Luna’s Howl has been straight-up murdered (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Wednesday, June 05, 2019, 12:08 (2009 days ago)

I’d love to have a serious heart-to-heart chat with whoever designed the Luna’s Howl rework.

They’ve taken one of the coolest, most unique hand cannons in D2 and turned it into an utterly mediocre piece of gear.

I get it... it was strong in PvP. It absolutely was NOT unstoppable. It had a fairly narrow window of peak effective range. Within that window, it was deadly. But get a little too close or a little too far away, and it lost its potency. The ability to 2-tap was a bit too good, even though it almost never happened in practice.

What really made Luna so strong and so popular was how accurate (within its ideal range) and responsive it felt. It felt quick and snappy and agile in a way that no other hand cannon in the game feels. It allowed players to move and think quickly. You could run and jump and turn and slide, and you never felt like you were waiting for your gun’s sights to catch up to you. And when you pulled the trigger, the bullet would actually go where you pointed.

With the move from 180RPM down to 150RPM, that feel is largely gone. It still feels a little better than other 150RPMs, but that really isn’t saying much. They all feel sluggish and sloppy by comparison, and now Luna has been dragged down close to that level.

But the worst part by far is the change to the Magnificent Howl perk. This perk is what allowed the original 180RPM Luna to 3-shot kill, if you landed 3 quick headshots without missing.

The original perk let Luna fill important PvP rolls. A good player could catch shotgun-rushers as they tried to close in. It also made Luna one of the best last-ditch options to shut down an enemy super. And in PvE, it made Luna wonderfully effective against majors and bosses. It wouldn’t compete with special or heavy weapons, but if you got stuck fighting yellow bars and you only had primary ammo, you could still dish out some damage.

The new Magnificent Howl perk is utterly useless. I can’t imagine a scenario where it would ever make a meaningful difference.

This kind of thing just makes me sad. Luna was literally the only hand cannon I really enjoyed using in D2, because HCs overall just feel crappy in D2 (compared to how they felt in D1). I get that some people felt that it was a little too effective in PvP... I’d argue otherwise, but even so. We can see what happens when the bloom and initial accuracy mechanics are toned down by looking at D2 on PC; Luna doesn’t even crack the top-5 weapons in crucible, because it is no longer the only hand cannon that actually hits what you point it at. Heck, I’d be perfectly happy if they just gave Luna out to every player. Instead, Bungie has taken one of the coolest, most fun, and most challenging to acquire weapons in the game, and made it completely average and forgettable.

Not cool, bro.

ps

I’m really enjoying the new content so far. Had a great time playing yesterday. Stuff like this just really bums me out, because I put crazy amounts of time into acquiring cool weapons like Luna’s so that I can take them into new content and have fun with it. So nerfs like this have the effect of making me care less and less about chasing down cool weapons in the future. There’s a real “enjoy it while it lasts” feeling around weapons like Mountaintop, Recluse, or Outbreak... anything cool and effective and powerful. I don’t want to play a game like Destiny if every weapon is equally mediocre. We already played that game. It was vanilla D2, and it got stale real fast. I’m hoping that Bungie realizes they went too far with the Luna nerf. Even if it never gets restored to its former glory, I’d hate to see this same design attitude applied to any more weapons going forward.