While I believe that Destiny 2’s current season, Season of the Seraph, is the best season the game has seen in quite some time (you can read what I think about it here), that doesn’t make it perfect. With the new season came new seasonal activities, including Heist Battlegrounds and weekly story missions, each filled with various traps for players to avoid. Unfortunately, those traps are more of an annoyance than they are a fun and interesting gameplay mechanic for players to look forward to.
SERAPH TOWERS
Some of those traps come in the form of Seraph towers. These tall, intimidating towers aim a bright red-orange laser at players as they attempt to fight their way through hordes of combatants. While a player is within the line-of-sight of these lasers, a “15-second” debuff called “Threat Detection” is applied to them. Once the debuff’s timer runs out, the Seraph tower fires at and kills the player. If the player can manage to find a barrier of some kind to evade the line-of-sight of these towers, however, the player is safe and the debuff’s timer begins refreshing.
For starters, although the “Threat Detection” debuff has a 15-second timer, it is much shorter than 15 seconds. In fact, I actually timed the debuff myself and discovered it only lasts for roughly 9 seconds. Maybe Bungie thought a 9-second timer was too random of a number and decided to make it a fake 15. I don’t know. Whatever their reasoning was, 15 actual seconds might have been nice considering how difficult it is not only to find cover in 9 seconds but to find cover that actually works. I have been caught multiple times behind rocks and walls that for whatever reason don’t seem to block the lasers enough for me to avoid getting killed by them.
LASERS
In both the Heist Battlegrounds and the weekly story missions, players will also have to work to avoid “trip” lasers. These lasers shoot out from the walls and will unforgivably one-shot anyone without the new damage-reducing buff provided by the Exo Frame in the H.E.L.M.
While these are a little more fun to deal with than the Seraph Towers, they are still quite an annoyance. Many of the lasers that require players to jump over them are ironically placed in areas with little overhead room, meaning jumps have to be perfectly timed to evade them. Some are even placed within door frames, for whatever reason, meaning you will inevitably hit the top of the door frame trying to jump over the lasers, sometimes resulting in death.
Some lasers are even set to a timer, leaving them active in short increments, and if a player happens to run into a room too quickly, they might find themselves right in the path of lasers that were previously inactive. Cheers to all of you first-timers who rushed into a hallway death trap without warning.
I have nothing against unique gameplay mechanics being added to each season in Destiny 2, but if Bungie is going to do this, they should at least be mechanics that are fun to experience, not just unnecessary and often unavoidable annoyances meant to painfully slow players down. Don’t get me wrong, I am thoroughly enjoying Season of the Seraph. I just wish the aforementioned obstacles functioned a bit differently.
Destiny 2 is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.
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