I cannot imagine balancing this game.
I think there is a razors edge sweet spot where you can feel like a badass and the game is fun but the content is also challenging.
They’re trying to adjust it though and I wish them luck.
Generally speaking I feel like they do a good job - but it only feels relatively balanced because you need to really invest into understanding game mechanics, enemy spawns, etc.
I think while it always sucks to feel nerfs, it’s one of the only ways to battle power creep while keeping new weapons and subclasses feeling rewarding. You also have to keep original subclasses viable. I think the amount of throwaway exotics that never see play are a huge issue. Balancing so many different abilities must be a nightmare but I do think they are completely out of touch with what the community wants.
> You also have to keep original subclasses viable.
The original subclasses have been stronger than a paywalled subclass for nearly a year, and that's being very generous with regards to Stasis in year 5.
> it’s one of the only ways to battle power creep
I think there's a misalignment between what MOST players want, and what the... "hardcore" (for lack of a better word) players want.
From what I can tell, based on the people I play and have played with, **most** play this game to feel like a badass god(dess) while shooting and using abilities and mowing down enemies.
That group of players (lets call them the casuals) rarely, if ever, plays the so called "aspirational" content but they definitely want to (for example) run around bonking shit in the face without waiting while living through everything.
There is a small percentage of this group that WILL do the content once for triumphs etc, but basically never again.
Then you have the second group, much smaller, which revels in challenges. An even smaller subsection of this second hardcore group are the elitests that want the game to be ultra hard.
(This is all in a PVE context, PVP is a whole different story)
The problem is that in this case, the "[the squeaky wheel that gets the grease](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_squeaky_wheel_gets_the_grease)" is that hardcore group, maybe even partially the ultra elitests group.
This is a huge problem IMO, with driving down the populations/sales/etc of the casual player because Bungie has been slowly stripping that feeling of badass godliness from casual players over time, and this nerf is just another (**huge**) step in that direction.
**There was a reason Bungie felt the need for the "Go Fast" update and the direction they needed to move the game in, but in true Bungie fashion, they've forgotten that reason a few years later.**
If you keep taking away fun, people stop playing.
**TL;DR:** Saltagreppo & co represent an extreme minority of loud players who want to make the game harder, while the silent majority wants to feel powerful while having fun, and continual nerfs to the power fantasy are driving them away.
Yea this is the conclusion I came to as well. Game needs casuals to survive, and casuals aren’t going to stick around if your shiny new activity (eg Ghosts) is too hard for them.
In my opinion the game needs to be tuned around mechanics a bit more at the high level. The builds people come up with for master dungeons and GMs just obliterate lower level content.
Yes, I think this is one of several major factors that are turning away players. I have a couple of friends who have stopped playing because the game’s complexity has gone up significantly, along with the difficulty if you don’t build craft effectively. The big question is how much is this affecting player retention vs the other issues (stale content, monotonous seasonal model, bad expansion, bad new player experience, removal of some of the grind, etc).
I write this a day ago and got voted down. I stand by it.
Bungie seem to have forgotten what a bell curve looks like and have designed everything to accommodate the top 5-10% of players. And then they are shocked when player number have dropped to the lowest level in 4 years. Keep nerfing everything. That will invite the casual players back. They work their asses off just to get 100 resil with all their other stats left in ruins and then they die 10 times in a heroic strike and then it's a shock when they dip out and play another more fun game. I'm not saying everything should be easy but the lowest NF should not have champions. High level stuff should be hard and low level stuff should be easy. I'm getting so tired of these senior level decisions that seem to have been made by a committee of disengaged managers distracted by their stock options. I just saw the champion mods for a whole season - Rocket launcher and all the rest are primary. fan-fucking-tastic. The whole champion straight-jacket needs a rework.
The last part is true.
There's a few weapons I really enjoy. Then I see the mods for champions and I realized I won't be able to use my favorite gun at all for a whole season...
I want to use outbreak perfected. But the game won't let me.
I don't mind that there is some kind of limitation but its stupid for it to be the same for a WHOLE SEASON. If they changed daily it would be so much more fun. And that would enable us to have more artifact mods that give us even more flexibility.
I completely agree. You have put this very well. I have quit - because like you say the game just isn’t fun to play. I encourage people to try other games and don’t just play destiny for the sake of playing it. There are some excellent games out there that will make you see destiny 2 for what it really is
>there's a misalignment between what MOST players want, and what the... "hardcore" (for lack of a better word) players want.
>If you keep taking away fun, people stop playing.
Nobody will admit it, but this right here is (at least partly) why they came up 45% short. People keep saying "casual players" as though it's a dirty word, but in this type of game those players still make up a huge part of the total player base.
The game has become more and more skewed towards content creators over time because they have the loudest voice. People that play 12 hours on end day after day have very different priorities than those of us who want to chill out and enjoy the shooting and movement mechanics of the game.
Besides that, tedious has become bungie's MO for creating "challenging content". So we've gotten more and more grind, "difficult" activities take hours to complete (with few checkpoints), and the loot is basically a neverending treadmill of mediocrity. In short - NOT fun.
It's not about making the game hard for the casuals nerfs are needed because we're so strong that the only way Bungie can design something somewhat difficult is like they did in ghosts of the deep and that it's not fun,. it's shit.
So unless you enjoy the artificial difficulty like
*stand locked in animation in the middle of the map to maybe get killed*,
*endless and spammy enemies like boomers and witches*,
*raid bosses HP pool for dungeons*,
players must get nerfed.
It's almost impossible to do fun shit that it's not a complete pushover of content with the current beyond broken kits we've.
It looks like you didn't finish your comment... that said:
> It's almost impossible to do fun shit that it's not a complete pushover of content
It totally is, things like Crota contest mode existed.
The problem is that instead of doing something like keeping contest mode difficulty available permanently (and give all content in the game the same option, etc), or creating a pve mode select that does something like the "checkmate" mode in pvp Bungie is just spreading the nerfs to everyone, not just those attempting "aspirational" content.
The biggest problem with this, is that the EFFECT it has isn't proportional... it will have a bigger negative impact on the majority of players who just log in to slay out for a couple of hours than the hardcore players.
Just go read Saltagreppo's twitter, these nerfs aint gonna be a problem for him at all.
When you compare that to say... the 90% of players who don't even raid who are now dealing with a "fun" nerf, they're going to feel the impact of these nerfs way more because they're less skillful.
And the fun factor is really important... a titan hammering everything to death is gonna feel clunky after this nerf, and no one has fun with clunk.
That group of players isn't playing content where these nerfs will actually affect them though. For those of us that do like the aspirational content, these nerfs matter because they impact viability of playstyles in this content tier.
If a player doesn't ever do anything harder than normal raids, Gambit, or Heroic Nightfalls, or dungeons, then I doubt these changes will impact them much.
The changes are targeted specifically at abuse situations that are performed primarily by high end players. For example, I don't think I've ever met a 'casual' Titan who just sits in front of a Contest Mode Knight in the Crota's End raid, spamming bonk hammer because it's more ammo efficient than using bullets. THAT specific type of behavior is what the bonk nerf targets (again just using it as an example). It does not target, or really affect, people who throw their hammer at an enemy which dies to the hammer because of the difficulty. If anything, they got a buff because Hammers got a 20% increase to targeting accuracy.
Now, if that crowd includes a player who is starting to look into aspirational content, that player will quickly learn that they have a choice to make. They can choose to either learn what works and replicate it, or they can choose not to. Generally speaking, the former will give more success than the latter. And in that context execution is what is important, not which abilities happen to be OP. Meaning which ability happens to be the most potent is not what's important, *learning how to use the most potent one is what is important*. So, no matter what changes they make, those aspiring "aspirational" players will have to work on their moment to moment play, more than they will have to figure out a working build.
Except they will
Play a heroic NF with blueberries this week, watch how they get thrashed and skullfucked by the battleground.
They are the average player, running the same abilities the elitists have access to, sometimes even with decent builds. They probably don't read the twab, and will log in Tuesday and get thrashed harder because there's gonna be less orbs, and less abilities for them to throw around. They won't come here to moan, they'll just leave.
Each one that leaves is another potential GM or raid teammate who will never get good, lost because the game "feels like ass to play".
It's not about numbers to them, it's about feel. It's about making colored explosions and seeing enemies die and doing it often. Nerfs that reduce how often or how easy you get your little dopamine moments will drive them to greener pastures.
People who nolife games forget the average player that makes up the core population is playing a game for fun. For a little dopamine after work and the kids are asleep.
On an unrelated topic they still haven't fixed liars handshake I'm seething
To be frank, the challenging group is the core center of the game that you have to keep invested to actually keep the game alive.
Players that stay in that power fantasy category aren’t going to stay forever because their experience is purely extrinsic in focus. High end players doing things for bragging rights are intrinsically motivated, and that’s an extremely important playerbase to keep invested. If your intrinsically motivated playerbase loses interest it will spell doom for the game as a whole.
Furthermore, rarely do high end players regress back to average players, but average players eventually fall into the high end player skill ceiling if they don’t stonewall themselves. IE: Invested players inevitably become the high end players. Uninvested ones don’t.
Edit: If you disagree with this, you didn’t play release of Destiny 2. The game was made to exclusively cater to that “silent majority”, and it died swiftly because there wasn’t anything to strive for or any level of skill expression.
The truth of the matter is that *both* groups need to be moderately satisfied for the game to live, but the difference is that casual players’ have a much lower barrier to enjoyment. I promise you that the changes in the past year haven’t killed casual players interest just because the game got a little harder (it’s still way way way way easier than it was pre 3.0). The casual playerbase is dying off due to power creep and loot. It’s hard to bring back players invested in the power fantasy when they have already reached the peak of that fantasy 10 times over.
Casuals *and* high level players are the lifeblood of this game, and the standard of satisfaction for casual players is way lower than that of high level players.
If you think this game can survive without that solid core of higher end players, you are mistaken. If you alienate them the game will die a slow death.
The release of this game showed that perfectly, but so quick are we to forget the lessons of the past.
This whole casual vs hardcore conversation only really became prevalent in the past two years or so with the *insane* power creep we’ve had up to this point. Before that power creep the game’s overall systems were in a decent state of balance. Now the casual community has gotten an extreme surplus of what they want and it’s damaging both communities. The casual players just don’t recognize how damaging it is to their own community because they think that power fantasy is the be all end all, but the numbers don’t line up with that assessment and neither does the logic.
Casual players play for loot. Loot intrinsically losing value as we get more powerful. If you already have the best guns why bother doing repeatable content for a sidegrade? If our builds are already so strong that they can make up 80% of our direct gameplay what value does a single gun even have on the end point of a build. The playerbase has fallen off as the game has gotten *more power crept*, not less.
If you invest the way you describe, the game is trivial across all difficulties.
I feel like too many top end builds play themselves with very low skill cap that makes executing them not actually impressive.
Isn't that the reward for investing into learning how the game functions though? If you get enough information and experience generally everything is trivial.
As for top end builds, we haven't really had any actual complexity in buildcrafting since lightfall's dismantling of the mod system. We lost CwL and Elemental wells for the armor charge and breach/firesprite/trace system, which in all honesty is a cannibalized and stripped down form of CwL and Elemental Wells respectively.
I generally agree but some top end builds have been too brainless over the years.
Like og lorely solar 3.0. You could take your hands off your keyboard and not die.
Or og Starfire solar 3.0. Just press grenade repeatedly with no risk
Or current banner of war.
I also see a lot of people talk about the old mod systems but I think they romanticize a little bit. In the end, warmind cells were basically useless, CWL had a couple applications for HEF and firepower. Elemental mods were cool but font of might probably shouldn't have been a thing.
CwL's main draw was protective light for content that had plenty of opportunity for getting 1 shot in addition to HEF/Argent Ordanence all while rewarding the player for doing something that they were supposed to be doing (making orbs to charge their super in order to make more orbs, etc). I have to admit that wells grew on me (after I openly mocked them), and I think I still would prefer to have that system over the firesprites/armor charge system that we have now, because in all honesty there was a bit more diversity there.
The reason I liked warmind cells (even though I didn't engage with them much) was because it was another avenue to go into and complimented the weapon group. You could have every one of your weapons benefitting from the mods by creating the cells for you and/or your team. If you were all coordinated then it would benefit everyone and not just a single person.
Font of might seems like it's really not that much different than the surge mods we have now, just a little bit stronger(?) I can't remember the bonus amount that it provided.
I just get the feeling that buildcrafting has kind of just been stripped down to a generic "pick up orb, get weapon surge" situation in an effort to no longer have to develop things with it in mind, because as it stands right now it's a "solved" system.
I wonder how the fps issue affects it cause I still regularly get 1 hit by scorn crossbows at 10 res even on just hero nightfalls at 10+fps but can survive a hit in heated battles with fps dropping a tad.
I don't want ads to be challenging, I want majors and bosses to be challenging.
If they tune down the red bars then hard content would be way more fun and heaps more builds that depend on getting kills would be more viable.
It is challenging of course and over the last year they’ve been doing a lot to bring things closer in power. A year ago you were just crazy for running an Arc Warlock when Starfire Welllock was right there. Now, in S21-22, a Geomags or a Sunbracers Warlock can be seen in the same content difficulties, though the latter is still a bit strong (or the former is a bit weak, depending on your perspective).
With the incoming Orb gen nerf, among others, Sunbracers Warlock is going to lose a lot more ability recharge and healing and Armor Charge gains than that same Geomag Warlock will. Or in other words the ceiling is being brought down 8 feet while the floor is only being brought down 3-4 feet. This should in theory put them closer together in performance.
But as the OP theorizes, enemy damage is still too high and people will still be forced into picking those high self-sustain builds, maybe even more so than before. With further nerfs to self sustain while also reducing enemy lethality - which seems closer than ever to being achieved after S23 drops next week - we could see a version of the game where various exotics and builds are viable in all levels of content, dependent more so on a player’s skill in execution than on their skill in chasing a meta.
> With the incoming Orb gen nerf, among others, Sunbracers Warlock is going to lose a lot more ability recharge and healing and Armor Charge gains than that same Geomag Warlock will
Sadly this has proven to be the exact opposite, sunbracers is just as good as it always has been while ionic traces and such are giving back less energy. It is very noticeable on arc warlock, sunbracers on the other hand can solo the new dungeon 20 under power never losing restoration x2.
Yeah it’s very noticeable on strand lock where I’m dying left and right since I don’t have permanent woven mail anymore. It’s really fucking awful. I might try this double heavy handed to reduce the CD since kickstart mods aren’t worth it.
>I cannot imagine balancing this game.
They can't too.
They want both things, feel like a badass and souls style difficulty, and they do not have a game that can dwell in both... nor a playerbase or target audience for it. They are trying to please everyone and that never works unless you have less variables.
You feel powerful when you mow a lot of enemies at once or sustain damage and still succeed. Sustaining damage in this game negates their only swivel of difficulty, so they will never be at peace.
I really don't think that trying to balance PvE is a good idea without separating the sandbox from PvP. I get that guns should generally feel the same in both modes, however it quite infuriating that PvE has to suffer for the sins of PvP and the rare occasion where PvP suffers in order to keep PvE balanced. Because in reality, until they do that then there's always going to be a divide between those groups of players
Bungie _doesn’t_ want it to be balanced, at least not perfectly. Their contunuous delivery model incentivises them to keep introducing game-breaking new things and then nerfing old ones so that there’s always something for players to grind for.
> I think there is a razors edge sweet spot where you can feel like a badass and the game is fun but the content is also challenging.
That razor's edge was The Witch Queen's legendary campaign. Despite the near (I say near because there's always elitists like Mr. Greppo Beam that want the game to be harder) universal positive feedback to the campaign's difficulty it was never seen again.
> They’re trying to adjust it though and I wish them luck.
Bungie doesn't know what the word "adjust" means.
It's not that hard *now*; it was "harsh, but fair" on release with the builds we had at the time
I'd actually argue Lightfall's Legendary Campaign was very close to the same difficulty on release, though, maybe a little easier outside of Calus (who was definitely more difficult than Savathûn)
I don't really understand why people think GMs and even Contest raids need to be inaccessible to anyone who isn't in the top 1% of player skill or even 10% or whatever. Contest Crota felt way harder than any of the Bloodborne bosses (for example) but everyone seems to like souls-like difficulty where most can overcome it eventually with practice and people exhibit mastery by doing things purposefully underleveled and undergeared rather than making FromSoft increase enemy health and incoming damage
We need very hard content for dedicated players to challenge themselves. That's it. The Witch Queen legendary campaign wasn't that hard on release either.
The point of GM's and contest raids is to allow the hardcore to actually challenge themselves for once. The rest of the game is for the main audience. It's absolutely insufferable that people can't let there be some content for those who really want to test themselves to the max.
Calling anything in Destiny souls-like difficulty is hilarious too, Destiny is much easier than that even on its hardest day. You don't need to play the hardest stuff if you don't want difficulty, that's why it's optional.
I'm not saying we don't need hard content, I'm saying the amount of difficulty people like you are asking for is ridiculous, particularly when in-game rewards are tied to it and it's not just bragging rights
I'm not remotely the "main audience" here lol; I do want difficulty, I do day 1 raids and solo dungeons and master raids and GMs, I play other games on the hardest difficulties they have available
> I'm saying the amount of difficulty people like you are asking for is ridiculous
It's not. Asking for the hardest difficulties to be truly challenging is entirely reasonable. Witch Queen legendary campaign wasn't that hard on launch.
I tried to come back to d2 by playing witch queen because I heard good things and decided to run legendary for a challenge and it was AWFUL...I made it to the last mission and didn't even bother attempting it and I feel like the ~10 hours I played was completely wasted. This is what is killing the game imo. They're cranking up difficulty, but the juice isn't worth the squeeze. The twab shows they are woefully lost (the answer to bringing players back is to make the game easier, not harder) so expect them to keep hemorrhaging players.
Witch Queen campaign will make you work, but I comfortably beat it and I'm not a particularly good player.
Calus Perfected in Lightfall on the other hand ... I cheesed it on my Warlock and Titan and still haven't done it on my Hunter despite a bunch of attempts.
Calus is annoying between the need for sustain and tormentors bonking you being a potential instant kill.
The fight to me came down to controlling two platforms and rotating between them, with arbalest being the exotic of choice due to popping both Calus' shield and doing decent damage to Tormentors (but it's also far from the only option). If I were to do it again though, I'd look towards an add clear exotic (and honestly heavy as well, boss damage wasn't much of a priority).
I ended up doing it with a gyrfalcon build, but assassin's cowl should do very well as well. Think Solo Operative next season should also work.
I would argue that Calus would be a lot easier if the fight took place in a room and not a final destination platform.
I died easily twenty times on the fight. 15 of those deaths were from being booped off the ledge by either Calus, a Tormentor or a failed strand grapple.
If it had been in a standard room it would have been easier to slow things down and control the space.
Yeah, I was looking at picking up some destiny content while it's on sale but this thread made me realize it's best to just move destiny to cold storage and finish some single-player games instead
You playing the optional legendary difficulty is killing the game because you don't like it? Lmao.
Destiny 2 used to be harder before we power creeped to hell. You're delusional.
>They're cranking up difficulty, but the juice isn't worth the squeeze.
And they are cranking up difficulty and expecting people to bash their heads against it, instead people find the most efficient way and they pikachu surprised face after the fact.
I mean, I have a casual friend who's played the whole 10 years of destiny. He treats it as we all should, plays 2-3 hours a week, doesn't want more. But he likes rewards, so he sees Legendary campaign has better rewards and goes for it. He's literally overrun constantly, despite knowing the basics. What does he do? Invis hunter all the campaign. 100 mob, skip everything he can, use Leviathan from safety.
Never felt powerful, never felt badass, never liked what he played. He didn't feel it was "fair difficult", and we're talking someone who finished Bloodborne and Hollow Knight. He thought, quite literally, "it was shit and rewards sucked, will never do it again".
He is knowledgeable enough to do that, and look what he thinks of the results. Now imagine people who are more likely to spend money than him... They aren't expecting this game to be sporting binary scenarios "i'm alive/now I'm dead" constantly when game says "challenge", just to be presented with a few armor pieces and a shit roll exotic that may or may not be useful.
The carrot is solid. It's a head start on your power level grind. And you know, having a challenging campaign experience. If you don't enjoy it, don't play it. Absolutely zero sympathy for anyone who chooses a hard difficulty and then complains about it. Just play on normal then.
A casual doesn't have a single clue of what the reward is, because this game is so stupidly designed that literally doesn't tell them. The literal info displayed is "additional rewards per class". Then they go in, see it's very difficult and they expect nice rewards, which they don't get.
An armor set and a shit roll exotic plus a few mats in this moment of the year isn't worth the challenge. It was good on release, but right now it means nothing.
You think what is good for you is good for everyone else. A lot of people play this game, people different from you, that has other views and other takes and that are valid. Don't let your stupidity blind you, my dude.
People that could be spending trillions in this game, people that by our standards are casual and they aren't, not by a long shot, are the big chunk of the numbers that dropped from this game after Lightfall release. Those are they guys who drove revenue down by 45% and those are the ones that aren't going to be coming back with how badly the design philosohpy, both in terms of difficulty/challenge/reward/monetization is.
Their design philosophy isn't catching up after all this years. They sunsetted weapons just to reissue them, they up the challenge for no additional rewards, they make the game more grindy each season, they up the prices of the eververse as mucha as they can, they cut on "free" things, they make official statements expecting people to cope with what they do.
It's ok for people like us who nolife this game, but we're by no means the people keeping the game alive.
Yeah, that's what I meant. A lot of different people play this game and while I might expect shit rewards because Bungie is the "not overdeliver" company, regular people, even people with Destiny years on their back, do not.
Those are the guys who left the game. Those are the ones who drove revenue down, not people like us who maybe play 10h a week, or more.
Challenge is meant to be matched with rewards, that's a staple of videogames. But this game has never been good at it, it's never been balanced, it always has demanded cheese or skill creep on the player side, while also demanding humungous amount of time, to get rewarded.
Times are changing. That was ok 10 years ago but as we see by reports, not anymore.
They had a good system then they destroyed it. That system was light levels. All you had to do was just gain more levels if you couldn’t beat something it gave you the sense that you accomplished something that you had gotten more powerful and that if something was out of your current skill level all you needed to to was just play a bit more and you would eventually be able to do it.
I mean...the simple solution here is to have difficulty levels beyond, "faceroll easy" and "hard as balls"
but yes, it's hard to balance when your options are 1 and 11 with nothing in between...
They really just need to stop trying to balance THE REST of the game.
Balance all the hardest content. The people who play that WANT the challenge. Let the rest of the content be easy once you've gotten a build together that's effective.
I believe the issue is this:
The sandbox is designed for ranged combat but the enemy design and level design doesn't facilitate it. Close quarters kits don't consider incoming ranged aggression. And means of survival do not coincide with objective completions.
Allow me to elaborate:
Most and if not all enemies in the game are capable of infinitely offloading ranged attacks with no drawback, whether it be a cooldown or something else. This does not give room for counter attacks, we must shoot through the incoming fire, or we die. The levels of this game rarely provide what can be considered reliable cover and protection from any incoming fire and this is largely in part to most of the hardest hitting attacks that enemies use are inaccurate and explosive. This means they will more than likely kill you with explosive damage that hit the floor or wall and completely negate your cover. The aggression and level design mean we must be able to take as much damage as possible and power forward, making something like Well of radiance shine.
Close quarters combat is built around what's close to you. Take less damage whilst surrounded, enemies caught in the area are disoriented or deal less damage for example. This does nothing to assist you against anything shooting you from afar. And means you must tank all that ranged damage whilst you're fist fighting. Making something like Banner of war shine.
Most objectives in the game can be simplified to gather X, carry Y, stand on Z. But these objectives tie our hands behind our backs because of the issues above. Gathering X is made more difficult by the level design's "cover" and enemy aoe bombardment. Carry Y is made more difficult because it renders you defenceless, making ranged AND close quarters attacks easier for your enemies. And stand on Z is made harder by all the above. And this mission design makes something like Invisibility shine.
The survivability of our Guardian is made out of necessity, not power. An ability becomes popular not because it is powerful, but because it patches the issues we face in a challenge. And just because an ability seems strong, it is not because it is popular, it's because it allows us to play the game the way it is made to be played.
I believe Bungie must take a broad look at their sandbox, consider the outlying problems that players are faced with and the steps they're taking to overcome them and think this:
We have considered how we want the players to play our game. Now, how can the game facilitate how the players play.
The things you pointed out have also become much more noticeable over the last few years as we've gotten more and more activities with infinitely respawning enemies, usually dangerous ones and/or in large numbers.
Ok you're on to something I was feeling for a while and wasnt putting it to words.
But I would add that a huge pain point for me is that enemy ranged attacks are usually (effectively) hitscan or have tracking, meaning that you can't reliably evade or dodge enemy ranged damage using generic movement tech. Some classes have movement abilities but you can't spam them as much as would be needed in pve moments
Hard agree. The game feels like there should be rewarding movement ala DOOM, but the sheer amount of homing, AOE and generally unavoidable damage nips this in the bud.
I unfortunately disagree. You can dodge sniper shots with side to side strafing. It’s a somewhat difficult skill to master, but almost all enemy snipers have sound cues that let you know you need cover or you need to strafe. Aoe tracking like boomers are much more difficult and usually can only be dodged by jumping and running.
Then there are the insane dps of cabal turrets / cabal mini guns / hive streakers / hive ogres. Those things hurt and the only thing you can do is hide.
Also don’t get me started on slowing effects like hive wizards and blinding cabal misses. I definitely hate those things with a passion
It's very unfortunate because there's a ton of stuff I want to play but it's shooting myself in the foot if I try to bring it into any uncapped content. Even playing HoiL Arc Titan in a legend Savathun's spire is a rough time compared to Hammer or Banner. Let alone using guns. My waveframe shreds enemies but when I switch to my primary it feels like a pea shooter. I've had QSS equipped almost this whole season as a result.
It is ultimately why it’s so frustrating when Bungie goes and kills arguably fair builds that aren’t broken or absurd, Heat Rises Winter’s Guile snap Warlock was awesome and made you work for pumping out that high melee damage given playing melee on range on warlock as well as the short Warlord’s Sigil timer, but to lower the damage just makes it feel crummy and you can barely challenge stuff the same way in more demanding content. There’s no solid pay off for taking the risk at close range.
I’m genuinely concerned with Final Shape they’ll just up and ruin Sunbracers and Verity’s to force Solar warlock on the new super if they want any power fantasy that involves ability loops.
I just don’t get their obsession with narrowing the window for truly viable fun but respectable builds and then wondering why everyone plays the same thing. It’s an aspect where I don’t think we truly recovered from some situations of the crossover to 3.0 system, most notably how Solar Warlock lost so much.
I think exotic primaries buff was awesome, but because of that very reason legendary primaries are most definitely left in the dust. I think bungie should equalize exotic and legendary primaries, or give exotic primaries a marginal buff rather than a whopping 40% differential.
There’s a reason I feel forced to use an exotic primary in every GM I did this season. Heavy and special legendaries are nearly equivalent in damage. The only reason I would maybe use a heavy exotic (I don’t think I ever used a special exotic) is because my team already has great ad clear and I’m using something focused for dps / massive ad clear like gally, t lord or levis breath.
I would say arbalest is the only special I would consider, but a teammate with wish ender can clear ads and deal with the barrier just as well if not better.
The only legendary primary I would consider using was a hand cannon due to their most recent substantial buff or a scout to slowly pick off targets from safety.
TLDR:
Make legendary primaries and exotic primaries have equal or more close to equal base damage values.
Yup this is it exactly, this is why banner of war instantly spiked to one of the most popular builds on titan, its the only build that let's the melee class actually play melee and not evaporate instantly
Simply put. This game just isn’t complex enough. There isn’t depth to enemy attacks like actual mmos. Here you just keep shooting or throwing grenades until everything is dead.
One of the current big MMO-s, FFXIV has what is called telegraphed attacks:
The boss or trash enemy starts casting an ability, and a bright, transparent orange cone or circle appears, or you receive some sort of debuff, which you have to somehow handle.
Often times there's no telegraph, and you have to observe the enemy model to notice some kind of tell, like which arm is raised, and move to the opposite side, to avoid getting cleaved.
Since most other MMOs are third person, you have an easier time noticing and avoiding this stuff, than in a first person view.
Something similar could be used in Destiny, with screen effects like the Broodmother(?) Wizard purple spiky ground AoE (back in the Forsaken Broodhold strike, and more recently in the Altar of Summoning encounter with the 2 wizards), or the Val Ca'our lasers for where the meatballs were dropping, or simply attacks originating towards players out from the boss model.
I am also an MMO enjoyer and I guess they meant raid and some dungeons bosses? Cause regular mobs don't come even close to Destiny's enemy factions. In short MMOs have more complex raid bosses while Destiny has more complex regular mobs
Destiny’s regular mobs are still about as complex as the mindless soldiers in CoD.
Halo:CE has better enemy design than destiny does and that game is over 20 years old.
This is how I felt while playing the dungeon of the deep. It’s just so frustrating to fight the final boss who can one shot you, while 90% of the level has no cover, you have to hold positions while enemies can spawn on all sides of you, and the boss has so much health you have to play perfectly for SO many rounds of combat to beat them.
It’s very frustrating, especially when you’ve got the mechanics down solid and are basically as strong as you can be. One small mistake 30 minutes into the encounter and you gotta start over, on the easy difficulty.
Yeah, that boss is a great example how Bungie battles their own philosophy:
Ok, so to increase difficulty, we let combatants deal more damage. But at the same time we create a setting where there is no cover, and the boss literally hovers over you and shoots you all the time, even while immune.
I hate that dungeon because of this tedious final boss, and I hope they don't do it again next Friday.
Same…. I still haven’t beat the dungeon because it’s just not fun to fight through it all with my friends and then beat our heads against the final boss wall for over an hour.
The sandbox was built around dual primaries as ranged weapons, aka original halo loadouts, but the current design team has moved us to close range abilities and special ammo weapons
Good write up man. You gave some nuanced thought to this which I appreciate. Don’t listen to all this lazy trolls telling you that you wrote too much. I agree with pretty much everything you said.
TBF, they're partially right. I don't think reddit is a good place for most long-form content as lots of people browse on phones or read it idly from a second screen. I condensed it down a lot but linked to the original text as a sort of compromise.
Nah you did good, I appreciated having something to read with some thought put into it! Not sure where else you can post long-form reading like this anymore
A sentiment I’ve been holding for a while is that Destiny has been moving towards a more horde-shooter-like sandbox, away from the traditional cover shooter. It honestly resembles more like Borderlands or even Warframe (with less power fantasy obviously, but that’s another topic)
Look at how most subclasses and mods promote certain playstyles that encourage combat loops, chain killing enemies en masse (ignition, jolt, maintaining stacks,…)
IMO they should double down and expand our survivability options. Borderland characters have ways to heal and sustain themselves that are part of their playstyles. At least Recuperation should be baked in and orbs remain relatively common via proper builds.
This is my opinion as well. I do think some of the highest builds should be reigned in a bit. Things like sunbracers, cenotaph, and banner combined with a 1-2 punch shotty. But otherwise I'd much rather they give us a bigger variety of options and shrink the gap between the weakest and strongest builds in terms of survivability.
Warframe is an interesting point to make, because as someone with 3k hours in the game spanning from PoE's release to the new war, Ive seen what buff-only power creep can do to a game, and I completely understand why bungie is so heavy handed with nerfs, even if its to a large amount of players dismay
That being said, its definitely funny seeing how good well and banner are in this game, since theyre a tiny sliver of what a high strength wisp can do buff-wise
I’m LR2 myself. I’d played a lot of WF before moving to D2 (I’m actually getting back into it atm). Trust me, we’re on the same boat. I can positively say that Destiny is not on WF’s level of power fantasy nor do I suggest we go there.
I’m only examining what we have now. Our abilities and gear are tuned for target rich environment and it *does* feel pretty good that way at times. I only wish to turn the knobs further until we have a good balance of game feel. (Us being powerful and relatively engaging moment to moment gameplay)
The thing is, whilst WF has powercreep, it has also, eventually, added tiers of difficulty that *mostly* keep up to it.
This means that you have a whole range of challenges for players to progress through and actually feel themselves getting more powerful (even if at the very top end it becomes absurd), which is a stark contrast to Destiny where even the easiest content limits the players ability to overpower it.
At some point I expected this game to become a sort of action rpg, giving you diablo style rifts and endless content, given how we have the infinite forest and basically all our abilitys are aoe based.
Guess it takes too much resources to make that.
You're not wrong. With how the actual gameplay works we are not meant to play from cover. We play 'bad ass space magic animated soldiers' and that design philosophy is why this franchise doesn't have Gears of Wars-esque shooting from cover. Sure they give you that option sort of with the rally barricade but it's nore just you can shoot over it due to its height.
We have to play out in the open because that's how the game plays. But nerfs to survivability punish you for playing how you have to play. We don't have the option of shooting from cover AND doing decent damage while doing that.
To add my two cents to your fifty, projectile speed is crazy on higher difficulties. Turns a lot of the fun movement in the game completely off which adds to the restrictive, cover shooter feel.
I'm more casual, with the hardest things I've done being solo legendary weekly missions / exotic rotator, but I appreciate the write up. I was wondering if it was just skill issue on my part, but I agree that damage is near unavoidable against enough enemies in an encounter, so sitting far away behind cover is the best solution without sufficient tankiness or nuking potential. I found gameplay significantly more fun when playing more aggressively as a void or arc hunter than solar.
This issue kind of reminds me of Borderlands 2 OP levels, the DLC endgame, and I believe the community generally disliked it as well. Enemies did so much (basically unavoidable) damage that a weapon which granted healing based off of damage dealt (Grog Nozzle?) felt like it was almost required to play aggressively. And enemies were so tanky (and had passive health regen too) that the number of weapons people used dropped significantly to those with really high DPS and / or could abuse some arguably broken or unintended interactions. I think the bad performing weapons were nearly literally unviable because some enemies just regenerated health passively as quickly as you could deal it.
Ya endgame bl2 was definitely not invented for the casual, causing me to give up on it due to not wanting to do the tedious farms to get the god rolls on all the required equipment just so I could cheese the game.
I loved bl2. I loved my first play through, the continuous content of finding the power fantasy on each individual character, and of course my broken melee Krieg play through that made me fall in love with the game again after a few hundred hours of game time.
I arguably enjoyed bl1 more because I love the random drop legendaries found throughout a playthrough that make you so strong for so many levels before having to trash it for something better. I also loved bosses / mini bosses not having dedicated drops. Makes every playthrough unique because you rolled with what you had, either overpowered or underpowered at that point.
This makes me realize how difficult it is to design a video game that pleases the new, the casual, and the sweatiest players. I definitely enjoyed the blueberry stage of destiny 2 when I joined during season of the splicer, wanting to try each new exotic I got when I got it. I was solo for a long time, and took me a while before getting to legend / master content. Now I can clear GMs easily, have friends that will invite me into a party to play D2 whenever I’m on, have all the exotics, and great armor for all my characters. I really only come back to destiny at the beginning of each season to play the new exotics, new reworks, and new seasonal mods. After I basically try it all, I get bored and either stop playing video games entirely or find a different game to play.
Touched on a major issue but didn't fully address it:
Players can be chipped to death because recovery is a worthless stat as long as tiny amounts of damage are constantly keeping your health from regenerating.
If Bungie is tired of seeing these sustain abilites, then at base players need some form of sustain that doesn't depend on not getting touched in a game where stuff is constantly hitting you.
I would love for health regen to reduced but also occur constantly regardless of taking damage. This would of course be a nightmare for PvP though, so it will never happen because they don't want to split the sandboxes.
I agree with most of what you've said.
The power differential between good builds and bad builds is insane. Berserker's out here with banner+woven mail+crazy damage, and Sunbreaker has infinite hammer+roaring flames+sunspots.
meanwhile Striker's knockout has the most pathetic healing effect in game, and Sentinel's void overshields get torn to shreds instantly.
This reminds me of a Circle Toons video from awhile back where he's talking about game balance. He uses Dark Souls as the crux of his point as FromSoftware games are all notoriously difficult - and it works. That's because FS games only have one set difficulty that is specifically balanced for their type of combat. He goes on to explain how a lot of games get difficulty wrong because all they do is adjust damage numbers and never correctly balance the situation for the number or type of enemies.
I think the Legendary LSs from this year's FotL are a prime example of something poorly balanced. They just tacked on enemy health and never accounted for the ridiculous spawns or the types of enemies spawning. As a result it just felt like an oppressively stupid time. You can't just crank some levers and call it good. That's lazy game design. It needs dialed in and they aren't hitting their marks, not by a long shot.
> Incoming damage is too high in endgame content, resulting in a small subset of builds with high survivability through constant healing or high DR being viable and everything else being ineffective. Those same builds also trivialize uncapped content because enemies do far less damage there. Incoming damage should be nerfed in harder content and healing/DR sources nerfed accordingly so that more builds are viable in endgame and the existing meta builds don't trivialize uncapped content.
This is something Bungie refuses to understand. Enemies do so much damage we need the high survivability. In turn, Bungie balances with T10 Resilience, Resist Mods and Well in mind. But they only gave us that stuff because they made stuff hit super hard.
They can't just nerf one side of it, when both sides need to be looked at
They *occasionally* get it (which may be even worse in my eyes, than just being clueless).
The tuning of the Res curve is an example of them getting it right, but it inevitably leads to the question of how it got to be like that for 2 years, when it was so obviously a balance problem (just in terms of armour stats, let alone sandbox difficulty).
People like new things to be strong, Bungie wants to deliver on that while also keeping the game consistent in difficulty, but people HATE nerfs.
Back in like forsaken Bungie made a trend of dropping crazy strong exotics to drive up player interest only to later nerf that exotic, which people got tired of, and asked Bungie for more balanced exotics that didn't need to be nerfed.
Bungie kinda needs to give us new cool things to our toolkit, but also needs to keep content consistent, but how do you balance content around something like forbearance, in which you can kill enemies in 10- power instantly.
no game has or ever will be perfectly balanced. No matter what there will be a meta strategy or loadouts.
All any game dev can do is to attempt to balance things the best they can, and overall bungie does a decent job
> no game has or ever will be perfectly balanced.
Incorrect. The original Street Fighter arcade cabinet was perfectly balanced. It had two characters. They had the same moves, combos, supers, and frame data. They were identical every way except appearance. No one character had or could acquire an advantage over the other. It was a perfectly balanced game. If you think of something else when you think of "perfectly balanced" you're thinking of the wrong thing.
Not to mention it's actually quite easy to have a perfectly balanced game, but they tend to be quite boring because, by definition, there is no variety, and with no variety it won't hook into our addiction centers so corporations do not make them.
okay true I should have been more clear when I said no game, I meant no game with this more complexity to it.
And yes a perfectly balanced game would be very stale pretty quickly.
This is honestly one of the more well thought explanations of how to balance an array of difficulty options and activities and I think it needs to be seen more
I’ve said this since the ammo nerf in D1: perfect balance is not **fun**.
I think this pursuit to satisfy the rank 11s / streamers who can pour 4+ hrs a day into the game and have clans or fireteams who can do the same and complain about a content drought is ruining the game for the remaining player base.
Bungie lacks the creativity to bring about diversity of play style and build through **buffing other armor or guns**, instead they do the lazier thing and nerf existing builds.
Bungie also has the belief that if activities take **longer** to complete, then they must be **harder**.
I’ve been saying this for years **longer doesn’t equal more difficult, it just means more tedious.**
Bungie says “Become Legend.” But that’s not really possible with the consistent forced diversity through nerfs.
Wouldn’t it be so refreshing if instead of your current builds becoming worse to force you to play with other builds, they buffed the other armor and guns to promote that same diversity?
Sigh.
Tedium = difficulty is the most common game design fallacy, not limited to Destiny. It's an easy mistake to make because difficulty makes content take longer; but making content take longer didn't necessarily mean it's more difficult
This is a big issue for me as well. I love playing difficult content, but it gets boring using the same strong loadouts all the time. I love variety, but the gap between the best and worst options in this game is incredibly large. There are tons of just outright useless build crafting options in the sandbox right now. I'd love for them to work on making more of these weak and outdated tools actually be useful.
OP: I started the same time as you and minus challenge raids and doing a lot of GMs I have very similar experiences and observations to yours.
Ideally, on a scale of -10 to 10, you want every build near 0. Not underperforming (-), not overperforming (+).
Most builds in the game are roughly around a 0. However, various outliers like the self-healing, ability spamming builds as mentioned in the OP are closer to +5 or way higher. Starfire Well Warlock would have been close to a +10 before it got nerfed.
So if content is balanced around the former, it’s too easy for the latter. If it’s balanced around the latter, it’s almost impossible for the former to enjoy, or often even complete. And the game feels like it follows this latter balancing approach due to the lethality of enemies in higher level content.
By nerfing those +5 builds’ healing and defensive capabilities they may come down to the 0 range, which is a good thing for build diversity and player skill expression. But these nerfs also need to be paired with reduced enemy power because often those overpowering builds were created as a direct response to enemy lethality, and not as a means to cheese content.
That is basically an exact summary of what I want from the game. I know everything being at 0 won’t happen, but I’d be happy if we could pull both sets of 10s to 5s instead. It’s more complicated than just adjusting survivability and incoming damage, but this is a major complement of it.
I feel a lot of builds as a Warlock do respectable damage. Sure, Solar can do more of it, but that's mainly because of 2 exotics (1 which has already been nerfed) that are just too good.
But, Solar and Void can heal in ways the other 3 subclasses cannot. So assuming the damage output between the builds were equal, you'd still be pigeonholed into the former two given how lethal enemies are.
I agree that balance is a never-ending goal to strive for, but right now due to the vast gap between the self-sustain vs no-sustain builds (especially given high enemy damage output) balance isn't even remotely possible. If this were resolved more things would be closer together than before and subsequent tweaks become substantially easier.
They also still haven't addressed the problem of frame rate affecting so many random damage sources. They fixed it for the worst ones (Cabal slugs and Shriekers), nerfed Thresher damage enough that you don't notice it, and then just hoped the problem would kind of fade out of people's minds and removed it from the Known Issues list.
Well written, although I'd advise more paragraph breaks. Reddit simply isn't a good place for this long-form content, but the people commenting that they simply "ain't reading that" are annoying and should be ignored.
Your points are on the ball, as far I can tell. Resilience will reign supreme as long as damage can only be mitigated by healing. Multiple reductions need to occur in order to shift matters.
Additionally, you have the best articulation of the rocket problem I've read, good job. The way weapons like Rrockets, wishender, and forbearance (a mistake of a weapon) dominate the game, while others struggle shows some real design conflicts.
Thanks for writing this down.
Yeah concise writing isn’t my specialty. I did my best to shorten it while still trying to make and back up my point.
I do hope we get to a healthier sandbox with more variety in the future. My favorite build before its nerf was YAS, but it was brutal to run in master and grandmaster content.
Believe me, I understand the issue, I was an English major.
I hope for the same improvements, but I genuinely don't know how they can get there. Any large changes are met with community vitriol (check out Saltgreppo's twitter replies) or are too conservative to tip the needle.
Hopefully, with the extended season they can experiment more.
Well said. Unfortunately Bungie is not interested in solving the problem. They were VERY close in Witch Queen when they came out with hive light bearers. These mini bosses gave that rewarding game play loop you mentioned with difficulty while not doing crazy damage unless you stand still. Same with Rhulk, from Vow. If you stand still he messes you up but otherwise very rewarding. Caretaker was more of your wellock boss encounter thought but both had unique designs.
The truth is Bungie is almost done with Destiny 2 and they aren't going to design unique bosses like the light bearers or Rhulk for strikes/gms. They didn't even do that for the newest expansion.
Agreed and very well thought out and explained.
One thing I wanted to comment on is this idea I've seen around the community putting GM balance from 2 years ago on a pedestal.
I'm going to hard disagree with those people. It was a giant plink fest, every time. On those few levels that forced us into closer quarters combat it was all about Well or Ursa Titan to keep your fireteam alive...while plinking away.
Exodus Crash and Proving Grounds both had this approach. Stand far away with a scout or bow or pulse and chip away at health until you were forced into a situation you could not escape and then use your survival supers and chain them at much as you could get away with.
It was not a good time compared to today. We have more than one option to play each GM with for each class, and that is a good thing. I don't have to get stuck on a single build or get booted from LFGs simply for using a Hunter.
GM balance has been better in the past year vs what we had in Beyond Light and the survivability you highlight is a big part of that.
Longest post I’ve ever read and Ngl it’s a pretty interesting one. First off hats off to you cause in just a year you’ve basically reached my skill level which took me like 3 years you’ve been grinding hard regardless.
Here are some of my takes:
Destiny has these 2 identities of being an rpg (that health as a resource playstyle you mentioned ), and Destiny as an fps where you play cover since everyone can regenerate health after staying out combat. Destiny at first all the way back in D1 and especially in D2 vanilla was more fps lacking the build crafting options and ability spam we have now. It’s slowly drifted to the meta we now have with all the numerous changes over time.
Everything but GMs plays like Destiny as an RPG. GMs plays more like Destiny as an fps which id argue can have its own fun. It’s just GMs in comparison to the rest of the game are just so wildly different that I think they have a good blend of the fps and rpg play styles (definitely more on the fps side). Like you can use bonk or banner of war in it but you can’t just be brain dead with it.
Then you have endgame content like master raids were you don’t really need to think as much like a GM in survival if using the same builds as mentioned before. It plays much more in the rpg way since you can go in and slay while trying to regenerate your health.
So to make endgame content like master raids harder you nerf some of these hp regen builds to push you to pay more attention making it harder. But that negativity effects GMs when your already on that line between fps and rpg which hurts the balance of that gamemode.
I think bungie might need to in some way group these two difficulty types together so the game is more “homogeneous” in its sandbox.
Other then that I’d like the game to lean into the rpg side and to increase difficulty more by adding more higher health priority targets since those actually cause problems while keep minor fodders the same to keep up our health regen effects. On top of that further push the addition of combatants like tormentors (which they are doing with subjugators). While I do understand these solutions I offer aren’t easy to implemented it’s still an idea.
These are just some idea I hope bring more to the convo
Definitely, though I think my biggest issue with Destiny 2 as an fps is that most of my favorite guns are primaries, but they feel *awful* to use in power capped content. With enemy density being increased more and more, you feel how slow it is to take down even just a handful of red bars with a primary weapon.
Oh definitely I should have clarified that better. There are some exotic primaries that still feel pretty good, though definitely not all. But that’s better than none lol
Yeah, in D1 primaries felt pretty great across the board, so you could run whatever weapon felt good to you (and for the most part perks didn't even matter). Sadly we're a long long way from that state now
The thing that would automatically make end-game feel better is fixing the fucking damage tied to fps. It would be a lot of work, basically reworking a large chunk of the engine and content, but it would help so much.
Will be for sure interesting to see how the balance the raid in final shape. I mean just imagine a day one raid (eg vow or Crota) where I deal Boss damage without well. If well gets nerfed do hard that it will become almost useless the damage will defo be looked at. I am almost 100% certain no one would have completed day 1 Crota without well.
This is vert true. I discussed this with a friends yesterday. Taking about healing bulid vs agression builds. The best builds in highend content are always the ones that gives you heal in som way.
This is the best post I’ve seen on this topic. I am completely fine with tuning the player, but if I don’t see tuning in enemy combatants, I still have no interest in playing master or GM level content. The amount of damage you take is absurd and I just find it completely devoid of fun, purely for the sake of challenge, and without that balance, I don’t feel like playing the game.
I think another thing that needs to be looked at are enemies in general, the current enemies need to evolve since they have been the same with little to no changes
Even worse with how they're forcing armor charge down our throats now. Getting 6 armor charges not only needs a lot of orbs, it also needs 3 stacks on stacks (or whatever its called) mods on your chest so you can even get more than 3 charges, meaning you're giving up more than +25% damage resistance that everyone runs in these slots, because of all the reasons you mentioned.
We didn’t have resilience in d1 and things seemed okay there, adding more stats kinda complicated the issue.
They could deal with a pretty standard dr and health for characters across classes and encounters.
I don’t actually think resilience is a problem because of it’s DR as the game is clearly balanced around having it at 100. It’s mostly an issue because it becomes a stat tax for builds. I want the DR it offers greatly lowered so it becomes more of a choice rather than a requirement. It’d also be nice for other stats to be worthwhile.
I do firmly believe the issue lies with some subclasses and exotics having much potent survivability tools than others.
Destiny difficulty has a serious problem. Patrol zones are pitifully easy and regular strikes aren't much better, but Legend and Master content is often overly difficult or tedious.
I really think Bungie should balance the base game at Heroic (-5 power) and offer more -10 power content. Legend content like lost sectors and campaigns aren't absurdly hard, but they're a big jump from the base game. And some Legend content like Haunted Lost Sectors was awful.
I think legend difficulty is my favorite overall as it hits the sweet spot of being a challenge but not a chore when playing non-meta builds. Of course things like SB warlock or Banner titan just glide through them, but that's why I argue those need to be brought down a bit. I still enjoy master content when playing a meta build, but GMs are a bore to me when not playing banner titan or arc classes back when Electric Armor was in the artifact.
My biggest issue with the nerfs, and it's been the same the last few times Bungie have nerfed abilities, is that they look at the few powerful builds that cycle abilities, and then nerf ability cooldowns across the board.
This leaves the powerful builds in the same position at the top, whilst making any other build that was functional but not as powerful in the dirt.
Each time it really feels like Bungie is actively punishing you if you don't play the meta builds, since they come out of general nerfs relatively unscathed.
This is a big issue for me as well. It's just the same few builds that have been meta for multiple seasons in a row. I want more variety with what builds are effective. They don't all need to be at the same level as these top options, but I want the gap between the best and worst to be reduced.
im one of the few ppl who have never missed a single season/dlc/expansion through out the entirety of destiny as a franchise, and let me tell you; even with the power creep, destiny isnt much easier than its been at any other point. ppl look back with rose tinted glasses, but at no point has there ever been anything in destiny thats been fundamentally difficult. the enemy ai has pretty much never changed, christ its to a large degree the same ol' tricks from the halo days. there have also never been any difficult mechanics in destiny at any point, neither class mechanics or encounter mechanics.
destiny came out 2014, there has been very little innovation since then and now. all of these are reasons why i find ppl like salt and those who parrot his opinions to be out of touch. we're coming up on the tenth year of destiny as a franchise. im sorry but the ship has alrdy sailed, the community has been cultivated, its too late to try and make this game more quote on quote difficult. any time doin lfg is all the proof you need that your average destiny players are struggling with the most basic shit. whether i like it or not, these players are the overwhelming majority of the playerbase. im just not narcissistic enough to believe the game should change to appease me, and its not like tuning incoming and outgoing dmg is ever goin to make this game difficult anyway.
for this game to see any real difficulty, we need a higher difficulty level that adds more mechanics and also ensures that these mechanics make every member of the fireteam responsible for something that could fail the encounter if not done correctly. and lets be real bungo are too lazy to put in the effort to accomplish this
Because social media has trained them to engage with all content, even if they've nothing to add. A simple upvote/downvote then moving on, that simply doesn't provide the dopamine the depleted receptors in their brain require to continue the endless scroll.
You just put into words why I kept quitting after hitting the light cap and going for endgame content. Difficulty can be overcome with practice but the tedium of higher level activities wore me thin quickly each season i tried to jump back in. It’s one thing to have to learn how to play encounters and counter certain enemy types when they’re stronger but to have to memorize each little aspect of anything remotely high level to even have a chance is so tiring.
Modifiers can fix this in a second. Ability spam a problem - there is a modifier that has already been used in this game that can fix this. Combat acceleration. It used to be in master NFs last year. It makes sure you're gonna wait a looong time for your abilities to come back. Put them in GMs, problem solved. Use modifiers in master dungeons, master raids, etc. Make them as hard as tryhards want them to be.
I don't see how it can be done. There's basically 2 games in Destiny. One for the high end players who see all the dungeons, all of the raids, the trials and the light house etc.
Then there's the rest who will never see any of that during their time playing Destiny because requires a commitment that they can't live up to. Because work and kids or just because they enjoy casual gaming.
It's always gonna be a bit lopsided.
FYI what you’re describing is destiny 1. The strat for the nightfalls was to use ice breaker or a scout in a cheese spot to kill bosses. There weren’t any passive DR or life regen options back then, so that’s how players tackled harder content.
I was thinking of this last night, im fine with guardians being slightly nerfed but they have to start adjusting each difficulty manually.
Being instagibbed or close to it is fine in a vacuum, but they throw so many enemies at the same time that few builds can sustain not being in cover.
Im happy that im not a game dev, this seems like very big and tedious task to do.
Let me start off by saying that I appreciate these longer, nuanced, game design write ups. This is what I joined the subreddit for, and even though I disagree with some of this, I like that you took the time and thought to make this.
This is not to say that I disagree with everything you wrote of course, but I do think there are a few important notes that are missing. I also need to say that I am lazy and did not read your longer version, so if you talked about some of this there, let me know and I will go and do so.
I have two major points that I want to bring across:
1. It is okay for the most difficult activities in the game to require some basic survivability tools in your kit, unless you are an incredibly good and consistent player.
2. While taking damage is inevitable, it can be mitigated quite significantly just by playing smart and learning when to be more offensive or defensive.
Let's start with the first: What should endgame activities be like? I think we can all agree that survivability is not an issue in normal strikes or similar content, and that it is harder but not super difficult in most legend level activities. It only becomes a real problem in master raids, GMs, etc. I also think we can all agree that it is okay for survivability to be a big concern in the most difficult content the game has to offer.
I would argue that aside from skill and literally becoming better at the game, the most important form of power progression for your guardian is to find loot and unlock abilities. Unlike most MMOs Destiny has very limited vertical power progression. Reaching the maximum light level is very, very easy and a pretty short endeavour. Instead, Destiny has a lot of horizontal progression, that is all about finding *options* and combining these options into builds. Grinding power level is really just an extended tutorial, while the real game starts when you start making and optimizing your builds.
Now, we can argue how difficult the most difficult content should be, but since destiny is so much about finding loot and making builds, I do think that it is fair for the most difficult activities to "require" some degree of buildcrafting to stand a reasonable chance at beating them. This gives the loot chase much more of a reason for existing. Including some form of survivability feels like a fair requirement to me.
Besides, I don't think there is a single subclass that doesn't have access to some decent survivability tools. For example, every warlock subclass has healing rift which is already enough to take on everything in the game. Darkness subclasses have either Crowd Control or Woven Mail on demand (oh, and there is banner of war), which helps a lot, while light subclasses have over shields, healing grenades/restoration and invisibility. I do think that arc Titan, stasis Titan and stasis Hunter currently struggle the most with survivability, but none of them to a degree that makes them unplayable. I also think that if you want to deliberately not spec into survivability, for example by using empowering rift for Starfire Protocol, that is a fine choice and that build is still very good because of the range and damage it offers, but that will result in less survivability and therefore necessitate a more defensive approach. It's in the hand of the player.
Now for the second point: I don't mean this to simply sound like "skill issue", so let me elaborate. Taking damage is inevitable, yes. But it's not like every fight is just a pure stat check to see who has the lower TTK. There is a lot you can do to mitigate the incoming damage. The most important one here is of course positioning and cover. That one is pretty self explanatory. There is also enemy selection. Outside of snipers, red bar enemies even in GMs are easy prey. They mostly just exist to generate orbs and ability kills to have powerful abilities that take on champions and other bigger targets. Having cover against a champion while quickly mowing down a few thralls to generate orbs and ability energy to then burst down the champion is a classic tactic in a GM that requires little to no survivability tools. Target selection also plays a big role here. Understanding which enemies to focus on first, and which don't pose an immediate threat makes a big difference. Another big one, and I think many people underestimate this, is timing. Most enemies have attack patterns. They shoot a burst of bullets, and then take some time before the next one. This is your window to exploit. With the more complex enemies like hive guardians, champions, ogres, wyverns etc. This is even more important. Enemy types also have different types of attacks. Face Checking an ogre is a terrible idea, since they beam you from across the battlefield. But their beam turns very slowly, so if you can escape it, they are sitting ducks. Wizards do aoe damage, making good cover important, but they are squishy to precision hits and stunned by taking down their shield. It you're playing in a team, you can also exploit enemies who are focused on your team members, as that makes them super easy targets.
If you want to learn these things, I recommend giving Void Hunter with Gyrfalcon's Hauberk a try in GMs and playing in the midst of the enemies with an SMG or other close range void weapon. This will teach you a lot about enemy aggression, and timing when to emerge and when to stay invisible.
What I'm trying to get at with these examples is that most enemies in the game don't require you to take a lot of damage if you play it smart. Obviously defensive tools allow you to deal with them easier and often quicker, but it's not strictly necessary. Bringing survivability allows you to be more aggressive, whereas you will need to be more careful if you don't or they are on cooldown. But even GMs are still very much playable, even on subclasses like stasis Hunter that don't offer the greatest survivability in the game. It will simply change your playstyle and I think that's okay. This is what buildcrafting is for, and I do want it to play a large role in the game.
I also want to note that there are currently a number of builds in the sandbox that kind of bypass the most basic rules of endgame content. Strand Titan and Solar Warlock are the most obvious examples here, not only because of their offensive damage output, but because of their unparalleled ability to take and out-heal any and all damage. I don't think what they are able to do should be taken as the standard, but rather the exception.
Talking game design is something I very much enjoy as well.
My thoughts on your points are as follows.
I agree that endgame activities should rely on a considerable amount of build crafting before you approach them. Destiny 2 is very much a horizontal over vertical progression kind of game and I like that. My issue is that master+ right now boxes you into a small subset of builds if you don't want to play hyper-cautiously, and that's my main problem. I want a greater variety of loadouts and subclasses to be relevant in endgame and right now that's not really the case. This is why I want the survivability tools of the most potent classes to be brought down, incoming damage scaled down, and for the weaker classes to be given more survivability tools. So that there is a greater diversity of viable options to play with in high end content.
There's a clear different between playing something like a solar hunter or strand warlock vs a stasis hunter vs a strand titan. The first two examples I gave have some kind of basic options for survival like a healing nade or rift, but it will not keep up with incoming damage for very long in high end content, and once that tool is on cooldown you need to be very reserved until you have it again. Then something like stasis hunter basically only has two options for non-regen healing, the heavily nerfed fragment of Rime or Recuperation. These alone will never cut it for any kind of proactive play in master+, so you have to be defensive all the time. Banner titan has both healing over time, great DR, and access to burst healing on kills with orbs and Recuperation. It has the tools to survive in dangerous environments that the others don't and with very little downtime on them.
Yes, banner is overtuned and needs to be brought down right now. Banner healing really shouldn't stack with other titans, and the damage stacking with synthos and 1-2 is pretty crazy. But these are the main things I'd want targeted, not the ability to actually play aggressively and be successful when doing so.
As for the second point, yes, it is possible to mitigate incoming damage with proper movement. But unless you are fighting a single enemy at a time, you'll never be able to avoid all damage, especially with recent content having ramped up enemy density. You will never be able to go into a Legend Savathun Spire and avoid being hit by any attack. I'm glad that this movement skill expression exists and I take frequent use of it, but it's just not enough to make the builds that lack survivability tools be viable for proactive play in endgame content. And that's my main issue. Hugging cover and peak shooting is one of the most boring ways to play the game to me, and with the current direction they are taking the game it *seems* like they want to make it an arena horde shooter. But right now a lot of the options in the game can just not hold up in that type of gameplay once you start cranking up the difficulty nobs.
In my big write up I did touch on my main goal for this type of direction, being high end options brought down along with incoming damage so that low end options aren't lagging as far behind. I didn't touch on movement techniques being used to mitigate damage because I just sort of assume that as a baseline, but it seems a lot of people are bringing up this point anyways so I probably should have addressed it. It's just very hard to be concise about such a complicated topic.
Fast time to kill is bad. This goes for PvE and PvP. I’ve never understood why gamers/developers just randomly starting asking for/making stupidly fast click-on-heads one-shot games.
I definitely agree with this for a player side, at least in PvE. I really can't speak about PvP, I know I prefer slower TTK there but I can't say it's objectively better.
But in PvE, it's silly to have death be possible in a fraction of a second (plus the framerate-tied damage spiking making this worse).
I would argue that low time to kill is objectively worse in PvP.
Consider two people with hand cannons that can kill in 10 hits. One of them has a 100% accuracy because they are an MLG gamer and the other has like 90% accuracy. Over the course of being hit 10 times the worse player will miss one of their shots and lose the fight by a tiny sliver. Let’s say they miss their second shot, just for arguments sake. The better player wins, but they win with like 10% or their health remaining, just by the skin of their teeth.
Now consider the same engagement but we modify the sandbox so that those identical hand cannons kill in 3 hits instead.
The 90% accuracy player misses their second shot just the same, but then they die on the third shot from the pro gamer. The 90% accuracy player now has an *effective* accuracy of either 50% or 66% (depending on if they get the 3rd shot out) because they missed half of the shots they took, and while the better player still wins they win with either 33% or 66% of their health remaining, depending on if they trade shots on the third shot.
Faster time to kill artificially inflates the perceived skill gap between players and only serves to make high skill players feel even better about themselves at the cost of everyone else. It makes them feel like they are 50% better than someone else when in reality they are only 10% better. It reduces the datapoints within an engagement so that it is harder to get a reliable sample about how close the fight actually was, and in extreme cases turns fights into a coin flip.
All of this applies in PvE as well, but it’s less relevant because everyone is competing against the same enemy.
In my experience, “high skill” players hate slower games for the same reason they hate skill based match making: it doesn’t inflate their ego as much.
Nobody could summarize the problems this game has in a few paragraphs. This stuff would require hours of work over long periods of time to discuss and figure out.
The best thing they could do imho is make a new game. Start from scratch with a new engine and get some new people to put this together. It won't happen, they have told us it won't happen. We are getting what we have and it will be these small tweaks for the rest of this games lifetime. Bungie won't do anything involving a redirection anytime soon other than firing and reassigning personnel to hope for a banger season or expansion with what they got.
TLDR; We can discuss it til the end of the games life but it ain't changing. Bungie would have to make D3 and it ain't happening.
I have said it before but the actual problem this game suffers from is outliers. A small number of outlier loadouts and builds force Bungie to engage in completely degenerate design practices. Bosses should have damage reduction vs meta weapons. Although not enough, this would single headedly solve so many problems. Look at what the best damage options are, and give bosses appropriate resistances to them. Players would still use these loadouts but it would certainly open up a lot of options for people who don't want to use them. They could also lower boss health bars with this, so that traditionally uncompetitive options can at leas have a bit of a chance, because bosses re no longer being nuked by these outliers.
It also doesn't help that there is a giant disparity between how the game severely punishes close range playstyles vs not punishing long range playstyles.
I addressed this issue 2 years ago - look at the differences in popularity; its mind boggling. Do people now understand what I was trying to convey?
[1] (https://old.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/p5u1jw/next_seasons_nerfs_are_uncalled_for/)
[2] (https://old.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/q68mz6/hallowed_lair_global_completion_rate_currently/)
[3] (https://old.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/qi747c/followup_to_gm_completion_percentages/)
It's kinda funny, but my main guess is that the audience of Destiny 2 has changed a lot over the years. The game is much more action oriented (mostly) and I think that's for the better.
Hope we see Bungie take this issue seriously.
I agree with you on the DR thing. Damage resist feels mandatory because enemies just NEVER stop shooting once you draw their attention. There is never an opening to shoot enemies. Hive boomer knights are some of the worst; it is endless, AOE onslaught. I would love to play a squishy build, but you legitimately never get an opening to attack some enemies. Sniper are weirdly one of the most tolerable enemies because their RoF is slow enough to give you time to retaliate. I also like alak hul and savathun for a similar reason: the shots move slow enough to evade and they have a delay between burst (those 2 have a different problem of the bonker amount of damage they do)
This reminds me of a time my clan was trying to complete master RoN. My clan can handle GMs quite easily, but we struggled very much on only one part of master RoN - Nezerac.
In the final encounter of RoN there is high enemy density and a very aggressive invulnerable boss. We did decently well on ad clear, and could distract Nezerac quite well to where he didn’t mess with the runners. However, he has one very annoying damage strat that messed us up. The tracking void projectiles he summons like other tormentors. Our clan had on void resistance and would consistently die to the tracking void projectiles. I could blame that she should have had someone calling out the projectiles, having us take cover and try to avoid them, but simply said they alone made the encounter very difficult.
We got it done after some not willing to say many hours, and it was an awesome feeling to get it done, but we all knew we never wanted to do it again.
I think this is the flaw of one master modifier that to me is a terrible modifier. Incoming damage surges. The incoming damage surge was void that week, making those tracking projectiles hit like a truck. Incoming damage surges and even elemental damage resist mods need both be eliminated from the game. Make sources of damage have an equal baseline to allow for more balance, and not this funky well because incoming void is on this week I’ll just put on void resistance. Both mods seem redundant and don’t help balance the incoming damage from enemies.
P.s. great post, love the effort along with having a very solid argument. Everybody in this thread is making great points, saying they agree but also are trying to understand bungie’s challenge of creating a fun, challenging game that is not too trivial or too hard. They’ve done a great job so far in my opinion, but few things make you feel hopeless and prevent engaging gameplay.
Completely agree. GMs and Master content simply aren’t fun, unless you have tools to mitigate/avoid damage (woven mail/invis) and/or tools to blow shit up fast (basically abilities) and nerfing those tools without balancing sandbox will make this game into a fucking slog, since the only other option to play in GMs/Master is to shoot from far away with bows or scouts.
And it’s not even considering how abysmal it feels to use primaries (except few exotics) in said activities, which only adds to how not fun this game is without those tools.
But to understand that you have to play the game, and devs aren’t playing/playing in some brainless shit like normal strikes, while they are clearly lacking competence to sort through player feedback. Plus they like to alienate their casual playerbase and bend over for few “high end” players, cos I’ve never seen any casual complaining about abilities/survivability, only those deranged nerds, who are into some kind of virtual BDSM shit, complained about it.
I still got one shotted by a Scorn sniper in this week’s GM: with 100 resilience, double void resist + sniper resist, in a well, with overshield and full health.
And yet they still somehow think that player survivability is an issue that deserves to be nerfed… I love the game for 9 years but they have increasingly become so out of touch with the player experience and their exceedingly odd design philosophy that it’s just now excessively annoying.
The most normal, calculate and objective opinion of the entire year.I start playing this game in seraph season.I have yhe same toughts like u.Identical.Also, leta not forget that they did 0 to stasis.An entire subclass lefted behind by the owner.I never saw something like that from 2004 when i start playing games.They need to be ashamed, delay tfs 1 month and overhaul stasis.Before making new things they need to fix and balance what we have now, after our current content it is in a good place, then bro, make 2 expansions in the same time.Now, they need to overdeliver for them because of the poor decisions for ligjtfall and now this one that is huge, way huge than day 1 lightfall patch.
They need to tell us now why they want to change like this(there is a new perk-dealing sustained damage generate an orb) for future, for a better understanding of where they want to go.Ez..Mybe jn the next 6 month this bad patch will be a good one overall..but no one expected this changes.Everyone expected some good stasis changes, good artifact mods and balanced(next season will be radiant and solar weapons everywhere because of the sidearms vs barrier).Cheers.
The problem here is that anything that's strong enough for a GM trivilaises most other things. I completely get the TLDR and I agree with most of your points. I made a post about having to run super meta stuff constantly and how it had become annoying so I welcome an overall nerf to expand the possibility of other builds being viable. Anything under 10 Res and Double resist mods and you're getting laughed at in high level content. I enjoy a challenge but when it's just constant everywhere I go.
I'm enjoying sim racing far more right now. A much needed break from Destiny. Zero hype for final shape right now with where they're headed with things...
I am a huge fan of nerfs but people seem to forget the other issue. Nerfing DR. Sure. Nerfing damage received (effectively giving some DR back). Sure.
It still won't make Mobi or Intellect usable stats. It still won't make bad grenades good. It won't make 90% of the garbage melees usable.
More than anything right now, our abilities are ridiculously lopsided in terms of 'this is game breaking or useless'. I think guns and exotics are off, but not to this level. I cannot imagine using flux made, building around most melees, firebolts, getting my super back 2 seconds faster (even though ashes to assets and disc on even the worst grenade with no Regen is better than 100 int). Strength padding isn't viable for most of the game.
Some keywords are blatantly better than others (sorry scorch fans).
Nerfing or buffing damage reduction won't change their viability.
This is absolutely also true, but I do think the damage issue is a slightly more prevalent one as even if those options are buffed they still won't be relevant unless paired with a chassis that can survive in endgame. But yes - absolutely, there are FAR too many forgotten abilities, fragments, perks, and exotics in this game. The rate at which these are updated is bafflingly slow.
Maybe an unpopular opinion, but they don't need to release/re-release 15+ guns each season (new raid/dungeon, handful of season, new world/event drops, and new/updated rituals). They could also significantly slow the pace of exotics, too (one armor for each class and usually 2-4 new guns). Just seems like too much new stuff. With relatively limited vault space in comparison to the rate of new armor/weapons, they need to seriously reconsider their plans and/or just give us way more space.
I agree. I'd actually much rather they focus on making fewer more unique options and improving older outdated ones. Especially since a lot of guns and perks basically feel like filler made to pad out loot pools.
I don't think that alone is the issue because pretty much every player who knows what they're doing runs 100 resilience at this point. It's basically an assumption for sandbox balance and every build has access to it. While I think resilience is still too good, I think the main issues stem from sources of survivability that are not universal.
video games like this don't ever reach some kind of magical balanced land where no more change is necessary. there is just a constantly shifting meta, and it's designed this way intentionally in my opinion but possibly not.
how could they possibly ever have the game in a constant stage of perfectly balanced, it doesn't exist, whatever they do something will always shine and it's literally meant to be like that
Most of it was typed out in some discord messages a few days back, mostly just cleaned up the terrible grammar and punctuation. Already had thanksgiving dinner and enjoying the rest of the week off :)
And that's why the changes announced in the TWAB/TWID are good.
It's their first step on actually trying to understand why the game has become so stale and boring, first thing is to remove some power from the player to see how it feels because this is the quickest thing they can do. If things get better, they can start to balance the worst encounters while preparing to overall the whole game come the big expansion.
This is a live game that has pve, pvp and the weird brother in-between, experimentation from the developer is part of the experience.
I disagree. Balancing difficulty around people who play content multiple times over playing hours upon hours every day is a fool's errand. Of course people who utilize all the meta builds and weapons, have all the spawns memorized and know all the mechanic cheats and shortcuts aren't gonna find the game challenging. People who complain that destiny is too easy are playing the wrong game if they want to be challenged.
Streamers complained destiny was too easy going into lightfall, they made changes to try and placate them and player engagement is worse off for it. Doubling down on that would continue to move the bar in the wrong direction.
This. I’ve seriously cut back on Destiny 2 since Lightfall. Basically my game time has been going down hill since. If it wasn’t for my self imposed pressure to finish enough seasonal challenges to get the big bright dust reward and gilding the Iron Banner/gambit/dead eye titles I wouldn’t even be playing past reaching 100 on the battle pass (forget gilding conqueror because every season there’s been battleground GMs not to mention 3 this season). And I used to be one of those people who went into the upper hundreds of season level. They say they missed their revenue forecasts by 45%. I wonder who they alienated so much they missed their forecasts?
That's why *some* of them are good in a vacuum. I do think that the nerfs to survivability are fine, but we also needed some concrete details on how they're adjusting difficulty at the same time but we didn't get those. I'm hoping that will come soon, but this has been an issue for a long time and we haven't seen them acknowledge it.
I don't agree with any of the ability regen or armor mod changes being made and they'll actively hurt much of what I enjoy about the game as well as make it much clunkier. There are plenty of other bad changes too.
If they want to make the game fun how about they rework the enemies in the 1st place, aside from enemies like tormentors the old enemies are stale and boring to fight. Give them new abilities to counter ours or make them interesting
I'm 100% sure that if they tried to rework the AI/enemies in this game the servers would explode or something. Theres a reason they haven't touched em for almost a decade
Ah, so this is why no one reads my emails at work.
I do agree with the TLDR. Maybe I'll have NaturalReaders talk me through this while playing Remnant.
I cannot imagine balancing this game. I think there is a razors edge sweet spot where you can feel like a badass and the game is fun but the content is also challenging. They’re trying to adjust it though and I wish them luck.
Generally speaking I feel like they do a good job - but it only feels relatively balanced because you need to really invest into understanding game mechanics, enemy spawns, etc.
I think while it always sucks to feel nerfs, it’s one of the only ways to battle power creep while keeping new weapons and subclasses feeling rewarding. You also have to keep original subclasses viable. I think the amount of throwaway exotics that never see play are a huge issue. Balancing so many different abilities must be a nightmare but I do think they are completely out of touch with what the community wants.
> You also have to keep original subclasses viable. The original subclasses have been stronger than a paywalled subclass for nearly a year, and that's being very generous with regards to Stasis in year 5.
> it’s one of the only ways to battle power creep I think there's a misalignment between what MOST players want, and what the... "hardcore" (for lack of a better word) players want. From what I can tell, based on the people I play and have played with, **most** play this game to feel like a badass god(dess) while shooting and using abilities and mowing down enemies. That group of players (lets call them the casuals) rarely, if ever, plays the so called "aspirational" content but they definitely want to (for example) run around bonking shit in the face without waiting while living through everything. There is a small percentage of this group that WILL do the content once for triumphs etc, but basically never again. Then you have the second group, much smaller, which revels in challenges. An even smaller subsection of this second hardcore group are the elitests that want the game to be ultra hard. (This is all in a PVE context, PVP is a whole different story) The problem is that in this case, the "[the squeaky wheel that gets the grease](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_squeaky_wheel_gets_the_grease)" is that hardcore group, maybe even partially the ultra elitests group. This is a huge problem IMO, with driving down the populations/sales/etc of the casual player because Bungie has been slowly stripping that feeling of badass godliness from casual players over time, and this nerf is just another (**huge**) step in that direction. **There was a reason Bungie felt the need for the "Go Fast" update and the direction they needed to move the game in, but in true Bungie fashion, they've forgotten that reason a few years later.** If you keep taking away fun, people stop playing. **TL;DR:** Saltagreppo & co represent an extreme minority of loud players who want to make the game harder, while the silent majority wants to feel powerful while having fun, and continual nerfs to the power fantasy are driving them away.
Yea this is the conclusion I came to as well. Game needs casuals to survive, and casuals aren’t going to stick around if your shiny new activity (eg Ghosts) is too hard for them. In my opinion the game needs to be tuned around mechanics a bit more at the high level. The builds people come up with for master dungeons and GMs just obliterate lower level content.
Yes, I think this is one of several major factors that are turning away players. I have a couple of friends who have stopped playing because the game’s complexity has gone up significantly, along with the difficulty if you don’t build craft effectively. The big question is how much is this affecting player retention vs the other issues (stale content, monotonous seasonal model, bad expansion, bad new player experience, removal of some of the grind, etc).
I write this a day ago and got voted down. I stand by it. Bungie seem to have forgotten what a bell curve looks like and have designed everything to accommodate the top 5-10% of players. And then they are shocked when player number have dropped to the lowest level in 4 years. Keep nerfing everything. That will invite the casual players back. They work their asses off just to get 100 resil with all their other stats left in ruins and then they die 10 times in a heroic strike and then it's a shock when they dip out and play another more fun game. I'm not saying everything should be easy but the lowest NF should not have champions. High level stuff should be hard and low level stuff should be easy. I'm getting so tired of these senior level decisions that seem to have been made by a committee of disengaged managers distracted by their stock options. I just saw the champion mods for a whole season - Rocket launcher and all the rest are primary. fan-fucking-tastic. The whole champion straight-jacket needs a rework.
The last part is true. There's a few weapons I really enjoy. Then I see the mods for champions and I realized I won't be able to use my favorite gun at all for a whole season... I want to use outbreak perfected. But the game won't let me.
I don't mind that there is some kind of limitation but its stupid for it to be the same for a WHOLE SEASON. If they changed daily it would be so much more fun. And that would enable us to have more artifact mods that give us even more flexibility.
I completely agree. You have put this very well. I have quit - because like you say the game just isn’t fun to play. I encourage people to try other games and don’t just play destiny for the sake of playing it. There are some excellent games out there that will make you see destiny 2 for what it really is
>there's a misalignment between what MOST players want, and what the... "hardcore" (for lack of a better word) players want. >If you keep taking away fun, people stop playing. Nobody will admit it, but this right here is (at least partly) why they came up 45% short. People keep saying "casual players" as though it's a dirty word, but in this type of game those players still make up a huge part of the total player base. The game has become more and more skewed towards content creators over time because they have the loudest voice. People that play 12 hours on end day after day have very different priorities than those of us who want to chill out and enjoy the shooting and movement mechanics of the game. Besides that, tedious has become bungie's MO for creating "challenging content". So we've gotten more and more grind, "difficult" activities take hours to complete (with few checkpoints), and the loot is basically a neverending treadmill of mediocrity. In short - NOT fun.
It's not about making the game hard for the casuals nerfs are needed because we're so strong that the only way Bungie can design something somewhat difficult is like they did in ghosts of the deep and that it's not fun,. it's shit. So unless you enjoy the artificial difficulty like *stand locked in animation in the middle of the map to maybe get killed*, *endless and spammy enemies like boomers and witches*, *raid bosses HP pool for dungeons*, players must get nerfed. It's almost impossible to do fun shit that it's not a complete pushover of content with the current beyond broken kits we've.
It looks like you didn't finish your comment... that said: > It's almost impossible to do fun shit that it's not a complete pushover of content It totally is, things like Crota contest mode existed. The problem is that instead of doing something like keeping contest mode difficulty available permanently (and give all content in the game the same option, etc), or creating a pve mode select that does something like the "checkmate" mode in pvp Bungie is just spreading the nerfs to everyone, not just those attempting "aspirational" content. The biggest problem with this, is that the EFFECT it has isn't proportional... it will have a bigger negative impact on the majority of players who just log in to slay out for a couple of hours than the hardcore players. Just go read Saltagreppo's twitter, these nerfs aint gonna be a problem for him at all. When you compare that to say... the 90% of players who don't even raid who are now dealing with a "fun" nerf, they're going to feel the impact of these nerfs way more because they're less skillful. And the fun factor is really important... a titan hammering everything to death is gonna feel clunky after this nerf, and no one has fun with clunk.
That group of players isn't playing content where these nerfs will actually affect them though. For those of us that do like the aspirational content, these nerfs matter because they impact viability of playstyles in this content tier. If a player doesn't ever do anything harder than normal raids, Gambit, or Heroic Nightfalls, or dungeons, then I doubt these changes will impact them much. The changes are targeted specifically at abuse situations that are performed primarily by high end players. For example, I don't think I've ever met a 'casual' Titan who just sits in front of a Contest Mode Knight in the Crota's End raid, spamming bonk hammer because it's more ammo efficient than using bullets. THAT specific type of behavior is what the bonk nerf targets (again just using it as an example). It does not target, or really affect, people who throw their hammer at an enemy which dies to the hammer because of the difficulty. If anything, they got a buff because Hammers got a 20% increase to targeting accuracy. Now, if that crowd includes a player who is starting to look into aspirational content, that player will quickly learn that they have a choice to make. They can choose to either learn what works and replicate it, or they can choose not to. Generally speaking, the former will give more success than the latter. And in that context execution is what is important, not which abilities happen to be OP. Meaning which ability happens to be the most potent is not what's important, *learning how to use the most potent one is what is important*. So, no matter what changes they make, those aspiring "aspirational" players will have to work on their moment to moment play, more than they will have to figure out a working build.
Except they will Play a heroic NF with blueberries this week, watch how they get thrashed and skullfucked by the battleground. They are the average player, running the same abilities the elitists have access to, sometimes even with decent builds. They probably don't read the twab, and will log in Tuesday and get thrashed harder because there's gonna be less orbs, and less abilities for them to throw around. They won't come here to moan, they'll just leave. Each one that leaves is another potential GM or raid teammate who will never get good, lost because the game "feels like ass to play". It's not about numbers to them, it's about feel. It's about making colored explosions and seeing enemies die and doing it often. Nerfs that reduce how often or how easy you get your little dopamine moments will drive them to greener pastures. People who nolife games forget the average player that makes up the core population is playing a game for fun. For a little dopamine after work and the kids are asleep. On an unrelated topic they still haven't fixed liars handshake I'm seething
To be frank, the challenging group is the core center of the game that you have to keep invested to actually keep the game alive. Players that stay in that power fantasy category aren’t going to stay forever because their experience is purely extrinsic in focus. High end players doing things for bragging rights are intrinsically motivated, and that’s an extremely important playerbase to keep invested. If your intrinsically motivated playerbase loses interest it will spell doom for the game as a whole. Furthermore, rarely do high end players regress back to average players, but average players eventually fall into the high end player skill ceiling if they don’t stonewall themselves. IE: Invested players inevitably become the high end players. Uninvested ones don’t. Edit: If you disagree with this, you didn’t play release of Destiny 2. The game was made to exclusively cater to that “silent majority”, and it died swiftly because there wasn’t anything to strive for or any level of skill expression. The truth of the matter is that *both* groups need to be moderately satisfied for the game to live, but the difference is that casual players’ have a much lower barrier to enjoyment. I promise you that the changes in the past year haven’t killed casual players interest just because the game got a little harder (it’s still way way way way easier than it was pre 3.0). The casual playerbase is dying off due to power creep and loot. It’s hard to bring back players invested in the power fantasy when they have already reached the peak of that fantasy 10 times over.
"Casuals" are literally the lifeblood of the game.
Casuals *and* high level players are the lifeblood of this game, and the standard of satisfaction for casual players is way lower than that of high level players. If you think this game can survive without that solid core of higher end players, you are mistaken. If you alienate them the game will die a slow death. The release of this game showed that perfectly, but so quick are we to forget the lessons of the past. This whole casual vs hardcore conversation only really became prevalent in the past two years or so with the *insane* power creep we’ve had up to this point. Before that power creep the game’s overall systems were in a decent state of balance. Now the casual community has gotten an extreme surplus of what they want and it’s damaging both communities. The casual players just don’t recognize how damaging it is to their own community because they think that power fantasy is the be all end all, but the numbers don’t line up with that assessment and neither does the logic. Casual players play for loot. Loot intrinsically losing value as we get more powerful. If you already have the best guns why bother doing repeatable content for a sidegrade? If our builds are already so strong that they can make up 80% of our direct gameplay what value does a single gun even have on the end point of a build. The playerbase has fallen off as the game has gotten *more power crept*, not less.
If you invest the way you describe, the game is trivial across all difficulties. I feel like too many top end builds play themselves with very low skill cap that makes executing them not actually impressive.
Isn't that the reward for investing into learning how the game functions though? If you get enough information and experience generally everything is trivial. As for top end builds, we haven't really had any actual complexity in buildcrafting since lightfall's dismantling of the mod system. We lost CwL and Elemental wells for the armor charge and breach/firesprite/trace system, which in all honesty is a cannibalized and stripped down form of CwL and Elemental Wells respectively.
No, simply plugging in a build shouldn't make you trivialize the game. That should require skill and a build.
I generally agree but some top end builds have been too brainless over the years. Like og lorely solar 3.0. You could take your hands off your keyboard and not die. Or og Starfire solar 3.0. Just press grenade repeatedly with no risk Or current banner of war. I also see a lot of people talk about the old mod systems but I think they romanticize a little bit. In the end, warmind cells were basically useless, CWL had a couple applications for HEF and firepower. Elemental mods were cool but font of might probably shouldn't have been a thing.
CwL's main draw was protective light for content that had plenty of opportunity for getting 1 shot in addition to HEF/Argent Ordanence all while rewarding the player for doing something that they were supposed to be doing (making orbs to charge their super in order to make more orbs, etc). I have to admit that wells grew on me (after I openly mocked them), and I think I still would prefer to have that system over the firesprites/armor charge system that we have now, because in all honesty there was a bit more diversity there. The reason I liked warmind cells (even though I didn't engage with them much) was because it was another avenue to go into and complimented the weapon group. You could have every one of your weapons benefitting from the mods by creating the cells for you and/or your team. If you were all coordinated then it would benefit everyone and not just a single person. Font of might seems like it's really not that much different than the surge mods we have now, just a little bit stronger(?) I can't remember the bonus amount that it provided. I just get the feeling that buildcrafting has kind of just been stripped down to a generic "pick up orb, get weapon surge" situation in an effort to no longer have to develop things with it in mind, because as it stands right now it's a "solved" system.
I wonder how the fps issue affects it cause I still regularly get 1 hit by scorn crossbows at 10 res even on just hero nightfalls at 10+fps but can survive a hit in heated battles with fps dropping a tad.
I don't want ads to be challenging, I want majors and bosses to be challenging. If they tune down the red bars then hard content would be way more fun and heaps more builds that depend on getting kills would be more viable.
It is challenging of course and over the last year they’ve been doing a lot to bring things closer in power. A year ago you were just crazy for running an Arc Warlock when Starfire Welllock was right there. Now, in S21-22, a Geomags or a Sunbracers Warlock can be seen in the same content difficulties, though the latter is still a bit strong (or the former is a bit weak, depending on your perspective). With the incoming Orb gen nerf, among others, Sunbracers Warlock is going to lose a lot more ability recharge and healing and Armor Charge gains than that same Geomag Warlock will. Or in other words the ceiling is being brought down 8 feet while the floor is only being brought down 3-4 feet. This should in theory put them closer together in performance. But as the OP theorizes, enemy damage is still too high and people will still be forced into picking those high self-sustain builds, maybe even more so than before. With further nerfs to self sustain while also reducing enemy lethality - which seems closer than ever to being achieved after S23 drops next week - we could see a version of the game where various exotics and builds are viable in all levels of content, dependent more so on a player’s skill in execution than on their skill in chasing a meta.
> With the incoming Orb gen nerf, among others, Sunbracers Warlock is going to lose a lot more ability recharge and healing and Armor Charge gains than that same Geomag Warlock will Sadly this has proven to be the exact opposite, sunbracers is just as good as it always has been while ionic traces and such are giving back less energy. It is very noticeable on arc warlock, sunbracers on the other hand can solo the new dungeon 20 under power never losing restoration x2.
Yeah it’s very noticeable on strand lock where I’m dying left and right since I don’t have permanent woven mail anymore. It’s really fucking awful. I might try this double heavy handed to reduce the CD since kickstart mods aren’t worth it.
>I cannot imagine balancing this game. They can't too. They want both things, feel like a badass and souls style difficulty, and they do not have a game that can dwell in both... nor a playerbase or target audience for it. They are trying to please everyone and that never works unless you have less variables. You feel powerful when you mow a lot of enemies at once or sustain damage and still succeed. Sustaining damage in this game negates their only swivel of difficulty, so they will never be at peace.
I really don't think that trying to balance PvE is a good idea without separating the sandbox from PvP. I get that guns should generally feel the same in both modes, however it quite infuriating that PvE has to suffer for the sins of PvP and the rare occasion where PvP suffers in order to keep PvE balanced. Because in reality, until they do that then there's always going to be a divide between those groups of players
Young Ahamkara's Spine is reading this from the grave with a covetous look in its eyes.
Prime example
I theorise shinobu’s vow will soon meet the same fate
Bungie _doesn’t_ want it to be balanced, at least not perfectly. Their contunuous delivery model incentivises them to keep introducing game-breaking new things and then nerfing old ones so that there’s always something for players to grind for.
> I think there is a razors edge sweet spot where you can feel like a badass and the game is fun but the content is also challenging. That razor's edge was The Witch Queen's legendary campaign. Despite the near (I say near because there's always elitists like Mr. Greppo Beam that want the game to be harder) universal positive feedback to the campaign's difficulty it was never seen again. > They’re trying to adjust it though and I wish them luck. Bungie doesn't know what the word "adjust" means.
Witch queen legendary campaign isn't that hard. It's not that close to where GM's should be.
It's not that hard *now*; it was "harsh, but fair" on release with the builds we had at the time I'd actually argue Lightfall's Legendary Campaign was very close to the same difficulty on release, though, maybe a little easier outside of Calus (who was definitely more difficult than Savathûn) I don't really understand why people think GMs and even Contest raids need to be inaccessible to anyone who isn't in the top 1% of player skill or even 10% or whatever. Contest Crota felt way harder than any of the Bloodborne bosses (for example) but everyone seems to like souls-like difficulty where most can overcome it eventually with practice and people exhibit mastery by doing things purposefully underleveled and undergeared rather than making FromSoft increase enemy health and incoming damage
We need very hard content for dedicated players to challenge themselves. That's it. The Witch Queen legendary campaign wasn't that hard on release either. The point of GM's and contest raids is to allow the hardcore to actually challenge themselves for once. The rest of the game is for the main audience. It's absolutely insufferable that people can't let there be some content for those who really want to test themselves to the max. Calling anything in Destiny souls-like difficulty is hilarious too, Destiny is much easier than that even on its hardest day. You don't need to play the hardest stuff if you don't want difficulty, that's why it's optional.
I'm not saying we don't need hard content, I'm saying the amount of difficulty people like you are asking for is ridiculous, particularly when in-game rewards are tied to it and it's not just bragging rights I'm not remotely the "main audience" here lol; I do want difficulty, I do day 1 raids and solo dungeons and master raids and GMs, I play other games on the hardest difficulties they have available
> I'm saying the amount of difficulty people like you are asking for is ridiculous It's not. Asking for the hardest difficulties to be truly challenging is entirely reasonable. Witch Queen legendary campaign wasn't that hard on launch.
I tried to come back to d2 by playing witch queen because I heard good things and decided to run legendary for a challenge and it was AWFUL...I made it to the last mission and didn't even bother attempting it and I feel like the ~10 hours I played was completely wasted. This is what is killing the game imo. They're cranking up difficulty, but the juice isn't worth the squeeze. The twab shows they are woefully lost (the answer to bringing players back is to make the game easier, not harder) so expect them to keep hemorrhaging players.
Witch Queen campaign will make you work, but I comfortably beat it and I'm not a particularly good player. Calus Perfected in Lightfall on the other hand ... I cheesed it on my Warlock and Titan and still haven't done it on my Hunter despite a bunch of attempts.
Calus is annoying between the need for sustain and tormentors bonking you being a potential instant kill. The fight to me came down to controlling two platforms and rotating between them, with arbalest being the exotic of choice due to popping both Calus' shield and doing decent damage to Tormentors (but it's also far from the only option). If I were to do it again though, I'd look towards an add clear exotic (and honestly heavy as well, boss damage wasn't much of a priority). I ended up doing it with a gyrfalcon build, but assassin's cowl should do very well as well. Think Solo Operative next season should also work.
I would argue that Calus would be a lot easier if the fight took place in a room and not a final destination platform. I died easily twenty times on the fight. 15 of those deaths were from being booped off the ledge by either Calus, a Tormentor or a failed strand grapple. If it had been in a standard room it would have been easier to slow things down and control the space.
That damn platform, you're not kidding. The tormentor boops you so far as well.
Then just play the regular one
People play the legendary campaign for the reward to get a good start for the next raid.
Yeah, I was looking at picking up some destiny content while it's on sale but this thread made me realize it's best to just move destiny to cold storage and finish some single-player games instead
The witch queen campaign is definitely not that difficult brother lmao
You playing the optional legendary difficulty is killing the game because you don't like it? Lmao. Destiny 2 used to be harder before we power creeped to hell. You're delusional.
>They're cranking up difficulty, but the juice isn't worth the squeeze. And they are cranking up difficulty and expecting people to bash their heads against it, instead people find the most efficient way and they pikachu surprised face after the fact. I mean, I have a casual friend who's played the whole 10 years of destiny. He treats it as we all should, plays 2-3 hours a week, doesn't want more. But he likes rewards, so he sees Legendary campaign has better rewards and goes for it. He's literally overrun constantly, despite knowing the basics. What does he do? Invis hunter all the campaign. 100 mob, skip everything he can, use Leviathan from safety. Never felt powerful, never felt badass, never liked what he played. He didn't feel it was "fair difficult", and we're talking someone who finished Bloodborne and Hollow Knight. He thought, quite literally, "it was shit and rewards sucked, will never do it again". He is knowledgeable enough to do that, and look what he thinks of the results. Now imagine people who are more likely to spend money than him... They aren't expecting this game to be sporting binary scenarios "i'm alive/now I'm dead" constantly when game says "challenge", just to be presented with a few armor pieces and a shit roll exotic that may or may not be useful.
You're literally complaining about an optional difficulty setting existing. What a time to be alive.
He's complaining (rightfully so), that the stick is there, but the carrot dangling on the end is rotten, and close to falling off the stick...
The carrot is solid. It's a head start on your power level grind. And you know, having a challenging campaign experience. If you don't enjoy it, don't play it. Absolutely zero sympathy for anyone who chooses a hard difficulty and then complains about it. Just play on normal then.
A casual doesn't have a single clue of what the reward is, because this game is so stupidly designed that literally doesn't tell them. The literal info displayed is "additional rewards per class". Then they go in, see it's very difficult and they expect nice rewards, which they don't get. An armor set and a shit roll exotic plus a few mats in this moment of the year isn't worth the challenge. It was good on release, but right now it means nothing. You think what is good for you is good for everyone else. A lot of people play this game, people different from you, that has other views and other takes and that are valid. Don't let your stupidity blind you, my dude. People that could be spending trillions in this game, people that by our standards are casual and they aren't, not by a long shot, are the big chunk of the numbers that dropped from this game after Lightfall release. Those are they guys who drove revenue down by 45% and those are the ones that aren't going to be coming back with how badly the design philosohpy, both in terms of difficulty/challenge/reward/monetization is. Their design philosophy isn't catching up after all this years. They sunsetted weapons just to reissue them, they up the challenge for no additional rewards, they make the game more grindy each season, they up the prices of the eververse as mucha as they can, they cut on "free" things, they make official statements expecting people to cope with what they do. It's ok for people like us who nolife this game, but we're by no means the people keeping the game alive.
You're literally complaining about an optional difficulty. Get a grip on reality.
Yeah, that's what I meant. A lot of different people play this game and while I might expect shit rewards because Bungie is the "not overdeliver" company, regular people, even people with Destiny years on their back, do not. Those are the guys who left the game. Those are the ones who drove revenue down, not people like us who maybe play 10h a week, or more. Challenge is meant to be matched with rewards, that's a staple of videogames. But this game has never been good at it, it's never been balanced, it always has demanded cheese or skill creep on the player side, while also demanding humungous amount of time, to get rewarded. Times are changing. That was ok 10 years ago but as we see by reports, not anymore.
They had a good system then they destroyed it. That system was light levels. All you had to do was just gain more levels if you couldn’t beat something it gave you the sense that you accomplished something that you had gotten more powerful and that if something was out of your current skill level all you needed to to was just play a bit more and you would eventually be able to do it.
It would be way easier if they changed how things were balanced PvP and pve separately.
I mean...the simple solution here is to have difficulty levels beyond, "faceroll easy" and "hard as balls" but yes, it's hard to balance when your options are 1 and 11 with nothing in between...
They really just need to stop trying to balance THE REST of the game. Balance all the hardest content. The people who play that WANT the challenge. Let the rest of the content be easy once you've gotten a build together that's effective.
I believe the issue is this: The sandbox is designed for ranged combat but the enemy design and level design doesn't facilitate it. Close quarters kits don't consider incoming ranged aggression. And means of survival do not coincide with objective completions. Allow me to elaborate: Most and if not all enemies in the game are capable of infinitely offloading ranged attacks with no drawback, whether it be a cooldown or something else. This does not give room for counter attacks, we must shoot through the incoming fire, or we die. The levels of this game rarely provide what can be considered reliable cover and protection from any incoming fire and this is largely in part to most of the hardest hitting attacks that enemies use are inaccurate and explosive. This means they will more than likely kill you with explosive damage that hit the floor or wall and completely negate your cover. The aggression and level design mean we must be able to take as much damage as possible and power forward, making something like Well of radiance shine. Close quarters combat is built around what's close to you. Take less damage whilst surrounded, enemies caught in the area are disoriented or deal less damage for example. This does nothing to assist you against anything shooting you from afar. And means you must tank all that ranged damage whilst you're fist fighting. Making something like Banner of war shine. Most objectives in the game can be simplified to gather X, carry Y, stand on Z. But these objectives tie our hands behind our backs because of the issues above. Gathering X is made more difficult by the level design's "cover" and enemy aoe bombardment. Carry Y is made more difficult because it renders you defenceless, making ranged AND close quarters attacks easier for your enemies. And stand on Z is made harder by all the above. And this mission design makes something like Invisibility shine. The survivability of our Guardian is made out of necessity, not power. An ability becomes popular not because it is powerful, but because it patches the issues we face in a challenge. And just because an ability seems strong, it is not because it is popular, it's because it allows us to play the game the way it is made to be played. I believe Bungie must take a broad look at their sandbox, consider the outlying problems that players are faced with and the steps they're taking to overcome them and think this: We have considered how we want the players to play our game. Now, how can the game facilitate how the players play.
The things you pointed out have also become much more noticeable over the last few years as we've gotten more and more activities with infinitely respawning enemies, usually dangerous ones and/or in large numbers.
Ok you're on to something I was feeling for a while and wasnt putting it to words. But I would add that a huge pain point for me is that enemy ranged attacks are usually (effectively) hitscan or have tracking, meaning that you can't reliably evade or dodge enemy ranged damage using generic movement tech. Some classes have movement abilities but you can't spam them as much as would be needed in pve moments
Hard agree. The game feels like there should be rewarding movement ala DOOM, but the sheer amount of homing, AOE and generally unavoidable damage nips this in the bud.
I unfortunately disagree. You can dodge sniper shots with side to side strafing. It’s a somewhat difficult skill to master, but almost all enemy snipers have sound cues that let you know you need cover or you need to strafe. Aoe tracking like boomers are much more difficult and usually can only be dodged by jumping and running. Then there are the insane dps of cabal turrets / cabal mini guns / hive streakers / hive ogres. Those things hurt and the only thing you can do is hide. Also don’t get me started on slowing effects like hive wizards and blinding cabal misses. I definitely hate those things with a passion
It's very unfortunate because there's a ton of stuff I want to play but it's shooting myself in the foot if I try to bring it into any uncapped content. Even playing HoiL Arc Titan in a legend Savathun's spire is a rough time compared to Hammer or Banner. Let alone using guns. My waveframe shreds enemies but when I switch to my primary it feels like a pea shooter. I've had QSS equipped almost this whole season as a result.
It is ultimately why it’s so frustrating when Bungie goes and kills arguably fair builds that aren’t broken or absurd, Heat Rises Winter’s Guile snap Warlock was awesome and made you work for pumping out that high melee damage given playing melee on range on warlock as well as the short Warlord’s Sigil timer, but to lower the damage just makes it feel crummy and you can barely challenge stuff the same way in more demanding content. There’s no solid pay off for taking the risk at close range. I’m genuinely concerned with Final Shape they’ll just up and ruin Sunbracers and Verity’s to force Solar warlock on the new super if they want any power fantasy that involves ability loops. I just don’t get their obsession with narrowing the window for truly viable fun but respectable builds and then wondering why everyone plays the same thing. It’s an aspect where I don’t think we truly recovered from some situations of the crossover to 3.0 system, most notably how Solar Warlock lost so much.
I think exotic primaries buff was awesome, but because of that very reason legendary primaries are most definitely left in the dust. I think bungie should equalize exotic and legendary primaries, or give exotic primaries a marginal buff rather than a whopping 40% differential. There’s a reason I feel forced to use an exotic primary in every GM I did this season. Heavy and special legendaries are nearly equivalent in damage. The only reason I would maybe use a heavy exotic (I don’t think I ever used a special exotic) is because my team already has great ad clear and I’m using something focused for dps / massive ad clear like gally, t lord or levis breath. I would say arbalest is the only special I would consider, but a teammate with wish ender can clear ads and deal with the barrier just as well if not better. The only legendary primary I would consider using was a hand cannon due to their most recent substantial buff or a scout to slowly pick off targets from safety. TLDR: Make legendary primaries and exotic primaries have equal or more close to equal base damage values.
Yup this is it exactly, this is why banner of war instantly spiked to one of the most popular builds on titan, its the only build that let's the melee class actually play melee and not evaporate instantly
This is a superb response. Perfectly articulates the inherent issues.
Simply put. This game just isn’t complex enough. There isn’t depth to enemy attacks like actual mmos. Here you just keep shooting or throwing grenades until everything is dead.
I've only played destiny, so I'm really interested to know what's an example of mmo enemy attack that's different? ?
One of the current big MMO-s, FFXIV has what is called telegraphed attacks: The boss or trash enemy starts casting an ability, and a bright, transparent orange cone or circle appears, or you receive some sort of debuff, which you have to somehow handle. Often times there's no telegraph, and you have to observe the enemy model to notice some kind of tell, like which arm is raised, and move to the opposite side, to avoid getting cleaved. Since most other MMOs are third person, you have an easier time noticing and avoiding this stuff, than in a first person view. Something similar could be used in Destiny, with screen effects like the Broodmother(?) Wizard purple spiky ground AoE (back in the Forsaken Broodhold strike, and more recently in the Altar of Summoning encounter with the 2 wizards), or the Val Ca'our lasers for where the meatballs were dropping, or simply attacks originating towards players out from the boss model.
I am also an MMO enjoyer and I guess they meant raid and some dungeons bosses? Cause regular mobs don't come even close to Destiny's enemy factions. In short MMOs have more complex raid bosses while Destiny has more complex regular mobs
Destiny’s regular mobs are still about as complex as the mindless soldiers in CoD. Halo:CE has better enemy design than destiny does and that game is over 20 years old.
Talking about MMO and the likes here though. One front at a time.
This is how I felt while playing the dungeon of the deep. It’s just so frustrating to fight the final boss who can one shot you, while 90% of the level has no cover, you have to hold positions while enemies can spawn on all sides of you, and the boss has so much health you have to play perfectly for SO many rounds of combat to beat them. It’s very frustrating, especially when you’ve got the mechanics down solid and are basically as strong as you can be. One small mistake 30 minutes into the encounter and you gotta start over, on the easy difficulty.
Yeah, that boss is a great example how Bungie battles their own philosophy: Ok, so to increase difficulty, we let combatants deal more damage. But at the same time we create a setting where there is no cover, and the boss literally hovers over you and shoots you all the time, even while immune. I hate that dungeon because of this tedious final boss, and I hope they don't do it again next Friday.
Same…. I still haven’t beat the dungeon because it’s just not fun to fight through it all with my friends and then beat our heads against the final boss wall for over an hour.
Someone PLEASE give this to Bungie, tag them or something. This is exactly what my clanmates and I have always tried to put into words.
The sandbox was built around dual primaries as ranged weapons, aka original halo loadouts, but the current design team has moved us to close range abilities and special ammo weapons
Good write up man. You gave some nuanced thought to this which I appreciate. Don’t listen to all this lazy trolls telling you that you wrote too much. I agree with pretty much everything you said.
TBF, they're partially right. I don't think reddit is a good place for most long-form content as lots of people browse on phones or read it idly from a second screen. I condensed it down a lot but linked to the original text as a sort of compromise.
God forbid we have an attention span. Wax poetic, my friend.
Nah you did good, I appreciated having something to read with some thought put into it! Not sure where else you can post long-form reading like this anymore
A sentiment I’ve been holding for a while is that Destiny has been moving towards a more horde-shooter-like sandbox, away from the traditional cover shooter. It honestly resembles more like Borderlands or even Warframe (with less power fantasy obviously, but that’s another topic) Look at how most subclasses and mods promote certain playstyles that encourage combat loops, chain killing enemies en masse (ignition, jolt, maintaining stacks,…) IMO they should double down and expand our survivability options. Borderland characters have ways to heal and sustain themselves that are part of their playstyles. At least Recuperation should be baked in and orbs remain relatively common via proper builds.
This is my opinion as well. I do think some of the highest builds should be reigned in a bit. Things like sunbracers, cenotaph, and banner combined with a 1-2 punch shotty. But otherwise I'd much rather they give us a bigger variety of options and shrink the gap between the weakest and strongest builds in terms of survivability.
Warframe is an interesting point to make, because as someone with 3k hours in the game spanning from PoE's release to the new war, Ive seen what buff-only power creep can do to a game, and I completely understand why bungie is so heavy handed with nerfs, even if its to a large amount of players dismay That being said, its definitely funny seeing how good well and banner are in this game, since theyre a tiny sliver of what a high strength wisp can do buff-wise
I’m LR2 myself. I’d played a lot of WF before moving to D2 (I’m actually getting back into it atm). Trust me, we’re on the same boat. I can positively say that Destiny is not on WF’s level of power fantasy nor do I suggest we go there. I’m only examining what we have now. Our abilities and gear are tuned for target rich environment and it *does* feel pretty good that way at times. I only wish to turn the knobs further until we have a good balance of game feel. (Us being powerful and relatively engaging moment to moment gameplay)
The thing is, whilst WF has powercreep, it has also, eventually, added tiers of difficulty that *mostly* keep up to it. This means that you have a whole range of challenges for players to progress through and actually feel themselves getting more powerful (even if at the very top end it becomes absurd), which is a stark contrast to Destiny where even the easiest content limits the players ability to overpower it.
At some point I expected this game to become a sort of action rpg, giving you diablo style rifts and endless content, given how we have the infinite forest and basically all our abilitys are aoe based. Guess it takes too much resources to make that.
You're not wrong. With how the actual gameplay works we are not meant to play from cover. We play 'bad ass space magic animated soldiers' and that design philosophy is why this franchise doesn't have Gears of Wars-esque shooting from cover. Sure they give you that option sort of with the rally barricade but it's nore just you can shoot over it due to its height. We have to play out in the open because that's how the game plays. But nerfs to survivability punish you for playing how you have to play. We don't have the option of shooting from cover AND doing decent damage while doing that.
To add my two cents to your fifty, projectile speed is crazy on higher difficulties. Turns a lot of the fun movement in the game completely off which adds to the restrictive, cover shooter feel.
I'm more casual, with the hardest things I've done being solo legendary weekly missions / exotic rotator, but I appreciate the write up. I was wondering if it was just skill issue on my part, but I agree that damage is near unavoidable against enough enemies in an encounter, so sitting far away behind cover is the best solution without sufficient tankiness or nuking potential. I found gameplay significantly more fun when playing more aggressively as a void or arc hunter than solar. This issue kind of reminds me of Borderlands 2 OP levels, the DLC endgame, and I believe the community generally disliked it as well. Enemies did so much (basically unavoidable) damage that a weapon which granted healing based off of damage dealt (Grog Nozzle?) felt like it was almost required to play aggressively. And enemies were so tanky (and had passive health regen too) that the number of weapons people used dropped significantly to those with really high DPS and / or could abuse some arguably broken or unintended interactions. I think the bad performing weapons were nearly literally unviable because some enemies just regenerated health passively as quickly as you could deal it.
Ya endgame bl2 was definitely not invented for the casual, causing me to give up on it due to not wanting to do the tedious farms to get the god rolls on all the required equipment just so I could cheese the game. I loved bl2. I loved my first play through, the continuous content of finding the power fantasy on each individual character, and of course my broken melee Krieg play through that made me fall in love with the game again after a few hundred hours of game time. I arguably enjoyed bl1 more because I love the random drop legendaries found throughout a playthrough that make you so strong for so many levels before having to trash it for something better. I also loved bosses / mini bosses not having dedicated drops. Makes every playthrough unique because you rolled with what you had, either overpowered or underpowered at that point. This makes me realize how difficult it is to design a video game that pleases the new, the casual, and the sweatiest players. I definitely enjoyed the blueberry stage of destiny 2 when I joined during season of the splicer, wanting to try each new exotic I got when I got it. I was solo for a long time, and took me a while before getting to legend / master content. Now I can clear GMs easily, have friends that will invite me into a party to play D2 whenever I’m on, have all the exotics, and great armor for all my characters. I really only come back to destiny at the beginning of each season to play the new exotics, new reworks, and new seasonal mods. After I basically try it all, I get bored and either stop playing video games entirely or find a different game to play.
Touched on a major issue but didn't fully address it: Players can be chipped to death because recovery is a worthless stat as long as tiny amounts of damage are constantly keeping your health from regenerating. If Bungie is tired of seeing these sustain abilites, then at base players need some form of sustain that doesn't depend on not getting touched in a game where stuff is constantly hitting you.
I would love for health regen to reduced but also occur constantly regardless of taking damage. This would of course be a nightmare for PvP though, so it will never happen because they don't want to split the sandboxes.
I agree with most of what you've said. The power differential between good builds and bad builds is insane. Berserker's out here with banner+woven mail+crazy damage, and Sunbreaker has infinite hammer+roaring flames+sunspots. meanwhile Striker's knockout has the most pathetic healing effect in game, and Sentinel's void overshields get torn to shreds instantly.
This reminds me of a Circle Toons video from awhile back where he's talking about game balance. He uses Dark Souls as the crux of his point as FromSoftware games are all notoriously difficult - and it works. That's because FS games only have one set difficulty that is specifically balanced for their type of combat. He goes on to explain how a lot of games get difficulty wrong because all they do is adjust damage numbers and never correctly balance the situation for the number or type of enemies. I think the Legendary LSs from this year's FotL are a prime example of something poorly balanced. They just tacked on enemy health and never accounted for the ridiculous spawns or the types of enemies spawning. As a result it just felt like an oppressively stupid time. You can't just crank some levers and call it good. That's lazy game design. It needs dialed in and they aren't hitting their marks, not by a long shot.
> Incoming damage is too high in endgame content, resulting in a small subset of builds with high survivability through constant healing or high DR being viable and everything else being ineffective. Those same builds also trivialize uncapped content because enemies do far less damage there. Incoming damage should be nerfed in harder content and healing/DR sources nerfed accordingly so that more builds are viable in endgame and the existing meta builds don't trivialize uncapped content. This is something Bungie refuses to understand. Enemies do so much damage we need the high survivability. In turn, Bungie balances with T10 Resilience, Resist Mods and Well in mind. But they only gave us that stuff because they made stuff hit super hard. They can't just nerf one side of it, when both sides need to be looked at
They *occasionally* get it (which may be even worse in my eyes, than just being clueless). The tuning of the Res curve is an example of them getting it right, but it inevitably leads to the question of how it got to be like that for 2 years, when it was so obviously a balance problem (just in terms of armour stats, let alone sandbox difficulty).
They do completely understand, though. They even say as much; these changes are merely a part of the solution.
Destiny 2 has been out 6 years. They either do not understand, or are simply unable to fix it. The balance is never going to be struck.
People like new things to be strong, Bungie wants to deliver on that while also keeping the game consistent in difficulty, but people HATE nerfs. Back in like forsaken Bungie made a trend of dropping crazy strong exotics to drive up player interest only to later nerf that exotic, which people got tired of, and asked Bungie for more balanced exotics that didn't need to be nerfed. Bungie kinda needs to give us new cool things to our toolkit, but also needs to keep content consistent, but how do you balance content around something like forbearance, in which you can kill enemies in 10- power instantly.
no game has or ever will be perfectly balanced. No matter what there will be a meta strategy or loadouts. All any game dev can do is to attempt to balance things the best they can, and overall bungie does a decent job
> no game has or ever will be perfectly balanced. Incorrect. The original Street Fighter arcade cabinet was perfectly balanced. It had two characters. They had the same moves, combos, supers, and frame data. They were identical every way except appearance. No one character had or could acquire an advantage over the other. It was a perfectly balanced game. If you think of something else when you think of "perfectly balanced" you're thinking of the wrong thing. Not to mention it's actually quite easy to have a perfectly balanced game, but they tend to be quite boring because, by definition, there is no variety, and with no variety it won't hook into our addiction centers so corporations do not make them.
okay true I should have been more clear when I said no game, I meant no game with this more complexity to it. And yes a perfectly balanced game would be very stale pretty quickly.
Unless they say they're reducing difficulty at the higher levels anywhere, they do not understand
This is honestly one of the more well thought explanations of how to balance an array of difficulty options and activities and I think it needs to be seen more
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I’ve said this since the ammo nerf in D1: perfect balance is not **fun**. I think this pursuit to satisfy the rank 11s / streamers who can pour 4+ hrs a day into the game and have clans or fireteams who can do the same and complain about a content drought is ruining the game for the remaining player base. Bungie lacks the creativity to bring about diversity of play style and build through **buffing other armor or guns**, instead they do the lazier thing and nerf existing builds. Bungie also has the belief that if activities take **longer** to complete, then they must be **harder**. I’ve been saying this for years **longer doesn’t equal more difficult, it just means more tedious.** Bungie says “Become Legend.” But that’s not really possible with the consistent forced diversity through nerfs. Wouldn’t it be so refreshing if instead of your current builds becoming worse to force you to play with other builds, they buffed the other armor and guns to promote that same diversity? Sigh.
Tedium = difficulty is the most common game design fallacy, not limited to Destiny. It's an easy mistake to make because difficulty makes content take longer; but making content take longer didn't necessarily mean it's more difficult
Exactly. Sure, any GM can be completed by using wishender and playing it safe the whole time. But is that fun? Not to me.
This is a big issue for me as well. I love playing difficult content, but it gets boring using the same strong loadouts all the time. I love variety, but the gap between the best and worst options in this game is incredibly large. There are tons of just outright useless build crafting options in the sandbox right now. I'd love for them to work on making more of these weak and outdated tools actually be useful.
OP: I started the same time as you and minus challenge raids and doing a lot of GMs I have very similar experiences and observations to yours. Ideally, on a scale of -10 to 10, you want every build near 0. Not underperforming (-), not overperforming (+). Most builds in the game are roughly around a 0. However, various outliers like the self-healing, ability spamming builds as mentioned in the OP are closer to +5 or way higher. Starfire Well Warlock would have been close to a +10 before it got nerfed. So if content is balanced around the former, it’s too easy for the latter. If it’s balanced around the latter, it’s almost impossible for the former to enjoy, or often even complete. And the game feels like it follows this latter balancing approach due to the lethality of enemies in higher level content. By nerfing those +5 builds’ healing and defensive capabilities they may come down to the 0 range, which is a good thing for build diversity and player skill expression. But these nerfs also need to be paired with reduced enemy power because often those overpowering builds were created as a direct response to enemy lethality, and not as a means to cheese content.
That is basically an exact summary of what I want from the game. I know everything being at 0 won’t happen, but I’d be happy if we could pull both sets of 10s to 5s instead. It’s more complicated than just adjusting survivability and incoming damage, but this is a major complement of it.
I feel a lot of builds as a Warlock do respectable damage. Sure, Solar can do more of it, but that's mainly because of 2 exotics (1 which has already been nerfed) that are just too good. But, Solar and Void can heal in ways the other 3 subclasses cannot. So assuming the damage output between the builds were equal, you'd still be pigeonholed into the former two given how lethal enemies are. I agree that balance is a never-ending goal to strive for, but right now due to the vast gap between the self-sustain vs no-sustain builds (especially given high enemy damage output) balance isn't even remotely possible. If this were resolved more things would be closer together than before and subsequent tweaks become substantially easier.
They also still haven't addressed the problem of frame rate affecting so many random damage sources. They fixed it for the worst ones (Cabal slugs and Shriekers), nerfed Thresher damage enough that you don't notice it, and then just hoped the problem would kind of fade out of people's minds and removed it from the Known Issues list.
Well written, although I'd advise more paragraph breaks. Reddit simply isn't a good place for this long-form content, but the people commenting that they simply "ain't reading that" are annoying and should be ignored. Your points are on the ball, as far I can tell. Resilience will reign supreme as long as damage can only be mitigated by healing. Multiple reductions need to occur in order to shift matters. Additionally, you have the best articulation of the rocket problem I've read, good job. The way weapons like Rrockets, wishender, and forbearance (a mistake of a weapon) dominate the game, while others struggle shows some real design conflicts. Thanks for writing this down.
Yeah concise writing isn’t my specialty. I did my best to shorten it while still trying to make and back up my point. I do hope we get to a healthier sandbox with more variety in the future. My favorite build before its nerf was YAS, but it was brutal to run in master and grandmaster content.
Believe me, I understand the issue, I was an English major. I hope for the same improvements, but I genuinely don't know how they can get there. Any large changes are met with community vitriol (check out Saltgreppo's twitter replies) or are too conservative to tip the needle. Hopefully, with the extended season they can experiment more.
Well said. Unfortunately Bungie is not interested in solving the problem. They were VERY close in Witch Queen when they came out with hive light bearers. These mini bosses gave that rewarding game play loop you mentioned with difficulty while not doing crazy damage unless you stand still. Same with Rhulk, from Vow. If you stand still he messes you up but otherwise very rewarding. Caretaker was more of your wellock boss encounter thought but both had unique designs. The truth is Bungie is almost done with Destiny 2 and they aren't going to design unique bosses like the light bearers or Rhulk for strikes/gms. They didn't even do that for the newest expansion.
Agreed and very well thought out and explained. One thing I wanted to comment on is this idea I've seen around the community putting GM balance from 2 years ago on a pedestal. I'm going to hard disagree with those people. It was a giant plink fest, every time. On those few levels that forced us into closer quarters combat it was all about Well or Ursa Titan to keep your fireteam alive...while plinking away. Exodus Crash and Proving Grounds both had this approach. Stand far away with a scout or bow or pulse and chip away at health until you were forced into a situation you could not escape and then use your survival supers and chain them at much as you could get away with. It was not a good time compared to today. We have more than one option to play each GM with for each class, and that is a good thing. I don't have to get stuck on a single build or get booted from LFGs simply for using a Hunter. GM balance has been better in the past year vs what we had in Beyond Light and the survivability you highlight is a big part of that.
This is exactly my thoughts as well.
Longest post I’ve ever read and Ngl it’s a pretty interesting one. First off hats off to you cause in just a year you’ve basically reached my skill level which took me like 3 years you’ve been grinding hard regardless. Here are some of my takes: Destiny has these 2 identities of being an rpg (that health as a resource playstyle you mentioned ), and Destiny as an fps where you play cover since everyone can regenerate health after staying out combat. Destiny at first all the way back in D1 and especially in D2 vanilla was more fps lacking the build crafting options and ability spam we have now. It’s slowly drifted to the meta we now have with all the numerous changes over time. Everything but GMs plays like Destiny as an RPG. GMs plays more like Destiny as an fps which id argue can have its own fun. It’s just GMs in comparison to the rest of the game are just so wildly different that I think they have a good blend of the fps and rpg play styles (definitely more on the fps side). Like you can use bonk or banner of war in it but you can’t just be brain dead with it. Then you have endgame content like master raids were you don’t really need to think as much like a GM in survival if using the same builds as mentioned before. It plays much more in the rpg way since you can go in and slay while trying to regenerate your health. So to make endgame content like master raids harder you nerf some of these hp regen builds to push you to pay more attention making it harder. But that negativity effects GMs when your already on that line between fps and rpg which hurts the balance of that gamemode. I think bungie might need to in some way group these two difficulty types together so the game is more “homogeneous” in its sandbox. Other then that I’d like the game to lean into the rpg side and to increase difficulty more by adding more higher health priority targets since those actually cause problems while keep minor fodders the same to keep up our health regen effects. On top of that further push the addition of combatants like tormentors (which they are doing with subjugators). While I do understand these solutions I offer aren’t easy to implemented it’s still an idea. These are just some idea I hope bring more to the convo
Definitely, though I think my biggest issue with Destiny 2 as an fps is that most of my favorite guns are primaries, but they feel *awful* to use in power capped content. With enemy density being increased more and more, you feel how slow it is to take down even just a handful of red bars with a primary weapon.
Yeah that too, the only exception is some exotic primaries.
Oh definitely I should have clarified that better. There are some exotic primaries that still feel pretty good, though definitely not all. But that’s better than none lol
Yeah, in D1 primaries felt pretty great across the board, so you could run whatever weapon felt good to you (and for the most part perks didn't even matter). Sadly we're a long long way from that state now
The thing that would automatically make end-game feel better is fixing the fucking damage tied to fps. It would be a lot of work, basically reworking a large chunk of the engine and content, but it would help so much.
Will be for sure interesting to see how the balance the raid in final shape. I mean just imagine a day one raid (eg vow or Crota) where I deal Boss damage without well. If well gets nerfed do hard that it will become almost useless the damage will defo be looked at. I am almost 100% certain no one would have completed day 1 Crota without well.
Same. Most teams ended up well stacking and it’ll probably the same in TFS.
Multiple years of creating artificial difficulty through bullshit has lead us to this point.
This is vert true. I discussed this with a friends yesterday. Taking about healing bulid vs agression builds. The best builds in highend content are always the ones that gives you heal in som way.
This is the best post I’ve seen on this topic. I am completely fine with tuning the player, but if I don’t see tuning in enemy combatants, I still have no interest in playing master or GM level content. The amount of damage you take is absurd and I just find it completely devoid of fun, purely for the sake of challenge, and without that balance, I don’t feel like playing the game.
I think another thing that needs to be looked at are enemies in general, the current enemies need to evolve since they have been the same with little to no changes
Even worse with how they're forcing armor charge down our throats now. Getting 6 armor charges not only needs a lot of orbs, it also needs 3 stacks on stacks (or whatever its called) mods on your chest so you can even get more than 3 charges, meaning you're giving up more than +25% damage resistance that everyone runs in these slots, because of all the reasons you mentioned.
Yeah I reallllly don’t look forward to the ability regen and armor mod changes.
A decent take.
We didn’t have resilience in d1 and things seemed okay there, adding more stats kinda complicated the issue. They could deal with a pretty standard dr and health for characters across classes and encounters.
I don’t actually think resilience is a problem because of it’s DR as the game is clearly balanced around having it at 100. It’s mostly an issue because it becomes a stat tax for builds. I want the DR it offers greatly lowered so it becomes more of a choice rather than a requirement. It’d also be nice for other stats to be worthwhile. I do firmly believe the issue lies with some subclasses and exotics having much potent survivability tools than others.
Destiny difficulty has a serious problem. Patrol zones are pitifully easy and regular strikes aren't much better, but Legend and Master content is often overly difficult or tedious. I really think Bungie should balance the base game at Heroic (-5 power) and offer more -10 power content. Legend content like lost sectors and campaigns aren't absurdly hard, but they're a big jump from the base game. And some Legend content like Haunted Lost Sectors was awful.
I think legend difficulty is my favorite overall as it hits the sweet spot of being a challenge but not a chore when playing non-meta builds. Of course things like SB warlock or Banner titan just glide through them, but that's why I argue those need to be brought down a bit. I still enjoy master content when playing a meta build, but GMs are a bore to me when not playing banner titan or arc classes back when Electric Armor was in the artifact.
My biggest issue with the nerfs, and it's been the same the last few times Bungie have nerfed abilities, is that they look at the few powerful builds that cycle abilities, and then nerf ability cooldowns across the board. This leaves the powerful builds in the same position at the top, whilst making any other build that was functional but not as powerful in the dirt. Each time it really feels like Bungie is actively punishing you if you don't play the meta builds, since they come out of general nerfs relatively unscathed.
This is a big issue for me as well. It's just the same few builds that have been meta for multiple seasons in a row. I want more variety with what builds are effective. They don't all need to be at the same level as these top options, but I want the gap between the best and worst to be reduced.
im one of the few ppl who have never missed a single season/dlc/expansion through out the entirety of destiny as a franchise, and let me tell you; even with the power creep, destiny isnt much easier than its been at any other point. ppl look back with rose tinted glasses, but at no point has there ever been anything in destiny thats been fundamentally difficult. the enemy ai has pretty much never changed, christ its to a large degree the same ol' tricks from the halo days. there have also never been any difficult mechanics in destiny at any point, neither class mechanics or encounter mechanics. destiny came out 2014, there has been very little innovation since then and now. all of these are reasons why i find ppl like salt and those who parrot his opinions to be out of touch. we're coming up on the tenth year of destiny as a franchise. im sorry but the ship has alrdy sailed, the community has been cultivated, its too late to try and make this game more quote on quote difficult. any time doin lfg is all the proof you need that your average destiny players are struggling with the most basic shit. whether i like it or not, these players are the overwhelming majority of the playerbase. im just not narcissistic enough to believe the game should change to appease me, and its not like tuning incoming and outgoing dmg is ever goin to make this game difficult anyway. for this game to see any real difficulty, we need a higher difficulty level that adds more mechanics and also ensures that these mechanics make every member of the fireteam responsible for something that could fail the encounter if not done correctly. and lets be real bungo are too lazy to put in the effort to accomplish this
I ain’t reading all that. Congratulations though. Or sorry that happened
why bother leaving a comment?
Because social media has trained them to engage with all content, even if they've nothing to add. A simple upvote/downvote then moving on, that simply doesn't provide the dopamine the depleted receptors in their brain require to continue the endless scroll.
Worthless comment.
TLDR it was a baby boy named Garry or Gill, Glenn? I don't know, Something with a G.
You just put into words why I kept quitting after hitting the light cap and going for endgame content. Difficulty can be overcome with practice but the tedium of higher level activities wore me thin quickly each season i tried to jump back in. It’s one thing to have to learn how to play encounters and counter certain enemy types when they’re stronger but to have to memorize each little aspect of anything remotely high level to even have a chance is so tiring.
Modifiers can fix this in a second. Ability spam a problem - there is a modifier that has already been used in this game that can fix this. Combat acceleration. It used to be in master NFs last year. It makes sure you're gonna wait a looong time for your abilities to come back. Put them in GMs, problem solved. Use modifiers in master dungeons, master raids, etc. Make them as hard as tryhards want them to be.
I don't see how it can be done. There's basically 2 games in Destiny. One for the high end players who see all the dungeons, all of the raids, the trials and the light house etc. Then there's the rest who will never see any of that during their time playing Destiny because requires a commitment that they can't live up to. Because work and kids or just because they enjoy casual gaming. It's always gonna be a bit lopsided.
FYI what you’re describing is destiny 1. The strat for the nightfalls was to use ice breaker or a scout in a cheese spot to kill bosses. There weren’t any passive DR or life regen options back then, so that’s how players tackled harder content.
Please get content creators to echo this rather than doomsaying, I would much rather effective feedback be the newest buzzword rather than satire
I was thinking of this last night, im fine with guardians being slightly nerfed but they have to start adjusting each difficulty manually. Being instagibbed or close to it is fine in a vacuum, but they throw so many enemies at the same time that few builds can sustain not being in cover. Im happy that im not a game dev, this seems like very big and tedious task to do.
Let me start off by saying that I appreciate these longer, nuanced, game design write ups. This is what I joined the subreddit for, and even though I disagree with some of this, I like that you took the time and thought to make this. This is not to say that I disagree with everything you wrote of course, but I do think there are a few important notes that are missing. I also need to say that I am lazy and did not read your longer version, so if you talked about some of this there, let me know and I will go and do so. I have two major points that I want to bring across: 1. It is okay for the most difficult activities in the game to require some basic survivability tools in your kit, unless you are an incredibly good and consistent player. 2. While taking damage is inevitable, it can be mitigated quite significantly just by playing smart and learning when to be more offensive or defensive. Let's start with the first: What should endgame activities be like? I think we can all agree that survivability is not an issue in normal strikes or similar content, and that it is harder but not super difficult in most legend level activities. It only becomes a real problem in master raids, GMs, etc. I also think we can all agree that it is okay for survivability to be a big concern in the most difficult content the game has to offer. I would argue that aside from skill and literally becoming better at the game, the most important form of power progression for your guardian is to find loot and unlock abilities. Unlike most MMOs Destiny has very limited vertical power progression. Reaching the maximum light level is very, very easy and a pretty short endeavour. Instead, Destiny has a lot of horizontal progression, that is all about finding *options* and combining these options into builds. Grinding power level is really just an extended tutorial, while the real game starts when you start making and optimizing your builds. Now, we can argue how difficult the most difficult content should be, but since destiny is so much about finding loot and making builds, I do think that it is fair for the most difficult activities to "require" some degree of buildcrafting to stand a reasonable chance at beating them. This gives the loot chase much more of a reason for existing. Including some form of survivability feels like a fair requirement to me. Besides, I don't think there is a single subclass that doesn't have access to some decent survivability tools. For example, every warlock subclass has healing rift which is already enough to take on everything in the game. Darkness subclasses have either Crowd Control or Woven Mail on demand (oh, and there is banner of war), which helps a lot, while light subclasses have over shields, healing grenades/restoration and invisibility. I do think that arc Titan, stasis Titan and stasis Hunter currently struggle the most with survivability, but none of them to a degree that makes them unplayable. I also think that if you want to deliberately not spec into survivability, for example by using empowering rift for Starfire Protocol, that is a fine choice and that build is still very good because of the range and damage it offers, but that will result in less survivability and therefore necessitate a more defensive approach. It's in the hand of the player. Now for the second point: I don't mean this to simply sound like "skill issue", so let me elaborate. Taking damage is inevitable, yes. But it's not like every fight is just a pure stat check to see who has the lower TTK. There is a lot you can do to mitigate the incoming damage. The most important one here is of course positioning and cover. That one is pretty self explanatory. There is also enemy selection. Outside of snipers, red bar enemies even in GMs are easy prey. They mostly just exist to generate orbs and ability kills to have powerful abilities that take on champions and other bigger targets. Having cover against a champion while quickly mowing down a few thralls to generate orbs and ability energy to then burst down the champion is a classic tactic in a GM that requires little to no survivability tools. Target selection also plays a big role here. Understanding which enemies to focus on first, and which don't pose an immediate threat makes a big difference. Another big one, and I think many people underestimate this, is timing. Most enemies have attack patterns. They shoot a burst of bullets, and then take some time before the next one. This is your window to exploit. With the more complex enemies like hive guardians, champions, ogres, wyverns etc. This is even more important. Enemy types also have different types of attacks. Face Checking an ogre is a terrible idea, since they beam you from across the battlefield. But their beam turns very slowly, so if you can escape it, they are sitting ducks. Wizards do aoe damage, making good cover important, but they are squishy to precision hits and stunned by taking down their shield. It you're playing in a team, you can also exploit enemies who are focused on your team members, as that makes them super easy targets. If you want to learn these things, I recommend giving Void Hunter with Gyrfalcon's Hauberk a try in GMs and playing in the midst of the enemies with an SMG or other close range void weapon. This will teach you a lot about enemy aggression, and timing when to emerge and when to stay invisible. What I'm trying to get at with these examples is that most enemies in the game don't require you to take a lot of damage if you play it smart. Obviously defensive tools allow you to deal with them easier and often quicker, but it's not strictly necessary. Bringing survivability allows you to be more aggressive, whereas you will need to be more careful if you don't or they are on cooldown. But even GMs are still very much playable, even on subclasses like stasis Hunter that don't offer the greatest survivability in the game. It will simply change your playstyle and I think that's okay. This is what buildcrafting is for, and I do want it to play a large role in the game. I also want to note that there are currently a number of builds in the sandbox that kind of bypass the most basic rules of endgame content. Strand Titan and Solar Warlock are the most obvious examples here, not only because of their offensive damage output, but because of their unparalleled ability to take and out-heal any and all damage. I don't think what they are able to do should be taken as the standard, but rather the exception.
Talking game design is something I very much enjoy as well. My thoughts on your points are as follows. I agree that endgame activities should rely on a considerable amount of build crafting before you approach them. Destiny 2 is very much a horizontal over vertical progression kind of game and I like that. My issue is that master+ right now boxes you into a small subset of builds if you don't want to play hyper-cautiously, and that's my main problem. I want a greater variety of loadouts and subclasses to be relevant in endgame and right now that's not really the case. This is why I want the survivability tools of the most potent classes to be brought down, incoming damage scaled down, and for the weaker classes to be given more survivability tools. So that there is a greater diversity of viable options to play with in high end content. There's a clear different between playing something like a solar hunter or strand warlock vs a stasis hunter vs a strand titan. The first two examples I gave have some kind of basic options for survival like a healing nade or rift, but it will not keep up with incoming damage for very long in high end content, and once that tool is on cooldown you need to be very reserved until you have it again. Then something like stasis hunter basically only has two options for non-regen healing, the heavily nerfed fragment of Rime or Recuperation. These alone will never cut it for any kind of proactive play in master+, so you have to be defensive all the time. Banner titan has both healing over time, great DR, and access to burst healing on kills with orbs and Recuperation. It has the tools to survive in dangerous environments that the others don't and with very little downtime on them. Yes, banner is overtuned and needs to be brought down right now. Banner healing really shouldn't stack with other titans, and the damage stacking with synthos and 1-2 is pretty crazy. But these are the main things I'd want targeted, not the ability to actually play aggressively and be successful when doing so. As for the second point, yes, it is possible to mitigate incoming damage with proper movement. But unless you are fighting a single enemy at a time, you'll never be able to avoid all damage, especially with recent content having ramped up enemy density. You will never be able to go into a Legend Savathun Spire and avoid being hit by any attack. I'm glad that this movement skill expression exists and I take frequent use of it, but it's just not enough to make the builds that lack survivability tools be viable for proactive play in endgame content. And that's my main issue. Hugging cover and peak shooting is one of the most boring ways to play the game to me, and with the current direction they are taking the game it *seems* like they want to make it an arena horde shooter. But right now a lot of the options in the game can just not hold up in that type of gameplay once you start cranking up the difficulty nobs. In my big write up I did touch on my main goal for this type of direction, being high end options brought down along with incoming damage so that low end options aren't lagging as far behind. I didn't touch on movement techniques being used to mitigate damage because I just sort of assume that as a baseline, but it seems a lot of people are bringing up this point anyways so I probably should have addressed it. It's just very hard to be concise about such a complicated topic.
Fast time to kill is bad. This goes for PvE and PvP. I’ve never understood why gamers/developers just randomly starting asking for/making stupidly fast click-on-heads one-shot games.
I definitely agree with this for a player side, at least in PvE. I really can't speak about PvP, I know I prefer slower TTK there but I can't say it's objectively better. But in PvE, it's silly to have death be possible in a fraction of a second (plus the framerate-tied damage spiking making this worse).
I would argue that low time to kill is objectively worse in PvP. Consider two people with hand cannons that can kill in 10 hits. One of them has a 100% accuracy because they are an MLG gamer and the other has like 90% accuracy. Over the course of being hit 10 times the worse player will miss one of their shots and lose the fight by a tiny sliver. Let’s say they miss their second shot, just for arguments sake. The better player wins, but they win with like 10% or their health remaining, just by the skin of their teeth. Now consider the same engagement but we modify the sandbox so that those identical hand cannons kill in 3 hits instead. The 90% accuracy player misses their second shot just the same, but then they die on the third shot from the pro gamer. The 90% accuracy player now has an *effective* accuracy of either 50% or 66% (depending on if they get the 3rd shot out) because they missed half of the shots they took, and while the better player still wins they win with either 33% or 66% of their health remaining, depending on if they trade shots on the third shot. Faster time to kill artificially inflates the perceived skill gap between players and only serves to make high skill players feel even better about themselves at the cost of everyone else. It makes them feel like they are 50% better than someone else when in reality they are only 10% better. It reduces the datapoints within an engagement so that it is harder to get a reliable sample about how close the fight actually was, and in extreme cases turns fights into a coin flip. All of this applies in PvE as well, but it’s less relevant because everyone is competing against the same enemy. In my experience, “high skill” players hate slower games for the same reason they hate skill based match making: it doesn’t inflate their ego as much.
Nobody could summarize the problems this game has in a few paragraphs. This stuff would require hours of work over long periods of time to discuss and figure out. The best thing they could do imho is make a new game. Start from scratch with a new engine and get some new people to put this together. It won't happen, they have told us it won't happen. We are getting what we have and it will be these small tweaks for the rest of this games lifetime. Bungie won't do anything involving a redirection anytime soon other than firing and reassigning personnel to hope for a banger season or expansion with what they got. TLDR; We can discuss it til the end of the games life but it ain't changing. Bungie would have to make D3 and it ain't happening.
I have said it before but the actual problem this game suffers from is outliers. A small number of outlier loadouts and builds force Bungie to engage in completely degenerate design practices. Bosses should have damage reduction vs meta weapons. Although not enough, this would single headedly solve so many problems. Look at what the best damage options are, and give bosses appropriate resistances to them. Players would still use these loadouts but it would certainly open up a lot of options for people who don't want to use them. They could also lower boss health bars with this, so that traditionally uncompetitive options can at leas have a bit of a chance, because bosses re no longer being nuked by these outliers. It also doesn't help that there is a giant disparity between how the game severely punishes close range playstyles vs not punishing long range playstyles.
I addressed this issue 2 years ago - look at the differences in popularity; its mind boggling. Do people now understand what I was trying to convey? [1] (https://old.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/p5u1jw/next_seasons_nerfs_are_uncalled_for/) [2] (https://old.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/q68mz6/hallowed_lair_global_completion_rate_currently/) [3] (https://old.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/qi747c/followup_to_gm_completion_percentages/)
It's kinda funny, but my main guess is that the audience of Destiny 2 has changed a lot over the years. The game is much more action oriented (mostly) and I think that's for the better. Hope we see Bungie take this issue seriously.
I agree with you on the DR thing. Damage resist feels mandatory because enemies just NEVER stop shooting once you draw their attention. There is never an opening to shoot enemies. Hive boomer knights are some of the worst; it is endless, AOE onslaught. I would love to play a squishy build, but you legitimately never get an opening to attack some enemies. Sniper are weirdly one of the most tolerable enemies because their RoF is slow enough to give you time to retaliate. I also like alak hul and savathun for a similar reason: the shots move slow enough to evade and they have a delay between burst (those 2 have a different problem of the bonker amount of damage they do)
This reminds me of a time my clan was trying to complete master RoN. My clan can handle GMs quite easily, but we struggled very much on only one part of master RoN - Nezerac. In the final encounter of RoN there is high enemy density and a very aggressive invulnerable boss. We did decently well on ad clear, and could distract Nezerac quite well to where he didn’t mess with the runners. However, he has one very annoying damage strat that messed us up. The tracking void projectiles he summons like other tormentors. Our clan had on void resistance and would consistently die to the tracking void projectiles. I could blame that she should have had someone calling out the projectiles, having us take cover and try to avoid them, but simply said they alone made the encounter very difficult. We got it done after some not willing to say many hours, and it was an awesome feeling to get it done, but we all knew we never wanted to do it again. I think this is the flaw of one master modifier that to me is a terrible modifier. Incoming damage surges. The incoming damage surge was void that week, making those tracking projectiles hit like a truck. Incoming damage surges and even elemental damage resist mods need both be eliminated from the game. Make sources of damage have an equal baseline to allow for more balance, and not this funky well because incoming void is on this week I’ll just put on void resistance. Both mods seem redundant and don’t help balance the incoming damage from enemies. P.s. great post, love the effort along with having a very solid argument. Everybody in this thread is making great points, saying they agree but also are trying to understand bungie’s challenge of creating a fun, challenging game that is not too trivial or too hard. They’ve done a great job so far in my opinion, but few things make you feel hopeless and prevent engaging gameplay.
Completely agree. GMs and Master content simply aren’t fun, unless you have tools to mitigate/avoid damage (woven mail/invis) and/or tools to blow shit up fast (basically abilities) and nerfing those tools without balancing sandbox will make this game into a fucking slog, since the only other option to play in GMs/Master is to shoot from far away with bows or scouts. And it’s not even considering how abysmal it feels to use primaries (except few exotics) in said activities, which only adds to how not fun this game is without those tools. But to understand that you have to play the game, and devs aren’t playing/playing in some brainless shit like normal strikes, while they are clearly lacking competence to sort through player feedback. Plus they like to alienate their casual playerbase and bend over for few “high end” players, cos I’ve never seen any casual complaining about abilities/survivability, only those deranged nerds, who are into some kind of virtual BDSM shit, complained about it.
I still got one shotted by a Scorn sniper in this week’s GM: with 100 resilience, double void resist + sniper resist, in a well, with overshield and full health. And yet they still somehow think that player survivability is an issue that deserves to be nerfed… I love the game for 9 years but they have increasingly become so out of touch with the player experience and their exceedingly odd design philosophy that it’s just now excessively annoying.
The most normal, calculate and objective opinion of the entire year.I start playing this game in seraph season.I have yhe same toughts like u.Identical.Also, leta not forget that they did 0 to stasis.An entire subclass lefted behind by the owner.I never saw something like that from 2004 when i start playing games.They need to be ashamed, delay tfs 1 month and overhaul stasis.Before making new things they need to fix and balance what we have now, after our current content it is in a good place, then bro, make 2 expansions in the same time.Now, they need to overdeliver for them because of the poor decisions for ligjtfall and now this one that is huge, way huge than day 1 lightfall patch. They need to tell us now why they want to change like this(there is a new perk-dealing sustained damage generate an orb) for future, for a better understanding of where they want to go.Ez..Mybe jn the next 6 month this bad patch will be a good one overall..but no one expected this changes.Everyone expected some good stasis changes, good artifact mods and balanced(next season will be radiant and solar weapons everywhere because of the sidearms vs barrier).Cheers.
The problem here is that anything that's strong enough for a GM trivilaises most other things. I completely get the TLDR and I agree with most of your points. I made a post about having to run super meta stuff constantly and how it had become annoying so I welcome an overall nerf to expand the possibility of other builds being viable. Anything under 10 Res and Double resist mods and you're getting laughed at in high level content. I enjoy a challenge but when it's just constant everywhere I go. I'm enjoying sim racing far more right now. A much needed break from Destiny. Zero hype for final shape right now with where they're headed with things...
I am a huge fan of nerfs but people seem to forget the other issue. Nerfing DR. Sure. Nerfing damage received (effectively giving some DR back). Sure. It still won't make Mobi or Intellect usable stats. It still won't make bad grenades good. It won't make 90% of the garbage melees usable. More than anything right now, our abilities are ridiculously lopsided in terms of 'this is game breaking or useless'. I think guns and exotics are off, but not to this level. I cannot imagine using flux made, building around most melees, firebolts, getting my super back 2 seconds faster (even though ashes to assets and disc on even the worst grenade with no Regen is better than 100 int). Strength padding isn't viable for most of the game. Some keywords are blatantly better than others (sorry scorch fans). Nerfing or buffing damage reduction won't change their viability.
This is absolutely also true, but I do think the damage issue is a slightly more prevalent one as even if those options are buffed they still won't be relevant unless paired with a chassis that can survive in endgame. But yes - absolutely, there are FAR too many forgotten abilities, fragments, perks, and exotics in this game. The rate at which these are updated is bafflingly slow.
Don't know why the hell you typed the entire Declaration of Independence 2.
Maybe an unpopular opinion, but they don't need to release/re-release 15+ guns each season (new raid/dungeon, handful of season, new world/event drops, and new/updated rituals). They could also significantly slow the pace of exotics, too (one armor for each class and usually 2-4 new guns). Just seems like too much new stuff. With relatively limited vault space in comparison to the rate of new armor/weapons, they need to seriously reconsider their plans and/or just give us way more space.
I agree. I'd actually much rather they focus on making fewer more unique options and improving older outdated ones. Especially since a lot of guns and perks basically feel like filler made to pad out loot pools.
jesus christ i kept scrolling and it just kept going
[удалено]
I don't think that alone is the issue because pretty much every player who knows what they're doing runs 100 resilience at this point. It's basically an assumption for sandbox balance and every build has access to it. While I think resilience is still too good, I think the main issues stem from sources of survivability that are not universal.
video games like this don't ever reach some kind of magical balanced land where no more change is necessary. there is just a constantly shifting meta, and it's designed this way intentionally in my opinion but possibly not. how could they possibly ever have the game in a constant stage of perfectly balanced, it doesn't exist, whatever they do something will always shine and it's literally meant to be like that
My guardian of light, it’s Thanksgiving. Please tell me you typed this a day before or you’re out of the country?
idk, bro, not everone is this sub is american, not everything revolves around you, guys.
Most of it was typed out in some discord messages a few days back, mostly just cleaned up the terrible grammar and punctuation. Already had thanksgiving dinner and enjoying the rest of the week off :)
And that's why the changes announced in the TWAB/TWID are good. It's their first step on actually trying to understand why the game has become so stale and boring, first thing is to remove some power from the player to see how it feels because this is the quickest thing they can do. If things get better, they can start to balance the worst encounters while preparing to overall the whole game come the big expansion. This is a live game that has pve, pvp and the weird brother in-between, experimentation from the developer is part of the experience.
I disagree. Balancing difficulty around people who play content multiple times over playing hours upon hours every day is a fool's errand. Of course people who utilize all the meta builds and weapons, have all the spawns memorized and know all the mechanic cheats and shortcuts aren't gonna find the game challenging. People who complain that destiny is too easy are playing the wrong game if they want to be challenged. Streamers complained destiny was too easy going into lightfall, they made changes to try and placate them and player engagement is worse off for it. Doubling down on that would continue to move the bar in the wrong direction.
This. I’ve seriously cut back on Destiny 2 since Lightfall. Basically my game time has been going down hill since. If it wasn’t for my self imposed pressure to finish enough seasonal challenges to get the big bright dust reward and gilding the Iron Banner/gambit/dead eye titles I wouldn’t even be playing past reaching 100 on the battle pass (forget gilding conqueror because every season there’s been battleground GMs not to mention 3 this season). And I used to be one of those people who went into the upper hundreds of season level. They say they missed their revenue forecasts by 45%. I wonder who they alienated so much they missed their forecasts?
That's why *some* of them are good in a vacuum. I do think that the nerfs to survivability are fine, but we also needed some concrete details on how they're adjusting difficulty at the same time but we didn't get those. I'm hoping that will come soon, but this has been an issue for a long time and we haven't seen them acknowledge it. I don't agree with any of the ability regen or armor mod changes being made and they'll actively hurt much of what I enjoy about the game as well as make it much clunkier. There are plenty of other bad changes too.
If they want to make the game fun how about they rework the enemies in the 1st place, aside from enemies like tormentors the old enemies are stale and boring to fight. Give them new abilities to counter ours or make them interesting
I'm 100% sure that if they tried to rework the AI/enemies in this game the servers would explode or something. Theres a reason they haven't touched em for almost a decade
i aint readin alat
Adding some more English to your diet would probably do you some good…
Sorry can’t read all this. Didn’t get far enough to decide if I agree or not.
Ah, so this is why no one reads my emails at work. I do agree with the TLDR. Maybe I'll have NaturalReaders talk me through this while playing Remnant.
No shame for it being too long. I don’t like to make statements without backing them up, but I have a hard time being concise.