Destiny 2’s Raid Race Reveals Everything Wrong With Armor 3.0

Raids are the pinnacle of endgame content in Destiny 2, and each one offers a new and unique challenge to the Guardians willing to submit themselves to its whims. In Edge of Fate, devs offered new armor and weapons to those Guardians who planned on raiding the day of the raid’s release. Tackling a raid on day one, in Contest Mode, is something to be undertaken by only the most prepared of Guardians, but Desert Perpetual’s day one raiders didn’t really take advantage of Armor 3.0’s new features. These players need the best of the best—in terms of their equipment and build—to complete the raid, but it seems Armor 3.0 just doesn’t make the cut.

Very Few Day-One Raiders Used Edge of Fate Gear

With the release of Armor 3.0 came a whole slew of new armor pieces, buildcrafting, and weapons to try, but the majority of raiders brought old weapons, mostly from The Final Shape and some older exotics. This indicates something interesting: despite the almost complete overhaul of the weapon and power system, most high-tier players still prefer the vestiges of Armor 2.0, particularly in terms of weaponry.

Though Kepler introduced a plethora of new weapons with awesome perks, most raiders preferred reliable 2.0 guns in their loadouts. With Sunsetting reversed a while back, most longtime players have a vault full of god-roll weapons at their beck and call, rendering new weapons, no matter what tier, ultimately unnecessary. The only truly essential thing brought by Armor 3.0 seems to be Light level, with newly-statted armor somewhat optional if players don’t care about set bonuses.

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Playing Edge of Fate‘s campaign on Legend difficulty was enough to earn players the gear they needed to reach 100 power, which is the effective power cap for Contest Mode of Desert Perpetual. Outside of the requisite power, very few players bothered to grind out high-stat armor, instead focusing on beefing up builds from the Armor 2.0 system. With so much riding on being the world’s first to finish the raid—including a sick belt and online acclaim—why didn’t players take the time to find the best gear possible?

Part of the answer to this question lies in the way stats have changed from 2.0 to 3.0. With 2.0, an excellent armor set will see a Guardian with one, two, or three stats reaching 100, but likely no more than that. This left the other stats in the dust, but was a great way to buff up specific pieces of a build. With Armor 3.0, stats can reach up to 200, with a significant buff past 100. Unfortunately, finding a wide variety of high-stat armor is tough in Edge of Fate, and getting the rolls required to run triple and even double 100s seemed to be too much work for even the most dedicated of Guardians. On top of the difficulty in earning good gear, another problem arises: no one knows what stats matter most.

One Week to Earn and Learn Armor 3.0: Was it Enough?

The new armor system features tiers of weapon and armor quality, allowing players to guarantee high-tier loot drops from more difficult activities; however, because the 3.0 system is so new, it was next to impossible to learn what stats are most impactful in just one week.

In Armor 2.0, a Guardian’s Resistance stat needed to be 100 for any endgame content, no matter build or class. Bungie claimed that Armor 3.0 would eliminate mandatory stats, allowing Guardians to buildcraft more freely in a way that wouldn’t burn them, but no balance system is perfect, and this is highly unlikely to be fully true. That being said, Edge of Fate had only been out for a little under a week when Desert Perpetual released, not leaving a ton of time for experimentation.

Instead of running optimized builds using Armor 3.0, the raid and world’s first face saw most Guardians running high-light, 3.0 armor with one or two stats at 100, but nothing higher. Despite being told that 100+ stats only make those stats more powerful, most Guardians still preferred to build to 100 and then focus on getting other stats up as well. Whether this is a holdover from Armor 2.0 or truly the best way to build in the new Armor 3.0 environment remains to be seen.