In an effort to create a fair but competitive environment in the World First race, Destiny 2 developer is adding some new restrictions to the Crown of Sorrows raid on Day 1. Essentially, teams will not be able to over level the content and will have their power levels locked to specific thresholds at each encounter.

Bungie’s Luke Smith made the announcement in a blog post on the developer’s website, explaining the raid team’s thinking behind these latest changes. Over the last few seasons, Bungie has seen the World First race transform into a rush to hoard power level progression and manipulate quests in an effort to reach the highest power possible. For the launch of Crown of Sorrows, the new Destiny 2 raid included with the Season of Opulence, those methods will still be important but only to a point.

During the first 24 hours of Crown of Sorrows’ availability, Bungie will turn on a mode called Contest. This mode will make it so a player’s power level does not give them an advantage over a specific threshold, basically creating a baseline difficulty regardless of how much work a player/team has put in.

For Crown of Sorrows, this means that the first encounter will not grant an advantage to players above power level 700 and the final encounter will not grant an advantage over power level 720. Because of the way Destiny 2 handles damage and mitigation through plateaus, any player at power level 716 should be at the max for the final encounter.

destiny 2 season 7 raid crown of sorrow

No doubt the preparation for the Destiny 2 raid will still be rewarding, but this is Bungie addressing major concerns from the community with smart decisions. Now, the World First raid race will be the fairest it has ever been, with the most dedicated players going into the endgame experience at a similar power level.

Additionally, Bungie plans to launch the Season of Opulence update for Destiny 2 Season 7 at 8am PT on June 4th and take the servers down until 10am PT. That way every player has roughly two hours to download and ingest the update and prepare for the “doors to open” at 10am. Then it’s all about grinding challenges and obtaining powerful rewards until 4pm PT, when Crown of Sorrows goes live.

Destiny 2 Season of Opulence releases June 4, 2019 at 10am PT for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.