The first of three Twitch Reveal Streams from Bungie about Destiny: The Taken King took place today. The topic being Year Two of Destiny and how the experience in the Tower and with your gear will be different than year one.
Community Manager, Deej, was joined by Executive Priducer Mark Noseworthy and Senior Design Lead Tyson Green to give us a tour of the Tower in TTK. Meanwhile new Community Manager, Cozmo, pulled questions from the community.
Your current light level pre-TTK will be your character level when TTK drops. So a 34 now will be a 34 in TTK. But Bungie suggests you don’t dismantle any of your current gear seeing as they will be using your current gear to technically determine your character level. Don’t worry, you don’t have to have it equipped or anything. Just hold on to your items until after TTK drops, they have other purposes as well.
Your character level goes up with XP earned from everything you do in the game. This will function very much like leveling from 1 to 20 in the vanilla game.
Light level is now an average of all of your equipped attack and defense numbers. However not only do armor and weapons carry your light level but Ghosts and class items factor in as well.
Similar to in the vanilla game there appear to be limitations on what items you can equip based on the items level verses your current character level. For example you cannot equip a level 40 chest until you are at a character level of 40 yourself.
Intellect, strength and discipline stats have always been a bit confusing when it comes to understanding their exact cool down times, but in TTK each one will have an exact number attached to the cooldown value along with a visual bar, which should make these stats much more user friendly when deciding what gear you want to equip.
In your character menu there is now going to be a Quest tab which houses your current active quests as well as your current bounties. There will be 16 bounty slots instead of just 10. New bounties will be available and should be completed more easily doing the things you want to do instead of being forced to complete them within very certain locations/modes.
You can select to track up to 4 bounties at a time. This means when you pull out your ghost along the side of your screen will appear those 4 bounties with the specific progress you have currently made on them. Bounties may be turned in from anywhere, you will no longer have to return to a social space to turn them in when completed.
When you first start up your game after TTK releases you will have access to a Spark of Light, available at your postmaster. This item is a boost that can be applied to one character to bring that character up to Level 25 and open the campaign for The Taken King. This can be applied to either a brand new players character, one of your lower level alts or if you choose to start up a new character in a different class to experience the new subclasses.
As an aesthetic addition you will be able to choose which weapon type appears on your back in social spaces, instead of it defaulting for you.
The Speaker will still offer material exchanges as he did in House of Wolves but all of his items have been updated to the proper levels for TTK. His class items also offer reputation gains as well as other perks similar to armor. He also offers ghost shells limited to the rare level which now have defense, intellect and strength stats as well as perks that help you find resources more easily when out in the world playing.
Shaxx will carry crucible weekly bounties. If you complete all five within the week you will receive a nightfall tier reward. He also offers new armor and weapons as well as legendary ghosts. These ghosts have the stats like the new rares ghosts but also have the addition of extractor perks and glimmer perks. Extractor perks give you extra resources when you collect resources from the wild. Glimmer perks give you extra glimmer when killing PvP enemies of specific classes in the crucible.
Currently to purchase vanguard or crucible items you must have marks specific to vanguard or crucible, which have a cap of 100 each for the week. In TTK you will no longer need these, instead there will be a universal currency for vanguard and crucible called Legendary Marks. These Legendary Marks may be used at both crucible and vanguard vendors as well as be applied other places. Your wallet can hold only 200 at a time and they are shared across characters like glimmer. However, unlike with the old marks, Legendary Marks may be used and then you can go back out and continue to collect more, there is no weekly limit. The crucible and vanguard marks you currently have will be changed into commendations, which can be turned in when TTK drops to quickly up your reputation with different vendors.
When you dismantle a legendary item in TTK it will drop legendary marks for you.
Factions have been reworked as well. You will be able to pledge to a specific faction and gain rep with them without having to wear faction items. Pledging costs 2,500 glimmer and you can only change your faction once per week. Material exchanges : you can “donate”motes of light, weapon parts, armor materials, special and heavy ammo synths to possibly receive reputation. Faction packages will be much better with a guaranteed legendary and no repeats on shaders and emblems which allows for a better chance at the items you have yet to receive.
Exotic Blue Prints will be the new way to store your exotics. There will be a terminal in by the stairs in the Hall of Vanguards area. This terminal stores all exotics you have obtained and shows the engrams for those you are still missing. So if you delete an exotic after TTK releases have no fear you can go to the collection and grab it again for a small price. This also means you save on vault space if you want to.
Some year one exotics, I repeat some, will be upgraded and improved. These will be available also in your collections. If you currently have fro example Light Beyond Nemisis you can go into your collection and for a few marks and received the year two version of said helm. The year two versions have some new perks and the original main unique perk is no longer at the end of the upgrade tree it is automatically active on that piece of gear.
Another example they gave was Suros. The new year two Suros may be obtained from your collection terminal if you already have Suros from year one. The new Suros is black instead and allows you to choose to shoot faster again, like the original Suros before the Focus Fire perk was activated.
Bungie warned that attack values may appear lower in number but promise they will be as effective as they are. The numbers have just changed to fit with the new light level system.
There will be other Collection Terminals around the tower for emblems, shaders and ships. These will function similarly to the exotic one. Any items you have received will be permanently in the list available for you to retrieve again any time. They should also show you the items you haven’t received yet and where you can go to find them.
The Cryptarch will sell legendary engrams now that will be guaranteed to turn into the legendary item they are meant to be, no lower level items and no shards.
The Gunsmith will allow you to gain reputation with him by using his field test weapons and completing quests that he is tied to. As you rank up with him you can choose weapon Foundry Orders and receive new weapons on Wednesdays. The available orders will change out each week. This is known as Armsday.
The concept of ascending weapons is not completely lost. The new option is called Infuse. You can activate this on legendary and exotic weapons from year two only. When you select Infuse on your upgrade tree you can consume a higher level weapon to bring your chosen weapon up to a higher attack value. This allows you to continue forward with a weapon you like by sacrificing other weapons to it. It is unsure at this time if this allow applies to armor or not.
Throughout the stream Cozmo continued to mention how community members were asking about vault space. Finally towards the end of the reveal the changes to vault space were shared.
Vault space for weapons will be doubled. Vault space for armor is slightly more than doubled. You will naturally have more space in your other items slots thanks to the Collections. So hoard on guardians!
It also appears to be no limit or a very large limit on items such as those shown in the image below.
In the last few minutes of the stream Deej and team showed off the new dance emotes for what appeared to be a male Exo, a Human female and a male Awoken. One of which included doing the Sprinkler.
We are also just going to leave these images here to let you hype on your own about the sword we had a glimpse of.
The full reveal is available in the past broadcasts on Bungie’s twitch and should be uploaded to Youtube tomorrow we believe.
Let us know your thoughts on the reveal and what your more excited for in the comments. And don’t forget to check out the Taken King Strike Reveal next Wednesday August 26th at 11am PDT on Bungie’s Twitch channel.
