Data Shows Just How Broken Destiny 2’s Vendor Engram Focusing Is

“At the start of Season of the Wish, ritual activities completion rewards will now include additional drops of ritual engrams (Vanguard, Crucible, Gambit). This influx of engrams will let players focus more often for gear from Seasons past and present.”

Remember that? How’s that been working out?

If you’ve been playing Destiny 2 at all this season, you know that what Bungie said in a pre-Wish TWAB above has simply not come to pass. Engrams are sparse, focusing is massively expensive, and it feels like we’re getting far less loot, not more. Well, turns out there’s data to support that.

Commander Pika took data from a whole lot of ritual activities, calculate the engrams drops and figured out what’s going wrong here. Here are the takeaways:

• The average of all ritual playlists, Vanguard Strikes, Crucible and Gambit, is a vendor engram drop rate of about 30%, or just under.
• This is extremely close to what past data suggests about the former ritual playlist drop rate, if not a bit lower, indicating that there has not been an engram drop rate increase at all.
• Crucible can be a bit higher if you win consistently, Iron Banner is noticeably higher, almost a 50% drop rate with a 75% chance on a win.
• Given the increase in costs to weapon focusing, namely the ones that now cost three engrams, this means players are getting 50% fewer weapons through focusing. PvP players, if you win a good amount, is more like 20-30% less instead.
• The mathematical solution Commander Pika proposes is that to offset the new costs, Bungie would have to both double the engram drop rate and lower focusing cost to 2. Or instead just lower the focusing cost to 1. But the Crucible win/loss/rep system screws up this math a bit.

The overall point is that the engram drop rate does not seem to have been meaningfully improved as promised from ritual activities, if it’s been improved at all. In turn, the increased focusing costs means less overall loot. If you’ve engaged with this system at all, math aside, you know this at least feels correct, and here’s the data to show it.

Given the current state of Destiny it would not surprise me if they simply…didn’t increase the drop rate, either forgetting or thinking they did but some tech issue prevented it from actually happening. But since it’s not a glaring bug, it hasn’t been investigated over a month into the season.

The easiest answer is to just lower the focusing costs, which is the biggest problem most people have with the current system, though of course it would be nice if they actually made the drop rates what they were supposed to be. Whatever is going on, the system isn’t working and somehow is far less rewarding than it was previously. Fixes need to be made.

Commander Pika also made a long video on this that’s worth watching:

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