Synthstrand is Killing Destiny 2 Transmog

Since the start of Destiny 2 Season of the Splicer, it’s been possible to transform the appearance of your armor. Through the miracle of Transmog, you can keep the stats and perks on a piece of armor, but then change its appearance with an Ornament. You make these Ornaments by breaking down other pieces of armor that you like the look of but hate the feel of. This should be a brilliant feature, but sadly the implementation of it from Bungie has pretty much killed it.

All About Synthstrand

The crux of the issue here is Synthstrand. It’s a complicated process making an Ornament, but Synthstrand is the most basic item you need to pick up in order to get on your way. You use it to make another resource, and then another, and then finally you can make an Ornament, after what it’s becoming more and more obvious is hours of grinding.

Guardians have discovered, and Eurogamer has reported, that you can only pick up Synthstrand once every two minutes. It doesn’t drop any more than this regardless of the number of enemies you kill. Given this little fact, the awesome Guardians from r/raidsecrets have now run the numbers on how long it takes to earn enough of this stuff to make one single Ornament. The results aren’t pretty.

It’s been reported that one Ornament takes 25 hours of in-game time. To actually make all of the Ornaments available for the season, of which there are twenty this season as a one-off and ten every other season, you’d need to play for a total of 53 hours. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty proud of my 200 hours in the game since launch, small though that might be to most of you. 53 hours per season is not time that I have to spare. I’d even go as far as saying those with all the time in the world don’t have this much time to grind out Synthstrand.

The issue gets worse when you consider that this figure is solid farming time. If you do anything that isn’t optimal gathering, it adds to the time you’ll be farming for. That’s such a colossal faff that it makes me a bit angry. This feature was added as part of a crying out from the community, serving the Guardians playing Destiny 2. However, now it’s very clear that Bungie has geared the system to be much easier and preferable if you just buy Silver and pay for your Ornaments. You’re still locked by how many you can make, but it’s faster to buy them.

Bungie is usually quite respectful of our time in the game. In this feature though, they’re not being respectable at all. Let us know what you think in the comments.

Jamie Moorcroft-Sharp

I'm an avid Destiny 2 fan and player. I fell in love with Destiny 1 during the early alpha and have been hooked by the universe ever since. I really enjoy playing with other Guardians, speculating about the lore, and writing about as much of the Destiny universe as I can.