‘Destiny 2’ Materials Caps Are Getting Better But Also Worse

Since the dawn of Destiny 2, players have complained about a set of caps on materials in the game, namely 10 Ascendant Shards and 50 Enhancements Prisms, materials mostly used to masterwork armor. Later, those were joined by 10 Ascendant Alloy for weapon crafting.

The cap felt bad, especially when Masterworking exotics costs three Shards at time, and extra ones would go to your postmaster where they could easily get pushed out by blue engrams and be destroyed entirely.

Now, things are changing. At long last, Bungie has announced that the caps are being raised. It’s now 30 for Shards, 30 for Alloy and 100 for Prisms. Three times as many? Twice as many? Sounds great!

But, there’s a catch.

The other half of this change is that Shards, Alloy and Prisms can no longer go to your postmaster at all. This is to prevent more “pushing out” situations, although those are far less frequently now that blues no longer drop a zillion times.

What that means, however, is that this is actually a net decrease in total materials shortage for players who run three characters. Previously, you could hold 10 Shards/Alloy on you, then 10 in each postmaster for 40 total. Now, that’s down to 30. Prisms could be 200, and now that’s down to 100. So for these players, the type that would probably being doing enough events to have their postmaster stacking materials in the first place, their cap is effectively lower than before.

Datto made the point to me after I said this that for players that have this many mats anyway, maybe it doesn’t matter:

“If you’re the kinda person who can hold 40 shards, you’re not someone who struggles to get them anyway and/or have nothing left to even use them on in the first place (raises hand).”

I get what he’s saying, but I don’t know, it feels like you could also make that argument about hardcore players who just run a “main,” as if they’re stacking up to 30/100, the same thing probably applies to them.

What I was really hoping to see here was that Bungie was just going to combine Ascendant Shards and Ascendant Alloy into one material. Endgame materials are in a weird spot right now. Bungie wants you to use Shards not just for Masterworking, but now gambling on focused exotics, but the price is way too high for the potential benefit. Alloy, meanwhile, has a variety of not-great sources to farm it from across the game, and it feels like it would be better if they were all just the same thing.

Bungie has certainly improved its economy in time, deleting planetary mats, killing rainmakers and matterweaves, but this one is a little weird, given that it’s a cap raise for some, but a cap lowering for more dedicated players. Just very strange.

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