I would imagine Xur will still have the random engram. Motes may become a bit more useful. The new vendor may accept them as well. This is Bungies way of helping you prepare for that.

DeeJ_BNG 135 points 2 hours ago "Here's what I can confirm about Xur right now: -Exotic Engrams will still sporadically appear in his inventory -His inventory will be more powerful next week"

DeeJ_BNG 27 points an hour ago "The plan, as I understand it, is for shards to be available all the time. Engrams will appear from time to time."

The Dark Below PS Exclusive Strike
obviously spoilers for gameplay but a good look at some of the new weapons in action

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LOL at all the green loot drops

Yep, I noticed the green drops too.

Interesting use of the Black Garden map here. But in the end, it's way too similar to the Nexus strike. The end battle is almost a carbon copy.

And everybody will continue to look exactly the same.

And every 2 levels costs 20 dollars.

I think they are underestimating how much interest their game will lose as a result of the direction they're taking it.

agree, that is disappointing

Everybody looked the same in Halo 2 and I played that for like two years.

Destiny has the right amount of content for me. It would be great for there to be more to do but then I would be playing the game too much.

You ain't lying. I haven't played since they announced their upcoming changes. I logged in and bought the Titan helmet Xur was selling, but I didn't bother grinding out XP to upgrade it. I also queued up the last bunch of bounties, but I honestly didn't feel like completing them. Sure, I could've finished them and had all my stars aligned for a new Vanguard Commendation on Day 1, but that'll get me what? One new weapon? For the first round of new nightfalls, raids, weeklies, etc tomorrow I'll probably just be sticking to my already maxed out go-to weapons anyway. No need to use a brand new weapon on the first day. For me, there's really no point in playing until the DLC is live.. Hopefully the new content will renew my interest, but I'd be lying if I said their planned changes didn't sour me a little. It feels like more unnecessary grinding to an already grindy game. I hope this new stuff is worth it.

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Typical PR doubletalk, but the guy gets into the internal discussions about glimmer and vault storage increases.

Yep.

All of those raid guns you worked so hard for are pretty much going by the wayside when they should be getting a buff to 32. Just add an upgrade slot. It's not rocket science, and we'll still collect the new shit, because it's new, and we're compulsive. Same for the raid armor, and as an added benefit, people might actually mix and match some gear. We'll still want the new raid armor, even if it's just for cosmetic purposes.

And Xur says keep all of those motes of light that you saved up for the week he finally shows up with chest armor.

It's all incredibly dumb, and I'm with you. Will wait and see what they do and just run my weekly stuff for now.

In Warframe, there are hundreds of weapons with everything from throwing stars to rocket launchers, and everything levels to 30 from your first gun to the hardest guns to get. And they all use the same mods. Some are better than others, obviously, but nothing gets left behind in terms of level cap.

Quick question about the expansion so I know if I should buy it or not: does it include matchmaking for weekly strikes and/or raids?

No, but if that were implemented it wouldn't be through DLC anyway.

That topic came up in the video I posted. Basically Bungie's stance as to why the Raid doesn't have it is that they want the people going into a raid to understand they're making a commitment to complete something, and they don't want it to get to the point where you have a group of people playing, and all of a sudden one of them has to go eat dinner, or just up and quits, leaving the rest kind of screwed over.

I get the argument to a certain extent, but at the same time, there are people who haven't had a chance to play the raid because they can't get 5 people together to do it. And the weeklies/nightfalls should already have matchmaking. Silly that they don't when they already have it for the lower level versions.

Groucho, do you not like us here?

Seriously, if you want to run the Raid, we'll squeeze you in!

No it does not.

Edit: Doh, King beat me to it. Yeah, I was going to post that too regarding what DeeJ said in the video about raid matchmaking.

The problem for me is that I can't make advance plans for when I can play, and when I do it seems to be a lot later than everybody else here.

At any rate, until they add matchmaking for it I'm going to pass on the DLC. No point in paying for content I can't access.

I don't know what you consider later than anyone on here. TheKing is playing when I go to bed, and still playing when I wake up. and then he plays for another 8 hours after that. I'm pretty sure most of the Destiny DVDTalkers play well past midnight (at least for me since I'm on the east coast)

so those of us up to 4:00 am CT some weekends aren't up late enought for you

there is almost always a late night group on willing to help and that enjoys taking on newcomers to the raid

I have 2 characters with full slots of completed but unredeemed bounties (well 1 still has an exotic bounty slot open) .... I don't plan on doing anymore bounties on them till the new content tomorrow and will redeem the lot of them then

Yeah, TheKing never sleeps! I'm in Central Time and I don't start playing till 1030pm and usually stay up till 1 or 2am (sometimes later).

I prefer to play late, so maybe we can all get together at some point. The difficult thing for me is the actual get-together. Of the last 4 clan-type fireteams I've been a part of, only one actually played, and it took something like 40 minutes to actually get everyone on. The other 3 either never got enough people or had too many for me to play, and even then, there was something like a half hour of waiting a pop.

we do our best to schedule longer commitments such as the raid in the DoD thread

I still think that way works best and having an early group and later group during the weekdays with reserves if the list becomes too long
I'm even up for having a set schedule of days/times if people think that works best

if anyone has any better suggestions I'm all ears/eyes

as for strikes/dailies/weeklies/nightfalls I can tell you there is almost always a group of 3 running these or willing to help out if you need it

Just so no one takes that the wrong way, some of that was on another forum, so I'm not blaming my pals here at DVD Talk or anything.

Personally, I wouldn't want to run the raid with total strangers, but I also admittedly have never successfully completed the raid (and only managed to get a fireteam going once). I can see why the raid might need something more robust than the current matchmaking system, but I do wish there were some kind of tools in-game.

On the other hand, I can't support any argument against matchmaking for the weeklies. It'd be nice to maybe have a filter to look for people of a certain level, but I haven't had any trouble with the pick-up groups I've thrown together at destinylfg.net. I know the signal-to-noise ratio might be lower if it were in-game, but still, the weeklies don't demand that much coordination or even communication across the group.

Yeah, other than a single normal raid with these guys, I did all of my raiding this week off LFG.

At this point, other than some minor variations, everybody does the same thing and knows what to do.

I would wait untill Xur gets here to turn them it, that way if you want to/can upgrade an exotic you will have a bunch of bountys to turn in.

not a bad idea but I'm sure I can complete a set of new bounties to have ready to redeem by Friday
this was more about not ranking up any vendors/factions prior to the DLC

Some people don't want to be squeezed in or have to play around other people schedules.

Some people have different hours. I doubt there are many people in DVD talks clan on between 1AM and 6AM CST.

Setting things up through a message board is not even remotely as quick and convenient as match making would be.