The Solstice Event in Destiny 2 Needs to be Changed

Destiny 2's Solstice of Heroes event started a few weeks ago, and I've been working on completing the armor for the Hunter and the Titan. Usually I look forward to the seasonal events, but I've never been overly fond of the Solstice event because I hate the European Aerial Zone. 

When the European Aerial Zone, EAZ for short, was first introduced, it was a little exciting, but after the one play through it was boring and the only reason to keep playing it was to get the XP and/or complete the armor set requirements. After the first year I didn't really bother with it. If I just so happened to playing Destiny a lot around that time of year and I felt like wasting time doing the armor, I would. 

This year I decided that I would complete the armor from start to finish, and for those who don't know what I mean, I'll explain it. Each hero class has it's own solstice armor set which includes a helm, gauntlets, chest plate, boots, and then either a Mark, Cloak, or Bond for the Titan, Hunter, and Warlock respectively. There are three stages to this armor which are as follows: Renewed, Majestic, and Magnificent. 

To upgrade the armor to the next stage, each piece has objective you need to complete. For instance, one piece of armor may have 3 objectives which could be anything from producing elemental orbs to completing certain activities like a dungeon or a raid. Once you complete the objects for each piece, you will be told to visit the statue at the tower to upgrade the armor. Once you complete the Majestic stage of the armor you can stop there, because the extra objective only add a white glow to each armor piece you complete at the Magnificent stage. The Magnificent stage is the hardest stage to complete. 

Just need to do a raid to finish...

So now that we've covered the gist of the event and the armor, I'll go ahead and give you my experience and why I think it all needs to change. 

I know I mentioned it earlier, but I've never been fond of the Solstice event solely because I always found the EAZ to be a pointless time suck. Why you ask? Good question. The reason I think it's a pointless time suck is because there is literally no point to it except that it's part of the seasonal event. 

When you load into the EAZ you're on what looks like a floating island that houses a dilapidated vacant city. Once the game mode starts, mini bosses will spawn on different areas of the map that the fireteam will need to defeat. You defeat as many of those bosses as you can before the time limit is reached. Once the time limit is reached you will be promoted to beat the final boss(es). Defeating the final boss spawns a chest with a solstice package inside. Once you have opened that chest, a prompt will tell you that chest will spawn and you have to find them. You'll have about 2 minutes to find all the chests and how many chests will depend on how many bosses you defeated before the final boss. 

That's it, that's the game mode. There's no real story to it, or any real point, it's just some random part of the game, and I know a lot of people will say that same thing about a lot of other game modes, but even the haunted forest is more fun because the whole point is to speed run through the changing branches. The path is never the same and they make each branch increasingly difficult. For instance, once you clear the first 5 branches, the modifiers stack so the first round might have been blackout, but the 6th round will be blackout and glass, players are easier to kill, whereas the EAZ doesn't actually get any harder and you aren't really doing anything save for jump from random building to random building just shooting monsters. 

Why is that a problem? Because they tie it to completing the armor as if completing the armor wasn't time consuming enough they make us play that pointless and boring game mode just to get keys to open chests that may or may not have high stat armor or some other pointless drop I'm just going to delete anyway. I think if they are going to make it a requirement that you have to play that game mode then they need to make that game mode more fun to play and not some chore that needs doing. 

Anyway, after knocking out the first round of just doing the EAZ a few times and some of the basic playlist stuff I moved to the next stage of armor which was a lot more involved. I still had to do the EAZ a few times, but at least the other stuff was more challenging. One requirement was getting a blind well done and I hadn't done one of those in a while so it was fun, but still time consuming. 

I finished the Majestic set and obtained the Magnificent set only to find that this is going to be the most labor intensive part of the finishing the armor, and mind you, all this does ad a glow to the armor. Nothing else. Looking over the requirements, I had to do a dungeon, a raid, a master nightfall, legendary lost sectors, and defeat 15 champions or guardians in competitive crucible modes. At this point I'm down to needing to complete a raid which I'm not looking forward to at all.

At the end of the day, would I do this again, probably not which is exactly why some years I don't even bother with this much effort, but since I've started I have to see it through to the end or else this was a waste of time, but I will say that they do need to change the EAZ and if that means changing the way the solstice events works then so be it, but they've got to find something more fun especially if they are going to tie armor objective to it.