THAB 5/16/19: No Fun Allowed edition (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Friday, May 17, 2019, 22:39 (2034 days ago) @ CyberKN
edited by CruelLEGACEY, Friday, May 17, 2019, 22:42

A few thoughts.

I’ll say upfront that I understand the nerfs to the super-refilling exotics. That makes a certain amount of sense, IMO.

But when it comes to everything else, these nerfs look to me like a huge step backwards for D2. Back in the early days of D2, even in the warm glow of new-game excitement, I found boss battles to be boring. Whatever other mechanics were involved, spamming a huge target with auto and scout rifles just wasn’t fun. None of the game’s heavy weapons packed much punch, so these encounters inevitably came down to spamming primary weapons.

Then after several months, we finally started to get some firepower. The weapon slot changes, along with additions like the Ikelos shotty & Sniper, Sleeper, Whisper, followed by 1KV, Thunderlord, Mountaintop, improvements to Darci, and others; for some time now we’ve had a diverse selection of fun and unique ways to dish out serious damage numbers.

But even while this selection has continued to grow, the effectiveness of this selection has been whittled down.

Box Breathing and Trench Barrel both got hit hard. Machine Guns had their boss damage nerfed. Sleeper and Whisper have both been nerfed already (Whisper severely so), with more nerfs in their immediate future.

To me, this pattern shows a lack of foresight on Bungie’s part. The playerbase will always gravitate towards the weapons that are the most effective and fun to use. Bungie’s statements seem to say that they see these outliers as problems to be addressed, and so these strong weapons are being repeatedly brought down. But perhaps Whisper and Sleeper wouldn’t be seen as standing so high above the pack if Box Breathing, Trench Barrel, or Machine Guns were as effective as they used to be.

In addition to that, I just don’t buy the argument that Sleeper or Whisper or any of the other guns being nerfed are overpowered. Whisper *can* generate infinite ammo, but that’s actually REALLY HARD to pull off, outside of a couple specific instances. Bouncing Sleeper Shots isn’t exactly easy to pull off correctly either. If anything, it’s an added layer of skill for players to work on. Not Forgotten and Luna’s Howl are particularly effective on console, but look at the PC side. If I remember correctly, neither of those weapons crack the top-5 most effective primary weapons list, largely due to the fact that the lack of bloom and reduced recoil on PC make a whole bunch of other weapons able to compete with them, and win.

Basically, what this all looks like to me is a slow and gradual progression back to the boring boss fights of vanilla D2, where nothing stood out because nothing was particularly effective in any scenario.