So, about the Journey

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Just finished a PVE playthrough of Siptah back-to-back after a playthrough of Exiled Lands, both with a friend.

I can with 100% confidence declare that the previous journey system was better in every way except for perhaps presentation. My reasons for this conclusion are as follows:

Instead of giving a universally useful reward (xp), xp is now trivial to gain and so the journey rewards you with stuff that either breaks the survival game immersion (like supply crates or weapons in the early game) or is completely useless.

Levelling used to be ROUGH. Once you got to around 20ish, if you wanted to get any higher, you were going to start checking items off of that journey. Now you can comfortably level all the way to 60 by just dash attacking every deer as you run past. You just hit 60 now, regardless. No effort required, just killing everything that gets in your way for a few days will do the trick. Because levelling used to be rough, the Journey was essential to every player’s progress.

Next up, the old journey was forgiving about doing stuff out of order. You could do the dungeons out of order, you could do the crafting steps out of order, all of it. It would still ENCOURAGE you to do them in order, but you would never be in a situation where someone’s “find the vault of the bat guys” didn’t trigger as complete on the way in because they didn’t step on the right pixel and you clear the whole dungeon with your friends only to clear it and find out someone didn’t get all the steps, and then the further realization comes that it doesn’t actually matter because the reward is a garbage Destiny mask anyway.

In the Exiled Lands I tried doing the Journey the old way, diligently checking off each item. I figured I was doing pretty good too, because I was leveling fast. It wasn’t until around the end of the first playthrough that I realized that I wasn’t even getting xp from it and that I was still getting like 3% per kill from deer at like level 45. By the time I hit Siptah, I came to the (correct) conclusion that it was worthless and just skipped the Journey all together.

I’m not trying to come across as “old thing good, new thing bad”. I think a lot of the stuff that’s been added is great. I like the treasury, I like the world events (wish there were more, though), the new tavern system looks amazing and I hope there’s lots more PVE siege variety added.

Not trying to throw the baby out with the bathwater here, but not all of the changes have been for the better (such as making the human NPCs completely oblivious to everything, if you need another example).

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I didn’t try the old journal system, since I took a break before journals were added at all, but I agree that this current one has some flaws.

Like you mentioned not being able to get credit unless I do it in a certain order is really annoying, the best example of this is probably the dungeon delver-entry.
And you’re also right that spamming kills is the fastest way to level right now, unless you play with mods and farm boss bounty heads.

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Levelling was never rough in this game and you always had methods to speed level, like at one point javelins, decorative skulls or now farming black ice, no matter what, you can level up to 60 in a couple of hours and completely ignore the journey.
Ten and now, the difference now is, that you at least can get some useful rewards from doing the journeys, like the master slaver hood for example.
What puts me off much more, is that they are more and more forcing you to play a certain way: want legendaries, you have to go into dungeons. Want the bar, you have to do purges.
It all seems more and more disconnected, forcing a certain gamestyle on you, making gameplay mechanics obsolete.

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100 % agree. Journey steps a so annoying now that I have all but given up trying to complete them. And what ever happened to the journeys for finding all the lore stones?

The old system had minor issues compared to the current system. Would have liked it much better if they would have added in the boss / storyline to get the “Defeat the Mummy of the Ring” journey step. Even a choice of final journeys for stay or leave the Exiled Lands that lead to a really cool have-to-complete-journey-to-get reward.

The current journey system is well presented and I’ve heard players say they even learn something doing them. But having to select the journey prior to exploring the lands is awful.

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There were exploits to make it not rough, definitely; exploits that should have been addressed more quickly than they were. That’s been the story of this game’s dev cycle. Mountains of bugs that need fixing and features that need polishing, but the devs never knew how to say “NO. STOP ASKING.” to the people spamming every live stream about wanting mounts, or katanas, or trebuchets, or being able to mount their trebuchet and shoot katanas out of it, or whatever.

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While I agree there’s been plenty exploits out there to level in the past, leveling with black ice is not.

I find the journey system now too tedious, specific and rigid. I only completed some of the steps once to get island ranger armor and ran into the same issue. Unacceptable in my books.

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My biggest issues with the journey are the not getting credit for things out of order, especially if the steps appear in multiple journeys and that they appear to have reordered knowledge requirements, without revisiting the journey system so that they make sense.

  1. Dismantler

    • Halfway through this journey, it requires you to get the fluid press, which unlocks at level 28. But the journey ends with dismantling an item; the basic dismantler unlocks at level 22 now.

  2. Master Chef

    • This journey is unlocked by unlocking the master chef knowledge, which you don’t get until level 55. The second step is to unlock the preservation box, which is available at level 43.

To me it makes more sense to have the stuff unlock in the same general order as utilized by the journey so the trigger to start master chef should, ideally, be unlocking the preservation box. You get that started and then wait to get to 55 to unlock the improved stove with the master chef knowledge.

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The new motto here is all about $$$$. The quicker you get to 60, the more $$$ you spend.

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I hadnt played much in awhile because I have been busy with mods, but last night I was checking out EL because I hadnt in awhile on the beta client. I found the journey system to be a big improvement personally. I never use boosted rates so the initial packs and things were nice and if I put my modders hat back on, its a great method for adding rp elements in the devkit for pc. Its a very nice framework for customization beyond its base game usage. I can see how that would be lost if people are unmodded or using mods that dont utilize it, but even on its own I prefer it to the old journey steps. Even the fact that if you dont want any hand holding at all, you can just clear the first journey and not select anything and its pretty much out of view.

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I hope that’s not true. It may well be, but I hope not.

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According to one friend who has played the TestLive (Public Beta), these accrued Journey Step issues are fixed. I have yet to verify it myself, but plan to this afternoon if possible. It is noted in the Patch Notes, so here’s hoping!

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