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Destiny 2's Transmog System is an Absolute Greedy Mess
Category:
GAME GUIDES

Destiny 2 Soft Cap Explained: What is the Soft Cap in Destiny 2?

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Noah Nelson
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Published: Jan 26, 2023 09:48 am

Destiny 2 has a lot of lingo that you need to learn if you want to play it and one of the first terms you’ll need to know, especially if you are new to the game, is soft cap. What does soft cap mean in Destiny 2? To find out, read on.

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Destiny 2 Soft Cap Explained

The soft cap is the range at which your Power Level is at. Your Power Level determines how powerful you are in the game and is your main “level” stat. Each season, the max Power Level increases by around 10 or 20 points. Therefore, the soft cap in Destiny 2 is the bottom level you can be, which is currently 1,350, to around where the soft cap ceiling is, which is around 1,530 in Season of the Seraph.

Every new player starts Destiny 2 at the soft cap. To increase your Power Level, you need to acquire better armor and better guns by playing game modes like main story missions or seasonal activities like Heist Battlegrounds.

Once you have reached the soft cap ceiling, you will need to find Legendary equipment to push your Power Level into the powerful cap area, which is currently between 1,530 and 1,580. After the powerful cap, you’ll need to get to the hard cap, which is currently 1,590. The hard cap is the highest level you can get in a season of Destiny 2 and can only be achieved through the seasonal artifact or by acquiring Pinnacle gear.

To simplify it, since Destiny 2 uses arbitrarily big numbers that grow each season, think of the soft cap within the context of a regular RPG with ten levels. The soft cap in Destiny 2 would be like if you were anywhere between level one and level seven in a normal RPG. The powerful cap is around levels eight and nine and the hard cap is at level 10.

That is what the soft cap is in Destiny 2. It is basically the starting level for all players when they start Destiny 2 or begin a new season. As mentioned earlier, each new season and expansion, like Lightfall, pushes the soft cap higher when it raises the powerful and hard cap. That’s why it is important to constantly be getting new gear or breaking the new gear’s stats down to absorb that Power Level.

Destiny 2 is available now on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and PC.

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Author
Image of Noah Nelson
Noah Nelson
From his early days of blog-style music, movie, and game reviews to working as the Esports Writer at Coastline Community College, Noah Nelson now works fulltime as a Staff Writer for Attack of the Fanboy and PC Invasion. He has been helping gamers everywhere with Destiny 2 god rolls, Warzone 2 DMZ missions, and collectibles in any indie game for over a year and a half. His Bachelor's Degree in English Rhetoric and Composition with a minor in Journalism from CSULB has shaped him to be a strong writer and editor. His fondest gaming memory is playing Sly Cooper 2 after begging his mom (for hours) to play it before his birthday and he still cries myself to sleep remembering the time he accidentally saved over his 99% completion save file in Kingdom Hearts 2.