Destiny Come On Already

Only the most casual players are going to have problems with any of that for more than two weeks after the game launches

My take on the weapon slot reshuffling is that they wanted to solve two “issues” at once:

  • All non-sidearm special weapons can potentially be a one-hit kill in PvP at their optimal ranges, and it’s been shown that players will overwhelmingly gravitate towards those weapons as soon as special ammo is available. Hell, I feel like I’m being sniped more often now that people are using Ice Breaker in Crucible constantly instead of using a normal sniper and being limited by special ammo spawn rate. I don’t have much of an issue with the old weapon slots in PvE, but I welcome this change as someone who enjoys (but sucks at) PvP.
  • With the special slot freed up, Bungie thought they could address a common community complaint from Year Two onwards: elemental primaries. I tend to think that what the community was asking for wasn’t so much elemental primaries (the Y1 Trials ones didn’t get any play compared to VoG/Crota) but rather raid weapons that felt like they were worth using, and their elemental property was the cherry on top. For PvP, this second slot would be completely redundant if they hadn’t also made it so elemental primaries deal bonus damage to Guardians currently in a super.

I’m curious to see what the competitive community will do with regards to heavy ammo, because right now using it is banned in most competitive games, but everyone is using Palindrome/Eyasluna and a mid-impact sniper. Now that snipers have been shifted and that heavy ammo is only picked up by one player at a time (unclear if this is only in Countdown?), I wonder if they’re going to allow heavy again or restrict the subclasses of heavy that can be used.

There are a bunch of implications to allow players to have multiple heavies like:

  • If you use a heavy synth, does it only impact one weapon or both?
  • Is the cooldown shared or per weapon slot?
  • Are the heavy weapons both pulling from a common heavy ammo pool or do they individually hold ammo? If so, what weapon gets the ammo if you walk over a heavy ammo pack?
  • And perhaps most importantly, Bungie designs all encounters to be beatable with only primary weapons, because you may run out at any time. Does this persist [and these proposed changes just further trivialize endgame content] or do they change the design of their encounters to account for this? It’s hard to allow players to have that freedom and not run into scenarios like House of Wolves where Skolas got melted by Ghorn before the mechanics of the fight even got triggered by the world first team (Solar Burn definitely didn’t help there)

And this completely ignores any technical restrictions that may or may not exist because of the design of their engine.

Isn’t that kinda the entire struggle of game design?

Where did they say they didn’t want Destiny to be a competitive game? They had a deal with MLG for Rise of Iron, but then they kinda blew it because what Bungie wanted competitive play to be was completely disconnected from what the existing competitive scene was doing.

The standard competitive Destiny meta was 3v3 Skirmish, no exotic armor, no heavy ammo, some banned exotic weapons (Pocket Infinity RIP). Bungie walks in after Rise of Iron and tells people organized competitive play from now on is 6v6 Supremacy, all exotics allowed, heavy allowed, and any subclass build is A-OK. (It’s actually completely baffling to me that they wouldn’t just go for Trials as an esport, because that would be way more interesting than FUCKING SUPREMACY.)

I understand wanting your esport rules to be as true to what is possible in casual play as possible because then it’s a better ad for your product, but Destiny was never designed as an esport, and allowing everything in 6v6 means you can have Defenders and Gunslingers building up super trains in the middle of a map and it’s not even fun to watch. That’s why there were only like one or two official tournaments and then you never heard Bungie talk about them again.

I’m excited to see PvP get better because I love spending time in there even though I’m terrible at it, but it does suck to see those improvements take place at the expense of PvE which I think is in a pretty good place as it is in D1 right now.

(this is very tongue-in-cheek but) Bungie never said Destiny was an MMO, they said it was a shared world shooter.

The only reason I’m bothered by the gear reset because of the implication at the end of Year One that the shader and emblem we got for completing vanilla Destiny would follow our Guardian along for the rest of the ride. That made it sound like (at least some of) your gear would always be with you, regardless of its irrelevance in current content, and now I feel like I’ve been misled to some extent.

I know I can still boot back into D1 to play around with my stuff if I want to, but what is the population going to look like one or two years from now when I wanna go mow people down in Crucible with Vex Mythoclast?

What I would like to see is a different “format” available under activities in the director where I can play through a strike or story mission (which as is, don’t give you rewards past the first playthrough) using “legacy weapons”. Maybe normalize the damage like you do in regular Crucible and just let me get in there and grind out my bounties with a retro loadout if I want to. Maybe Mayhem Crucible playlists would allow legacy weapons too, since that’s broken enough as is.

There’s no way this is technically viable long-term but I sure as hell would prefer this to having to dive back into D1 to use Vex Mythoclast or That One Really Good FWC Fusion Rifle I Like And Have Three Of.

I’m not 100% certain of this because the only emblems being used during that event/stream were the new D2 class symbols, but I believe the emblems now also take over the entire navbar on the inventory menu, so there are now 3 sizes of them: “square” and “wide” like Destiny 1 had and now “navbar”.

Assuming that’s not a generic class indicator, they’d have to revisit every emblem in the game. Certainly not impossible but I can understand wanting to throw them out and start fresh. Of course, that’s not what you’d expect from a game that literally has an “investment team” but heh.

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that post was way longer than I had anticipated

edit: oh yeah I forgot to mention in the “competitive game” section that funnily enough D2 won’t have private matches which is a great way to shoot yourself in the foot if you’re trying to make a more appealing game to the PvP tryhard community

I don’t disagree with this but at the same time it’s the most exciting thing to me about Destiny 2; not that it’s necessarily a good decision but that someone is going to try to break out of the iron logic of MMO expansions: you’re only selling to your existing audience, and broaden it to game sequels which traditionally are bigger than the first.

I’m very interested in whether it’s a successful move and what that means for long-form progression in this new (and likely dominant over the next 5-8 years) genre of lite-MMOs.

Even if it’s just a way to clean their database, sure, fine, but it does seem an odd move for, as sakurina said, a company with investment designers. But then will they just wipe the slate clean anytime they feel like tweaking the game mechanics or weapon roles? I’m curious to see what they’re going to do and how people will respond to that as well.

To clarify I’m mostly okay with losing my guns. I want new stuff anyway, but the emblems and shaders, the real records of my achievements getting the axe when the systems themselves still seem to be in place (decorating the menu bar with new emblems still seems like a lazy excuse to trash the old ones, though yeah it is a lot of work.) is a bit discouraging. It’s been hinted that they’re gonna throw a bone at old players and give them a “I participated” in D1 emblem, but that feels a bit trite. Just take it all away if that’s how you’re gonna handle it.

Anyway, I’ll be working a lot less hard to get stuff (are there going to be horrible new sword quests again? Cause screw that), which is probably for the best.

I’m also not suggesting players should be allowed multiple heavies, but rather lamenting that they are now regulating most of the interesting weapons to the heavy slot.

a heavy weapon is now:

  • shotguns
  • rocket launchers
  • sniper rifles
  • swords
  • heavy machine guns
  • grenade launchers
  • fusion rifles

which is a fairly diverse list, but two thirds of the weapons you will be able to equip in destiny 2 are now limited to:

  • auto rifles
  • hand cannons
  • pulse rifles
  • scout rifles
  • sidearms
  • LMGs (which just look like bullet-hose ARs with the range of a side-arm)

which are all weapons that exist mostly along a less-interesting spectrum.

maybe i’m getting this wrong, but it feels like i have less choices to make and less variety in my load-outs, short of stopping in a menu to change stuff around frequently. i guess we’ll see how it plays out and if it’s a big deal or not.

Yeah, I can see where you’re coming from.

The main advantage I can see to having a second primary slot is being effective at two different ranges consistently. If you put aside one-hit kill potential, I think one of the reason people gravitate towards hand cannon + sniper or scout + sidearm is the desire to be effective at both short and long ranges. The energy slot reshuffling eliminates the OHK potential and lets you focus purely on complimenting your range weakness in the kinetic slot.

Energy weapons granting bonus damage on Guardians in a super also means you need to think about what range you typically engage with supers at in order to maximize the effectiveness of that slot (in PvP anyway).

The one thing I’m ignoring in this is ammo, mostly because I totally forgot to pay attention to kinetic/energy ammo drops while looking at D2 footage, and I have no idea how they work. This post presumes energy ammo is as available as kinetic ammo in all game modes, and for all I know that could be complete BS. I’ll try to watch the strike again later and see if this is correct.

It doesn’t really change that two thirds of the weapons are going to be less exciting though. I feel like fusion rifle fans are really getting screwed by this reshuffling because they’re already inconsistent, and now you’re going to get even less of a chance to use them.

Has it been confirmed that emblems and shaders aren’t carrying forward?
I’m kinda ambivalent, it’d be nice to bring the flawless trials emblems, glowhoo and the dog eating a tennis ball forward but at the same time I’m hoping we’re way too busy figuring out an excellent new raid to be disappointed.

I’m reserving judgement on weapon balance and inventory until I’ve played the beta at least. We don’t know anything about the ammo economy, whether there are going to be the kind of ‘special in a primary slot!’ exotics that came up in the first game etc. it does look like they’re further limiting how much control you have over class builds. I was really hoping they’d go the other way with this and we’d see more wacky specialised builds this time.

My main concern is the campaign and other low-level pve activities. The stock Destiny campaign mission is an easier version of the library - you follow a linear path, the ghost makes a dumb quip and you have to fight trash mobs while it opens a door. The strikes are the same thing with a bullet sponge at the end. It’s a boring slog you have to grind through to make the number high enough and unlock The Good Bit - which you need five other players and a chunk of time to play.

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Guess it depends if emblems count as possessions. I think it’s safer to assume they’re going away and be pleasantly surprised if they’re not than the other way around.

I also think that’s why I’m drawn to the stupid shirt so much; yeah, it’s another $30, but it’s a physical manifestation of what will probably be the 1000+ hours I spent in D1 and it can’t be taken away from me down the line by a gear reset or servers going offline. Now if only I could stop getting sniped by Ice Breaker long enough to get these six last Crucible quartermaster bounties done.

It’s very telling that your idea of “interesting weapons” seems to start and end with “anything capable of a one-shot kill”

The weapons in the power weapon slot still feel very distinct from each other, even ignoring the OHKO potential. I think rye is coming more from a PvE perspective, so they aren’t necessarily one hit kills in that context aside from trash mobs which die to anything. Primaries don’t have that much variation; they’re relatively boring but reliable workhorses, except now we’ve got two of them instead of two more varied weapon slots.

Exotics should become the way you spice up those slots, but we don’t really have anything exciting to look forward to there yet. I think simplified subclass perk trees are likely to hurt the exotic situation as well. Tlaloc is the kind of exotic I really liked in D1 because it’s a pretty standard scout rifle until your super is up, in which case it becomes the best scout in the game. But if you’re gonna use Tlaloc, you’re going to want to throw all your resources into your neutral game instead of buffing your super, since you’re disincentivized from using it. There aren’t very many exotics in the game you can shift your entire subclass build around, and I would like to see more of that in D2’s exotic design rather than novelty weapons that aren’t really viable anywhere.

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also fuck whoever decided to take titan skating away

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i don’t play pvp. i agree the game needs to be better balanced there, and i’m sure they’ve tested how this stuff works and know better than i do about all this, but hey, i feel like discussing stuff and voicing my thoughts in a place where what i say might not be casually dismissed in a sentence or two.

it’s very telling your response to my post seems to suggest i’m a certain kind of person? like what the fuck? thanks dude.

[quote=“idiot, post:336, topic:1932”]
My main concern is the campaign and other low-level pve activities.[/quote]

Same. I want a really great campaign again. I could replay the Bungie Halos dozens of times and complete objectives differently. That’s just not the case in Destiny - too often it’s firefight-in-campaign without Reach’s twists. Even the best levels in TTK are just The Library with cooler wallpaper.

Or - more easily - give me a nice little whetstone again. Take me back to gruntpocalypse all day every day.

I wish I had played the Halo games. :<

This section of Reach is a neat example of the kind of versatile arena spaces Halo used to have and the variety of tools you could use. Using the EMP effect from a grenade launcher to down a flying craft is typical of the creative strategies you could use to bend Halo. The “ammo” in Halo is the finite amount of human and covenant weapons available to pick up, and you were often forced into using subpar equipment in a pinch or learning unconventional uses for basic weapons, e.g. the same EMP effect from the grenade launcher can be caused by the basic plasma pistol at full charge.

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I missed out on the halo games too, I definitely enjoy hearing more about them!

what

jesus i’ll play halo with you guys

I think the issue isn’t so much lack of people to play with, but rather that the only sane way to play the Halo games in the year of our lord 2017 is to own an Xbox One and I’m not gonna buy one

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There’s always the first one on PC but that’s fairly hard to find legally these days.

Whatever happened to that Russia exclusive one?