One of the stars of Destiny 2’s new Lightfall expansion is Neomuna—a free roam patrol zone inside a dazzling futuristic city on Neptune. It starts out tough as nails due to a recent difficulty hike across Bungie’s loot shooter, but there are plenty of fun collectibles to hunt and little secrets to uncover. In fact, one of those secrets is so hard to find almost no one in the game has completed it yet: a weekly world boss event called Supernumerary Blitz that drops guaranteed Exotic loot.
Every week a different part of Neomuna acts as a Vex Incursion Zone. Enemies spawn in greater numbers, there are more Strand energy sources, and every once in a while a Supernumerary Blitz public event will spawn. All of that information can be gleaned from the overworld map, but as Forbes’ Paul Tassi points out, actually getting the event to spawn, let alone completing it, remains a huge obstacle.
How Supernumerary Blitz works
He likens it to an MMO-style world boss, which coming off the recent Diablo IV beta feels especially appropriate. The major difference, however, is that while Blizzard’s action-RPG does a lot to telegraph the event and load it up with players, there’s very little fanfare around Destiny 2’s Supernumerary Blitz boss fight. In roughly 50 hours with the expansion I’ve only encountered one twice, and both times hardly any other players were around to help out.
When it occurs, Supernumerary Blitz looks like any other run-of-the-mill public event unless you toggle over the map marker. It consists of six shielded Gatekeeper-size Minotaurs appearing on the map surrounded by an army of smaller Vex. Like the Vex phase of Terminal Overload, Neomuna’s main public activity, you need to kill glowing Minotaurs, grab the trace rifles they leave behind, and fire them on the giant Minotaurs to break their shields. Then you can get to work chipping away at their spongey health meters, with just 10 minutes to destroy them all. It’s actually a really cool idea, and something Destiny 2 needs way more of. Unfortunately, no one seems to be able to find or finish it.
According to the Warmind Destiny analytics site, less than 1 percent of all players have currently earned the triumph for completing a Supernumerary Blitz event. Bungie increased the spawn rate of the event in a patch last week, but it still seems to be pretty infrequent. I just spent close to two hours in Neomuna and didn’t spot one. It’s a guaranteed Exotic gear drop, so I get that it shouldn’t be happening all the time (though a daily or weekly limit on Supernumerary Blitz chests would also get around that).
The bigger issue is that it never quite feels like a traditional MMO-style world boss event because Neomuna instances rarely have more than half a dozen players spread out across multiple zones. If you’re not in the Vex Incursion Zone, there’s nothing to alert you to a Supernumerary Blitz getting underway if you aren’t constantly checking. And given the high recommended power level of the event, it’s tough for even a fireteam of three to take it on unless they’re experienced, coordinated, and already near the power cap.
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Then there’s the issue of the event being so intense it actually appears to have crashed some players’ games. That seems to at least in part be due to the massive amount of enemies spawning during a Supernumerary Blitz and the fact that so many players are now using the new Strand subclasses, whose ultimates have also been known to occasionally crash the game.
Other players just wish the randos around them knew what they were doing. “I have tried to clear this public event seven times and each time I have watched the timer tick down to nothing and we fail because people are not breaking the bosses shields or even trying to go for the minotaurs and it’s very frustrating,” wrote one player on the Destiny subreddit. And without any in-game looking-for-group tools or other good means of quick communication and matchmaking, Supernumerary Blitz can sometimes feel like an exercise in futility. Then again, that’s the Destiny experience in a nutshell. Hopefully it doesn’t stay that way.