Regarding reload perks (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Friday, May 22, 2020, 14:37 (1650 days ago) @ INSANEdrive

It’s true that reload perks are generally more desirable than many other perks. But the problem with taking a dispassionate, birds eye view of the perk pool and saying “let’s just slow down the bonus effects of all reload perks” is that it doesn’t take “feel” into account. Reload perks have one of the most noticeable impacts on the feel of a gun out of all the perks in the game. And for most players, there’s a threshold that a reload speed can hit where it just becomes too long for a player to want to use the gun. That threshold will certainly vary from player to player, gun to gun, but at a certain point it doesn’t matter what other perks a weapon has; if the reload is too slow, in just not going to use that gun. And many guns in D2 are already in that state, unless they have some kind of reload perk.

In other words, reload perks are required to make many D2 weapons viable, because their base reload speeds are too slow. Reduce the effectiveness of those reload perks, and all Bungie has done is shrunk the pool of weapons that I will ever use.

As has become a running theme of mine over the past year or so, this looks like yet another example of Bungie making design choices based on data, rather than feel or fun. Sometimes, a certain perk/weapon/ability being used more than all the others is evidence that they got that perk/weapon/ability RIGHT, not that it is too good and needs to be reigned in.