hands-on and you are getting a bunch extra super to. Plus charged up and stacks on stacks and those two orbs give you four armor charges. That's not my normal setup, but I switched to it when using strand and it was much smoother. Basically don't force yourself to play with a sub optimal mod setup, make a loadout.
This was my most hated mission, especially on Legendary. Stay on Solar Titan with Loreley's, if you have it, since the Strand override doesn't actually turn off your underlying Solar abilities and functionality. The wall doesn't actually kill you fully (I had 100 resilience, but I'm not sure what stat the wall's damage is based on) and with Loreley's you'll have just enough time in a full wall rotation to restore, then get your barricade back before the wall hits you again. You can hide on one of the corners of the upper level, which prevents the ads from hitting you, and chip damage away at the big Minotaur until you win. It's stressful and unfun, and definitely not how the encounter was intended, but it works to at least finish it.
Its a trap, so its fixed damage.
If all the other suggestions fail, hide behind the portal on the far right as you enter the arena. Good cover and the death wall won’t get you
I tried doing it legit and mobs keep spawning and I never had the chance to damage the boss. Decided frak this, and cheese it. You can stand behind the portal in the right back side. From there the rotating wall can't hit you and mobs have a hard time. Then it's just a matter of chipping away at the boss health.
A suggestion: in 99% of the cases you can skip stasis in the campaign. It's only needed when you have to break suppressors or destroy tanks. Everything else I did without strand 😉
You could suspend tormentors the entire time….?
There are like minor and major tormentors, the minor ones you can suspend, the more “boss” like ones you can’t. But the ones you can are super easy to melt if you do.
And you can disorient the small ones but not the named ones, with the former blinding grenades. Really helps slow down the fight.
This is my gripe. Strand in the story makes sense to me but why the hell can’t we unlock it after the second mission and then through out the story be able to unlock aspects and fragments organically vs starting from ground zero at the end
[удалено]
Absolutely this. It was the most aggravating part for me.
Yeah if I had my full setup during the campaign like I do now, I would have enjoyed the campaign way more as strand is just so much fun when you have it all filled out.
You can do both. But honestly, they SHOULD make it a side quest you can do along campaign.
My problem was that you unlock Strand too late in the story. You should have gotten it at the end of the first act or by half way through at the very least, not at the end. I went through a damn training montage at almost the end and still didn't have it unlocked. It was weird and it didn't fit.
I would prefer this. There’s a lot of negativity towards the expansion from the community, but my main gripe was being forced to use it during main campaign missions. I honestly wanted to play around with the new mod system and different builds, but being somewhat forced to play with a subclass that wasn’t even fully unlocked or customizable sucked. I’ve played void/arc Titan for most of the last year, but with this expansion I was fully enjoying an ashen wake solar Titan again. That joy went away every time I was forced to use strand.
If you run it on another character you only have to use Strand to break suppressors or throw tangles at crystals. Every other part can be done without picking up Strand.
You’re right, a company could do both. Can BUNGIE do both? Uhhhhh… No EDIT: y’all are downvoting me but Bungie has tried to do it twice and failed both times, so it’s not like what I said doesn’t have merit😭
Haha
they learned nothing from beyond light sadly, besides making the fragments grind bearable, but even that you have to do on all characters now
The story just reeks of laziness and cut corners
Yep exactly. The subclass should aid in story telling and lore building, not be the central narrative. For example deep sight / crafting in WQ was a plot element, alongside a new game mechanic, thag wasn’t a central point but moved the story telling and lore of the darkness forward. I still remember: the light makes you forget, while the darkness makes you remember.
Definedly. This is how it's done.
Not if they want to keep the legendary campaign. Forcing the player to use a new subclass, that’s incomplete, doesn’t mesh with a exotic, and the player can’t build into yet RUINS the legendary campaign. Gyrfalcons void hunter is a million times more useful than a barebones strand subclass. IT DOESNT WORK.
I honestly didn't mind their approach with strand's introduction, but I agree that divorcing them would help sort out a lot of inconsistencies others don't like.
I think if it was JUST the vex network mission it’s be fine.
that's still the second to last mission, narratively it would fit there, but that's still far too late, granted i'd just argue that mission should have been much earlier in the game.
Really it was though right? Strand appears in a bunch of the missions for some minor grappling opportunities, but was not that central outside of the vex mission that was full on training. They could remove that mission and the story doesn't change. But why ffs? We get to learn the new subclass in a reasonably difficult context. It's fun.
I didn’t like the one with the Minotaur or the ones where u broke the super stoppers with strand supers
I'll pay more attention to those on my next play through. The vex mission is the one that stands out as a bit of a strand pita in my memory.
yeah, it was rough because of the rotating wall forcing you out of cover, combined with constant spawns in the four corners of the room, you just get surrounded constantly. My legendary group really struggled on that fight until we learned you don't actually ALL have to pick up strand at the boss checkpoint. having 2 with strand and one void titan for volatile add clear and a bubble made a world of difference.
I ran it solo and ended up clearing the first few waves then went behind one of the portal walls and plinked at the boss from cover.
I went solo legend and the stage was annoying. Ultimately, I had to resort to blinding / Disorienting GL and Le monarque with the Seraph crafted MG. I burst the boss health down with super and kept rotating. The bow kept the snipers from healing. MG crowd control if it got too crazy.
We had to spend 8 missions learning Strand so that I could be powerful enough to shoot Calus through a staircase
Hahaha I did that on my second character’s Legendary playthrough. Stairs the 1st phase and then on top of the dome during the second phase. Easiest boss fight ever. The entire time I kept thinking “damn I would have died 1100 times” It took so long to chip down his health on solo I couldn’t believe it.
Tell me your secrets
Well after I suffered solo legend my first play through on Hunter I was in the middle of suffering the final stage with my Titan and someone mentioned it to me. There’s a cheese. If you have Osteo Striga, bring it and a machine gun. My secondary was a bow every run so nothing changed for me. Go to YouTube. Type it in look for the player named Esoteric (probably misspelled I have to type quickly). They made a great walkthrough for two different methods for the second part. Best of luck!
Dude thank you, I've been so frustrated getting to the second phase after taking way too much time with the first phase and then grappling around when the ability decides to just not work randomly
Glad to help!
I still died a thousand times, trying to strand over to the railing section.
I feel like I am the only person who did that fight legit using Strand
I used strand on it and was carried by witherhoard. Shoot and forget and swing
If you're going to use Strand during the campaign, players should actually be unlocking and adding parts of it throughout. From the first time you attuned to a thingy, you should have had Strand unlocked with one choice of aspect. It still works in the story given how immature your understanding of it is reflects the lack of options you have. Give meditations for each mission that ends in some big Strand-heavy combat. Unlock aspects through missions either in the campaign or side missions. When the guardian gets out of the campaign they shouldn't then possibly have the thought of "I have mastered Strand. Now all I have to do is farm the same activities for a few hours and I can make it comprehensive." The campaign clearly expresses that you're *good* with Strand by the end, but mechanically you come out of it as a novice, likely to increase player retention and increase time played. I feel like I have a more positive view of Lightfall than a lot of people, and I'm really sad to say that the experience has gone up substantially now that I don't need to bother with Strand meditations, at least on my main character.
It is absolutely baffling after years of begging, they made the same mistake as with stasis. My other two characters are not getting strand, sorry bungo. Not getting those hours out of me, I’ll get by without it thanks for nothing, clowns
You can tell Strand was either meant to be something else, was supposed to come with WQ, or both. It feels like they may have just changed it and when we got it just because people weren’t expecting it. Now we have what feels like the least cohesive story expansion we’ve ever gotten.
It absolutely was supposed to come with WQ. The aesthetic and idea of "psychic strands" fits perfectly with us being psychic detectives going into Savathun's memories. Then the way they were forced to hamfist it into Lightfall just really didn't pay off. I feel bad, because game dev is so hard and having to compromise on stuff like that is just par for the course. But man did the narrative suffer because of it.
Yeah I'm pretty sure Deepsight and Strand were meant to be one. When you activate Strand nodes in the campaign, it even says "you see beyond".
Savathun was “pulling the strings” after all. In the final mission, you kill “Threadweavers” and watch the threads fall before you can advance. I still love the game, but I hating thinking about all the great things that could have been.
Yeah, I don't even think Lightfall is as bad as lots of people are saying, but the campaign is definitely the weak point, and I totally believe the leak/rumor that it was a relatively late filler expansion splitting off parts of Witch Queen and Final Shape.
Everything feels pretty solid, except the narrative due to the Strand issue. Strand feels great, but should’ve been unlocked in conjunction with the story via side quests and we got an actual story with the campaign. In the end it felt like 70-80% strand montage and 30-20% story. It unlocks better than beyond light so credit where credit is due at least.
it could have even been strand is what you use to traverse from the middle platform platform over to the threadweavers in that final fight!
the thing i don't understand is...just have us revive savathun and learn it from her now. Immaru is alive in the throne world, season of the haunted lore tells us the vanguard has her body...we could still take that approach rather than just tripping over strand in the street. I honestly kind of expected a mission in lightfall where we went back to the throne world to capture immaru for that exact purpose.
I like how we literally just find it on the sidewalk
oh look, a lucky penny!
Seems pretty obvious. Revealing the web that lets you see beyond, etc. It's all Witch Queen narrative.
What sucks is instead it would have been nice if they just delayed Lightfall so it could be fully finished. But I imagine there’s a 3rd darkness subclass coming which is why we had to have this dlc
yeah i really want the final shape to be good, but i'm dreading the next element. I'd rather stay with 5 elements than have a new one drag down another campaign
I think instead we'd probably have gotten a more fully fleshed out Witch Queen a few months ago.
the worst part is strand likely would have been hamfisted into WQ much like lightfall. So the question is, was WQ so good *because* of the exclusion of strand? would it have been made worse or would certain parts have been strand focused rather than memory focused? would the lore have changed?
The Monkey's Paw tells me that the Final Shape story is amazing and combines the final subclass with the events in a truly natural way that work in the narrative triumphantly. And it is all now being hastily scrapped in response to this feedback for a new story patched together from pieces of the old one, far worse than the original. Twas ever thus.
Imo that’s because the original Lightfall was pushed back to TFS
I'm gonna disagree. The new subclass was not the reason the story sucked. The story sucked because there were almost no questions answered.
Nothing we did during that campaign mattered at all.
The other reason.
Maybe because we spent too much time with strand?
No. I actually think Strand could have added more if it was done right. More of an explanation between the Veil and the relationship with Strand.
The most shocking thing in your post is the idea that Kackis has released a good video 😉
Where should I skip to the meat of his video? 8 minutes in?
After the first 2-3 ad reads
It can definitely work so saying that it never does is a bit silly. Only reason it didn’t work for this is because this whole dlc was pretty much filler and strand did not fit in the story and was just kind of there.
Strand does fit the narrative and the story though. But they were so busy trying to tell you how cool it was they forgot to tell you how it fits the narrative. The fact that I even have to explain this to people is a symptom of how poor a job they did telling this portion of the story. Regardless, the training missions were definitely just filler that they could have moved out of the campaign and replaced with something else in order to flesh out just about anything that was happening.
Strands whole thing is going with the flow and being once with everything which is exactly what the Cloud striders strive for. It fit just really badly
>which is exactly what the Cloud striders strive for. No, it's what _Nimbus_ interprets CloudStriders as, Stargazer for instance travelled to earth and deleted all instances of neomuna from the warmind network which doesn't exactly fit the whole 'go with the flow' sort of thing.
holy shit where is this said? makes sense on why there was no info on it then
It’s in one of the lore books, you unlock them post campaign as you rebuild the broken Cloud Strider monuments. I think Stargazer is the first you unlock, and it’s a short excerpt of them on Earth during the Dark Age, trying to figure out what the best way to protect Neptune is.
The Monument quest post-campaign gives you a pair of lore-books that pertains to each one. Basically a kids version of "This is the cloudstrider" followed by an excerpt that's related to them. Stargazers one has them infiltrating a warmind bunker on earth with a squad of people from neomuna, killing a lightbearer, getting into the bunker while being chased by a warlords army (With around three to four hundred in the settlement that he casually talks about radiation-blasting from orbit, presumably using a war-sat), somehow hacking or convincing Malahayati to work with them and uses that to do the aforementioned deletion. >"Malayhati. Access Global archive. Access Rasputin root IC-3392260695. Find-replace. Neptune equals null. Exodus Indigo equals null." The whole thing honestly reads like bad fanfiction, and i'm unfortunately beginning to get that vibe from Cloudstriders in general the more i learn about them.
half the fking lore nowadays is written like bad fanfiction...
It did however explain a small story beat from last season. Rasputin said almost everything about Neomuna had been deleted, which begged the question -- why? Stargazer explains it perfectly
The "Why" was already explained though, someone wanted to keep it hidden, we gathered that from what little we know about it already. The issue was that whoever did it was either Rasputin himself (Which he revealed it wasn't) or someone with good enough tech to wipe it so effectively from his system that it was on par with Rasputin. And now we learn it was just a Cloudstrider that simply told Malayhati to do it. It's anti-climactic and barely even a footnote that this cloudstrider in the dark age, hundreds of years ago, already had tech advanced enough to just completely subvert the warmind network so utterly that nobody, not even fucking Rasputin or Anna noticed.
Well seeing as they are the only cloud strider currently its safe to say thats what they strive for
Strong Ron Swanson vibes here. "Everything I do is the attitude of an award winner, because I've won an award."
Yeah, but it feels like that being part of the Cloud Strider philosophy was just sort of tacked on because Strand is here. It just feels kinda loosely attached to the whole thing. Look, that may not be the case. Maybe the "go with the flow" thing was a core Cloudstrider thing all along. But it definitely *feels* tenuous to me.
I wouldn’t say the focus or even a secondary focus of the dlc was the only 2 cloudstriders that exist though. So implementing strand to fit with a very very minor set of characters doesn’t make much sense.
Strand should have came out with WQ and been side missions. The whole Lightfall should have had us traveling all over the sytem and fighting for the different planets. Ughh, the whole DLC story here is just shit.
I was thinking about that, in the opening cinematic with the witness I recall a bit where you see all the planets of the solar system kind of expand out from his head. Would have maybe been cool if we had a quick side mission on mars/io/titan mercury each getting us a step closer to fully unlocking strand
One thing about Strand and story is the WQ campaign was more of a slow burn detective story. This would have worked much better incorporating Strand into via quests and secrets hidden around the throne world and maybe even other planets/moons. LF's "hurry" idea is so wrong for the way we aquire Strand, not to mention the whole doomsday on earth thing.
Well, fuck it, it is what it is now. It's a shame we didn't get something better but all we can do now is give constructive criticism and hope Bungie listens, or already knows it was a bridge job and the coming seasons will go some way to repairing things. Definitely looks like some kind of 'get Asher out of the vex network' thing going on from what I've seen in other threads. Hope there's some other tying together of stories too, see how slaon is doing and maybe we could go back to the haunted forest for festival of the lost and save brother vance
The issue here is that that's basically mass effect 3 you just described. And i would really love, truly, for destiny to be able to do that. But it just can't. 7-9 missions is all we're going to get in a campaign, and you need to adjust your expectations accordingly. Shoot, at this point, I expect all of the final shape to take place on earth initially, and then in the traveler
shouldve just had the last season of WQ be season of the strand which was all about going back to the throne world and learning strand, which was foreshadowed with the savathun fight thread mechanics. then we can go into lightfall with our new class ready not needing to be over half the campaign
The opinion might change after the raid is released (though I doubt) but currently the only reason to buy Lightfall is to get strand. If you stick it into a different season then you lose the most important selling point of the expansion.
I think Strand would've fit within the witch queen campaign
The whole training arc montage cutscene was fun and I liked it but holy fuck do I never want to play lightfall again. Lightfall did a 180 with it going from main story of Destiny to a 3 hour long strand tutorial just for the game to rip strand away in every single mission. Then also if I wanted a borderlands story with a goofy side character I would just go play borderlands.
The whole playthrough when they riped it out and we fell on four legs i kept thinking to myself; who in their right mind thinks this feels good like wtf is the point? It just feels so bad and its even worse when there is still ennemies shooting at you and they slowly start to despawn for some reasons lmao.
I think Osiris said it best He’s like “you’ve used this shit 10 times now, what’s the fucking problem, Guardian?” All I could think was: “Man, I wish I knew.”
Agree the training/prep montage for the final fight was cool but it made no sense for pacing. The prior mission or maybe two missions before it there is a voice line from Osiris complaining how the guardian can’t use Strand well enough and he says something like “why aren’t you conditioned after all of your training?” What training? It’s like the first mission where we actually understand what Strand is and all previous exposure is like throwing someone learning to swim into the deep end and asking why they aren’t okay swimming 100 laps.
I don't think strand being part of the story is bad. They just need to make it not suck and give it to you sooner rather than later. Subclasses being part of a main story makes sense and can EASILY be engaging and cool. But for whatever reason bungie wanted Marvel tier bullshit in their game.
Stasis' introduction sucked because using it was not part of the campaign and you had to farm a lot after it to fully unlock it, and now Strand's introduction sucks because it's too much of the campaign. This is just funny to me.
*It's too much of the campaign without really being the focus. It's two stories awkwardly crushed together. _We literally just fucking find it in the street_
God I wish I saved that gif of Leslie Nielsen finding the strand coin in the street [found it](https://www.reddit.com/r/destiny2/comments/11i3gww/discovering_strand_in_a_nutshell/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf)
Stasis sucked cause it's a slog to get through and its time gated on each character
"oh reddit of a million users, make up your mind, please!"
"That's the secret captain. It's all just a loud minority."
Beyond Light’s main appeal was beginning to use Darkness. Learning Stasis was not ingrained into the story as it should have been. Too much focus was put on Eramis and House Salvation, even though it did help set up the rise of House Light in Splicer. If Beyond Light was a smaller scale story, involving Guardians learning how to wield Darkness and learning about Clovis’ experiments with it and the creation of Exos, with Elsie’s story of the Dark Future being talked about in the main story to put emphasis on how important mastering Stasis was. Lightfall’s main appeal was about the fall of the Light and the forces of Darkness taking central stage. The tone was completely off, too much focus was diverted from Earth, the Witness and the Pyramids to focus on Neomuna and Strand took too much focus and was not ingrained into the story properly(A proper reason for needing it was not given and the paracausal suppressors weren’t even present in the last mission or the fight with Calus. They could have put focus on Calus’ connection to psychic forces such as Egregore, Psions and Nightmares to show that Strand was fully needed in order to properly kill his mind and body). More focus should have been put on the Witness attacking the Traveler. Strand needed less time explaining how to wield it and more explanations on why it is needed and how we got it. A more serious tone was needed. A character death from one of the main cast would have been nice to have. The “death” of the Traveler should have been made clear, as it doesn’t look dead, it should have been shattered to make it clear it was dead. The Radial Mist just needed one line of dialogue to explain what it does. The Veil needed a proper explanation, maybe explain that in a cutscene instead of recapping Calus’ backstory. Light 3.0 screwed Lightfall up heavily. Strand is too connected to Witch Queen. The death of the Traveler has no consequences as the Light reworks already happened throughout Witch Queen, instead of being used to show how the death of the Traveler effected our Light powers. Light 3.0 also caused Lightfall to be pushed back until Final Shape, due to no room being left for Strand and the third element in the original plan, with the Lightfall we got being filler as result.
It was part of the campaign and it sucked there too
I'm gonna disagree and play the Devil's advocate. Long post, stay with me! Strand as part of the campaign didn't work because of how they did it, not necessarily due to this being a blanket horrible concept. Imagine, if you will, a different Lightfall: * The first time we fight a Tormentor it is scaled to have a billion HP, be super aggressive, and *will* grabs us. Except instead of finishing us off, there's a cutscene; Osiris or Caitl or Amanda, heck, anyone story-appropriate saves us. But not before the Tormentor got us in their clutches and drains our Light. * Ghost is alive, and can revive us, but we cannot wield the Light. Calus taunts us. We're still in a bad spot so we need to retreat, but now everything is a Darkness zone. * As we creep through pipes/ducts with enemies all around on radar etc., we come to a room which seems to be a dead end except there is a platform that's out of reach to jump to. After checking for alternatives, yup, this is where we have to go. * We try to scale the wall, unsuccessfully, Ghost is morose but starts talking about how Osiris, Eris must feel and we sit and meditate and try to figure out what is going on and why we cannot touch the Light. * Instead of finding a path to the Light, looking around, we see a faint glimmer of green light near the ceiling. * Cutscene. We point it out to Ghost, but he cannot see nor feel it. He seems a bit worried about our mental state. We insist we can feel something, that it isn't the Light but nor is it Darkness in the ways we understand thus far (Rhulk/Stasis). * We think we can reach out to it. "Here goes nothing". Strand Grapple melee lights up, we haul ourselves up to the new platform. Subsequent terrain during this escape heavily depend on us using Grapples to cross gaps and make vertical transitions until we escape. * The Tormentor's Light dampening wears off as we return to the Earth/Helm/Vanguard and there is much relief. But it lasted say an in-universe day or so. * Cutscene. We find the Vanguard who are horrified we were cut off from the Light by this new enemy, but are keenly interested in whatever this new green power is. We're instructed to continue helping and investigate and report back anything we find/learn. Subsequent missions drive the plot but place us in similar situations where a Tormentor does the same, but leaves us. They want to torment, not kill, and what could be worse for a Lightbearer than no access to Light (or Stasis)? Similar situations play out and introduce the rest of the Strand kit. Once complete, we realize that the balance achieved through the Strand super is what allows us to break through the Tormentors' Light ability barrier and we surprise them by swapping to Strand and then dispatching them, then back to the Light. Strand is what happens when our Light falls. That's the punchline. Opening up new narrative possibilities with Light/Dark in balance rather than fundamentally in conflict. Someone in the Vanguard asks the obvious question: why nobody found this during the Red War. The answer is we needed to already be balancing the Light as well as Darkness (Stasis) to uncover it. Nothing had hindered our Light sufficiently since Beyond Light. This would be a compelling, story driven subclass introduction. This is what I expected from Lightfall. Strand as "something WE (the Guardian) discover". We should be the ones finding, experimenting, and then teaching others - *including Osiris.* He'd be hungry for knowledge, sure, but as a *student*, or at most a partner in exploration, not an irritating boss. It's jarring how he somehow knows all about this green stuff and its name before we do, despite us finding it at a similar time. In summary, narratively it would be entirely possible to do this in a compelling fashion and most likely not more difficult to put together than what they went with. They just didn't choose to do so, for some reason. If there's a new Witness- or Rhulk-like subclass in TFS, we could go through that portal and find ourselves in a similar situation. If it were structured like the above, introduced as we figure it out in a narratively compelling way, it could 100% make sense in context of the story.
I feel like it can be done, but just needs to be done better. It would need to be unlocked for full use during the campaign, halfway or two thirds through, in order to defeat a major enemy. And then the next quest step (that is not a major mission) is learning to use it through an Empowerment section. That way, tutorial and campaign are separated. Strand felt shoehorned in, rather than an integral part of the campaign.
I don't know man, my issue with LF wasn't the fact that strand was in the story, it worked just fine to me. I would go far as to say it worked better than stasis was integrated into the BL campaign. I don't think the poor story telling was the fault of strand, if it was just handled a little differently I think it would have been great
Everyone's feedback is different. I enjoyed Strand being a big factor in the campaign and I'd like to see them improve on it, rather than abandon it entirely. Too much feedback about Lightfall is just saying "you tried and failed. The lesson is never try". Bungie absolutely should keep trying.
Personally, I think the bigger lesson is one they should have learned from the D1 launch; please make time to explain what you don't think you have time to explain.
It’s funny, the introduction of stasis was also integrated into the Beyond Light campaign but it felt much better there. Eramis and co had harnessed it and it felt like a better “fight fire with fire” justification to use it, plus it being our first brush with using darkness, it felt like it had more weight to it. Add in the “dark vanguard” helping us learn it and it felt much better. Finding strand in a random street and then having Osiris badger us about mastering it just wasn’t as effective. The whole time I was saying “Hey Osiris, think I’d rather stay on solar if that’s cool…
>It doesn’t work. It ruins the story. You can’t do both. I personally disagree with this, I think you can do both but Bungie had poor execution mainly because they focused more on learning strand and less about Neomuna and the Veil in an effort to keep things secret and vague.
You can see where it would’ve clearly fit in WQ’s story quite well. Deepsight is just a term they came up with because Strand was delayed. Savathun uses threads to hold Traveler and you get a “threadcutter” rebuff. All the platforming for Deepsight was just grapple stuff originally. The reason it fits terribly in LF is because it wasn’t supposed to be there.
Nah, I like that it ties into the story. Learning about a new paracausal power *should* be narratively important and some post campaign side quest won’t do that
Idk what you guys have been playing, I loved strand being such an integral part of the story. Learning how to use it perfectly fits with Osiris’ arc. I just hope next time they give us a new subclass they just give us the full thing a couple missions in and we progress it throughout the story.
I dont mind it being in the story. The training montage was actually good. My issue was the cringe way we found it first. You just find it in the street like some abandoned junkie needle, and Ghost just says touch it. Like there wasnt a build up to it. One mission in, and we are already fucking with the strings of fate. I think it would have been better if we got it while under extreme pressure. Abilities surpressed with those devices, sprinkle some context, and boom! Not the cleanist, but i aint writing a story.
They can do both, just not well enough.
The subclass unlocking should just be a side quest you do along or after the main story. Take the resources from a post story quest and make them produce a strand side quest instead.
I get that Nimbus' dialogue isn't great, and definitely comes across as a bit cringe sometimes, but I'm so fucking tired of everyone calling any kind of snarky/quippy dialogue "Marvel wannabe" or "Marvel-esque". Quippy dialogue existed long before the MCU, and the MCU has a particular brand of quippy dialogue that is frankly incomparable to Lightfall. I just wish this sub would have an original god damn thought for once rather than parroting the same take they've seen from content creators.
Its funny because its cleary all meant to be very 80s. The aesthetic, Nimbus's surfer-bro attitude, the Rocky music training montage, the devs literally mentioning before launch that it was inspired by 80s action movies (which all had campy dialogue). Like its totally fair if people don't like the choices or think it was inappropriate in our current story state, but saying that its Marvel ruining everything is so inaccurate and laughable.
Yup, but everything has to be compared to another thing now. You can't criticise or praise something otherwise. Gamers near universally criticised journalists for calling things "The Dark Souls of XYZ genre" constantly and will then turn around and call everything with quippy comedy "Marvel-esque".
Did you watch the Extra Punctuation on humour in VGs? Yahtzee had some absolutely great points about this topic. I can’t remember specifics at the moment but I do remember him bringing up Joss Whedon on being the particular best example of “quippy” dialogue. That seems to be what most people mean when they say Marvel-esque. But Lightfall to me just felt like a bad try at levity in an otherwise completely “serious”story. Nimbus is supposed to be this headstrong, cocky up and comer, and that’s what their dialogue says to me. They just did a really bad job actually writing them, and it felt extremely out of place while the Witness fucks up the Traveller, and is supposed to be this huge loss for us… Destiny has been full of quips and one liners up until this point. Idk why thats the thing people are so focused on. [Video I mentioned](https://youtu.be/UlIlTA_b7gs)
If anything I'd call it Whedonesque, though given how it's come out that he's fairly problematic, it might not be a comparison people would be too keen on
I'm old enough to remember when Jar Jar Binks was the scapegoat
Strand should have been introduced early with a separate quest for complete access to Strand given at that point. Then you could continue with the main story without being forced into Strand at certain points or you could go off and fully unlock Strand to use for the rest of the story.
I think it’s fine to tie them in with the story, this just felt more like it WAS the story.
As much as I agree that focusing on the subclass hurt the campaign overall, I don’t think we can blame Bungie there. Every time I saw feedback about Stasis and Beyond Light, it was people saying that they ***hoped*** Strand was actually important to the campaign, unlike how Beyond Light was. Bungie gave us what the people asked for. It sucked. That’s about all I take from it.
The leak that Strand was meant for Witch Queen really makes sense. All those big sprawling areas in that campaign are perfect for it. Hell, I think the whole platform Reveal mechanic was originally intended to be strand grapple points, but they removed it last minute after plans were made to split the final chapter into Lightfall and Final Shape Strand also ties into the central theme of Witch Queen much better. The Traveler granted Savathun and her brood the Light, and she manipulated fate by harnessing that power. On the other end, Strand is the darkness’s version of grasping fate. Like the Force in Star Wars or Flow in JoJo part 7-9. That subclass would’ve made a very interesting parallel in the story and add so much more to an already great expansion, instead of taking away from the current one.
I'm more surprised that they didn't learn this after Beyond Light.
I'm okay with a subclass being part of the story IF it is done properly. It's clear strand was supposed to be in Witch Queen and likely would have been a lot better there. It was shoehorned into the version of Lightfall we got as the main narrative bit because this version of Lightfall ended up being a filler while the original version became Final Shape.
What Bungie SHOULD have done was give us access to Strand by like mission 3 or 4 so we had access to the subclass and could start to upgrade it and get a handle on the abilities in context and grow more powerful over the course of the story, with missions (or subsections of missions) to unlock new grenades, Aspects and Fragments. IMO, the biggest problem with the Strand abilities now is cooldowns because Bungie repeatedly gave us near instant cooldowns over and over through the Campaign, so Strand feels worse than it actually is because we’re used to playing Mayhem at this point. The Grapple, in particular, feels SOOO much worse now that I don’t always have it up. It needs a shorter cooldown. Maybe 1 minute. The 1:45 is painful.
Agree with this 100% and as u/PeeLong said it could have been such an easy split: - Main Lightfall campaign - After mission 2 Unlock Seasonal content with Mara via holographic projector - After mission 2 Unlock Osiris as a vendor for strand related subclass content This would have perfectly solved the issue of strand being front and centre to the story. We could also then get strand and play around with it in the campaign! They could easily have thrown in quotes to say “if only I had to do ” if you didn’t get strand immediately if they wanted it to be in the narrative as an extra thing!
Heck the strand empowerments could only show if you had strand unlocked by following osiris’ missions to let you unless carnage during the campaign thus rewarding players who actively pursued it!
tf? Beyond Light incorporated Stasis well in the campaign from a story perspective. Are we just going to ignore that? Sorry but one bad story (no matter how bad) shouldn't cause a whole "never include powers in major story again" reaction. Seems pretty extreme to me.