Marcus Richards
With Destiny 2‘s Season of the Lost came a lot of changes and new elements to the game that changed things around, paving the way for a different meta and a big gameplay shift. This was partly achieved thanks to all the tweaks and fine-tuning that fusion rifles went through with the seasonal sandbox patch, but also to the very interesting selection of seasonal mods within the Wayfinder’s Compass artifact. While Particle Deconstruction was immediately identified by players as the best mod for huge DPS numbers in Season of the Lost, the addition of Ager’s Scepter also had an impact on Stasis builds, making them effectively more powerful and viable in high-end content.
Season of the Lost also brought a complete rework of the Trials of Osiris system, which was extremely successful and praised by Destiny 2 players, even those who normally wouldn’t really enjoy PVP. As for PVE, things got interesting with Bungie finally making Scorn Champions and immediately throwing them into the mix of the current Nightfall rotation to spice things up, starting with the iconic Hollowed Lair Nightfall in week 1. Yesterday, Destiny 2 players could finally access Grandmaster Nightfalls for the first time this season, precisely with Hollowed Lair becoming once again the first in rotation to get this treatment.
Destiny 2: Why Mini Screebs Are Good for the Game
Grandmaster Nightfalls are the pinnacle of hard PVE content in Destiny 2 alongside Raids, and especially so Master Raids, albeit the only one getting this treatment thus far was Vault of Glass in Season of the Splicer. The difficulty of GM Nightfalls lies in its modifiers, but also the fact that if the whole team dies, they are taken to Orbit regardless of the number of revive tokens currently available, making it a very punishing activity. Modifiers also typically play a big part in how hard a specific Nightfall is, aside from the fact that some Nightfalls might be especially hard on their own even before delving into the Grandmaster version for them.
Every Grandmaster Nightfall also comes with a specific unique modifier for it, and while this often translates into generic elemental and situational damage increase from enemies within the activity, this is not the case for Hollowed Lair. Things kicked off with a boom in Destiny 2‘s new GM Nightfall rotation, as the Strike now features a brand-new modifier called Festering Rupture, which makes Scorn Stalkers spawn ‘mini Screebs’ on death. Destiny 2 players who have been around long enough to know what Screebs are and to fear them will most likely hate this modifier, as the mini version of the Scorn Screebs makes them harder to see and more agile.
Because Screebs exploding near players will always one-shot them, this can be especially difficult to handle in the GM version of Hollowed Lair, and even more so thanks to the incredible number of Scorn Stalkers present in the Strike. However, this makes for a brilliant addition that’s also very unusual for Bungie’s standards, particularly seeing how the company handled Master Vault of Glass. As a matter of fact, the Raid’s Master variant was basically scaled up in difficulty by adding more enemies, especially Champions, and extra layers of protection for them via more HP and more damage dealt.
Festering Rupture’s mini Screebs, instead, are a great way of increasing the difficulty of the GM Nightfall by making it more challenging and nerve-racking without artificially increasing difficulty. Mini Screebs also became the new Destiny 2 mascotte after the baby Eliksni from last Season, so much so that some players have proposed plushies and in-game ornaments for Exotic weapons based on them. Modifiers like this should be the new rule rather than the exception, as they make things more fun and yet preserve the spirit of hard content. Ultimately, other GM Nightfalls should have something like the mini Screebs as well, including the upcoming GMs this Season.
