I wanted to open up a discussion regarding the difficulty scaling of Archived Season Chapters, specifically looking at how the newer seasons had their difficulty lowered compared to early ones.
While lowering the difficulty made perfect sense during the live service era to ensure casual players would feel less punished to buy the Season’s Pass for each new live season, the game is in a different place now. With the current focus on rotating existing content and archives, these difficulty adjustments are inadvertently hurting the endgame loop for veteran players.
The Core Issues:
Vanishing Replay Value: Because the newer archived chapters are tuned to be significantly easier, they feel like a chore rather than an engaging challenge for endgame players like myself.
The XP Penalty: Lower difficulty directly translates to lower XP payouts. This makes replaying these beautifully designed chapters completely inefficient for anyone looking to grind and optimize their characters.
Dead Content: We have a wealth of great seasonal content sitting in the game, but veterans have no incentive to touch most of it because the rewards and engagement aren’t there.
The Proposal:
Now that these seasons live permanently in the game, could we look into ideally raising or, at the very least, re-scaling the difficulty parameters for all Season Chapters across the board (To 5012 instead of the watered down 3626)? Alternatively, adding a higher difficulty toggle (like a “Master” or “Doom” tier specifically for Archives) would allow casual players to still enjoy the story while giving veterans a meaningful, high-XP avenue to test their builds.
Fixing this scaling would instantly breathe new life into existing content, giving the dedicated player base a legitimate reason to replay every single chapter without requiring the team to build brand-new assets.
I’d love to hear the community’s thoughts on this, and hopefully, the team can consider this quality-of-life adjustment now that the game is in legacy mode, to liven things up a bit for the veteran crowd of players.
While Boss Rush is great content, it doesn’t solve the core issue. Events aren’t available all the time, and frankly, Boss Rush is highly inefficient for Citadel XP grinding. When veteran players are focusing purely on Citadel progression, the optimal route is replaying the Season Stories and Adventures.
To maximize this, players build specific, fully optimized XP Bonus sets. For context, my personal XP set sits at +187.4%. When you have a multiplier that high, the disparity between the older and newer seasons becomes massive.
Let’s look at the first battle on Elite Difficulty on the third (hardest) Chapter as a concrete example:
The Wedding Crasher (New Season): 598 XP
Older Seasons (e.g., Fallen Star / Watchers in the Stars): 661 XP
That 661 XP is where the new seasons artificially cap you at the very end of their chapters, whereas the older seasons give you that maximum value right from the first node.
The discrepancy doesn’t stop at XP, either. The chest rewards in the newer stories are also worse. In the exact same scenario:
The Wedding Crasher Chest: 90
Watchers in the Stars Chest: 101
When the primary goal is maximizing time efficiency for Citadel farming, there is zero incentive to touch the newer archived chapters. Veteran players will always default to older content for the better XP payouts and higher-quality chests, leaving a huge portion of the archived content effectively dead. Re-scaling the newer chapters back to the 5012 metric fixes this entire progression bottleneck.
Furthermore, going beyond a simple numbers fix by introducing a brand-new, permanent high-end difficulty tier would make the entire legacy experience feel fresh again. I would love to see this philosophy applied to Hunts as well. Giving veterans a unified, high-tier challenge across both Season Archives and Hunts would breathe massive replayability into the game, giving us a true endgame playground to test our maxed-out builds.
I’m not sure I understand including this point, as it would be expected that playing a lower difficulty would have smaller rewards?
If you are playing through the easy difficulties because you are grinding XP that’s different to the intended design of the difficulties and scaling rewards.
In the meantime, I can ask if someone can look into the difference of rewards from the older Seasons to the new ones, but there is no capacity to add in additional difficulties. I mean, I mentioned it anyways but I am aware without waiting for a response, that that is the case
I think my point about the XP drop-off might have been a bit unclear.
To clarify, I’m not playing on the easier base difficulty settings because I want a shortcut. I am explicitly selecting and replaying the highest possible difficulty tier available for each respective season’s story.
The issue is that the absolute ceiling for the “hardest” tier was heavily scaled down mechanically in later seasons. For example, the highest tier in early archived seasons caps at a 5012 Gear Score, whereas the highest tier in the final legacy seasons (like The Wedding Crasher) caps out at a much lower 3626 Gear Score.
Because the developers lowered the baseline stats of the “highest tier” itself for those newer live seasons, it also compressed the maximum reward brackets. Even with a fully optimized endgame XP build (mine sits at +187.4%), the first node on the highest difficulty of The Wedding Crasher only pays out 598 XP and a level 90 chest, while the same node in older seasons like Watchers in the Stars rewards 661 XP and a level 101 chest.
I completely understand that there is no capacity to add brand-new difficulty systems or toggles now that the game is in legacy mode. However, since you mentioned looking into the reward discrepancies between older and newer seasons, that would be amazing! (Just please don’t lower the older ones to match the less rewarding newer ones).
If the backend rewards/chest tiers on the highest difficulty nodes of the newer seasons could simply be normalized to match the payout of the older 5012-scale seasons, it would immediately fix the progression bottleneck. This would give veteran players a legitimate reason to replay the entire catalog of archived chapters rather than avoiding the newer content entirely.