It’s funny that The Witch Queen is regarded as one of the best Destiny expansions ever when you consider that its only contributions to the sandbox were glaives - a completely irrelevant weapon type - and crafting - a system so fundamentally flawed that Bungie has spent years stripping away almost every aspect of it. That’s how good the Vow of the Disciple raid and The Witch Queen campaign itself were; we’re even willing to forgive crafting.
After many updates, crafting has become a mere shadow of what it once was - which is✱ usually how we describe things that used to be great, but in this case, the less I have to think about crafting, the better. Little by little all of the frustrations and friction points have been chipped away, leaving behind nothing but a shallow frame of a system that should probably go away entirely at this point. With the new weapon enhancement system in The Final Shape, we finally have a suitable replacement for crafting.
When crafting was first introduced, customizing wea💫pons required a significant grind. First you had to collect patterns by attuning deepsight weapons, AKA killing things with red box guns until the pattern could be extracted. After doing that five times, you’d craft a basic version of the weapons, then use it for hours and hours to level it up. There were half a dozen types of currencies that came from all kinds of different activities you’d need to use in order to add enhanced traits to crafted weapons, and while you were doing that, your vault was filling up with even more red boxes waiting to be attuned.
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Two expansions later and almost the entire system has been gutted. Now you can extract patterns from red box weapons immediately, and when you craft your we𒀰apons, you can just pay to level it up instead of grinding. All of those different materials like Harmonic Alloys and Resonant elements have been removed, now reshaping weapons costs common materials like Glimmer and Enhancement Prisms. You don’t even need to wait for a red box to drop anymore. Thanks to Deepsight Harmonizers, any craftable weapon can become a red box. Aꦺt this point, the moment you get your fifth red box to drop for any weapon, you can immediately craft the exact version of that weapon you want.
Getting red boxes is easier than ever, too. The Final Shape’s post-game quests reward so many that you can craft at least two simply by following the story. The new seasonal (or episodic) activity, Breach Executable, has rewarded me with at least one red box every single run on expert difficulty. We’re only two weeks into the expansion and I’ve already crafted The Call, No Hesitation, Faith-Keeper, Timeworn Wayfarer, and Veiled Threat. Any drop I get that isn’t a red box immediately gets turned into Glimmer, because I know I’ll be able to g🦄et a crafted version of that weapon in no time.
The real nail in the coffin for crafting is the enhancement system, which allows you to enha⛦nce the traits of a weapon, just like a crafted weapon, by using it to level it up. The pool is small right now - only Onslaught weapons, playlist weapons, trials, Iron Banner, and a few dungeon and raid weapons - but the system provides an alternative to crafting that could one day replace it.
I don’t think crafting should go away entirely. It's great for raid weapons - spending hours on a raid only to get bad drops feels terrible, so the crafting system helps make it feel like you’re always working tไowards something. But when it comes to seasonal activity weapons, new expansion weapons, and anything else that would typically be craftable, making those weapons enhanceable is a much better option. I’m glad Bungie tries new things, but crafting has proven to be a failed experiment, and it's time to ♚move on.
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