As we're drawing to the end of this year of D2, I wanted to look back at what I still feel is one of the largest failure points of the year to discuss and offer some alternatives for future consideration, and that is the "effective power" / power deltas that were introduced to a majority of the game's content this year. So as we are all aware of, the outgoing destructive power of players has been on a gradual climb since Forsaken, with high powered options in terms of both abilities and weapons. For the most part, things were still fairly steady in terms of the endgame in terms of how the game got harder and more rewarding as you bumped the difficulty up, and what the player's power level helped to do was offer a longer-term route for less skilled players to still feel like they had a meaningful impact to the activity. WQ's 3.0 reworks, while a much needed adjustment to the previous 2.0 node/diamond system had the unfortunate effect of pushing the player power needle too far to the right, and in turn caused the endgame to lose out on its impact factor. Bungie, not wanting to rely on nerfs instead hit the power levels by enforcing effective power levels on higher difficulty activities, which removed that fall-back that the lower skill players have had in place for the past 8 years of the franchise. This also had the additional side-effect of making the endgame that much more tedious, which effectively killed one of the design goals stated earlier in the year: "Making the endgame more replayable"; This couldn't be further from the truth for myself and a number of my friends - Master content was now a one and done, once the triumph is checked off for harder stuff, we're not doing it again. Then last week's TWiD hit, and at a first glance it looked like perhaps things would be changing, especially with lines like: "Power offers a meaningful progression that rewards players with a real sense of getting stronger.", "Enemies will have a set feel for how tough they are even at the cap, but you will notice yourself getting stronger as your Power level grows", and "We look forward to continuing to explore ways to make difficult activities engaging and rewarding to conquer, while making your ongoing Power climb feel meaningful and important.". It's important to note that none of these statements are true when level caps/deltas are enforced on players, once you reach that set point, there is nothing more you can do; The game now enforces a minimum skill threshold where not meeting it means you're essentially out unless you can improve (Some players just cannot do so). So once again, Bungie is contradicting their own design goals with power deltas and it just seems like nothing is improving or can be done, right? Enter this week's Pantheon challenge. Now while things are still delta'd to a small degree, it offered a little bit of a glimpse of how a proper increase in difficulty should work in the game. The encounters have gone back to in a way, how D1's Hard mode raids were done, with additional mechanics or a change-up to the norm to keep players on their feet more often. It made it feel like each player needed to have a full understanding of the encounter to be prepared for the shake-ups. Additionally, new enemies are now present as well (Stronger mechanic enemies, Tormenters, etc.). So why can't we just take this and run with it? Drop the deltas on everything that didn't have it prior to Lightfall and adopt this system for higher difficulty content. Add in more majors/ultras or incorporate special new enemies (Tormentors, Lucent Hive, etc) to the higher difficulty. I know a lot of people moan about Champions when we hear the "just add more champions" line, but that could work as well if Champions got a 2.0 rework to make them behave more like these special enemies (Make stunning a support mechanic, but not a requirement). I have my own ideas on what Champion 2.0 could look like but I've walled of texted enough for one day. TL;DR for the end here: Power deltas continue to, and will continue to make the game tedious and not fun for a large number of players who want to enjoy all of the content the game offers. A proper change to difficulty that shakes up the foundation of the activity, similar to how Pantheon is shaking up raid encounters, would go so much further in creating a more engaging and meaningful activity adjustment compared to gimping the player to the point where the game feels like a slog.