Two of the biggest headaches I’ve found in playing strikes for at least a year now are players either speed-running the strike or not running it at all. Players trying to hammer out their pinnacle reward for the week just need 3 bosses dead as fast as possible and they don’t care what anyone else on the team needs as long as they get their 3. The other group of players have 5 to 10 bounties to do and they probably need 150 Vex and 150 Void so they have wandered off on Europa to kill as many Vex as they can find while the other 2 players (or sometimes 1 if 2 people go for a wander) must run the Glassway by themselves. So, Bungie, can we please have the ability to solo run Vanguard Strikes?
The addition of a solo queue to Iron Banner is the only reason I am still willing to go in there. The constant “mercy”, on both sides, after the switch to connection-based matchmaking made the mode almost unplayable if you weren’t in a 4-6 stack. But our voices were heard, and Bungie added the solo queue. Why can we not have the same for strikes? Or to go another, in my opinion better, way, just use the mechanic that already exists in the game for the EAZ and the Haunted Forest. For those activities, you can go in with either matchmaking or a locked fireteam. I ran dozens of Bright Dust farms in the Haunted Forest with just me and my five bounties and so did others in my clan. We wouldn’t have done it in fireteams because if you need 30 precision kills and 30 solar kills, you don’t need other people shooting your enemies. The goal is the farm, and I could farm all 5 bounties in less than 10 minutes, quit the activity and go get 5 more bounties. With a fireteam of 3, I was lucky to get 2-3 bounties done in a single 15-20 minute run.
If we get a locked fireteam for strikes, that means people can grab all the bounties they need, load the right guns and go in solo to do all the multitasking they want. They get XP, Bright Dust, a slightly harder strike experience since they are solo (let’s face it, strikes are easy), tons of bounties completed and don’t have to worry about what the other randoms in the strike are doing. It also allows people to 2-man strikes if they so choose as many people, myself included, play in pairs a lot of the time, and don’t need the 3rd player running amok while we try and get our stuff done.
This seems like an easy fix for Bungie, just make the strike playlist and each individual strike have the ability to fireteam lock and you’re done.
With regards to Nightfalls, I think they are in a decent place other than they can get boring to run. If Bungie would hide 1-3-5 Enhancement Prisms in each weeks Nightfall it would give people an extra incentive to do them each week, as once you hit gear cap, there isn’t really a need other than double reward weeks. You could have 1 Prism for Hero (1220), 3 for Legend (1250) and 5 for Master/Grandmaster (1280/1300), while only allowing a total of 5 to be collected per character per week. Meaning if you get the 3 hidden in 1250, they won’t be there when you do the 1280 and you’ll only have 2 left to find. You could either hide them, having like 20 spots in the Nightfall where they could be each week, or you could link them to an enemy or champion drop, forcing people to kill all enemies looking for them. Hiding them is a nod to all the great Destiny content creators as they now have a new article to write or video to make each week, but putting them in enemies forces people to engage with the content. Either way, I’m running a 1280 on each character each week to get my 15 Prisms. Could be fun for the designers to create places to hide them as well. It would also be nice to have since the guaranteed 18 Prisms from Pit of Heresy are going away at the start of Season 13.
I’m not going to put much more into Nightfalls since I think some major changes are coming for Season 14 when Vanguard gets the vendor changes that Crucible and Gambit are getting in Season 13.
TL/DR – Fireteam lock for strikes please.
