Heroic strikes and prestige Nightfalls are gone in Destiny 2: Forsaken

The end of the adjective era

In this week’s This Week at Bungie, the studio revealed how some of Destiny 2’s late-game activities will change when Forsaken is released early next month. This mostly includes strikes and Nightfalls, the difficult versions of which are being retired. Heroic strikes and prestige Nightfalls will instead be replaced with a more streamlined system, designed to accommodate players who purchase Forsaken, as well as those that don’t. Players who don’t own Forsaken will be referred to as “Legacy players” by Bungie going forward.

When Forsaken launches, strikes will have three difficulty settings: power 300, 400, and 500. Once a player has reached 40-power above a difficulty setting, it will be disabled for them, ensuring that the 500 setting will always have players months after release. All strikes will now have modifiers to compensate for the loss of heroic mode. For players who don’t own Forsaken, the strike difficulty will be capped at 200, although modifiers will still be applied.

The Nightfall is changing in a few meaningful ways as well. With the removal of the prestige difficulty, the base Nightfall will become harder to complete. The Nightfall will also no longer include one strike per week, as it always has. Instead, players will be able to choose from three available strikes, although they’ll only be able to select that strike if they own the expansion it was released in.

In This Week at Bungie, Bungie commented that this new Nightfall system should allow players to hunt for the strike-specific loot they want more frequently, without having to wait months for that Nightfall to return. Players without Forsaken will still be able to use their Challenge Card to add modifiers, although the 270 Nightfall will no longer have scoring effects.

Bungie is also changing a few other activities, such as story meditations and adventures. All planets will now have heroic versions of their adventures, with one featured per day when its location is the weekly flashpoint. Mars and Mercury will not receive these changes, although players will be able to take one extra adventure during Flashpoint week.

Ikora’s story mission meditations will be completely replaced by the new heroic story mission playlist. These missions, as well as the weekly heroic adventures, will share the same daily and weekly modifiers as the strike playlist.

While all of these changes will become active on Sept. 4, when Forsaken is released, some of them will show up on Aug. 28, ahead of launch. However, they will likely be missing a few features — such as strike scoring — until the Destiny 2 expansion properly launches a week later.