Destiny 2's power level cap to increase again in the Season of the Worthy

With a new Season comes new heights of Power for Guardians to chase and the upcoming Season of the Worthy is no different. Bungie has decided to throw the usual minuscule Power increase between Seasons out the window in favor of a more substantial increase this upcoming Season of the Worthy.

The Destiny 2 dev team had this to say about the changes: "We’re raising the ‘cap’ for gear drops 40 points—powerful gear will now drop up to 1000, with pinnacle drops going up to 1010. The soft cap has also been effectively raised 50 points.

"Gear drops from nearly all sources will continue to be upgraded until 950 Power, and powerful reward sources will not be required to progress to 950," they added.

The release of Season of the Worthy will see a 40 point increase to the Powerful reward from 960 to 1000 with the Pinnacle reward cap becoming 1010 which is the typical 10 Power difference between the two reward types.

This larger increase in Power between Seasons is likely to accommodate the higher difficulty activities being released in Season of the Worthy such as Grandmaster Nightfalls and Legendary Lost Sectors. This greater Power increase will create a smoother difficulty curve up towards these harder activities.

The soft cap has also thankfully been raised to 950 from its previous 900 meaning that any generic loot drops from various sources such as Strikes, Gambit and Crucible will help to raise the Guardian’s Power level.

This change cannot come soon enough as Trials of Osiris will be releasing on March 13th with a 960 Power Level requirement to compete. Without this soft cap increase, a returning player who was at the current 900 soft cap would need to grind all sources of Powerful rewards for over 3 weeks in order to reach the 960 requirements.

With this soft cap increase, between all the weekly Powerful rewards and a few Prime Engrams, a returning player should be able to hit the 960 requirement before Trials of Osiris starts.

Some smaller changes to the Power grind will also be coming mid-Season in the form of increasing the available sources of Pinnacle rewards. 

“We’re also looking to make some quality of life updates in the pinnacle band. Starting in 2.8.1. (coming mid-Season), we’ll be upgrading some existing powerful rewards to pinnacle rewards. These are the weekly Crucible, Strike, and Gambit challenges, as well as the weekly clan engram,” Bungie said in their latest update.

"With this change, we want to increase the total number of pinnacle power sources in the game, broaden pinnacle drop access, as well as increase the pools of items that can drop in the pinnacle band."

As it stands, the max Power cap granted by Pinnacle rewards is really only available to the more hardcore section of Destiny 2’s player base as the activities that grant these rewards are much more difficult, have no matchmaking and requiring a coordinated Fireteam.

This change will simply allow a more casual audience to still be able to reach the max Power, albeit slower than the players who are doing the Raids and 100k Nightfalls.

As a final note, Bungie gave a sneak peek into some changes to what they call ‘slot imbalances’. Slot imbalance is always a frustrating occurrence and is where a player is rewarded with Powerful Gear of the same slot, such as 4 Helmet drops in a row, which causes no Power gain after the first Helmet drop

“We’ve been looking at player feedback for some time, and are investigating a few approaches to the problem space. We’re looking to have an update on that at a later date. Until then, we hope the additional sources will help you on your climb.” says the dev team.

So at least we know that Bungie identifies that slot imbalance is an annoying aspect of Powerful and Pinnacle rewards. Hopefully, this change comes sooner rather than later. 

These Powerful and Pinnacle reward changes will go live alongside Season of the Worthy on March 10.