Get up to date with Destiny's new Pinnacle leveling system in Shadowkeep

With the release of Shadowkeep and the start of the new Season of the Undying, Bungie has changed how the pinnacle leveling system works, with less Powerful Gear sources in the game, and new source tiers giving Power increases.

In previous seasons of Destiny 2 and its content releases, Bungie had a slightly different approach to the way that the games players would achieve higher power levels when compared to the current system. Previously, once the player reached the ‘soft cap’ of the leveling system the only way to grow in Power was to hunt for Power Gear from the Weekly and Daily challenges as well as Prime Engrams. The main rule of thumb within this system was that the easy activities would give a small boost to the player’s average power but harder activities would give a much more substantial boost until the player reaches the hard cap within the leveling system.

With the release of Shadowkeep and the start of the new Season of the Undying, Bungie changed this system in a small way. Bungie decreased the overall sources of Powerful Gear and gave these sources tiers of either 1,2 or 3 with the Power increase from these tiers being 3, 4 and 6 respectively.

Once the player has used these Powerful rewards to reach level 950 they will have reached another cap within the leveling system. To reach the new hard cap of  960 from 950, the player will need to complete Pinnacle activities which are some of the hardest activities in the game such as the Garden of Salvation raid, 100k Nightfall points, Master difficulty activities, and Iron Banner bounties. These Pinnacle activities are the only way to make progress past a base level of 950 as all other Powerful Gear activities will simply reward on-level gear. 

Up until recently, these Pinnacle activities would only drop gear at +1 of the player’s current average Power level which posed a significant problem to many players as this meant that all gear slots would need to be 951 before Pinnacle activities began to drop 952 gear. The way this system worked created an enormous grind for any average player that wished to reach a base Power level of 960, a grind that couldn't even be completed by the end of the season.

In a season, if a player completes every single Pinnacle Gear activity that is available to them there is a total of 62 drops. The problem here is that if a player has perfect RNG and does not get a duplicate drop, which would slow progress, it takes 80 drops to get from 950 to 960. Therefore, with Pinnacle drops being only +1 it is impossible to reach the hard cap of 960 base Power. Many players even speculated that since the grind from 950 to 960 was so immense that it is supposed to be completed over the whole year rather than a single season.

Luckily, Bungie has heard the community outcry and recently released a hotfix to increase Pinnacle Gear drops from +1 power to +2 power. This fix allows players to progress from 950 to 960 at a pace similar to the regular Powerful Gear drops albeit at a slightly slower pace. Players are also able to use Prime Engrams to round out any gear slots that are lagging behind the others to act as a sort of failsafe from progressing too slowly.

This change has had some mixed reactions amongst the Destiny community. Professional Destiny streamer Connor ‘Gigz’ White posted two tweets giving a summary of his thoughts on the change saying:  “+2 pinnacles kinda stinky. Too easy” and “High key this is the best Destiny PvE has ever been. I think +2 pinnacles made the pinnacle progression too easy, but other than that I’m having a great time”.

On the other end of the spectrum, Reddit user ‘AlwaySTheSame738’ posted on the Destiny subreddit giving their praise for the change. They said: “Yesterday, I hit a gear score LVL 953, from 950, because of the new +2 pinnacle engram system. Thanks again for listening to the feedback from the community, much appreciated!”. Many of the comments in this thread also gave their praise for the new Pinnacle changes.

Check out the full Hotfix patch notes for other changes such as a fix to the Izanagi’s Burden quest here.