Posted by When I first talked about Forsaken, I focused mainly on the story and the Tangled Shore. Today I’m mostly going to focus on the Dreaming City, and next week I’ll be wrapping everything up by talking about the Strikes, exotics, subclasses, quality of life changes, and my final thoughts on the DLC.
The Dreaming City is Forsaken’s real endgame, and you only unlock it after beating the story. The Dreaming City is pretty big and offers a lot to players. After beating the story, your Guardian is tasked with going into the Dreaming City to purge the Taken threat that has infested it. This means that everyone’s favorite enemy faction–the Taken–are put front and center again, but so are the Scorn and Hive.
Once you enter the Dreaming City, you should try to be over 500 power. Most public events and tier 1 Blind Well events have enemies that are 520 power, and the power of the enemies only increases with more difficult activities.
The public events present in the Dreaming City include Taken blights, rift generators, and corrupted ether harvests. The Taken blights are identical to the ones present on Io and the European Dead Zone in the base game, and the corrupted ether harvests are the same as the ones in the Tangled Shore. The rift generators are a new public event, and they involve powering up a an Awoken rift generator with arc charges, which are dropped by Scorn Abominations. Once the generator is activated, you need to fend off waves of Scorn while protecting the generator core from being destroyed. The core can be recharged with additional arc charges that are dropped by Abominations. In order to make the event heroic, you need to destroy three Taken blights. Once this is done, you need to kill a Taken boss and you complete the event.
The Dreaming City also introduces a new public event called the Blind Well. The Blind Well is a lot like Archon’s Forge from Rise of Iron in Destiny. In the Blind Well, you have to fend off waves of enemies, then defeat one to three bosses depending on the difficulty of the event. The Blind Well has three tiers, much like Court of Oryx from The Taken King, and each tier requires a specific item. The tier of the event also directly corresponds to the number of bosses at the end, with Tier 1 only having one boss and so on. But once you complete a tier 3 Blind Well, you can use a different item to activate a heroic version of the Blind Well. In this heroic version, all you have to do is kill a boss, but there’s a lot more to it than that, and it does give you powerful gear upon your first completion for the week. Unfortunately, as fun as the Blind Well can be, it can also be incredibly boring and tedious. In order to get some decent gear every week, you can complete a bounty from Petra that requires you to beat the Blind Well a lot. Tier 1 events give 10% to the bounty’s completion, tier 2 give 20%, and tier 3 give 30%. And unless you have a lot of people working together in the Blind Well, this can take a long and frustrating time. It also doesn’t help that the loot that you receive directly from the Blind Well–other than the Seed of Light that you need to unlock you second new subclass skill-tree–is rather mediocre. You tend to get a lot of rare gear, all of which is useless, and when you do get legendary gear, it also tends to be useless. The biggest issue with the Dreaming City as a whole is that for it being the endgame of Forsaken with high level enemies and activities, the loot that drops is anything but. Once you break the soft level cap of 500, weapons and armor tend to drop at around ten to twenty power below what you’re currently using.
Another activity in the Dreaming City, one that is incredibly rewarding, is the weekly Ascendant Challenge. The Ascendant Challenge is a semi-high level activity that changes every week. It requires a certain consumable, because in order to complete the Ascendant Challenge, you need to be Ascendant and enter the Ascendant Realm. The Ascendant Challenge is a fun activity that can be difficult depending on your level, but it’s a lot of fun and the loot is definitely worth it.
There are tons of other secrets hidden throughout the Dreaming City, such as little cat statues that will give you weapons and armor when presented with a gift, but not everything has been found yet in the Dreaming City. It will be interesting to see what else there is as well as what changes.
Finally, I would like to talk about the new raid located in the Dreaming City. I have yet to even attempt it due to not being a high enough power, but from what I’ve seen it looks really good. The encounters all look incredibly interesting and rather difficult, and this is the first raid that has been really important to the story and lore of the game as a whole sine King’s Fall from The Taken King. I for one can’t wait to finally play.
All in all, the Dreaming City is an interesting area with a lot to do and a lot to offer. It’s really interesting that the area will change based on a three-week schedule, and I’m excited to see what there is in week three. If it’s noteworthy enough, I’ll mention it in next week’s article.
Broad Scope Entertainment 