Destiny 2 has seen a real lack of new Strikes added over the last couple of years. However, each season of the game has brought its own batch of repeatable seasonal missions. So, when Lightfall dropped, Bungie decided to add some of these seasonal missions into the game’s Strike and Nightfall rotation. It seemed like a reasonable enough decision, adding more variety to these sorely-lacking modes while drawing on some of the great activities that would otherwise simply be vaulted. But after a week of running Heist Battleground: Mars as the weekly featured Nightfall, it’s clear that this was a mistake.
To begin with, the Battlegrounds missions tend to be longer than Strikes — the Season of the Seraph Heist missions in particular. These missions also feature sets of mechanics that were designed to be experienced over the course of a season. In the Heist Battlegrounds missions, for instance, there are various traps like laser beams placed throughout. During the Season of the Seraph, players gradually unlocked upgrades that mades these missions less perilous over the course of the season. Now that these missions are in the Nightfall playlist, those upgrades are gone.
In the Nightfall version of the Heist Battleground: Mars mission, players have to deal with not only instant-kill lasers, but the Deathsinger that spawns and disables abilities unless it’s immediately killed. Then there’s the issue of players spreading out and activating more than one tower at once at the beginning of the mission, spawning countless enemies that can easily overwhelm you.
By the time you’ve raised the towers, made it into the base, blasted the seals on the door and met with the boss, you’re probably out of time and losing points. Then you have to deal with a boss who can disappear and one shot you inside of a Well of Radiance. Even on Hero difficulty, this is all pretty miserable. We can’t imagine doing it on Grandmaster.
Were the Heist Battlegrounds missions tuned at all for the Nightfall playlist? It doesn’t feel like it. While we appreciate the effort to add more variety to the mix of Vanguard Operations, Heist Battleground: Mars just seems out of place. It’s long, frustrating, and difficult for all of the wrong reasons. Why can’t we just have the Festering Core back?
