I think Datto and I had a psionic connection because:
1 Like
I thought I would like fixed rolls but I agree that in practice it just means thereās not really anything to chase after. And with armor being like 95% cosmetic, it feels like thereās a huge reduction in viable and meaningfully different builds. I was doing trials last night and literally every team had 3 or 4 MIDAs (with the occasional nameless midnight), 3 or 4 mini-tools / urielās, and wardiff coil / play of the game / the suros rocket launcher with the name I canāt remember. I would be fine just playing to collect cosmetic stuff, because Iām extremely vain, but none of the sets are super appealing to me atm and the shader system makes it a pain to switch your gear around anyway.
The advantage of fixed rolls is that it does make the game easier to balance, but the flip side of that is you can boil down every weapon class to a single tier list, and everyone will gravitate towards whatever the highest item they have on that tier list is. There was always going to be some of that, because having deterministic loot sources like in D1 meant you could at least get the best vendor weapons and build off of that, but it seems even more extreme in D2.
Even if you value a specific perk higher than the majority of the community (Icarus is a good example of a polarizing D1 perk), if the perk is only found on guns that are disadvantaged in other ways to the top of the meta, then that perk might as well not exist.
For me, I used to be willing in D1 to go in with a specific gun or archetype that had suboptimal ttk if it had a perk I thought would compensate, like firefly or third eye, or if it dropped with a scope with high aim assist or whatever. Now that variability is gone, and the best gun can be had by completing a pretty short questline, so why bother with anything else? I guess the upside is that greater uniformity in gear has elevated the role of skill in pvp. Or at least the role of sticking really close to your team and all training your MIDAs on the same guy.
we did the thing again
donāt really get the āgreater uniformityā thing
the overwhelming majority of people i matched up with in year 2/3 of destiny ran the one viable roll of eyasluna with the occasional rebel on a vendor hawksaw
A meta will always converge towards the top options over time, but it does feel like dramatically reducing the amount of possibilities in weapons has made the convergence happen almost instantaneously. It certainly doesnāt help that MIDA is being given out to every single player for completing a short quest.
man iāll be excited to be able to raid in likeā¦ when i have more than an hour of free time available.
yeah sakurina, i kinda feel you. i am a bit bugged that like everything in the game has sort of become a loot gachapon: put in tokens to the EDZ guy to get a random EDZ item, zavala to get a random vanguard item, gunsmith for a foundry weapon. oh? you leveled up and got another bright engram! sparrow/shader/emote gachapon. thereās lots of stuff to get, but no reliable way to get it. i think it would bug me a lot more if i had a lot more time to put into the game right now, but as it stands most things i get are new to me so iām kinda just happy to get anything.
itās an improvement over destiny 1 for sure, but it also feels like they forgot about a bunch of improvements they made over the course of the rest of destiny 1?
thanks for the free raid and trials weapons guys, btw! (lul) i got the scout rifle but the really lackluster new version of firefly makes me really, really bummed i sacrificed my cool full-auto veist scout rifle to infuse it that actually felt better than this raid full-auto scout rifle.
yeah i honestly feel like iāve been liberated from having to grind strikes to roll the dice and maybe get an imago loop with a roll other than performance bonus + take a knee
i played a lot of pvp in the first few weeks of destiny 1 and 6v6 suros was as much of a thing at this point, just you had to shoot into a cave or - of course - grind strikes to get it
iām not massively into the pvp meta and the mods system is terrible but i will not miss the strike grind
yeah, the current pvp meta seems to stem from this - on paper mida would lose to a bunch of other scouts/pulses in some situations if it didnāt have high caliber rounds and this nerf already happened in the first game
handcannons are also back in the āghost bulletsā taken king era and theyāre only viable if you have the handcannon from trials or the hunter exotic boots that have āyour hits will actually register!ā perks
itās certainly a little more obvious that this game doesnāt have the same amount of content as subscription mmorpgs but it never did
not going to lie iām also enjoying that schadenfreude re: youtubers in a panic over not being able to phone in a vendor reset video every week
2 Likes
mods are kind of exactly what i expected them to be: safe and boring. canāt really do anything interesting with them because then edge-cases risk destroying the sterility that preserves the Great Balance. so instead, you get to add 5 attack to a weapon and the ability to change a gunās element (probably the first and only good idea someone had for this shallow system).
yeah it feels like something they threw in at the very last minute
thereās the beginnings of something interesting there - the counterbalance perk from the first game now exists solely as a mod and in theory a hunter can stack two of them and maybe make something with janky recoil direction viable but to get anywhere with them youāre basically hammering the ābuy random modā button from banshee until you lose all of your glimmer / get the thing you want
also rye i miss playing destiny with you and iām really looking forward to running the raid and having a chat sometime
3 Likes
wtf this is a thing?
lord
i do think stuff like counterbalance being a mod is the more interesting places to go with those kinds of ānon-perksā. iāve said this before but so many of the perks in destiny are just bland as oatmeal. getting a gun with a perk like āyour first shot has more accuracyā is just not exactly the kind of thing that makes me want to pump my fist.
like if the core gameplay werenāt best in class iād have a really hard time getting behind this game (but maybe itās best in class because they intentionally limit the number of variables???)
Itās kind of hilarious this got turned into a perk when itās literally what the Age of Triumph hand cannon buff was and then they undid it
yeah actually @rye (and anybody else in his position) the raid encounters have a kind of bite-sized quality to them and raiding for an hour to get through one or two of them a couple times a week instead of sitting down for four hours at once feels much more viable than usual, and the raidās novel (cool!) structure feels like it almost suggests that. so you should raid! and so should the other quieter pmods!
as a late-game grind thing i easily prefer mods to tier 12 nonsense and random weapon rolls, though i do think itās weird that some mods slots are tied to certain classes and i wonder if that will get changed down the line. i also think new mods in general could be a very interesting space down the line??
mida does pop up an awful lot right now, though i do think thatās largely because itās tied to a quest everyone can do and the internet is telling people itās good. it does dominate if you engage it at its range with something other than a mida, but it loses to an awful lot if you get just a little closer, and new crucible is so much about positioning and particularly positioning re: your teammates that i really donāt feel like itās the only viable option. itās better than any other scout but i suspect a perk nerf will bring it in line soon enough
iām really enjoying trials, the last raid encounter is going to keep being āvery hardā in a good way for a while longer, the other raid encounters are breezy+fun, nightfalls have so far been either very difficult this week or as fun as non-raid destiny pve has ever been on other weeks, i havenāt tried prestige nf yet, faction thing should be cute, thereās gonna be prestige raid and iron banner next month at least - if anything at all happens in november and an expansion actually comes out in december (!!) this seems like a pretty ideal rate of New Stuff imo
also i love love clan stuff and iām very curious to see what our new banner staff thing looks like when we finish the season (?) at max level, this is all i really care about
2 Likes
so say someone in my house came into possession of a ps4 and both destinies, is it worth playing the first at all?
Nah
aw k. isnāt there some cute thing that happens if you do though?
There is but it doesnāt have as much impact if you didnāt play it and its endgame activities with other people, and everyone else has moved on to D2 already