light.gg

light.gg Destiny 2 Loadout Database

Frequently Asked Questions

• What's the overall intent of this feature? What're you trying to show me here?

• The idea with this tool is to provide a way for the Destiny 2 community to explore loadouts from high-skill players for challenging activities. Getting into buildcrafting can be daunting for new/returning players. We're hoping by providing a large, very filterable list of loadouts across all endgame activities, more people will be able to get into it.

  From there, in typical light.gg fashion, we want you to be able to really drill down into the data and say things like "show me all Gunslinger Hunter loadouts using Classy Restoration and The Last Word" or "show me all Trials loadouts that include an Auto Rifle" and so on.

  Eventually, as we gather more and more data, it will also be interesting to take a look at any trends that emerge and present those to the community as well.

• Where are these loadouts coming from? Are they just random D2 players?
• These are loadouts from high-skill players. "High-skill" is determined by an algorithm based off the player's Triumphs and other factors.
• How are you determining the loadouts to show? Can't people change gear in a lot of these activities?
• These loadouts are a snapshot of what the player was using upon completing the activity. Most of the PVE modes that this is tracking are equipment locked, but PVP activities such as Trials and Competitive PVP do allow swapping. We still think it's interesting to see the overall gist of what they were using regardless of what swaps were made.
• What's the catch here?

• There are a few ways this system can break down, and the initial beta phase is intended to bring the "holes" to light and attempt to patch them. Generally, here are the problems with this first phase:

  • Bungie doesn't provide a cut-and-dry way of seeing what equipment someone was using during an activity beyond how many kills they got with each weapon.
    • Our way around this is to watch for a high-skill player to complete an activity and instantly snapshot their equipment.
    • The problem is that an activity doesn't register as completed until someone goes to orbit. Any changes made between when they actually completed the activity and when they went to orbit will create a desync in what they were actually using and what is captured by our snapshot.
  • Beyond the issues with actually gathering snapshots, the criteria for "high-skill" are also a bit nebulous and might need adjusting.
    • However, the eye test so far seems to show most of the players being tracked are in the top 10% for their respective activity, so it's alright at least for a start.
    • We've added links to guardian/trials.report next to each build so you can vet the player yourself if you're suspicious.
  • Another issue is that this process is very demanding of the Bungie API.
    • In order to comply with their rate limiting requirements, we're only able to track ~5,000 high-skill players at a time.
    • This is why you're not going to find every build for every activity from all your favorite streamers here. The process tries to find active high-skill players and keeps watching them until they stop completing activities.
    • Whether a particular player gets picked up by the tracker or not is essentially random — which, for what it's worth, is probably a good thing given that we're not able to just track everyone we want to at all times.
• Any criteria beyond just being "high-skill"?

• Yes. The average power of the 8 core pieces of equipment must be within 10 power of the hard cap for the current season. This is subject to change at the start of seasons as people are still gearing up.

  Beyond that, any build with more than 8 empty armor mod sockets or 6 subclass mod sockets will be excluded.

  We also try to avoid duplicates by only storing one unique snapshot per player per activity per day. So, if one high-skill person plays 100 Trials games in a day and changes nothing in their build, that should only produce one snapshot. However, if they change a single mod, a new snapshot will be saved. It's possible that we make this dupe detection more aggressive over time to reduce "noise" from situations like this.

• There's a build here of a player wearing blues / no mods / underpowered weapons. What gives?

• At least for now, we think it's still interesting to be able to see that someone completed a GM nightfall using only 1560 blues. The value of being able to equip that build and try it yourself is obviously a lot lower, but it's still interesting regardless.

  If it becomes a big enough problem, we'll add a filter to the UI to hide such entries or outright exclude them from being captured in the first place.

• I want to try out one of these loadouts. How can I do that?

• Clicking the "Equip" link next to a given build will summon up DIM with the loadout populated. From there, it should help you in finding the closest loadout available to you given the mods/weapons/armor/etc you have acquired.

• Can we see the full list of who is considered "high-skill"?

• Maybe eventually, but at least for now I don't want to deal with people nitpicking the criteria. It's close enough to what I'm shooting to accomplish for now.

  If you really feel like a player or build should not be displayed, click the Report link to bring it to our attention.

• What if I don't want my loadouts tracked by this? Let me shoot things in peace!

• Bungie.net provides privacy settings that will allow anyone that doesn't want to participate to hide their activity history.

• Explain the popularity ranks on these loadouts. Why should I care what build someone with C ranked weapons is using?!

• The popularity ranks displayed are there to allow you to compare that particular player's roll to the most popular roll for that weapon. That's all. It's not making any attempt to tell you whether their roll is good or bad — just popular or unpopular.

  Part of the hope here is actually to show people that the game's hard activities can be done just fine with a wide variety of rolls, and that each player should focus on finding what works for them and they enjoy playing with.

  At the same time it is also reassuring to be able to see how many S and A ranked weapons show up in these loadouts. Though it's not 100% bulletproof, things are often popular for a reason, and being able to have that reinforced when it should be (and discouraged when it shouldn't) is a good thing.