While I am no stranger to hyperbole, I don’t think I’m overstating the recent launch of Destiny 2’s Ash and Iron “Major Update,” something that is now meant to pass the time between a six month wait between expansions, now that we don’t have actual seasons.
Just minutes after a preview of the next expansion, Renegades, actually looked pretty fantastic, the balloon popped when Ash and Iron launched and it was a disaster on every level.
The bugs came fast and furious, and early ones like seven kills ending Crucible games or the new activity being softlocked because everyone died between zones were at least fixed fast. But there are a wide range of both broken skills and weapons (go try out Sturm), and some promised updates or nerf reversions don’t seem to have happened at all. Every half an hour it feels like some new bug is found.
The worst issue is that The Portal, with changes meant to speed up progression, allegedly, launched giving everyone less powerful drops, making the new power climb ridiculous. This is in fact a bug, but we don’t have a timeline on a fix.
But for me, the main issue is not bugs. All these could be fixed and this is still just a terrible update all around.
The new activity of Ash and Iron is Reclaim, an exceptionally dull event that throws you into various Cosmodrome areas and a few reprised, very small Plaguelands zones, stripped of SIVA and their SIVA-infected enemies. It’s like showing up to a birthday party and it’s just a bunch of chairs around a table with no cake or presents.
In Reclaim you have Nether-lite objectives around the map, 70% of which are some variant of waiting out three waves of spawning enemies to insert some balls somewhere or throw balls at immune shields (this has already bugged out more than a few times for me). This ends in a boss fight that has a mechanic that has things like three player random teams trying to match a sequence of disappearing Vex blobs like it’s a Bop-It, and naturally it all goes to hell when everyone keeps shooting random stuff with no way to yell at them to stop. It’s awful, start to finish. I’ve played this three times. I’m done. I’m not kidding, and I’ve never bailed on an activity so quickly.
But one other thing Reclaim does is show just how awful the Portal system is. You can’t just show up, launch this activity, matchmake and get new loot. Because of the Portal and new power gain and Tier hunting, at my level (405), you arrive and are immediately thrown into a Grandmaster version, where you need to stack terrible modifiers to get to anything approaching a worthwhile drop to the point where you’re -30 or -40 under power which is deeply unfun. And customizable Grandmaster isn’t matchmade, so you have to go to Fireteam Finder every single time and make a listing. It’s absolutely insane this is how a brand new activity launches now.
Not that Destiny was in the best state before this, but this update is one of the worst I can remember in years. We’ve had underwhelming activities launch before, but at least you could easily play those activities, matchmake, without a stupidly oppressive power level and consistently get new loot you want rather than wading through a diluted pool.
The problem with Destiny now is The Portal, and what the Portal represents, a never-ending power climb that uses 95% old content and is a recursive loop that has become nearly the entirety of the game. Again, I’m hoping an expansion like Renegades can at least be a positive new addition to the game, but for now? Yikes. Just yikes.
(Bonus complaint: Eververse is now getting actively offensive with the amount of stuff it’s adding, and it feels like these Major Updates are mainly about the store itself. There are going to be four new armor ornament sets in the store over these three months, plus one on the premium track of the new battle pass. This joins lots of new individual ornaments and other cosmetics and on top of all of this, Bright Dust prices for armor have gone up as Bungie tries to drain those reserves. The icing on the cake is that one of the paid sets is Taken armor that players have longed to earn for years, with a separate pricey bundle that has a Taken shader. A cosmetic knife through the heart).
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Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2025/09/10/destiny-2s-ash-and-iron-is-a-disaster/