Destiny 2: Lightfall

[KartoffelKopf]

2 hours ago, Mr Ben said:

Oh yeah the Revelry made all pve content ridiculously easy, but I also used the Revelry to get my Recluse - Shinobu's Vow style. I suspect I made a lot of players salty in Comp over the course of those 2 days (Fabled in 2 days! - pretty insane how easy it was with the buff).

 

Everyone was at it, I played a game of clash that ended up something like 11-8 after everyone just stood at either side of the map lobbing skips and pulses. Was hilarious. I got Luna's and Recluse in only a few matches after the revelry ended after hooking up with a trio of 16 year old wannabe gangsters from Philly. They were obsessed with me being 45 and still playing videogames. They were hugely annoying but ridiculously good at PvP, may have been carried a little. Playing with good players does make you better though. 

 

I came in to this season very late but have to admit, gambit prime is a much better version of a game mode that started out great but began to get very tiresome. 

 

Zero Hour is what Bungie do best. Started out as feeling impossible but running it a few times and it all starts to fall in to place and who knew Arbalest would actually be useful. 

 

Might try the void configuration puzzle tonight if anyone is up for it?

[Gorf King]

I'm keen to give it a good long run, but I haven't even done heroic yet, so obviously that has to come first. We don't have enough people still playing the game in our regular crew to have given heroic a go. Maybe next week, so I guess the catalyst will drop a week later than it could have.

 

It's a great mission and a great weapon though. At this stage I have to assume that anyone who wanted to go into the mission blind to even its reward will have already done so. There's just no way you would be able to run this shit a week after release without having seen what it is you're going to win (especially since every other fucker is using it). So I'm not considering talk of the weapon itself spoilers. That being the case, Cool Guy has, as usual, written a great review of the gun which is especially pertinent for console users. 

 

 

[Mr Ben]

Yep, Aztecross said it with Chromatic Fire in pvp was great, but not so in pve due to the explosion killing any adds nearby before the nanites could do their job. I've not used it in pvp at all, but it feels so good to use in pve due to its snappy aim, good range and decent damage that its ovbiously going to be one of the more used weapons in Crucible going forward.

 

No idea if the bounty/puzzle thing will be significantly different next reset over this weeks, but it was pretty straightforward to do, and I cant see Bungie changing it much, if at all each week. I'm up for doing it whenever, as I find the mission far more enjoyable than the Whisper one, likely due to not being a massive fan of Taken enemies, and their constant warping everywhere.

[redbloodcell]

13 hours ago, Gorf King said:

I'm keen to give it a good long run, but I haven't even done heroic yet, so obviously that has to come first. 

 

Oh god the "jump on the tiny drain ledges" bit can f-off and die. I'm convinced there's a hidden cheese to skip it waiting to be discovered, like the green room in the Whisper mission. 

[luckypierre]

4 hours ago, redbloodcel said:

 

Oh god the "jump on the tiny drain ledges" bit can f-off and die. I'm convinced there's a hidden cheese to skip it waiting to be discovered, like the green room in the Whisper mission. 

Piece of piss with a warlock

[KartoffelKopf]

lol

 

 

[Nate Dogg III]

See that exotic you like? Yeah we’re nerfing it. 

 

https://www.bungie.net/en/Explore/Detail/News/47823

[Gorf King]

Oh man. The thing I dislike most about Bungie is this stuff - giving you something glorious, and then taking it away again. 

 

There's some unpleasant stuff in there, but by far the worst of it is them doing the whole Black Hammer > Black Spindle thing, again. I mean, they did it before and no-one liked it. And now they pull the same trick, as if they didn't know what White Nail did all those years ago in its first iteration.

 

There's just nothing wrong at all with White Nail pre-nerf, and pulling ammo from reserves makes the exotic completely unexotic. More to the point, why reintroduce the fucking weapon in D2, and White Nail at all, if they're just going to take it away again? I mean, they knew all this already. They've done it before. All of it.

 

Despite the lovely things Bungie often do (Whisper quest), they equally often turn around to you after their data is in and make you feel like your experience is that of a lab rat (Whisper nerf). And that leaves you thinking, despite the glory of what is fleetingly felt when you do the triumphant stuff, that ultimately there's no real point to any of this. Bungie have a habit of building you up so you feel great and then knocking you right back down again. And this time there can be no excuse about them not realising you'd be overpowered in the first place, because we've seen almost the exact same cycle in the exact same weapon before, in D1. They knew what they were doing and what the weapon did, downsides and all. Yet they did it anyway, to pull the punters back in, and then knocked it back down to jack shit again.

 

It's such a shame, because the imagination behind the quests to get this stuff, and then the rewards themselves, are unsurpassed in online gaming. They feel special; they stand out in a sea of mediocrity. And then they undermine that feeling with this.

 

I now confidently look forward to Outbreak Perfected being comprehensively unperfected real soon, just in time to make way for the next 'overpowered' weapon to take its place. And you know what? It makes me less likely to bother with getting it (well, I got it already, but I mean the full catalyst) in the first place.

 

Cynical. Cynical and stupid. You really can do better than this, Bungie. And you really have to.

[Mr Ben]

This will definitely weigh heavy on my decision whether to purchase the next annual pass or not.

 

Nerfing armour exotics as well - probably because Titans are not in a good spot in pve, so we'll nerf the other two classes best exotics to compensate.

 

No buffs, and no reason to think they'll do any, judging by what they say in that TWAB. How long before we're back to the days of using sidearms in pvp....

 

Season of Opulence? At this rate it'll be more like Season of Abstinence.

[Nate Dogg III]

I mean they've always taken quite obvious steps to move the meta – we're nerfing hand cannons and buffing pulses, that kind of thing – but this is just something else. Power creep naturally leads to designing yourself into a bit of a corner, and sure, nerfs are the most straightforward way out of it. But this sort of sweeping, fuck-everything nerf just makes everyone feel bad: not just the players who find their favourite tools have suddenly become dramatically less relevant, but also the design teams who only a year ago were on a promise to make players feel powerful, but are now being told they went too far. Whisper now not only doesn't feel like an exotic, it barely justifies being in the heavy slot. Should have had a whacking great damage buff to sweeten the pill and make sure the risk/reward element of the weapon is still a thing.

 

It's an incredibly worrying sign. If we've learned one thing over the last five years it's that Destiny is at its best when its makers understand that it's okay for at least a few things to feel busted, and at its worst when they aim for perfect balance. I realise that's counterintuitive for a design team but, again, if they haven't learned by now that it's how players feel that matters, then I'm not sure there's much hope for them. 

 

I can't imagine many people are playing the game at the moment. Those of us who are lapsed need a reason to come back. They whiffed on that with the high LL gate of the Outbreak quest, though I understand why they did it. This, though, is on another level entirely. 

[Gorf King]

It's a really dim move (sorry, DIM). You're right, no-one much is playing at the moment, despite Zero Hour injecting some interest back into what for many of us has been a lifeless Season of the Drifter. Partly cos power levels, partly cos good as it is, it's not a lot of content to come back for. But we were struggling to get six people willing to have at it seriously come June 4 in order to get serious with another blind raid - well, by struggling, I mean failing. And now this means we'll have even fewer who're willing to put the time in. Cos you don't get to use all that glorious shit you earned over the past year.

 

It's an odd thing for Bungie to do, when they must know they're entering a period of great uncertainty and they need to pull a few rabbits out of hats to bring players back in. Something to persuade them to shell out for the next annual pass, or DLC, or whatever it is that drops post-Activision. What's less likely to do that than taking everyone's favourite exotic PvE weapons and armour pieces, the ones people attack all the hardest content to get, or pray to the gods of RNG for? The ones where every time you use them you say out loud to your teammates 'god, I fucking love this gun/super', the ones that make the game so much fun to actually play?

 

We love them because they make us feel good. They actually make you do proper laugh out louds when you use them. They're among the best things about the game, and a big part of the reason we play it. In most of year one they were either non-existent or grey and underpowered in the name of 'balance'. People hated that, and stopped playing. And Bungie saw that and, lo, we got Go Faster, new and amazing exotics, and then Forsaken as a playground to go and have all this new fun in. Quests like Whisper, and now Zero Hour. They told us they'd rather make something game-breakingly good than boring and balanced and mediocre. People fucking loved this shit and they loved the insanely great weapons they got from the quests and drops. Bungie know this. They know we want more of this. And so... they nerf them into the ground.

 

I just don't get it. But I do get that they've just made it even harder to get people interested enough in the game to want to come back and do something like a blind raid. Why put the hours in when at the end of it you've just got the sort of shit we were using after beating Leviathan, then looking back and thinking, 'yeah, well, what was the point of that?'. In a looter that makes you work hard for some of the exotic stuff, you really need to covet that loot. In a shooter, you really need to covet that weapon for it to deserve its exotic slot. And they know this. They know because they've done this unexoticising thing before and have seen where it leads. To people not enjoying the game as much, and then not playing it.

 

Baffling.

[mikeyl]

Only recently found out that the Skull of Infinite Supers was a thing and been having the time of my life bombing literally everything in the last few weeks. So will be sad when it goes.

 

But it’s obv that everyone’s loadout for the endgame content is the same, must equip Whisper, must use tether boots, must have a specific type of shotgun, must have Warlock...it’s boring. Been also guilty at thinking why tf is the next guy shooting a trace rifle at the boss, just because they are not clued in on the meta. There’s a fine line between “feeling all powerful” and making all the content trivial and an administrative route. Understand it’s part RPG and that’s the point, but it’s also a shooter. Can imagine the gatekeeping due to exotic requirements makes it more inaccessible to casuals and new people.

 

So seeing all these crutch items being calmed down a bit may be a good thing. Use some different guns lads.

[Gorf King]

Sure, bring more variety to loadouts. But do it by making some better alternative weapons (which they have been doing recently). Do it by bringing some variety to the most effective tools by making the encounters and enemies and bosses themselves more varied. 'Use some different guns lads' is great if the other guns are as fun to use and as effective. It's not great if the other guns are fucking boring and not fun, or (which is the main reason people use Whisper) the ammo economy is shit and heavy perks don't work properly. Fix the game to make it better, not worse.

 

I don't agree that the exotics make the content 'trivial' either, and I'm surprised you're suggesting they do. I know that when we did our Riven runs, we found that fight immensely challenging every time. The blind run was really challenging, partly because of working out what to do (especially the Vault encounter), and partly the co-ordination and speed needed, especially the Riven fight. I know a lot of people seemed to just look it all up on YouTube and then use the cluster rocket launcher cheese, and that probably does make it trivial. But ironically, our group, using Whisper and playing the mechanics, didn't feel OP at all in that fight and wouldn't if we did it again tomorrow. I think it's still tough. Using some shitty purple cluster launcher probably makes it feel trivial, though, and is probably its own 'we must use this strat' mandatory requirement for some. Nothing to do with the exotics at all. 

 

In fact, the same's true of the last raid - we all used Sleeper and/or Whisper for the last boss and didn't find that a pushover either. So no, I don't agree that these exotics make encounters trivial. I do think cheesing the thing or exploiting does, or just looking up and copying the 'optimal strat' on YouTube. Which there'll be just as much of, or possibly even more, when the pinnacle weapons are nerfed. You'll just be using less fun, less effective weapons, which makes people even less likely to want to embark on something like a blind raid run. It's that loss which will trivialise content, because with less effective weapons they're more likely to look for a cheese method.

 

I wouldn't be surprised if the reason for this nerf might be that the forthcoming raid isn't imaginative or challenging enough to stand up to the pinnacle weapons. And if that's the case, the problem isn't with the weapons, it's with your encounter design. Because when they make imaginative and challenging content - like Riven - those pinnacle weapons work just fine with them. More of that please, and less of this.

[redbloodcell]

1 hour ago, mikeyl said:

Only recently found out that the Skull of Infinite Supers was a thing and been having the time of my life bombing literally everything in the last few weeks. So will be sad when it goes.

 

But it’s obv that everyone’s loadout for the endgame content is the same, must equip Whisper, must use tether boots, must have a specific type of shotgun, must have Warlock...it’s boring. Been also guilty at thinking why tf is the next guy shooting a trace rifle at the boss, just because they are not clued in on the meta. There’s a fine line between “feeling all powerful” and making all the content trivial and an administrative route. Understand it’s part RPG and that’s the point, but it’s also a shooter. Can imagine the gatekeeping due to exotic requirements makes it more inaccessible to casuals and new people.

 

So seeing all these crutch items being calmed down a bit may be a good thing. Use some different guns lads.

 

This isn't because those things are too good though, it's because so many other exotic armour pieces are trash, it's been applied so haphazardly and, speaking personally, feels like certain players are being punished whilst others aren't. Tethers by themselves aren't high-DPS supers & aren't providing a debuff that's as good as a class ability, without the quick recycle you get with Orpheus Rig Nightstalker is basically a dead class when it comes to Endgame content, and how is that supposed to help make the game experience better? I don't want to have to be a f*cking Arcstrider to be a useful member of a raid team, but this along with Shards being way too unreliable means that there's little choice. 

 

I guess I'll just have to get good at getting that 3x Combination Blow stack up and utterly break my Super DPS output instead, because that's not going to break your content is it, Bungie? 

[alex3d]

I'm sorry, could someone explain this to me in layman's terms? I'm aware that "nerfing" means that something has been made weaker, in this case D2's best weapons (exotics, legendary gear). But a) why does Bungie need to do this and b) why is that such a big deal? Thanks.

[Uncle Mike]

When/if you get to the endgame content (Raids, classically, but also the bigger harder more secret missions - Whisper of the Worm, the new Outbreak Perfected, Shattered Throne) or really start getting sweaty about PvP or Gambit, Bungie have an issue.

 

The best gear, that confers actual benefits to gameplay, can be hard to get. It should be hard to get, because it's powerful. Powerful stuff feels good. So you want the powerful stuff, and you play the hard content to get it. The hard content is fun to play, but needs commitment. The reward is the powerful stuff.

 

When you've worked hard to get the powerful stuff, you want to use it. It makes the hard content easier, so you'll play it more. But that gives Bungie two problems. One: people don't like it in PvP / Gambit when the guys with the best guns shoot them. Two: for people not gifted with a strong Destiny friends list, the third party matchmaking sites start insisting that people need the powerful stuff to be allowed to play the hard content.

 

Bungie's approach to this is often to start making the powerful stuff less powerful. Which pisses everyone off.

[alex3d]

Thanks. So the main problem behind it is players' different levels of progress, isn't it? 

[Uncle Mike]

And also RNG, and also that Bungie seem to think that if they made a great thing, and everyone uses it because it's great, that this is a problem because we're not using the other things. And that the way to fix that isn't to make more great things, but to make the great things less great.

[Hexx]

They've given 2 reasons (which are kinda interlinked).

 

If there's a massive disparity in power between items people always use the strong. Keeping it simple 1 exotic gives me 25 DamgaePerSecond. Another 100 DPS. People are probably going to use use the 100DPS one.

 

Bungie think this is a problem as it means there's not much diversity in builds/gameplay. (Players enjoy the 100DPS gameplay but wish there was other ways to do)

 

Bungie then need to design the encounters around players have a range of 25DPS - 100DPS. So people will use the stronger stuff to make it easier

for themselves. (It's a bit chicken and egg in argument in which comes first - but again "lack of diversity" can be a result)

 

Bungie's approach is to reduce the 100 one down to 25. Everything's dandy, people will pick different options, no problemo.

 

But 

• The 100 item was (often but not always) harder to get. But most of what they're nerfing comes at long quest chains. (e.g. Whisper) 
• Bungie designed the 100 item. This isn't a "surprise" problem. (e.g. Whisper they knew exactly what mechanic they were introducing). 
• People like power fantasy. Often the 100 items are [the only?) ways to fullfill that (and overcome some bad Destiny 2 design choices). People would much rather they made the 25 item into a 100 item (or an 80 item, or a 95, or a 125). No one wants to log in and feel much much weaker.
• They've been selling skins etc for the 100 item, that they're now changing the mechanics of to make it worse so it won't be used as much.

 

 

 

 

[mikeyl]

Riven ‘blind’ and ‘legit’ I’ll agree.  But that’s just one fight. Reckoning runs, the last boss on Scourge, Last Wish big Ogre, pvp, there’s always the specific equipment requirement. People are constantly instaquitting matchmaking the Reckoning if they see a Titan. That’s the reality and I’m sure there’s numbers in the Bungie computer backing up what everyone is using and wearing too much of.

 

I’d love the solution to make everything else better and louder, but to do that, more encounters will become easy-mode no matter how well they are designed. The Shiro-Chi race is amazingly well designed but it'll take a different approach if we didn’t all have infinite wells and orbs and tethers. And when everything is buffed up there will still be some more equal than others.

 

It also doesn’t help the casuals and first timers. At the moment who out of all us pro grinders would go into a raid with 4 first timers at max level but a set of average gear? We’d hate it.

[Gorf King]

Yeah, but you're just describing bad lfg groups. The worst excuse they ever had for a nerf (Gjally, D1), was that 'all the lfg groups are requiring it, so we're going to fuck it up'. That's no way to design pinnacle gear and weapons capabilities. Or, if it is, just design more equally powerful gear and weapons and make the encounters more varied so they demand or support a greater variety of weapons.

 

But ultimately, there'll always be a meta, and many lfg people will demand you conform to it whether they're right or wrong to do so. I know in D1 they usually demanded you had a Gjally as a requirement for running Crota. And they were wrong - it just wasn't needed. We completed that raid over 60 times and I don't think any of us ever used Gjally. And for Riven, as you know, they all tended to use cluster rockets and none of the pinnacle exotics at all. It was we who used Whisper, and it was fucking hard to do so, in the proper encounter without exploits. LFG groups will take that approach again with any content. People always do, and nerfing Whisper will make no difference to that.

 

I dunno, I think all the encounters except Kalli and the ogre in Last Wish are difficult, whatever you use. And these nerfs - I mean, shards of Galanor, why nerf that again? It's frustratingly inconsistent and dangerous to use as it is after the last few nerfs. It hardly makes anything piss easy, and certainly not the raids. All I know is that it was getting harder than ever to get a proper blind raid team together anyway, and this latest round of nerfs just makes it harder still. I can't see it doing anything to help 'casuals' or first timers at all, because this just makes the game more difficult for everyone, and if you can't get a three together for the Whisper quest, what hope have you of getting six for a raid anyway, let alone a blind one?

 

But on that note of helping raid newcomers through raids, we recently took a team mate who'd never played D1 past vanilla through the full set of raids, and it was great fun to do so. So yeah, we would do that if the person's up to it, and up for it. We managed to get a raid team of six easy for all of them even at short notice, but we can't even get a three for Zero Hour at the moment. Why? Because people love their gear and their weapons and those D1 encounters. And those same people are sick of this shit happening in D2: the pushing of content into modes they don't particularly want to play (the Gambit expansion; the Forges), and the last round of nerfs to Sleeper and Whisper, and now this one to them again plus a whole lot more of our favourite things. I give Outlook Perfected a few moths before it cops it too. So what's the point?

 

Bungie have a real problem here, repeating the mistakes of the past all over again, just when they can least afford to do so. As I said earlier, it's baffling. Nothing was terribly broken by these items and, if they were broken, they were broken in fun ways. It was enjoyable to use them, and it helped with doing the hard stuff (e.g. blind raids or the heroic version of Zero Hour). Now it's going to be a lot less enjoyable and a lot harder to do that kind of thing. If some LFG clown insists everyone has to be at max light and kitted out to their specs to do an activity, bollocks to them. I don't want my game design dictated by idiocy. I want the design and the rewards to be surprising, imaginative, challenging, and fun. Not grey and 'balanced' and with nothing exciting to aspire to. I want Gjally to drop - I want that moment of game-changing joy. I want the Whisper quest and the glory of discovering how great the reward is. I want truly great raid/secret encounters and truly great raid/secret rewards. And I want that joy to stay, to not be some temporary buzz that'll get taken away, just a marketing ploy to sucker people back in for a few weeks or months before the rug's pulled from under your feet again and you then get forced to choose which shitty purple scout rifle to plink away at a boss for half an hour with cos heavy ammo only drops every ten minutes and the DPS from your heavy weapon when you do have ammo is trash. Fuck that noise.

[alex3d]

1 hour ago, Uncle Mike said:

And also RNG

 

Isn't that supposed to lead to a more even distribution of powerful gear? After all, it's random...?!

[Mr Ben]

2 hours ago, mikeyl said:

Riven ‘blind’ and ‘legit’ I’ll agree.  But that’s just one fight. Reckoning runs, the last boss on Scourge, Last Wish big Ogre, pvp, there’s always the specific equipment requirement. People are constantly instaquitting matchmaking the Reckoning if they see a Titan. That’s the reality and I’m sure there’s numbers in the Bungie computer backing up what everyone is using and wearing too much of.

 

I’d love the solution to make everything else better and louder, but to do that, more encounters will become easy-mode no matter how well they are designed. The Shiro-Chi race is amazingly well designed but it'll take a different approach if we didn’t all have infinite wells and orbs and tethers. And when everything is buffed up there will still be some more equal than others.

 

It also doesn’t help the casuals and first timers. At the moment who out of all us pro grinders would go into a raid with 4 first timers at max level but a set of average gear? We’d hate it.

Yeah I struggled in Reckoning with anything other than my Warlock, purely because the random warlocks I team up with are all the wrong spec for the bridge encounter, which is the main issue in Reckoning T2/3 - Bungie needs to change the encounter post Opulence or no-one will ever play the damn thing after these nerfs - whereas at least some Titans had the brains to go bubble. Hunters werent the issue most of the time, and were tether specced, fair play.

 

Theres no excuse to not buff the other armour exotics though. @redbloodcel is correct. They really are utter trash, and I never see anyone using them. The same goes for a lot of the exotc weapons from Y1 now, thinking about it. How often do you see anyone use Sunshot now? Graviton Lance? Sweet Business? Never is the answer, despite them getting catalysts that made them seem amazing at the time. Not so much now.

 

Of all the weapon nerfs, I'm more annoyed by the change to Lord of Wolves, as I only started using it late this season, and it is the Lord of Shotguns at this point, admittedly. I hope the flat damage boost they're supposedly adding makes up for the 20% damage nerf, or it will be the most short lived "buff" an exotic gun has had in Destiny I think, especially one that was trash prior.

 

I also like how they nerf Whisper, when the main draw of the weapon is its infinite ammo, but dont address the massive issue that is the lack of heavy ammo drops, even when wearing heavy ammo finder! Like, fix the fucking perk for crying out loud before nerfing the one heavy that bypasses the problem.

 

But dont forget to buy our tat from the Bungie store!! This sweet TR3-VR shirt could be yours!!!

[redbloodcell]

1 minute ago, Mr Ben said:

I also like how they nerf Whisper, when the main draw of the weapon is its infinite ammo, but dont address the massive issue that is the lack of heavy ammo drops, even when wearing heavy ammo finder! Like, fix the fucking perk for crying out loud before nerfing the one heavy that bypasses the problem.

 

Yep, do that and you'd see plenty of more variety. Whisper might be a DPS monster but it's also a pain in the ass to use! 

[Lyrical Donut]

Here's Ya Boi Slayerage making some good points:

 

 

[Gorf King]

Not really. As well as it being invalidated because it's from slayerage - a gifted PC player who thinks every encounter is trivially easy, even when 98% of the player base think it very difficult - he barely addresses some of the central points of concern. For example, on the first point (his own skill level and platform of choice), he reckons Zero Hour is 'quick and easy' with 'virtually no threat to the player', and the boss fight is 'practically a free win'. Heh... no. It really isn't. As well as being slayerage, and therefore having godlike skills, he plays on PC, of course, and therefore has perfect aim and no recoil. Reminds me a bit of The Division 2's raid - if he had his way you'd probably not be able to complete Destiny 2 raids on console either, unless you were also god-like. No thanks, slayerage. He thinks, and always has, that *every* encounter, including every raid last boss encounter, is trivially easy, and regularly lobbies for them to be made harder. He did the same with Leviathan and almost everything else. He's wrong there; they are difficult enough that the vast majority of the player base never even try them.

 

The lack of properly addressing broader concerns comes because he seems to accept, for example, that Whisper is only good for some encounters, where the boss is static and has a large weak spot. He says it's not used otherwise: not where the boss moves around more, or where other mechanics mean you can't just stay ADS forever aiming at a static target. But he doesn't expand on that - just notes it and moves on. Same with the fact that the heavy ammo economy is fucked and there aren't synths - he notes that, seems to accept it might be an issue, but doesn't factor that in to why people really use Whisper. Just says it's something for another time, and moves on. I don't think you can accept that the issue might be with encounter design that almost forces you to use snipers - because bosses stomp the shit out of you but are static with huge weak spots - and don't drop enough heavy to feed non-Whisper snipers, and you can't use synths - and, having accepted those issues, fails to deal with them and says that nerfing the very things that get round the problem is fine. It's not fine. It's not something to deal with 'at another time', it needs to be dealt with at the same time as the nerfs to the things that make those issues tolerable.

 

The video is also somewhat tendentious because he's basing his 'the nerfs are fine' argument on only two of the nerfed items: Whisper and Skull of Dire Ahamkara. Like, Sleeper's being nerfed, but why? It doesn't conform to the model of infinite ammo or infinite supers that his whole video is based on. It's just, like, a powerful weapon sometimes, in some situations, because it's exotic. Lots of things are being nerfed that don't conform to the model. I don't think anyone thinks that Shards of Galanor in their current state trivialise content. Because they don't. Yet they're being nerfed too.

 

He also acknowledges in passing, but doesn't really address, another key point: that Bungie knew all this when they reintroduced Whisper into D2. They knew it because of D1. It cannot be a mistake. It feels - and this is what puts some people off the most - like Whisper was a short-term fix to get players back in, to raise the power fantasy, and that Bungie knew when they reintroduced it that they would bring it crashing down again later on in the name of balance. It feels like Bungie either don't know how to design power and also have the memory of gnats, or else they do this cynical thing deliberately, that they plan these cycles. And the concern there is that this might suggest they're going to follow that through like they did in late D1, leading to D2. That we're heading back on our way to D2 vanilla levels of exotic boredom. Personally, that's the feeling of déjà vu that occurs the most to me and is the most off-putting. Because the lame exotics and lack of power in D2 vanilla were depressing and dull as fuck.

 

Slayerage is a great player, but in terms of assessing how 'trivial' these exotics make the content, he's probably the worst person in the world to asses such a thing. And he doesn't give nearly enough attention to issues such as the fucked ammo economy and static, long-range-only boss encounter designs before declaring that really all the changes are fine, based on only two (the most obvious) examples. They'd only be fine if the rest of the game is tuned to them, and not to someone who can solo Last Wish while playing on a fishing rod controller. It's great to see the game played by a master, but world-first speed running PC soloists aren't best placed to judge what makes a game unbalanced or too easy or trivial to complete. 

[Mr Ben]

Personally, the only exotic I felt needed a nerf is Skull, as its ridiculous you can lob a nova bomb at a group of 4 red bar enemies, kill them, and get your super back. Shards of Galanor is nowhere near that level, as you wont get a super back at all, and Ursa's needs the full firepower of one of the tanks shooting you in Zero Hour to get a super back - thats a full arc bombardment, and the rail gun at the same time, if anyones wondering. If only a few enemies shoot you, you're lucky to get a quarter of your bar back, if that.

 

With regards to Whisper, If heavy ammo was plentiful then it'd have lots of competition. As it is, it barely drops, hence you feel forced to use Whisper in most boss encounters due to ammo constraints. Thats without taking stomp mechanics into consideration. They shouldnt have put it in the game as it was after D1's Black Hammer/Spindle shenanigans, but here we are.

 

They better have some good news (exotic buffs) lined up for one of the upcoming TWABS, as well as rebalancing activities that were balanced around these exotics (Reckoning T3 bridge instantly comes to mind - try that without wells, tethers or bubbles!), or there'll be more problems ahead for Bungie. Possibly Osiris level ones.

[Nate Dogg III]

Now I've had a few days to process this I realise it's really a problem with communication, like it has been for Bungie throughout Destiny's life. So many better ways to go about this, to both prepare the community for it happening and sweeten the pill a bit (by announcing buffs at the same time, say). Basically I'm blaming Deej again.

[Gorf King]

It might well be a problem with communication. But it might equally well be a problem with design. I recall Bungie doing some back-pedalling with vanilla D2 about some of its issues being about communication and perception. But it turned out - and was always obviously the case - that it was just a set of misguided design issues that made the game boring and colourless. I think it's fair enough that people who still play the game after it's been turned around and fully powered up again are extremely wary of this latest apparent 'balancing' nerfset that might be a first major step in rolling back the Go Faster approach that won at least some fans back.

 

No-one will know until the full patch notes are out and people have played the new content extensively enough to judge it (and how the new sandbox makes the older content work, or not work). I think the big problem there is, though, that fewer and fewer people are going to be lining up for the new raid on day one, and part of that is to do with this messaging. Or the actual effect of the nerfs. Take your pick, but neither is helping. 

[Nate Dogg III]

Oh I'm not dismissing the design decisions they've made at all. Just that, once you make them, there are different, variously effective ways of talking about them.

 

I mean imagine if they'd said two months ago, 'we're concerned certain exotics - specifically Whisper, Skull, etc etc - are significant outliers that are affecting not only player choice but also our approach to encounter design. We'll be monitoring community discussion as we work towards solutions'. Two months later, when you're ready to announce the changes, chances are the community has, if not quite come to terms with them, then at least had a chance to consider what they might be. And maybe the community talking about this stuff impacts your decision-making too, because they know the game better than you. A blanket, drive-by 'we're taking your toys away' is one of the worst ways you can go about it.