Time To Rework Destiny 2’s Court Of Blades Loot Drops

One thing I don’t love about Destiny 2 and its seasonal/episodic model is that Bungie is often so slow to implement needed fixes, either because they’re absorbing fan feedback too slowly, or some sort of technical issue prevents fast updates.

I have been impressed with Bungie’s new “dump loot on players” philosophy that arrived with Episode Heresy’s Nether, the main activity for the season, as when you’re relying on RNG, that’s how things need to be.

I am not impressed with Court of Blades’ system. It’s a fun activity, but it is also an enormous pain to farm, and the rewards on either difficulty level do not seem worth the effort as players pursue the newly added drops.

The problem with Court of Blades is that it has 1-2 drops for an entire run, which will normally take about 15 minutes unless you and your fireteam have developed some sort of blazing fast strategy (Microcosm!), to cut down on that time. Then, you are rewarded with at best, one or two drops. On Expert, no matter how many bosses you kill, you are lucky if you get even a single Adept drop even once in a few runs, god forbid you land one with double perks. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen even a single double perk normal weapon either.

This is a huge contrast with Nether where each boss chests gives you 2-3 weapons plus you can get another 3-4 weapons per zone just by opening chests. Plus, you are filling up your target farm Tome the whole time. You’re also doing that in Blades with the Tome, but comparing total time investment to total loot acquisition, Blades is not doing this right.

Another issue is a more general one with loot, with all these weird tiers where one needs to be eliminated entirely. We have:

• Normal loot drops with normal perks
• Normal, but masterworked loot drops with double perks
• Adept loot drops with normal perks
• Adept loot drops with double perks

Cut the third one. There’s no point in dropping Adept guns with only a single row of perks, especially given the way loot is currently doled out and with Blades especially, how rare they can be. Adept is already probably not really even worth it all that much at baseline, minus the cool skin and mod access, but still, it needs something that makes it at least on par with a double perk normal drop, as why are you even doing Expert mode, then?

I wish this was a fast fix, but the way episodes work with new activities and loot dropped later on this takes maybe two weeks to register as feedback, another two weeks to implement something and hey look we’re act Act 3 and this whole thing is getting deleted shortly thereafter. This isn’t good right now, but even if it’s changed, it will likely be far later than we need.

Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram.

Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.