I want to take a break from ranting about enhancement core infusion to talk about something actually related to the substantive content of Season of the Drifter in Destiny 2. Namely, the arrival of its primary activity, Gambit Prime. Yes, we have The Reckoning, but that activity exists to farm gear for Gambit Prime, so it’s clear what’s the central focus of this annual pass expansion.
Gambit Prime looked to expand on the strengths of Gambit and eliminate some of its weaknesses. But after almost three weeks of Prime now, I’ve come to the realization that I simply don’t like it as much as regular Gambit, and its advantages are outweighed by its problems.
I’ll start with what I like. I do think there is definitely room for different “spins” on Gambit, and one that exists solely as a single round is a good idea continuing that the length of original Gambit is one of its problems (though its new sudden death overtime round has helped with that). I like the new, smaller maps for Prime, and the addition of new, more powerful enemies that teams have to work together to take down. The addition of mote draining when there are too many blockers creates a new sense of urgency to clearing that I think works as well. And the primeval phase certainly solves the problem of insta-bursting bosses, but ultimately I view this part as a weakness, which I’ll get to later.
Before diving deeper in, I think I need to address something that could have been a strength of Gambit Prime, but the way it was executed does not work very well. I’m talking about the dedicated roles and armor sets for them. In theory, this sounded like a really fun way to make Gambit Prime stand out from original Gambit, but the process to get this armor to try out these perks has been…laborious, and I’m not sure how many players will even get to try out these sets when all is said and done. Here has been my thought process about Prime armor from launch until now:
“Cool I can just jump right into the The Reckoning and start farming Prime armor. I’m going for Reaper!”
“Wait, +1 Reaper? So if I get a full set of this, I only get the first Reaper perk? I have to wait for higher tiers for better armor?”
“Well, it’s Tier 2 now, but even if I get a full set here I still won’t have all the perks. Might as well just wait for Tier 3 to start farming that which is just a few days away.”
“Oh shoot, Tier 3 is 680 power and requires a lot of teamwork. If I’m going to do this with matchmade randoms I have a lot of leveling to do.”
And that’s where I am now. I’m at about 690 with my characters and just about to start jumping into Tier 3 to farm for a Prime set or two. Maybe. But I’m so burned out from the leveling process to this point, I honestly don’t even know if I’ll bother. I might make it through this entire expansion without even using the gear that was designed for it.
And I don’t think I’m alone. Playing Prime now, I rarely see people with full sets. Once every other game right now I’ll see someone weaken a powerful enemy or mark an invader or summon a super blocker. But rarely, as I think many players are in a similar position to me.
The other problem with these roles is that it very, very clearly makes Gambit Prime skew toward dedicated teams, more so than even regular Gambit. Even once I have a full set of my choice, I am just going to pretty much wear it no matter what my teammates are doing in a given game because well, I haven’t farmed for multiple sets, and there’s no way to queue up for specific roles. So I could get into a game with four Collectors and face off against a team with a person in every role that just wipes the floor with us.
In the end, the roles don’t seem all that impactful minus the invader set. Invasion is already a problem in Prime considering how frequently it happens (during the primeval phase you can be more less invaded constantly), and adding things like a bigger overshield, damage bonuses on Guardian kills and a complete locking of the bank makes invasion even more of a problem when one issue with regular Gambit was that invasion with its wallhacks was already probably too powerful.
The primeval phase is where Gambit Prime really breaks down for me. While I appreciate that the game was trying to create a system where the boss couldn’t be burned with 30 seconds of spawn by a coordinated team, the replacement concept is an utter slog most of the time. The first 2-3 envoy phases when you try to get stacks you might as well not do any damage to the boss, because a single invader with one or two kills can un-do 4 supers and a mountain’s worth of heavy ammo in those phases. So you save your supers and your heavy ammo and do minimal damage to the boss for a while until finally you get enough stacks where you can insta-burst it down. Because if you don’t, non-stop invasion will mean it’s healed right back up again. Combine this never-ending primeval phase with the fact that Prime is only on the same map over and over every week, and these games just become blurs over time.
I simply like regular Gambit more. Without having my own set of Prime armor I don’t feel like I’m missing anything over there. The length issue has been reduced by the sudden death phase. There’s less invasion over there and no risk of a “super invader” with a full set of gear coming to ruin your day. You won’t lose all your motes if your team doesn’t understand you have to clear blockers. Regular Gambit still has its issues, sure, but the longer we get into Prime, the more it feels like it’s going to be only for hyper-dedicated, coordinated teams where trying to play it casually is just not in the cards. And I just don’t know how much of an audience there is for that.
I think Prime is a cool experiment and parts of it work. But most of it doesn’t, partially because of the implemented gear grind for the sets that I think everyone wanted to use right away, partially because of the design of the mode itself. Maybe it can evolve from here, but I’m not sure how much it will.
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