Destiny 2 finally got transmog with Season 14, but the grind is more tedious than Guardians feared. If you want to look good in the MMO shooter, you have to work hard, spending up to 180 hours per season.
It’s worse than feared: Destiny 2 kicked off the new Season 14 on May 11. One of the main attractions of the Splicer Season is transmog – which also plays a prominent role in the cool trailer. Guardians were really excited for it, as they have wanted transmog like in other MMOs since 2014.
- The more that became known about the cosmetic feature, the worse the fears became. Transmog had a reputation before its release for being too complex and becoming too expensive due to artificial stretching and limitations.
- Now guardians are testing transmog and finding out that the artificial limits are the least of the problems, as the grind requires an unreasonable amount of work.
- It should take up to 180 hours to reach the limit of – uh – transmogifiable in Season 14. A whole gaming evening should go for each item, and a complete outfit easily requires 24 hours of gameplay.
Transmog is useful when the new armor is stronger or at a higher level, but you don’t like its appearance. This way, players can run around as they like without sacrificing the power of new items.
“180 Hours of Torture per Season”
Why does it take so long? The high time investment goes hand in hand with another criticism: Transmog is too complex. To transform even just one item and unlock your favorite look permanently, you have to put in a lot of effort.
Armor synthesis, the Destiny term for transmog, requires 3 new resources for each item, a bounty, and a visit to a gigantic sewing machine.
Here are all the steps and how long they take:
- Defeat enemies to earn synthetic threads. Guardians have discovered that these synthetic threads drop everywhere, but are practically stuck behind a kind of time lock.
- Every 2 minutes a kill gives you such a thread and you need 150 of them – so that’s 300 minutes or 5 hours. The calculations come from eager guardians on Raidsecrets (via reddit).
- After 5 hours of berserk killing enemies, you then pick up a bounty from Ada-1 in the Tower that costs 150 synthetic threads and provides you with more materials for synthesis.
- But wait, these bounties are quite involved. Tasks like defeat 40 champions or capture 30 zones in the crucible must be mastered – some of them take several hours (you choose the activity yourself).
- After the grind of at least 6 hours, you then visit Ada’s oversized sewing machine in the Tower and convert everything into the final material “synthetic fabric plate,” which is only usable for the class with which you converted it.
- Finally, use synthetic fabric to convert a single unlocked armor piece from your collections into a universal armor ornament.
If we assume at least 6 hours of grind for one item, we come to over 24 hours of gameplay for an outfit, which is a set of 5 armor pieces.
In one season, you can normally earn up to 10 syntheses through bounties. That makes 60 hours per character – or 180 hours per season if you want to max out the transmog cap with all 3 characters. However, the cap is likely still a long way off for most players.
That’s why the hard grind only becomes apparent later
It looks pretty at the start: To properly hook the guardians, you get enough synthesis material through the seasonal quest to afford 11 transmog processes per character. Even the first, usually very expensive bounty is on the house.
And transmog itself is truly impressive. You can neatly see all available items in a new menu, finally apply shaders as a preview for the entire outfit, and have many options to make your guardian look stylish.
But if you want more from transmog, you face the monstrous grind we described above. Or you reach for the silver wallet. Because with the premium currency, you save a massive amount of time. This shortcut in the cash shop is understandable, but the Eververse has always had a bad reputation among players.
Is the frustration exaggerated? With all the criticism, however, two points should not be forgotten:
- Transmog is purely cosmetic, so it has no advantage or influence on gameplay. Although some guardians swear that you fight better when you look unbeatable.
- The transmog samples are surely enough for some guardians to easily create 2 stylish looks per character, which they can then apply to any legendary armor.
If you’re content with a bounty per season, which you earn alongside multiple sessions, you may hardly notice all the grind.
What do you think of transmog in Destiny 2? Do you agree with the majority of guardians, saying that the grind is absolutely exaggerated and that Bungie wants to motivate players to shortcut through the Eververse? Were you excited about the cosmetic feature and don’t know what to wear first, or do you think the look of the guardian is anyway secondary? Let us know in the comments.
