Details About Changes Coming to Nightfall Strikes Revealed in This Week at Bungie

The latest This Week at Bungie has been posted that lays out a number of big changes coming to Destiny 2 and Nightfall Strikes. Most notably, timer settings will change based on player feedback that indicated the timer was "pretty stressful" and that players would like to be able to move through them at their own pace. To address this, a number of changes will be coming as revealed by several Destiny 2 team members.

Christopher Barrett said that players should be able to form FIreteams of any size and be able to "determine their own challenge level, by going slow and steady or fast and wild with elective modifiers to test the most hardcore veterans". 

Designers John Favaro and Tyson Green laid out some big changes coming to how Nightfall is scored.

• Players will be rewarded for "engaging and defeating monsters" ahead of running past them.
• Emphasis on certain mechanics will be avoided to let players "determine the most effective Meta". 
• bigger rewards for bigger challenges "up to the limits of your own capabilities"
• time based rewards
• scoring will be team based as the "sum of individual performances"
• scoring will mainly be driven by kills and "secondarily by orb generation"
• the score will continue to "bleed", ala timer, over time. The devs will be watching this closely
• at certain thresholds, scoring is reduced. For instance, after 15 minutes, points earned is reduced by 50% and so on
• Challenge Cards "boost the challenge in exchange for score multipliers"
• "Players will be able to see their (and your) scores on new Nightfall Emblems available as drops in each Nightfall strike. These emblems (and others like them) are now the source of auras, which are automatically enabled if your personal score is above a global threshold. At first the thresholds will be set based on what we think might be tough for players to reach, but we look forward to you showing us how much we underestimated you. Then we can raise the bar based on community scores."

Players will be able to help the team by testing the new system in the coming weeks and changes to it will be made according to feedback. 

The letter goes on to discuss the delay of the Eater of Worlds Prestige mode, though the good news is that the release is planned to move forward Expansion 2 rather than in May.

As we got closer to releasing Prestige Eater of Worlds, we knew we wanted to do something more. Over the past few months, we have been prototyping a new way of adding difficulty and replayability to raid activities. Today, I’m happy to announce that we have decided to push this feature forward and release it for all the Leviathan Raid Content with the release of Expansion 2.

This new version of Prestige requires players to complete raids filled with deadly enemies using a curated loadout of weapons and a special modifier that enhances the way you play. 

Check out the full newsletter on the Destiny 2 site.