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

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Saturday, May 18, 2019, 08:36 (2034 days ago) @ Ragashingo

I think you make a great point about boss encounter design, but it’s a double-edged sword. The exodus black strike was taken out of the game for months because the community hated that boss fight so much, specifically because damage windows were capped and segmented. This bleeds into a whole discussion about why players are running these activities in the first place (enjoyment of the activity vs drops), but I’ll get back to that later.

I like your example of Shuro Chi as well. But I don’t necessarily feel that it’s evidence that Sleeper is too powerful. I like to think of weapons in Destiny as tools. For a tool to be satisfying, it must be useful. There needs to be a job for which it is well suited. Sleepers job is wrecking bosses. It doesn’t really work for ad clear. You don’t get enough ammo to use it on every major that pops up. But when that boss phase comes along, it earns its exotic slot, and all the time it took to unlock it.

I look at it this way:

You mentioned how little damage you were able to do with 2-Tailed Fox compared to Sleeper. Well, imagine Sleeper didn’t exist, and everyone on your team was using 2TF, or other rocket launchers. Would that have made the fight more fun for you, or anyone else? Probably not, I’d guess. I doubt you’d be able to get anywhere near the damage numbers required to beat her. It just wouldn’t be possible. Now, perhaps this is a situation where rocket launchers are not the right tool for that job (side-note: Bungie has failed to make Rocket Launchers particularly well suited to any job, and that’s part of the problem). Fine. But Bungie is moving in the direction of having no tools that excel at Boss DPS, where I’d prefer they went the other direction and gave us more options. Give us more weapons that can hold a candle to Sleeper and Whisper. They don’t need to be as strong, but close enough that those 2 weapons aren’t seen as “required” for boss battles. And as I mentioned earlier, for a while we did have other options (trench-barrel shotguns, box-breathing snipers, machine guns), but Bungie went and nerfed all of them to the point where Whisper and Sleeper were once again disproportionally stronger.

On top of all this, there is the factor that many people who play strikes or raids want to get through them as quickly as possible. They’re not running Scourge of the Past for the 49th time because they enjoy it... they just want their damn Anarchy, and it won’t drop for them. Or they’re trying to get their Oxygen SR3, so they’re crashing through strikes as fast as possible. It’s an interesting connection to the main topic we’re discussing. Many players go to such lengths because they want to earn weapons that are powerful or unique in their own specific ways.

It’s a complex issue, no doubt.