[2020] Patrol Zones Rework and Overhaul

Originally posted by ZilorZilhaust

Hi Gunmaster! Thank you so much for the reply! I'm happy to elaborate on anything and everything. :-)

To me when someone is on patrol they are taking things as they come, they're out there looking for trouble and trying to keep the place safe. As the system currently stands you're not naturally patrolling. You're going into an area and bringing up your ghost and finding a patrol beacon that's got a quick turn around time to get whatever objective requires it done. If you're looking for planetary materials you go to the Planetary Vendor and get the 4 bounties and do those specific things. It's very structured for something that I think would feel better as a more free form experience that erred towards an open world feeling.

The experience itself isn't fluid because it just feels like you're doing some checklist items from other activities, either for a bounty, quest or to get some planetary mats and then moving off. I think it's safe to say that very few people go into a patrol zone in order to just patrol. There isn't really much of a reason to since there isn't much in the way of rewards and the way that the Patrol Zones are have ended up with them being kind of stagnant this long on.

I think the problem at the time with Challenges wasn't with the Challenges themselves but with a lot of things that were going on with Destiny 2 at the time. There wasn't a whole lot of anything to opt into doing and having bounties gave us the ability to to choose to do something. I'm not saying remove all bounties, I think they're good for Vanguard, Crucible, Gambit, Etc. However when it comes to Patrolling and given the nature of what actually patrolling a zone would entail it makes more sense to have something akin to Challenges where you're working to keep the whole area safe. So I do think bounties and player agency are important but should be saved for more targeted activities, patrols I think would benefit from being a more free form experience.

Public Events have powerful enemies but I can't recall the last Public Event where the boss took more than 5-10 seconds to melt into oblivion. Don't get me wrong, that is fun in it's own right but what was occurring with the Vex Offensive on the moon with the Invasions was cool. It required people to work together and then if you did well you got to fight a more powerful enemy still. That was a lot of fun and it took time and was challenging. I put the bit in there about tracking guardian kills because the arbitrary unknown time before an enemy leaves doesn't feel good to me.

I think that you could hinge some of the mechanics for these world bosses off of established mechanics from other patrol zone activities so we're using familiar existing mechanics that people have an established understanding of in order to help ease them into something that is different and more difficult but ultimately something they have completed something like before.

• Hive Knight World Boss
  • The Hive Knight World Boss spawns and is Immune to Damage
  • When the Hive Knight Spawns so does a Powerful Wizard and 3 Shielded Crystals
  • The Crystals are generating a Portal and the Portal is spewing out Thrall to attack players and defend the Hive Knight World Boss.

1. Kill the Wizard (This is evident and expected because it's a powerful enemy and it's natural to target them)
2. This creates a field on the ground like the one from Escalation Protocol. When this is spawned the Thrall from the portal swarm it. You have to stand in it to lower the shields on the Crystals and then Destroy them.
3. Destroying the Crystals severs the connection to the portal, stops the Thrall swarm from spawning, and weakens the Hive Knight World Boss allowing it to actually take damage.
4. The damage phase is controlled by the players. When the World Boss Hive Knight kills X Amount of Guardians he's able to summon a new Wizard which then opens the portal and creates the crystals starting the cycle over again.

With an encounter like this it's more complicated than an HVT or Public Event Heroic but it uses a lot of familiar mechanics that are used elsewhere in the patrol zones. So what you should do is relatively clear.

• Giant Taken World Boss (I didn't specify an archetype cause I wasn't sure, picturing big thrall boy)
  • This giant taken world boss spawns and with it a number of blights.
  • The giant taken has two main aspects. If you're near it you take constant damage. It is immune entirely to damage however there are spheres of Darkness around its knees.

1. You step into a blight. This gives you immunity to the constant damage effect. This also allows you to target the knee weak points to break the Darkness Sphere.
2. When it's broken you unload on it the knees until it topples over, not unlike a spider tank, this reveals a weak spot atop it's head.
3. You can attack this for critical damage, or you can enter a blight and then attack that weak spot to do critical+ damage and take it down even faster.

I think so long as familiar mechanics from existing public events are mix and matched into these encounters they can be expanded on and used in new ways to create interesting World Boss Encounters that leverage existing knowledge for public events to make them non-frustrating. Or, at least, as non-frustrating as they already are.

To comment on if that pillar is important, I do think so but I think it's okay if occasionally there is an exception to that. If 95% of the content in a patrol zone is relatively easy to sort out with some random guardians I think it's okay for 5% of it to be a bit harder.

As far as destinations, that's really the whole of my suggestions. I think there is a lot to be done with how Strikes are broken down right now as a playlist and activity but that doesn't sound so much like your area or really in theme with the rest of this post.

Thank you again for the reply. It made my day!

Originally posted by thebakedpotatoe

Challenges should have just been endless, like repeatable bounties. You clear one, get the reward, a new one loads into its spot.

A public event update might be good. The vex invasion felt kinda fun, but my favorite thing in d1 was where a taken event and public event happened at the same time. Patrols also need a bit more enemies on the map, especially because player presence actively causes enemies not to spawn. I've legitimate had players abuse this to get me to leave the zone. That's a bigger problem with "final blows" style bounties and objectives though (btw, final blows quest steps actively suck and cause way to many problems in this game) and less about other problems.

Originally posted by Joey2Chainz

First I would like to say this was a very well written post from OP and also, a great response from yourself. With that said, I do have an issue that caused immense frustration yesterday while playing.

Loaded up Mars patrol to finish my weekly flashpoint and run some public events but there were two guardians in interceptors who were camping the rally flag killing all other guardians in the area. Never knew this was a thing but it was a very frustrating experience. Even when the public event did spawn, they clearly were only going after other players instead of participating in the event. Fast traveled out of there and said screw it until I was put into another instance.

Originally posted by LawlessCoffeh

One thing, I'd really like to have like, a tiny bit of choice, or the ability to reject and replace a crapshoot objective that I'm NOT going to do.

Part of the reason I didn't like objectives as they were implemented was that if I didn't want to do one, I didn't really have any other options, and the problem here is psychological in part.

Fortnite has challenges that are given to you daily, and you have the option to replace one a day if you don't like it (IE: Play a match with a friend). I feel like this is an acceptable compromise, I'm not sure how you'd work in the option to replace one though.