Destiny 2's Season of Seraph brings a new playlist activity, Heist Battlegrounds, among the other weekly storytelling and content elements that come with every Season. What's important to know going into Season of the Seraph is the emphasis on story relevance, significantly more than the subplots explored in the last couple of Seasons, with Heist Battlegrounds bringing back vaulted locations and several characters to rehash the story before the upcoming Lightfall expansion arrives in Destiny 2. Aside from the Grandmaster Nightfalls and other higher-tier Nightfall Strikes, Heist Battlegrounds are currently the most difficult playlist activity currently in the game, due to the presence and lack of certain modifiers, among other factors.
More specifically, the playlist has yet to include any Elemental Burns or Singes, which increase damage from particular elemental sources. Instead, Heist Battlegrounds feature a unique modifier that increases the Power Level of every enemy by 5 above each participating player. The playlist limits fireteams to 3 match-made players and mixes in Power ammo boxes which expire individually for each Guardian rather than collectively timing out after one usage. Even with a more generous ammo supply, the playlist can still take anywhere from 10 to 40 minutes, though thankfully there are no Darkness Zones that reset teams back to the beginning of the activity when everyone dies, making encounters in Heist Battlegrounds difficult to complete.
Season of Seraph Brings Back Vaulted Locations, But Not Iconic Features
By week 2, Heist Battlegrounds included Mars, the setting featured in Destiny 2's vaulted expansion, Warmind. Also from the vaulted expansion, the playlist activity rewards Warmind weapons that have been updated for the current meta, including crafting patterns. However, these new Warmind weapons don't create Warmind Cells, despite their otherwise up-to-date perk pool.
Besides featuring Mars as a location, Season of the Seraph's Heist Battlegrounds take place in Warmind bunkers across other existing planets as well. While the activity starts in the patrol zones of a planet, the Warmind bunkers take players into increasingly enclosed corridors. This, combined with increased difficulty, acts as a juxtaposition compared to the last couple of seasonal activities that take place entirely in the openness of patrol zones. In this regard, Heist Battlegrounds play out more like a high-difficulty Vanguard Strike compared to the previous Seasons' playlist activities.
With Champion enemies making appearances throughout the Heist Battlegrounds activity, players are forced to bring the best anti-Champion weapons into the activity, dictated by this Season's artifact. The playlist could benefit from bringing in localized weaponry, much like Season of Haunted had the Scythe. For example, players who remember the Warmind expansion might also remember the Valkyrie Javelin, which should have returned for the Heist Battlegrounds playlist. A weapon as strong as the Valkyrie Javelin would help to mitigate some of the difficulty of the activity without forcing players to go out of their way to acquire it.
Previous Destiny 2 Season Activities Are Still Relevant
With the extreme and unmatched difficulty of the new seasonal playlist activity, revisiting past activities is among the easier and therefore recommended methods for progressing in the current Season. Specifically, Destiny 2's last three Seasons are still relevant, adding to the currently viable playlist activities for generating currency and progress in the current Season. Given the increased difficulty, Heist Battlegrounds make Season of Plunder's Expeditions seem like a Strike, and Season of the Haunted's Nightmare Containment feels like a Heroic Public Event. This route also allows players to bring anti-Champion weaponry and the best seasonal artifact mods from the current Season to mix up gunplay in past activities while that content is still available.
Spiking the difficulty of the current Destiny 2 playlist activity and incentivizing past activities with relevant rewards could be seen as a way of drawing out participation in the current Season, especially accompanying the weekly time-gated storyline. Previously, Bungie commented on players' Season fatigue, but the changes take time to be implemented and have yet to see the light of day. And yet, while the increase in difficulty is noticeable, some players on social media claim to happily embrace this change.
Destiny 2 is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.