I think they also never knew quite what to do with shotguns, and thus they got moved as well.

I don't really have any thoughts or a solution for them, though, just thought it should be in the discussion.

I think maybe the problem.. well a problem.. is that if you nerf the infinite range one shot kill guns far enough into the ground that they aren't a balance problem you have also made them zero fun to actually use.

Putting snipers back into the power weapon category gives the freedom to keep sniper rifles good.

Like BeardFade mentioned, I think maybe shotguns were actually the harder problem. Basically, movement and map size and everything is such in Destiny that they really could not nerf shotguns enough. If they made it so shotguns had a range measured in millimeters it still would not have been enough because planting the end of the barrel against an enemy's head was a common enough occurrence due to the way Destiny played.

Like Sniper Rifles, I think it's better shotguns be allowed the freedom to be a little ridiculous in exchange for having true limited availability again.

I hope Bungie boosts the effectiveness of the secondaries that were moved to power-slots, especially for PvE. Perhaps requiring a little more ammo restriction in PvP(?). Regardless of what needs to happen in PvP I hope they really shine in PvE now.

The nice thing about putting shotguns and snipers into heavy is that pvp playes like old school halo. Waiting for the rockers, sniper/shotgun to respawn kept them from being overused (see destiny 1 pvp). Now not only can we have that pvp strategy, we can still use our "own" guns. Also when someone does pick up heavy, the power weapon they are using glows at the barrel. So they made it more obvious who has it.

So it feels like maybe Bungie decided to move Special weapons into the power weapons category due to the difficulty in finding a good balance between primary, special, and heavy in PvP. I wonder if there might have been other ways of accomplishing the same goal?

For example, Titanfall 2 has sniper rifles, but they rarely get used in actual PvP instead of other weapons. For example, the Kraber has the is a one-shot kill anywhere on the body, but it has several disadvantages:

• Sniper bullets have travel time, so you have to learn to lead your targets depending on the range (extra hard because players move so much in TF2).
  
• Sniper shots have bullet trails so if you miss the player has a chance to figure out where they were getting shot from.
  
• Zoom is generally higher than other weapons

Similarly, shotguns in TF2 are either very close range compared to average engagement distances or they have travel time.

Are there other ways Bungie could have handled the special weapons slot without just turning everything into power weapons again?

Maybe they could have give snipers a long ADS time to give other players an advantage against a sniper that isn't hard-scoped down a hallway? Add aim movement so you have to constantly correct your aim?

Oh boy. Something I know about.

Titanfall 2 is both a good and bad example for a few reasons. First, it's a twitch shooter where if you get shot you're almost always dead with no chance of escape. Destiny is really not that and is much more about positioning and map control. Titanfall 2 has map flow and it's basically impossible to win by camping simply due to the nature of the game. It also has massive maps compared to Destiny. Like four to eight times bigger. Which means weapon zoom is a really important thing, and sometimes you'll encounter someone too far away to attack or too close for comfort and your best option is to run and hide *when you see them on your radar* rather than even trying to engage. Personally, I find the titan combat to be much more similar to destiny's combat than the pilot combat is. it's class-based, positioning based, and team-shooting based.

To get to the meat of your questions, though, yes, of course bungie could have balanced their weapons more effectively. I've talked about this a lot on these very forums. Everything from adjusting ADS speed to turning speed to movement speed to rate of fire to accuracy etc etc etc can be tweaked. Lots of it was. BUT... Bungie designed themselves into a corner, apparently, in D1. They made each gun draw its base properties from a class of weapons, so if they changed one gun, they changed them all. This was very problematic.

The other problem is map design. Bungie is famous for their wide open spaces in the middle of their maps, but Destiny is very much the opposite, with circular maps that have an obstruction in the middle and lots of twists and turns with few, very controlled sightlines for sniping. This makes shotguns and snipers super effective. A sniper can hold an entire avenue of approach singlehandedly, usually with some cover, and a shotgunner is constantly popping around corners to catch people by surprise, already in shotgun range.

Imagine, if you will, playing Destiny on Blood Gulch. Wide open middle. Ledges at the extreme ends for sniping. Warrens on one side for shotguns. But the vast majority of the map is medium range engagements with very little cover. The game would be completely different. In fact, I imagine everyone would load up a sniper rifle at the start, and - as the game grew more chaotic, would switch to their primary weapons more and more. Or maybe my favorite all time map from any game ever, Hang 'em High. Harder to snipe there, some places where shotguns would be useful, but mostly, again, primary weapons because of the excellent target acquisition.

One more problem destiny has is a shocking lack of verticality in pvp arenas. Or rather, poor use of verticality in a game where vertical mobility is so great. The strength of the game is player control and mobility, and yet most of the maps are strictly linear with small elevation changes. There are very few alternate traversal paths which require deft movement to successfully navigate. That's not to say you couldn't make novel use of the vertical space, but it was almost always with the appearance of glitching the geometry (such as being on top of the pipes by B on rusted lands) rather than going somewhere the designers placed with intent. Anyway, all of that generally circular, generally linear design with few open spaces lends itself towards sniper and shotgun play.

So it feels like maybe Bungie decided to move Special weapons into the power weapons category due to the difficulty in finding a good balance between primary, special, and heavy in PvP. I wonder if there might have been other ways of accomplishing the same goal?

Oh goodness. I'm glad I'm not the only person who had this same thought. I recently watched Datto RAVE over the Fusion Rifle in D2B PvP. I sighed.

There is a way to make a balance in PvE & PvP. Make PvE different then PvP. In essence - Problem solved. Bungie simply has made things harder for themselves then it has to be. I don't mind them trying new things - I encourage it. As if, they needed my encouragement. Yet this experiment really feels like it has gone on too long already. Every time they fix it, they make a problem. After a while, I have to wonder is it those who do the balancing or the system they have to work with. Thought experiment: Give someone who surfboards professionally a plank of wood, how well do they do? Give some one who has never surfed ever a professional surfboard, how well do they do?

Does anyone here recall having any issue with weapon balance between the PvE and PvP of any of the Halo Games? I was much more a PvP person at the time, and I don't recall having any issues with either. While granted, the gameplay stylings were different, they also didn't have to change the load out scheme to try and "fix" the balance.

At the very least we know that PvE and PvP were separate things in Halo:CE, with separate numbers for each. How? Hardy LeBel, one of the designers of Halo: Combat Evolved's multiplayer: (Link)

I also pointed out that if we just used one set of data, as I was changing the gun data for multiplayer I might be damaging the overall balance of the single player game. Jason agreed, and we decided to “branch” the data and create two versions of the numbers, one for single player and the other for multiplayer

Halo: Combat Evolved's multiplayer! Arguably why we have PvP multiplayer in the first place!

This balancing problem is totally Bungies own doing, their own choice. The more they dig... well. Seems I'll know about it without needing to touch PvP. I hope they can prove me wrong if they stay the course.

Bungie tried to have a "mid-tier" set of weapons, but couldn't reliably slot them in between the primaries and the heavy weapons.

I think they could have leveled out shotguns and snipers to be equal to primaries, but it would have been tough and would have changed the feel of the guns tremendously or resulted in significant overlap and redundancy with the various primaries.

How would you balance shotguns vs. AR and HCs for example? Snipers vs. Scouts?
DPS would have had to come down, and that would have driven many of the "pro" players away from those guns. Keeping the damage, but reducing the ammo would make the guns unusable in PVE.

Sure, you could have added scope charge time for snipers and made the shotguns like the low impact archtype where you had to be 5 feet away for a OHK, but most players would (and did) object to that.

So D2's implementation is about the best you can do while still maintaining the feel of the D1 weapons.