For the last few seasons,Destiny 2players have been hoarding bounties in an attempt to get a leg up on the competition. Because there is typically a race to hit the power level cap or to gain an advantage in the World First raid race, any extra XP that players can unlock quickly is valuable. So players spend the last few weeks of eachDestiny 2season completing bounties but not turning them in – a process commonly referred to as hoarding.
Up until this coming season,Destiny 2bounty hoarding has been useful because it instantly gives players bonus power levels through the Artifact. Depending on RNG and time, players might not get a big bump from their powerful rewards, but the bonus power level is predictable. Hoarding bounties had become the norm for anyDestiny 2teams that wanted to compete in theWorld First raid race.
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However, Bungie announced a key change with the Beyond Light World First raid race that changes that approach. When theContest modifieris active, the Artifact bonus power will not be available to the player, only their “real” power will matter. In essence, it was Bungie’s answer to all thoseDestiny 2players that told the dev to do something about hoarding bounties.
The problem, though, is that hoarding bounties is still valuable even if it doesn’t offer any bonus power level. To the best of our knowledge, bounties and XP are still key to leveling up theArtifact, which unlocks new seasonal modsalong the way. Bungie has not said what the new seasonal mods forDestiny 2: Beyond Lightwill be, but usually a few of them are useful, and more often than not the most useful are in the final row.
So hoarding bounties is still beneficial for anyDestiny 2players that plan on competing in theWorld First raid race on November 21st. If a mod like Oppressive Darkness is available on the new Beyond Light artifact than players will want to unlock it as soon as possible. The bonus debuff that comes from Oppressive Darkness has proven invaluable in endgame content, especially for burning down a single target.
We also don’t know how thenew Stasis subclasseswill be unlocked, so it’s possible that XP will be key to hitting all of the nodes on each subclass tree. One benefit of hoarding bounties may be gone, but there are still plenty of reasons to go through the process before Beyond Light.
And while there are reportedlyplans to rework XP allocation to encourage activity completionsover bounties, Bungie hasn’t detailed how significant those changes will be. Bounties still are the only tried and true way to gain an advantage going into a new season.
That is, unless Bungie announces that it will wipe bounties beforeDestiny 2: Beyond Light. For a while now many community members, even those who compete in the raid races and hoard bounties, have asked Bungie to wipe everyone’s bounties to give each team an even playing field. But at this point announcing a bounty wipe might frustrate too many community members who put in the time assuming that there would be no wipe.
Destiny 2: Beyond Lightreleases July 21, 2025 for PC, PS4, Stadia, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X. The PS5 version will release on November 12.
