We are now two weeks in to Master Vault of Glass.  I still have not cleared it with my regular raid team (or otherwise), though I believe I could find a team to get a clear if I really wanted to.  But I’ve played enough to have an opinion based on my playing experience.

Master Vault of Glass differs from regular Vault of Glass in two ways.  First, there are additional champions throughout the encounters.  Second, the power level of the enemies is set to 1450.  In Season of the Splicer, the power cap including pinnacles is 1420, which means that to be on par with the enemies you have to have 30 levels of artifact power, which is a little over season rank 463.  Needless to say, only a small minority of the population will reach 1450 this season.  This has led to predictable complaints.

One complaint is that the rewards are not worth the struggle (the rewards are a single timelost weapon available each week from the challenge and the possibility of higher-stat armor).  In general players that are more loot-driven than experience- or completionist-driven have this complaint.  As I am not loot-driven and I haven’t completed the seal yet the loot is not yet an issue for me.

Another complaint category is the 1450 power level.  Generally people object to artifact power to making Master mode easier either because (1) they think it should be easier generally; or (2) they think it should be at a set difficulty for all players.  Often this category of complaints is dressed up in the label of “Artificial Difficulty.”

A good example is this Youtube video from Fallout, in which he gives this “loose definition” of “Artificial Difficulty”:  “Making things more challenging not by improving the enemy AI or by adding more complex in-game mechanics but by stacking the deck in other areas.”  He appears to be firmly in camp (2), because his complaint about artifact power being useful is that it rewards “the wrong thing” in that he “[doesn’t] want to beat a challenging end-game activity through bounty farming” because “that doesn’t make [him] feel accomplished.”

Curiously, he also says this is an “accessibility” issue in that players who have reached 1420 and also gone well above rank 100 in the season pass are still finding master mode too difficult.  Fallout contrasts this with “contest mode” which he says is an example of power-level difficulty “done right”.

Contest Mode caps a player’s power level at 20 levels below each encounter, regardless of their actual power level.  That’s 1430, or 10 power levels above the pinnacle cap.  Fallout praising contest mode as having better “accessibility” doesn’t make sense to me, because the people he described as finding master VoG too hard despite having played a lot had to be all over 1430.  So it’s not a day one accessibility issue.

And having contest mode apply for all time to Master VoG is worse for accessibility.  In general, all Destiny content except for Grandmaster nightfalls can eventually be overleveled, making it easier.  This season 1450 is a reach for all but the most dedicated players.  Next season 1450 will be only 20 artifact power levels which is not at all uncommon.  And the season after that it will be only 10 power levels (or less, if the power cap increases by more than 10 for the Witch Queen release).  Thus, over the long term, setting a power level rather than using contest mode makes Master mode more accessible, not less.

I don’t think it’s useful to use pejorative terms like “Artificial Difficulty” to describe some methods of making content more challenging than others.  Champions add mechanics.  Power level makes enemies tougher and therefore requires different tactics.  At least some of that would be necessary even if more complex mechanics were added.  At the end of the day master mode is hard, and it is intended to be hard, and people will just have to play more carefully than they are used to in order to clear it. I think that is good and what I want from a “Master” mode.