Playing Destiny 2 with a new player will quickly open your eyes to how arcane and unapproachable the game has become. It’s easy to take the language of Destiny for granted once you’ve learned to speak it, but try to teach someone else how to play and you’ll quickly see how hard it is to catch up. We like to make a big deal out of the content vault because it excludes so many new players from important narrative moments, but to be honest, there’s people in my clan that have thousands of hours in the game and still have no idea what’s going on in the story.
The biggest barrier for new players is without a doubt the poor availability of mods. Many mods have become practically essential, and the process for obtaining them hasn’t been updated in years. Destiny 2 is long overdue for an overhaul to mod acquisition, because the current system is leaving new and casual players behind.
Early on in Destiny 2, mods were pretty straightforward. Weapon mods provided stat boosts to your guns by improving their recoil direction or ready speed, while armor mods gave you useful perks like better target acquisition or more frequent ammo drops. With the introduction of Charged with Light mods in Season of Dawn, mods started providing more powerful synergies that influenced playstyle. Charged with Light mods quickly became core to many builds and mandatory for high-level endgame content like Grandmaster Nightfalls. A new mod category, Warmind Cell mods, was introduced in the following season, and a third type, Elemental Well mods, was introduced during last year’s Season of the Chosen. All three types have come in and out of the meta from season to season, but there hasn’t been a time when at least some kind of mod synergy wasn’t essential since Charged with Light was first introduced.
If you’ve been playing consistently since Season of Dawn, you almost certainly have every CWL, Warmind, and Well mod already. These mods were rewarded for reaching certain milestones throughout each season. It wasn’t difficult as long as you were playing consistently. Getting them after the fact, however, is a whole different story.
To date, there’s still only two vendors that sell mods. Banshee sells a selection of four weapon mods, while Ada sells a mix of four armor mods, which can include both standard mods and seasonal mods from the past. The selection they offer is completely random and changes once every day at reset. If there’s a specific mod you’re missing, your only hope is checking Ada’s supply every single day until it shows up.
The website DestinyInsights.com tracks how many times each Charged with Light and Warmind Cell mod has appeared in Ada’s store over an entire year. In the last 365 days, Lucent Blade has only shown up three times. No CWL mod has been available more than 17 times, or once every three weeks, and the average Warmind Cell mod only appears eight times a year. Elemental Well mods are less than a year old so we don’t have the data, but they will have diluted the pool even further. Ada still only sells four mods each day, so with each new mod category Bungie introduces, it just keeps getting harder and harder to find older mods. This doesn’t just affect brand-new players. You could be into Destiny for multiple seasons, playing every day, and still be missing core parts of your kit.
Missing mods won’t stop you from playing the game, but it will certainly make it a lot more difficult. In the new Void 3.0 system, a Hunter without the Reaping Wellmaker mod is missing the engine that powers the entire build. There are other ways to make void wells, but if you don’t have Reaping Wellmaker, you’re going to be far less effective. Without the High Energy Fire mod, you’re going to be doing 20 percent less damage against the Raid bosses. Some of these mods make the difference between successful and failure in a lot of activities, and it's absurd that there’s no real way to get them.
I’d like to see some kind of lockout system for Ada that prevents her from selling mods you already have. That way, dedicated players can log in every day and slowly but surely finish their collection over the course of a few weeks. I’d also like to see these armor mods drop from playlist activities, as some mods have in the past. I wouldn’t even have a problem with old armor mods getting automatically unlocked when the season or expansion ends. Bungie already does this with power level, so why not give people old mods to help them catch up too? It’s bad enough that Banshee sells such a small selection of weapon mods that almost never change when Ada’s inventory is constantly growing, there has to be a better way to get the mods people need.
Void 3.0 has brought this issue to the foreground because so many Elemental Well mods are essential components to void builds, but this has been a problem since the end of Season of Dawn in June 2020. New players should experience as little friction as possible when they’re feeling things out and deciding whether they want to commit to the life of a Destiny player, but the inability to get key mods is a huge turn-off.
I would love to take new players into Vow of the Disciple and show them all the amazing things Destiny has to offer, but when they’re missing every exotic gun, catalyst, armor piece, and specialty mod you need in order to be competitive, they’re immediately going to feel like there’s no way to catch up. I personally missed most of Season of the Worthy and I’m still trying to fill in my Warmind Cell collection almost two years later. There’s plenty of other things to pursue in Destiny 2; mods should be readily available for everyone.