It's extremely subpar from what it was a few seasons back. You have plenty of amazing examples for players to look back on and say "wow, I remember when loot was actually something worth grinding for this."
Obelisks, especially once we had the cracktaline income to spam them out every week.
Old umbral engrams: amazing system with easy to access focusing at a good cost.
And menagerie: obviously what you've failed to replicate with the Hammer and combining it with Umbrals.
Nobody wants to farm for 30mins just to get a single t3 focused engram. It's not enjoyable when I can go into the nightfall with 12 people and clear it super fast for 2x rewards (and even normal rewards on other weeks). It's not worth our time to go into Battlegrounds either because it's a slog of tanky bosses, champions that you usually are the only person equipped to stun, and drop pods wasting countless minutes of deaths.
Please rework this system and make it stick for future seasons. Reducing the charges needed for a t2/3 is a start, but we also need more loot recognition through the Hammer perk system. Warmind Bunkers were a pain but they were worth a lot more in the end than this time-gated slog of the Hammer system.
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I have to agree, the new Umbral system is pretty disappointing. 5 hammer charges for 1 tier 3 engram? Yeah, I did the one for the weekly challenge but haven’t bothered to focus a single engram since. The cost of focussing it, and the grind it takes, is hugely outweighing the rewards available. Plus, I’m sure someone else on the forum did the maths on it, but it’s basically most economic to do the single charge engrams if you’re farming stuff.