There are a lot of pieces that make up the whole of Destiny 2, and over time a lot of said pieces have been overhauled to the joy of the community. However, I would argue one such element of Destiny 2 that has had everything around it improved but not improved itself is Legendary armor, and honestly, it’s high time Bungie overhauled Legendary armor drops.
One of the best changes Bungie recently made about armor was the removal the various subclass elements being tied to it. Likewise, the mod system overhaul was a breath of fresh air for how Legendary armor’s mod sockets are utilized. But beyond those changes, the act of using Legendary armor as a reward is still as stale as it has ever been. The difference in excitement I feel between a purple gun and purple armor dropping is night and day.
I asked myself why that is the case, and discovered that it’s because of rolls and the complete lack of impactful high value rolls.
Allow me to elaborate: when purple armor drops, it always has the same four mod slots, and the only thing a Guardian could get excited about is the armor’s gear stat rolls. The problem is that good rolls are incredibly unlikely unless you’re doing endgame difficult PvP or PvE content. This makes the majority of Legendary armor rolls nearly useless because you’re always going to know when to expect good and bad rolls.
It’s that knowing and expectation that kills the excitement of almost every armor drop. What’s worse is that during the endgame content, the armor may have a high roll, but the gear stat distribution may be in the opposite stats you’re looking for. This ends up feeling awful, especially considering the effort that goes into completing Destiny 2’s difficult endgame content.
Bungie should look into improving Legendary armor to be more compelling at all times and across all difficulties. This could also end up benefiting the new players experience as well, but that may be a topic for another time.
As a huge fan of action RPGs and anything that loots after I shoots, when purple armor drops there should be more rolls to consider. I know the argument for more RNG isn’t always a popular one, but if every single drop has the potential to drop as a god roll — with slightly higher chances in difficult content — then that should make each drop all the more compelling.
I think it would be a net positive for the Destiny 2 experience for players to not only fawn over every new gun, but every armor drop too; just like they would in every other ARPG in existence.
It wouldn’t be that hard to implement either, or at least to design a framework to build such a system around. One solution would be to give pieces of armor their own traits and origin traits like what guns currently have. These new armor traits would be what gives the armor its gear stat bonuses. Now, imagine three columns of traits that represent metal, fabric, and stitching. Each column’s trait could give two gear stat bonuses. A trait called Tight Weave could give, say, 12 Mobility and 8 Strength, while another in that same column could give 7 Mobility and 14 Resilience instead.
With such a system in place, players would look at each piece of armor dropped and compare the various armor traits to see if a high roll in two or three gear stats would be possible. I know I would certainly experiment with every drop if that were the case.
Additionally, a slight tweak to mod sockets could further improve excitement around Legendary armor drops. The change could be as simple as each drop rolling between three and six mod sockets, with four being the average roll. This would make it so current builds and loadouts wouldn’t be changed all that much, while allowing for future drops to give players more mod customization if they get lucky.
It’s easy to get carried away with RNG on top of RNG, but I’m confident that changes like these would be a net positive. They’d make half of the loot pool all the more interesting and worth playing and grinding for, while also giving players a reason to care about Legendary Armor drops for the first time in forever.
