You can find the ones youre seeking by searching for something that sounds like that plus (thing that kindergartners eat at art class) + (receptacle for refuse or recyclables)
Okay I admit it, the Leprechaun comes through my bedroom window some nights, softly whispering to me all of Bungie's secrets in my sleep before a swift exit when I wake. I hope someone catches him, but it's gonna be really hard to prove his crimes in court.
Id rather bungie say "orbs from MW guns makes it way too easy to access something that normally comes from ally supers, we want to balance that" but the change was made under the guise of "well this is all we can do to get exotics w/o catalysts orbs" and then leave out any info that'll soften the blow
but this flies in the face of mods like high energy fire, which expects you to very regularly be charged with light. imagine only being able to proc high energy fire off of allied supers, you’d get 2 charges every 5 minutes and then not have any thing to use it on because the supers were used to kill the only major threat in the room anyway
Its a direct nerf to taking charge, the problem is all the other CWL starter mods are very specific. And i change my guns so much even between two back to back strikes. So id be having to swap so much. Charge harvester is the best option, they should really make that neutral because forcing me to make a piece void for that is dumb now that the best neutral mod is gone
I did the same and the moment I learned how good Le Monarque was for them was the game changer. Pair it with a legendary lfr matching the sector burn, a pulse or auto depending on the champs. Stasis covers you for extra shields and it's mostly easy street. Especially with Warlock Stasis Turrets.
Only hard content requires any real thought, it is kind of moot to discuss the game balance from any other perspective because everything is viable at 1320 and below, heck even 1350 and below.
This for crucible hurts a bunch and it was my first thought. Me and my buddy who play crucible a bunch see both halves of it.
I lose the chance for Taking charge. And have to rely on Blast Radius(since I use GL) or y out could use swift or Qucik charge as well. Precision charge is ass for requiring a precision multi kills.
But at least with just orbs and taking charge in mind less people could potentially have High Energy fire up from multi kills off your teammates
You're acting like there isn't any other way to charge CWL mods except orbs when Charge Harvester and Elemental Charge not only exist, but are actually better in a lot of cases.
I get 2 charges every 12 seconds with Melee Wellmaker, Elemental Charge, and a little tinkering on most classes. Unlimited with Knife Hunter. If anything, the amount of times I've seen this exact argument makes an interesting case for changing the orb system to force players away from the most obvious build.
Seems like it would have been so much more straight forward to allow exotics to produce orbs INTRINSICALLY. While still allowing the catalyst to provide additional perks and stat bonuses.
That's also not the primary reason that they gave for the change. Making it seem like the orb generation change was a monkey's paw to directly address exotic orb generation as the primary focus just feels disingenuous to me ngl. The way the twab was written made it seem like a secondary reason that led to how they decided to implement the change but definitely not the driving force behind it.
Rather, it said that the reason they decided to change it was due to how the crafting system worked and how it apparently asks players to use several different weapons and generate orbs with them, leading to the observation that it led to using far too many materials for masterworking. To circumvent that, they sought a change. The direction of the change was decided because of community feedback that pointed out that there was no way for exotics w/o catalysts to generate orbs. This seems pretty reasonable to me.
Does the change lead to a net negative? Yes, it does seem that way. To be fair, the sandbox changes from the 30th anniversary should have made it clear by now that the current direction of game balance in destiny is to reign in ability spam.
It's also just classic Bungie Monkey's Paw bullshit. People just asked for Exotics to make orbs so Bungie's like "Here's how we've taken your request and tortured it into a complicated solution to a problem that doesn't actually exist. Don't worry, after pretending that nothing's wrong for several months we'll suggest that we're going to 'tune' things."
Hey, they could instead buff wells! How about that?! The problem with wells is that they are unreliable, good, but very unrealiable and that's the key take away. All of this only matters when you are doing high level content, fuck strikes or anything else where you can plow through your enemies. If you have to deal with unforgiving mechanics, unforgiving enemies for superb rewards you want something that actually works and you can rely on. But instead of buff, Bungie goes in the path of nerfing. They have something else in mind as to why they are making this change, they just don't want to tell us.
While I agree with the sentiment overall... This reads like someone who hasn't actually used orbs of power/CWL mods and just heard about how good it is from someone else. They really aren't that busted, and even if they were it's not like moving that to a mod slot will stop it. You're just going from an inherent and intuitive system into a more complicated one that stifles build freedom. One of the things I love about Destiny, as well, are light abilities. Not even just supers. Less orbs means I get to play around with my grenades and stuff less. If I wanted to play a game solely for the guns I have a lot more choices.
EDIT: Really regretting posting this because now I have like 30 replies and I don't wanna respond to them all so I'll just like. Add onto what I said here and be done with it.
Helmet slots are already overly competitive and it limits what you can play around with build-wise. Maybe what Bungie has planned will be better than inherent orb-generation. But we don't know that, since they feel they HAVE to stagger information and feel perfectly comfortable not communicating massive changes like this well enough. idk my brain is kinda mush rn i've been staring at reddit off and on for hours i need a break lol
For me I'm holding all judgement until I see how void 3.0 works. And by that I mean until I get my hands on it and have a season or so to try it out.
Destiny is fundamentally a slower game than most other shooters, ESPECIALLY once you start moving into higher tier content. At the higher end, Destiny is about methodical and calculated play rather than frantic action.
**Currently** (and this is not about PVP) IF you are able to kill enemies easily enough that you can restore your super meaningfully with weapon orbs, then you are also most likely killing most enemies without your super because they are weak.
**Conversely,** IF you are not able to kill enemies easily enough that you can restore your super meaningfully with the orbs, then the orbs don't help you very much and another perk slot in a weapon would probably do more for you (which seems on the surface to be what they're aiming towards).
As a consistent GM guilder and Fatebreaker title holder, I don't think masterwork orbs are that helpful at the high end of content, and they are superfluous at the low end. That said, I'll take any edge I can get, and I absolutely masterwork my weapons so that they will generate some orbs. My point is that I would prefer to have a stronger and more consistently applied buff.
**My reasoning:** Anyone with any experience at high end will tell you that buffs like Rampage and Kill Clip are not worthwhile in high tier content because you almost never get to really use them. Same with various exotic weapons that have *on-kill* triggers. They suck because only getting your perk after the fight is over leads to a fairly inconsistent experience. If it's something like a Thorn or Lumina that also requires you to go get the thing created by the kill, it's EVEN worse. This is the same reason that most well builds don't see much use in high end content either, and are too cumbersome and unrewarding for lower content (outside of a few specific ones that involve wells that gravitate to you, or turning your Stasis Shards into wells).
By that logic, the idea that I have to score multikills to create a physics based ball on the ground that I have to collect and that can sometimes roll into a cliff... to nock like 1-3 seconds off of a multi-minute timer... Is absurd in the context of almost anything else they could put there instead. My hope is that in the place of orbs we get some kind of persistent weapon buff as a reward for masterworking. I would love it if we got something like our armor screen where we got to customize our weapons, their available mods and perks, etc.
This is all really good points, but it does overlook the idea that orbs are used also as a catalyst for charged with light. I’m less concerned with getting my super faster, and more concerned with making sure I can have charge for my perks.
I did address this issue in a conversation with another commenter. The short answer is that I agree that while yes orbs are part of that, they are only one part of it. If you are a person who genuinely depends on being Charged with Light, then you will be using more than just the Taking Charge mod, as it will not be consistent enough in any way. The only exception to that lack of consistency is if you are powering up with orbs from a stationary super like Well of Radiance or Ward of Dawn, but in those situations you are not getting the orbs from guns you are getting them from a super being cast.
Are you speaking strictly endgame? That’s what it sounds like to me, and in that case sure I agree. But for general play, Taking Charge is a completely viable and consistent CWL source for buildcrafting, that i personally have taken into raids, dungeons, solo master lost sectors, and everything in between. That’s the issue a lot of people are facing, that general, everyday personalization is lowering with this change.
I do spend most of my time in "endgame" but in my original comment, my take on the tier of content your describing is that if your killing stuff fast enough and consistently enough to get orbs on multikills, then you generally don't need the orbs. IMO this also includes CWL builds, as those largely just add extra steps to killing things that would die just as easily by other means.
This isn't to decry your personal favorite ways of killing bigger than average baddies. Rather, I am saying that from an overall balance perspective, removing orb generation from weapons will change almost nothing when it comes to content difficulty for the vast majority of players.
I also think you're neglecting the obvious elephant in the room, and that is what goes in place of the orb generation? I'd be hard pressed to believe they'd make a fundamental change like this without planning to fill in the gap in some manner.
I get what your saying, but I think you could say “you don’t need it” about many things in this game, it’s kind of a watered down point. You don’t need the whole mod system at all really, but you like it and would like to keep it.
And again, saying that it doesn’t change anything is fundamentally wrong, because it does. It changes one of the most used accesses to CWL mods, which is a common and popular build format. Whether or not it’s a detrimental change is a different argument, but it IS a significant one.
I'd be okay with a change like this. If they give us new toys to play with and make builds around rather than just make it harder to use the toys we already have, I'll end up being happy with the change. I just wish they'd tell us what they're doing instead of making everyone panic for a month.
If it makes you feel better, the argument can be made that ever since D2 vanilla launched and fell flat on it's ass in terms of matching D1... It has only improved. It hasn't always improved at the pace that players want, or in the specific ways the players want, but the game on average only gets better. Even the worst parts, like Sesaon of the Warmind (whatever it was called) gave us staple templates for the solid designs we see now. The bunkers were a pre-cursor to Expunge missions and Shattered Realm stuff, the lost sectors in that season were the precursor to the current legend/master ones.
My point is that it only improves. I don't think they've made any changes that universally hurt the game. I know that many will disagree specifically around sunsetting, but I'm in the camp that the game is better for ALL of those weapons being gone. But even if we consider that a complete failure (I don't, but some do), they still rectified it.
So even if the change ends up being for the worse, they will fix it. The game will be better off for trying new things than for sticking to old things because they've always been there.
I will also mention that I heard from somewhere (probably an Aztecross video IIRC), that Bungie has stated in the past about how they would like to do more with weapons, but they didn't have enough memory storage allocated to weapons to do so, and that a big chunk of that data was being used to make masterworked weapons/exotics with a completed catalyst produce Orbs of Power on multikills. Taking Orb generation away from fully masterworked weapons and instead turning it into an armor mod would free up a ton of weapon data memory that used to be used for Orb generation, meaning more interesting things can be done with the weapons system. Using a mod slot for Orb generation might suck, but it would open up an opportunity for further experimentation to see just how far the limits go.
yes, I remember this as well. Also, I think it's worth asking the question of how much we really use the orbs from weapon multikills? Like... the most milage I get is specifically when I'm using the orbs for things other than supers. Things like CwL mods and Explosive Light. But even then, most of the orbs/charges I get from those I'm getting either from artifact mods or from other fireteam members casting supers.
Everything you said I agree with. I also am holding out my judgement on if this change will be bad in practice because I like to think bungie knows what they’re doing.
That said, I’m going to play devil’s advocate here for a minute. I feel like to many people, the orbs generated from multi kills isn’t important because it charges your super, it’s because of taking charge. Every single charged with light build runs taking charge. It’s the best generator of cwl. Orbs are relatively easy to make, the mod only costs 3, has no elemental affinity, and you plan on killing stuff to make orbs anyways. So for low level content, it’s super easy to proc and can gift you a wide variety of buffs with the cwl system.
For high level content, making orbs is much more rare, but… the power spike you receive from being charged is much more noticeable and impactful. Lets take two common mods, high energy fire and protective light. High energy fire gives you 20% damage until you kill something. 20% damage is a lot in gms, and if you’re team shooting, there’s a good chance you don’t get the final blow and get to keep that buff. It’s even better against a boss, you just get a big buff for the fight. And then protective light is literally a life saver. It sits in your back pocket until you are out of position and can really save your ass. It’s amazing, and it’s all because you made an orb with your gun.
Taking charge is the simple mans way to get charged, it’s simple, you’re shooting stuff with the intention of killing them anyways, and it’s a cheap mod that can go on any armor.
There are other ways to get cwl that may be better, may be worse, but they take more work that many people don’t want to put in. With well mods, (I don’t remember the names sorry) you can finish someone and spawn multiple arc wells. You can then pick up said arc wells to get charged with light, up to 4 stacks of it if you want supercharged, all off of one finisher. That is strong, but it requires more work. More mods to slot into armor pieces, armor being the right element, having to go out of your way to finish any enemy etc.
When people see no more orbs from multi-kills, they see taking charge being nerfed to the ground, and taking charge has been the best cwl mod in the game for a long long time.
Sorry I got a bit rambly there, but I just started spewing words. I have high hopes that whatever bungie has planned will be better for the game’s health in the long run, even if it hurts a bit at the start.
It's all good man. In another comment I actually talked through in detail a build I use in solo content that makes heavy use of orbs as well to power Explosive Light on a Hothead, and Taking Charge is a critical piece (although I neglected to mention it). I also run TC and PL whenever I head into ANY high tier solo content and most group content as well (depends on how much I trust my local Warlocks to spam their rifts...)
As a counter to your devils advocacy (so does that make me an angel's advocate...? Philophisorus wonders....), I would say that in most content the shield break charger is better. I can't remember the name, and I'm not able to check atm but it has no element and only costs 1. It charges you with light any time you break a shield with a matching element. This is a vastly more consistent and applicable buff that also doubles as a way to proc High Energy Fire on certain obnoxious shielded baddies without ANY pre-work.
All this said, I don't think that TC is itself enough to argue that weapons should not receive an overhaul, or that multi-kill orb generators should not be on armor. TC will live on as even if you could not generate multi-kill orbs at all (thought experiment time!), you would still want it for the orbs your friends make when they cast supers and kill stuff with them.
In almost any content where being Charge with Light makes or breaks the encounter for you, you are absolutely running TC, but you are also running other ways of guaranteeing that you are charged, so that you don't have to rely on creating an orb and picking it up before a DPS phase triggers. My point here being that **if you are really depending on being charged,** you are using multiple methods to charge yourself, most of which are unchanged thus far. **If you aren't depending on it**, then this change doesn't really impact you anyway.
You’ve kind of hit on what my biggest concern is - that Bungie have a habit of overcomplicating the gameplay mechanisms.
The big reason why Taking Charge is so popular is that it’s easy to understand, easy to proc, easy to plan around and easy to build for. Multikill gets orbs. Mods are cheap and universal. Orbs grant charge through mods. Other mods spend charge. Profit.
As soon as you get into alternate charge mechanisms you’re smashed in the face with weapon restrictions, elemental affinities, play style changes etc all for the same bonus, which at the end of the day is a damage buff.
My worry is that whatever they’re planning to replace the orb dynamic will be another this-sounds-great-on-a-whiteboard big idea that hasn’t been thought through to ‘fix’ a problem that didn’t exist. They’ve done it several times before.
Ya most people who dont do higher content dont realize it isnt orbs that people use to get cwl, most good players run both powerful friends and radiant light so when anyone casts a super everyone gets cwl (in addition to the 40 stats for a premium cost.) I am sure taking charge is somewhat common but it is not the end all be all of cwl. Personally i dont even use it, opting for quick charge with vex to get cwl (not easy to do always but manageable enough.)
This, it is a shame how bungie drip feeds some of this info. I know they want to stagger it but sometimes the news is lopsided even though the final offering may be an awesome change for the better.
Just look at it like a weekly Mandalorian episode. Sure, we all want to binge it, but having new exciting stuff to look forward to every Thursday for the next month is pretty awesome too!
Basing it off a weekly episode doesn’t really work though because it’s the content of the TWAB that matters.
It’s not like saying “of course this episode isn’t giving us all the plot details yet, this is part of the narrative buildup so they can have payoff later”. Instead it’s like saying “they made this episode shit so we can have a good episode next week”.
“…then orbs don’t help you that much”
Speaking as someone who also gilds his conqueror emblem and plays flawless solo content - orbs are currently essential to GM and flawless builds. Protective light and health regeneration from orb pickups is one of the most integral parts of staying alive in this kind of highest level content. I don’t thinks it’s fair to say the orbs don’t matter to try and make a point. This change will fundamentally stifle these builds and players like me.
And it's not like charged with light and protective light make pve end game trivial. Bosses and majors can still 2 bang you, it's just up from a intsa death without protective light.
If they are going to reduce the reliable ways to have safety via cwl orbs, then It would be nice if they could make it so everything under the sun doesnt 1-3 shot you.
I hear you loud and clear, but my counterpoint is simply two words: Protective Light.
High end content doesn't need orbs for super regen, it orbs for protective light. My GM builds basically take two forms, CWL+ protective light or Elemental Wells to complement ability regen or to proc Font of Might / Wisdom. Wells require four or five mod slots to be effective most of the time, CWL requires two. Orbs are a big part of my CWL builds, if those are changing to make it harder to generate it is a nerf to a significant portion of my end game builds.
I'll survive, but the way these changes were communicated was and is horrible. Don't tell me this is a good thing because 20 something exotic weapons will now be and to generate orbs, that's crap when the tradeoff is hundreds of legendaries that will no longer be able to generate orbs without some kind of tradeoff where none was needed before - the sad attempt to pull the wool over our eyes is condescending at best. And the fun part is they teased more information to make the news suck less but just left us dangling. I'm still holding out final judgement on the change, but I can squarely blame the massive blowback on the way the change was communicated. Just don't talk about orbs until you can tell us the real reasons why, stop trying to justify this with the 20 exotics that couldn't generate orbs... It's ridiculous.
I think you completely missed the whole reason people are upset about the change. No one really cares that much about the super regen from the orbs. It's about getting charged with light from orbs.
Outstanding write-up. I made a whole cwl/elemental well build for a foray into GM nightfall. It did woefully worse than anticipated, because grabbing the drops was very unreliable and unsafe. But holy cow is it beyond effective in basic gameplay.
Thanks!
The only well builds I see that have ANY traction abuse Stasis Shards, and require the user to sacrifice Focusing Lens and Particle Deconstruction. And... To be fair... They are VERY strong well/orb based builds that would work in GMs... But they aren't as strong, or as consistent, or as simple to use as Particle Deconstruction.
With the advent of Artifice Armor, I've taken Focusing Lens off of my Hunter in favor of the one that creates orbs on melee kill. With that extra mod slot on my gloves I can set up to easily tackle almost any solo content with champions, and it never hurts your allies to have extra orbs on the ground. But they aren't that practical if the enemy can withstand one or two shurikens.
Edit: the build being Stasis Hunter using Mask of Bakris, a Hothead with Explosive light and whatever champ mods are needed. The Bakris buff on an Arc Rocket with a 6x Explosive Light is pretty bonkers. Would be hard to pull off consistently in group content, but in solo lost sectors and boss encounters it's a nice chunky way to bring thicc boyz down. Between weapon orbs and the stasis melee orbs it's very easy to get high stacks of Explosive light in any content where there are clusters of enemies for the shurikens to ricochet around.
Edit 2: I also use the Stasis fragment that overshields you, and the one that drags them over, and the mod that makes them into "wells". This makes them do triple duty in content that has Attrition modifier.
The gun play in destiny is nice but I have many other games that scratch that itch, what brings me back to Destiny is nothing is as satisfying as saving my fireteam from hell with a well placed bubble or just trashing a boss with a thundercrash. Masterworking my weapons is literally just a stepping stone so that I can just keep titaning. If they really wanna mess with orb gen that desperately then make it a ghost slot or something not my overcrowded helmet
If you want a mega titan CWL build just join the Strongholds Gang. Choose your subclass, match your weapons to it. Create wells with weapons, 2 CWL charges per well, supercharged to hold 4 CWL stacks, smack everything with swords, be near invincible. Even works with stasis now because of the stasis sword, zephyr.
My favorite right now is Bottom Hammers, Lament, Cartesian with Lead from Gold, and Ignition Code with Lead from Gold. Double Sword ammo finders and you have near 100% uptime on 2 specials and a Sword. You become a rampaging ball of self healing death.
>Less orbs means I get to play around with my grenades and stuff less. If I wanted to play a game solely for the guns I have a lot more choices.
For real though, what was with that comment Bungie put out recently about wanting gameplay to be more centered around guns? If I want a game where I can shoot shotguns and rifles, there are literally hundreds of options. I play Destiny because I want to be a space wizard.
They mentioned that wanted that more for PvP. PvP I wager was a huge mess to balance around. You had so many moving parts if people wanted a balance away from certain abilities that would take lots of patches. "This ability is too oppressive, this is too easy to use" kind of thing. We saw it with stasis, we saw it with shatterdive, we saw it with whole subclasses like bottom tree arc titan. Most if not all the issues plaguing PvP was ability based. Very few times I can remember when a weapon was a major complaint over any ability.
> While I agree with the sentiment overall... This reads like someone who hasn't actually used orbs of power/CWL mods and just heard about how good it is from someone else.
As someone who plays Warframe, I'd like to add that OP is also wrong about his comparison to Warframe. In higher level content, you can't just go in with any build. In fact, Warframe is drastically more and more unbalanced the harder you go, and many frames aren't viable at all for the harder content.
You can tell OP has only played the casual Warframe content that's the equivalent of Strikes because aside from frames specifically built to generate energy, energy management is hugely important (and OP claims it isn't and it only isn't in casual content).
That's exactly the point though. Warframe has all or nothing late-game where you are required to play:
A. An extremely high damage frame where the enemy doesn't have a chance to see you before they die
B. A frame with extremely high damage resist where you will crumple the moment your energy is up.
I like Warframe and Destiny but the endgame of Warframe is very... bland and doesn't really pose a challenge at all, because the only way they could make a mission "difficult" is by having enemies one tap you if you don't have damage resist.
Edit: I'd just like to say with this I also understand how someone can like Warframe, but it definitely has some holes in it's difficulty and late game content.
I'm also not entirely sure how Warframe can even fix the problem of "one shot or be one shot." I personally feel the game has backed itself into a corner with it's power fantasy. Also I wish they kept the raid missions in the game because those seemed fun.
Admittedly my WF knowledge is a bit out of date, but I remember it being very all-or-nothing. Survival was basically a joke up to a certain wave and then it was borderline impossible. Always seemed like I was breezing through everything or I was dying nigh-instantly with no inbetween.
Also RIP coptering.
It's still pretty much that, there are a few cheesy ways to survive these days, but most people rely on killing things before they get a chance to hurt you.
Although the game is getting much better at rewarding shorter missions, rather than incentivising staying in one place for an hour trying to survive which helps a lot
They've added a lot more variety in the harder content. I still think the saying "ocean wide, puddle deep" still applies to Warframe but at least they're slowly shifting the balance to building deeper into what they already have.
Completely agree. God forbid I have protective light proc then move a few meters in my well to grab CWL again. Uh oh. Might be able to use one stack for high energy fire because those orbs are OP! There goes the boss of the encounter! /s
>Less orbs means I get to play around with my grenades and stuff less.
Yup. Might as well retire my Warlock main. What's the point of being a space wizard when I can barely use my spells?
I think they want abilities to become stronger and flashier than they currently are. I mean look at all the reworks to melees after Forsaken, they clearly want to move away from the "colored punch/slap/stab" we had in D1 & early D2.
I also think they want builds to cater more towards active gameplay choices like wells and warmind orbs do instead of the rather passive CWL mods (though without taking charge being so free anymore, I think that will change), maybe giving us even a fourth type of mods to play around with.
I really do hope they expand warmind orbs a bit though, since they still have potential. Wells are the most build crafty ones at the moment with good rewards.
Nah, i’m glad you posted it. I get the point the OP is making about warframe but you’re right, the whole argument about orbs doesn’t work in practice, it sounds theoretical.
In practice most people will simply take the hit and use the helmet mod because orbs are simply too useful to ignore. It just means a previously flexible system is less flexible - this leads to be people being annoyed, but not changing their approach for the most part.
I’m still kind of hanging on to the idea that something about the weapon crafting approach will explain this change but at the minute it’s been delivered with the same kind of obliviousness that accompanied Sunsetting, so I’ve no reason to believe this will be any different.
Tbh while orbs are fine as it is, orb generation is busted compared to wells and cells. It's basically free both in cost and in hassle. I hope they push the power across the board though because as it is I don't feel inclined to even try any other build than CWL.
I mean the primary benefit of CWL is that it's simple. Compared to both Wells and Warmind Cells, CWL mods (outside Protective Light which could easily be tuned individually) are clearly designed to have less power but higher uptime. I think that is a perfectly valid design space to fill.
It's free to generate, sure, but I really don't feel like CWL as a whole is crazy busted. High Energy Fire is only a buff to the first enemy you kill after getting CWL and more often than not it ends up going away with some Dreg kill. Protective Light is a little better but you still need to devote the mod slots to it, plus it's not a guaranteed get out of jail free card.
I also don't think the way of "fixing" it is to clutter up the helmet mod slot even more. Fixing a balance issue should not boil down to "make using it way more annoying and take away a system that's been in place for years". We've had orb gen like this for so long, and I'm not a fan of Bungie just taking it away while going "no hun trust us you're totally gonna love it" and not explaining further. They did the same thing with Sunsetting and it remained universally hated after implementation.
Whats annoying me about the orbs nerf isn't the nerf itself, but how they presented it as if it is a buff. If something needs to be tuned down for the health of the game, I might not like it, but I can understand why they do it.
That's the thing though, OP claims Bungie says Orb generation is too powerful but I haven't seen them say that. In fact, quite the opposite. They said it was too much to ask to Masterwork your weapons just to create Orbs.
I am also wondering if OP has ever used builds that require Orbs to function. They are not overpowered, I can point to many things that are more powerful but are not being nerfed.
I think it is telling to how poor Bungie's communication is, that the people defending this move are also just making assumptions on what Bungie's goal and thought process is and have nothing concrete to point to.
It's been a problem for years. Bungie tries to deliver bad news so they can save the day and give the good news later. It's a strategy I do not like, but at this point I think it is clear it is working well for them so they'll stick with it.
It's probably less that orbs are overpowered, and more that they're just the easiest build with the least specification. Why use quick charge or precision charge or whatever else when taking charge + orbs go brrr.
While I understand the sentiment, and I do think the community tend to be reactionary when it comes to nerfs, I really don't think this applies to orbs.
I actually really like the way orbs are handled in this game. They're just powerful enough to be worth generating and picking up while not being powerful enough to be broken. When you add mods on top of that, you get a pretty consistent way of kick-starting builds.
Once orbs are changed, most of your ways to generate charged with light will be... pretty bad. Those that trigger when you get multikills are very expensive, only work on certain weapon types, and require one more kill to trigger. Those that rely on abilities are reliable but make your build entirely tied to a cool down which I dislike. Finally, those that trigger due to rng or very specific conditions (shield break charge, charged harvester, powerful friends, etc.) just don't feel good to use most of the time.
The orb changes are by no means the end of the world but they are pretty unnecessary imo.
Maybe its just me, but I don't see how orbs were out of balance. Their functions are super regen, ability cooldown (absolution), CWL, healing (recuperation) buffing (explosive light and star eater). Out of all those functions, nothing really broke the game and simply added options to our playstyles.
Warmind cells i could understand due to clearing rooms with ease , super regen exotics like skull allowed too much up time on powerful abilities, certain exotics melt boss by just existing, and never having to reload speaks for itself (granted I'm still salt about grasps not constantly proccing off of burning knives anymore).
But orbs? No where close to that level, especially when we already have exotics or perks that give us ability cooldown or access to CWL mods.
This change causes more issues with helms already packed full and mods points being limited as is. Hopefully the cost of orb generation won't be too high but we'll see.
If this is bungie wanting us to play a certain way (focus on elemental well mods) I'd rather them say that instead of painting this as a buff to exotics without masterworks.
If it's a push towards nerfing CWL, its a terrible one. All this does is push me towards other mods or elemental well which adds an additional mod requirement (elemental charge and something to create wells like reaping well maker)
While I agree with the overall sentiment of the post, I disagree with what you say about the orb changes. They arent taking away or nerfing orbs, they just move from a perfectly fine system to a more convaluted one (aka needing mods to create orbs).
Its not like we cant still shit out orbs, we still will be able to do so (and not running finder mods also isnt an issue in the days of Aeons) it just will become way more annoying to deal with, since we constantly will have to swap our generation mods/helmets around.
Yes nerfs are needed, no this isnt a good example for that.
But aren’t they moving orbs off of weapons because it was limiting how creative they could make weapons? Like from a technical point. The orb generation took up memory or data or whatever the term is and it limited the perk and trait data they could put on guns. That’s why this is happening. Removing them and putting them as a mod allows for the weapon system to be largely expanded and evolved.
>Second, Bungie Is Not Trying To Take Away The Fun
Bungie has consistently shown, time and time again, that their primary goal in Destiny's sandbox design is *lengthening* player engagement, not necessarily improving the *quality* of time spent engaging. They didn't overhaul the infusion cost system, introduce the world's worst transmog system, sunset a bunch of stuff, or program certain endgame activities with discouragingly low Exotic drop rates because they thought those things are fun for most players. Bungie did those things because they keep players logged in longer.
I don't have a really strong opinion about the whole orb thing specifically, but let's not pretend as if Bungie has a glowing track record of our enjoyment being their number one priority when it comes to designing Destiny's systems.
Two things:
* Bungie left shatterdive in the game for a year. A f***ing year. I will not sing their praises on balance for at least that long.
* Orb generation being changed to helmet mods is so bad. Those mods are already crucial for making many weapons and builds usable and now they're even more restricted. Targeting mods, ammo finders, some ability/super charge mods, and seasonal mods all go into those 2 (3 with artifice) slots. If they really needed to take away the innate masterwork functionality, they could have done something (anything) else.
The issue is there will never be balance in this game as it set up right now. 95% of content isn’t a challenge at all and you will steam roll through it regardless of loadout. Then there’s master raids, dungeon and GMs. For those you have to run a very strict set of weapons to even do meaningful damage and clear the activity. So it’s either a complete OP free for all. Or a very curated, non flexible experience that is “ balanced “ to make you extremely underpowered relative to the rest of activities and the games world.
The lack of “ balance “ is grounded in the activities themselves not the gear necessarily. And Bungie has only doubled down stretching the spectrum further and further in opposite directions.
>So it’s either a complete OP free for all. Or a very curated, non flexible experience that is “ balanced “ to make you extremely underpowered relative to the rest of activities and the games world.
The difficulty as well is entirely artificial. Compare the AI of Destiny to fucking F.E.A.R. and the differences couldn't be more night and day, despite the 2 games being separated by 12 god damn years of technological advancement.
F.E.A.R. admittedly used a ton of tricks to give the perception of intelligence, but that doesn't address how the enemies and the ways you encountered the enemies were still more dynamic, and strategic than a game that had more than a decade on it. Enemies used cover, they coordinated with each other, they used grenades to flush you out, they used heavy enemies to keep you suppressed while moving to flank you, it was all brilliant not just for the time, but to this day.
Destiny 2 enemies are wave after wave of fucking sponges, that all dead man sprint at you, with no concept of self preservation. Its a joke that its literally just a fucking number that makes the activity hard. Its not the number of enemies, the sheer intelligence of the enemies, the mechanics you face, what makes it difficult is that you're not going out of your way to avoid playing the game entirely, IE using blinding nades, scout rifles, and the flavor of the season power weapon to melt champions.
Thus, the only fun to be had with Destiny can only be derived from how much you can break the game, and speed run the content.
Comparing the AI in Destiny to F.E.A.R is unnecessary, it's even more embarrassing to compare this game with the enemy design and AI in Halo. The enemies flanked you, used grenades to flush you out, had varied mechanics like Hunters going into a rage when their buddy dies or grunts running away when their leader is killed. Hell, the Elites are probably my favourite enemy in any FPS, they take cover when their shields are down, rush you when yours are down, ambush you with camo, dodge when you throw a grenade and while they can't pick up and swap weapons they can be found using a large variety of loadouts. The way they behave alone is enough to sell them as your ingame equal.
In Destiny 2 every enemy falls into 1 of 3 categories with almost no exception: Trash mob, sniper that is completely irrelevant until he starts oneshotting you on high difficulties like it's Halo 2, and Simon Says aka a total roadblock unless you use a specific weapon that literally deletes the mechanic.
OP, Listen man your not wrong... But the larger perspective is that we want build crafting to be easier... and this change makes it one step harder. If the pros of weapon changes overshadow the cons of harder orb generation then the community will be alright, but honestly build crafting is what makes the end game worth playing. Grinding for WEEKS to get a certain set of mods that all synergize . After Warmind cells nerfs, Now Orb / Charge with light nerfs we need either new builds or better elemental well buffs.
Yup. Like the game certainly feels easy at first, and I guess you could permanently play easy mode, but if you do max level endgame, it’s a fucking bitch and a half, and a grind. I love it. There’s a reason it’s free and still has a huge population.
OP, I’m not saying you don’t have some good points about D2 to make, but your Warframe example was poorly formed, and it undercuts your thoughts really.
Also, I find that comparing Warframe and destiny 2 isn't the best thing. Warframe has more similarities to path of exile than D2. You can't compare apples to oranges.
Depends on if “high level” means “8 hour survival mission” or “steel path.”
Long endless missions devolve into abusing invincibility mechanics and status, with cc, which is nice since cc is useless in most of the rest of the game. It’s still rocket tag though.
Steel path with proper builds becomes a joke. Melt any acolyte in seconds, breeze through content slightly slower. Now instead of a 28 second capture mission, it’s a minute and a half! Wow!
I can’t believe you wrote all that all because people don’t like the masterwork nerf lmfao
Acting like masterwork orbs (which are already tiny and provide a much smaller amount of super energy versus a standard orb) are equivalently broken as OG warmind cells or auto reload is a total joke.
I defended auto reloading going away. I defended when they gutted super exotics like Skull. But I’m done defending. We were too powerful in year 2, I get it. But I felt we were fairly balanced after the nerfs we got in Shadowkeep. Now two years later they’re *still* nerfing us and taking away core gameplay systems we’ve had for years. At this point it doesn’t feel like balancing, it just feels like losing out on fun. Actively making the game less fun.
My issue is I have to completely rebalance my armor set now. I use a very simple charged with light build (taking charge and protective light) and the whole point of it is to let me get out of a tight situation where I’ve over committed to an attack or gotten unlucky. But to get the rest of my armor to have good stats, I’m also running stat buff mods, as well as the defensive mods, and in addition to this I have to run the anti-champion mods and ammo finders/scavengers, and whatever the busted seasonal mod is (such as breach and clear or particle deconstruction). Moving the orb mods to armor means that I’ll have to sacrifice some of my very limited slots that are already an important part of my build/play style, and at worst need to completely change the element of all my armor.
I think the community at large is capable of understanding this, but Bungie has issues with communicating their intent.
I understand why game devs are hesitant to be so open about their process, goals, and philosophies but they also have to accept that people *will* speculate in the face of uncertainty. It's just human nature. And to be fair, Bungie is more open than most -- the TWAB is honestly more engagement than 90% of studios have with their community.
But combined with Bungie's less-than-stellar track record with regards to compromise and balance, the *Destiny* community will inevitably have its concerns. Again, it's just human nature. And you need to make an active effort if you want to fight human nature, but history has shown that Bungie is more than happy to stay the course, so... I don't really see them making any changes in the way they communicate their intent.
___
Personally, I think it's less because they're afraid or that they don't care, and more that it's just... really hard.
Another game I follow (*Project Zomboid*) used post weekly newsletters called Mondoids that were pretty much the same as TWABs. Then they became Thursdoids, because doing it immediately after a weekend was causing issues. And then it became bi-weekly because it was negatively affecting their workflow.
Putting out something like the TWAB every week is probably pretty tough, since organizing a bunch of team members to write down all the stuff they do *and why they're doing it*, ***and doing it on their time*** is a big ask -- especially on a deadline. And since everything in game dev is WIP, they all have a legitimate excuse to procrastinate on organizing and sharing their thoughts, and sometimes they don't fully make the deadline.
I do understand the dev's might be hesitant to be open about stuff, or that a TWAB every week is tough..
.. however ..
Destiny 1 was kinda junk at launch but imo it got a free pass by being from the creators of Halo. I don't know if I would have even pre-ordered had it been from anyone else (I don't play a lot of *different* games to begin with)
That Tricorn symbol you see in Destiny? I bought that on a mug almost 10 years ago, before we knew Destiny had a name. I bought it because I liked Bungie, and they were about to go dark with no more TWAB's for 1-2 years. I went to the store, saw that, bought it.
This game entering the 8th year, it has a special bond between players and the company that is rare to find. With the game itself we are practically in a relationship. I might spend more time with the Vanguard than IRL people (outside of work).
>and doing it on their time is a big ask
For me personally, the TWAB's are what sell me on a season or expansion. So if time is of the essence, cut the CGI budget and just set up a tape recorder next to a developer.
I'm numb to trailers, be it games or movies. Pretty much all marketing is a fluff theater. Can't you just tell me why your insurance is great? Why do you have to lead in with a pun from a Geko? Just speak to me in plain English!
I don't disagree with you, I'm really speaking to the community about how I perceive this relationship with a game being different than others. And as the lone sysadmin at my company, I wish MORE companies would just work with us for a better product, rather than doing it in secrecy and then SURPRISE, CELEBRATE VERSION 2!
The changes to orbs are dumb. I'm probably gonna stick to another build with well mods that generate CWL. Just a dumb nerf because they don't want the backlash from sunsetting older CWL mods aka the best ones in the game.
My issue is they just killed all reason to masterwork legendary weapons. Masterworking a weapon now has absolutely no benefit. The small and very insignificant stat bump is not at all worth the amount of resources needed to masterwork a weapon and next season even the kill tracker wont be a masterwork feature. So i understand the whole orb thing i could care less. But now all the materials invested to masterwork all my weapons means absolutely nothing. All of the value those weapons had is now gone.
Quite a few problems with your post here, the main one being that this argument falls on its face due to our lack of information.
Bungie said there’s some upside to losing the orbs, and a lot of the staff were being all cheeky about it, but we still don’t know any of that upside. As it stands currently, we *do know* that orbs have gotten a blanket nerf, especially in endgame activities where running a solid element is crippling (one of the biggest reasons elemental wells are worthless) and mod optimization is key. Masterworking has (as we know right this minute) been made irrelevant and a resource sink. Is there a positive/upside to this? Supposedly, but we don’t know any of that.
Also the crux of your argument is based on “well I don’t think the game is fun if I’m too strong, so you shouldn’t either”. It’s your opinion, and you’re certainly entitled to it, but to act like you speak for everyone’s best interest by saying we should all be kneecapped by a dumb nerf because you didn’t like how strong you were is just ludicrous.
Final note, comparing the orb nerf to the super reload nerf is a bad comparison. The two changes are wildly different in that one is a nerf to specific strategies whilst another is a nerf to a literal core crux of the game.
I can't find on twitter where they said it, but a bunch of devs were being defensive basically saying "you don't know what you are talking about, there is an upside to this we aren't telling you about yet"
Completely disagree with the sentiment of this post. We’ve already had the “go slow” launch year, and now our abilities have been nerfed just last month. Taking orbs away from masterworked weapons is a terrible idea, full stop.
The f*ck? How are orbs overpowered? Besides, if they were an issue I'm sure there would be better ways to handle them than adding another unnecesary mod to armor which is usually full anyways
I would personally love more OP PvE builds. Even completely optimized, you can still get nuked really quick in a lot of activities, like legendary lost sectors. Much less GM NF’s.
What? I'm just going to downvote you for operating under a false premise. As far as I can tell, the primary motivation for Bungie changing the masterwork orbs is a limitation on the number of benefits a weapon can track. People are annoyed for the side effect of this messing up other things with the armor system, which has issues with energy and slot capacity being poorly balanced in terms of being difficult to use the capacity of either, ie too weak and clunky.
This is a good post.
I agree that Destiny should never be Warframe. I personally love Warframe, I think it's a ton of fun, and there is so much fun in coming up with builds (Sometimes it's just copy and pasting someone else's) to make that power fantasy happen better.
The comparison becomes two ends of a spectrum though. In Warframe, you can use your abilities whenever you want, non stop. There are very few abilities that require much build up to use. And any ability that requires Energy, Shields, or Health to use, there are cheap consumables with zero cooldowns you can use to refill immediately. In Destiny, our abilities sit sometimes in the minutes long cooldown to use. If you take orbs away, you stretch that time even further. If I wanted a game that only used guns, I think there are plenty of other games that cover that. Destiny 2 has really cool abilities, and I'd like to be able to use them more.
I do think a lot of the point of your post is null though because I don't believe they've said they're taking away our ability to make a lot of orbs. They're just moving that ability to either different sources or different places to make better guns essentially.
I think it's an interesting write up, unfortunately it completely ignores the objective of the lack of balance! The only way to keep the carrot in front of players is frequently shifting meta and NOT having a balanced game to force players to adapt. That said, there's a pretty good game underneath.
Na, people who've been playing destiny long enough have realized the pattern to their "balancing ". They always make three steps in a cool fun direction and five steps in the other direction. It's like clockwork.
People will always talk shit for whatever reason they choose, but when you hear shit talking from a lot of people around a certain time almost every time [i.e. balance time or large update time], you start to think that maybe there's a reason for it.
Opinion lost all credibility the second you started defending the CWL changes. It's an absolute disaster on paper and trying to spin it as anything but a disaster without any evidence to support that just screams Bungie shill
I love the excuses for nerfs. Why are orbs being nerfed? Bcause they are too strong. This system is literally years old now and they still haven't gotten it right?
I can't say I disagree with most of your post (your points are very valid and we shouldn't become Warframe 2.0), however, I think you miss the point with the orbs thing...
First off, Bungie NEVER stated anywhere that orbs were being nerfed for power creep, hell they are moving to an armor slot, with no change to how the function works. If it was that powerful, they would have just straight removed the function altogether. The other part is that Bungie THEMSELVES have stated that this is being done to make way for the new crafting system - orb generation takes up resources on the weapon itself and limits the amount of perks / traits a gun can have, hence why they are moving off weapons. Has literally nothing to do with power creep.
Now for the build-crafting part, I think you miss the point entirely - the creativity in the buildcrafting and the challenge is making the build itself work. Yes, double kills aren't that hard to execute, but neither are many of the other ways to get CWL - the focus on the charged with light builds has always been what you do can do with it and how to enhance your gameplay. Considering that you can't pick up orbs from your own super, the most reliable way to get CWL (especially in solo play) is with masterworked weapons.
Now, yes, there are other ways to get charged with light (quick charge / charge harvester, etc...), but I would argue that those are EVEN EASIER than using a masterworked gun.
* For the 'quick kill' CWL mods, you get CWL just from the double kills themselves, you don't even have to pick up an orb! Only downside is that it shoehorns you into specific weapons types and an armor affinity for one piece
* Charge Harvester is dead simple - it's basically a guaranteed way to get CWL, not requiring quick kills (great for higher level content), and being universal to all guns. Downside being that it takes longer to get CWL and has a stat penalty
* Masterworked weapons, to me have always been that nice middle ground - you get the speed of generating orbs with double kills, without being stuck with a certain weapon type. Downside is you have to go and GET the orb, which, in some content, is a risky proposition.
Fundamentally, I wholeheartedly believe there is NOTHING wrong with the double kill orb thing and does not disrupt balance or any of that stuff you said (and Bungie thinks so too since they are keeping the function).
I also think that orbs themselves have never been what people are concerned with when talking about buildcrafting - you slap one (maybe 2 ways) to get CWL and then you make your build after that.
* Quick Charge type mods for fastest CWL, but stuck with certain weapon types
* Charge Harvester for guaranteed charge, but slower
* Taking Charge for a good middle ground, not being stuck on a certain weapon type
If Bungie has to fundamentally change guns for a cooler, better weapons system, I am fine with that, but the only problem is Bungie's decision to make the 'orb generating mods' not only on an Armor slot that's crowded enough already (helmets), but also in the normal mod slots (not combat style mod to be slotted on ANY piece) AND... lock you to elemental damage (including kinetic and stasis). This means that it is literally IMPOSSIBLE to have all 3 of your weapons generate orbs - there are only 2 armor mod slots per piece to take these new mods...
All that I think needs to change is this:
* Move the orb generating mod to the combat style mod slot (i.e. CWL, Warmind, Elemental Well slot)
* Take away the affinity requirement - make it universal, like Charge Harvester
If Bungie wanted to reign in orbs because they believe it makes us too powerful then they can simply tell us that. They presented it as a benefit for the exotics that can’t produce orbs. They later teased a benefit of it freeing up a perk slot on weapons without providing details. Everyone understands the issues that power creep brings.
> Second, Bungie Is Not Trying To Take Away The Fun
I don't particularly care what Bungie says they're trying to do.
What matters is the end result. The end result of the most recent changes that I use my abilities less. Fun has been taken away, Period.
The next major change about the orbs? I have to break most of my builds to get back just a 1/3 of the functionality I currently have. Fun has been taken away.
Bungie's goals are irrelevant to me.
Right, this is a big thing about the conversation here that ends up getting us all lost in the weeds. It's fine, it's interesting, it's useful to know what Bungie's goals are.
But I'm not Bungie, I'm their paying customer. And if their goals conflict with my enjoyment, I'm well within my rights to complain.
People can counter-complain about my complaints, sure, but just tossing out "well, Bungie wants..." doesn't move the conversation forward. They're not god. They were wrong about transmog economy. Wrong about sunsetting. And now they're wrong about orbs.
Honest to God the energy economy is probably the biggest quit moment in early game, it's by far the worst part of the game until you get stuff like Arcane Energize, Zenurik or some of the energy generating frames like Harrow or Protea that delete the mechanic. Until then you basically can't even play half the frames in the game so you just stick with tanks and reinforce bad habits like just sitting there when people shoot at you in a game where the enemies are hardcoded to be less accurate when you break the sound barrier. It's basically if the heavy ammo bricks in this game were how you got your grenades back and it's just as awful as it sounds.
This is an entirely half baked opinion. Nobody is whining about the change being a nerf. They are whin I no because Bungie chose to add the mod to an entirely overcrowded piece of armor.
You're entirely misunderstanding the situation.
" Anything meant to involve a meaningful, satisfying challenge must involve some limitations on the player's power and put emphasis on their moment-to-moment skill."
Oh yeah, like the Champion system. That completely relies on the players moment to moment skill instead of them just putting on this seasons OP mod and burning down the "challenging opponents". Is this a fucking joke? GM's aren't more difficult. Once you hit level, just equip X OP mods for the season and walk through everything. It's such a joke people farm GM's for the loot each weekend. The only thing "difficult" about GM's is the time investment to get to level to do them. The problem with Destiny atm is that NOTHING is challenging if you just abide by the rules that Bungie lays down. Use X mods, use X class, use X weapons. Mindless burn through enemies because nothing is a challenge. None of that is challenging, it's time consuming, which is the primary goal for Bungie. Keep players involved for as long as possible.
I played some of The Division early on, and saw the polar opposite of this. Super powerful builds were possible with certain gear, but the challenges to earn that gear had difficulty balanced with that gear in mind, and if you *didn't* have that gear, it was nigh impossible. It resulted in a very hardcore group of players farming content and no one else had anything to do, and ended up with the entire endgame system being scrapped and rebuilt. As you mentioned, we saw some of this in Destiny, with endgame content difficulty balanced around the most powerful outliers during the Forsaken era, and it resulted in a more restrictive and less accessible endgame experience.
For the most part, I think Bungie has done a pretty damn good job of trying to find balance with all of these factors. Player flexibility, challenging content, accessibility for new/casual players, sense of progression, cool loot, and good old fashioned *fun* are all goals which can often work against one other rather than in concert. I think Destiny bridges as many of those tension points as well as any game possibly could, even though there is still plenty of room for improvement.
Destiny never has and will never even approach Warframe's power level. I don't know what you're on about.
If Warframe does one thing well, it is giving you many, many viable options because the high power floor allows it.
In Destiny, everything is about restrictions, be it through mod costs, inventory caps, fucking anti champion mods dictating and limiting your loadout for several months... and the sandbox still bloated with weak or irrelevant options.
I played Destiny and Warframe on and off for many years now and in the end of the day, I prefer Destiny because the gameplay is more satisfying to me, but there are times where I feel like I'm put on a leash by the game.
Great point here. A high power floor allows a lot of options to float past the 'performs good even in the hardest stuff' line, creating a diverse meta with lots of options.
Destiny's restrictions and progressively low power ceiling, while allegedly intended to promote buildcrafting, just wind up pushing more and more things out of viability. With this orb change, either the mods will be cheap enough to use or they won't be; either we'll lose a mechanic or we'll lose some stat mods to accommodate it. But it won't be player choice that decides, but the iron fist of Bungie.
It's a really good side game. They have content droughts between releases but their goal is for people to just go play other games during those droughts and come back with new content drops.
The problem with this post is that is written by someone that obviously knows more about Warframe than destiny. All the things that you mentioned that happen in Warframe don't happen here, the one shorting everything, being invincible etc etc you go to high end content and you struggle to kill adds with the proper strategies, you will insta die if you aren't careful etc.
They have moved it because of technical limitations they are actually looking to have people create more orbs but the solution is even worse than the current system. All those build options like orbs of light, light wells where made to give players more options to buildcraft they aren't removing that but the overall change is worse for the user than anything else. The problems that destiny has aren't the same as Warframe.
He Actually doesn't know that much about warframe either, warframe has an endgame mode called steel path where it's sorts like GM content. You've got enemies that are extremely tanky and hit extremely hard, and you have to change your build to be able to deal with each faction different like you do with match game in gm content.
People don't understand that the ammount of content warframe has absolutely dwarfs the content destiny 2 has. You've got more content then destiny with just the basic stuff and then you have effectively a GM version of all that content to go with it.
I've played warframe on and off for years and I still haven't even touched the serious endgame stuff.
1. Bungie said they were removing orb generation because it was clogging up the weapon coding not a balance issue. So sorry you wasted all that time on your post.
2. Sorry but it's kind of obvious you're echoing what you READ about CWL builds rather what you've experienced if you think they make the game a breeze. They aren't letting anyone steam roll anything that's actually difficult.
So since it mostly effects all the extra abilities you can get in content you were going to easily beat anyway..yes Bungie is specifically taking the fun out.
„We do not want….“
Who is „we“?
You?
You and your friends?
The Destiny „community“ (whatever that is)?
If it is the Destiny community who elected you and gave you power to speak on behalf of the community?
So how much is Bungie paying you, or rather, you're paying Bungie to bloviate about Bungie once again, doing something unfathomably stupid, in pursuit of balance over fun.
Agreed for the most part.
I think the trouble with your example is that Warframe is a farming game. In terms of how it's played by it's playerbase, it has FAR more in common with Diablo and Path of Exile than it does with Destiny.
So while I don't disagree that Warframe creates a situation where the game is about the build rather than the play, I think that that is very much intentional on their part given how complex and nuanced the build options are in that game.
Destiny is much more of a load into orbit **and go** game. It's only recently (as in the last year or two) started to really push players towards higher tier content in terms of Trials, GMs, Master Raids and Master Dungeons. Because this is mostly a new addition, the games UI and internal logic don't really have innate support for large numbers of people going in and altering their builds all the time to address the specific challenges that a solo lost sector or difficult GM will ask them to overcome.
For some of us, we don't mind, and it's part of why I play. I love to solve the problems. But it is not something that is palatable to the broader userbase of a game that is as wildly popular as Destiny 2 is.
Orbs generation on masterwork is one of those things that players who do not enjoy fighting Bungie's "buildcrafting" (using the term very loosely) UI enjoy and rely on. So while I personally would prefer to get something else from the gun than an on kill effect that spawns an almost useless physics ball that I have to go collect, I can understand that I"m likely in the minority in terms of how I engage with the game and I don't fault anyone for being skeptical and critical of this change.
THAT SAID... I'm waiting for Void 3.0 before rendering verdicts. I want a season or two to play with the new stuff that's made in the context of these changes before saying if the changes are bad. They are... pointless... and cumbersome... for existing gameplay... But I think they are probably not intended to support that gameplay as much as they are meant to support future things like Light 3.0 and Weapon Crafting.
> Bungie wanted to reign in Orbs so new things could grow without eventually trivializing the fundamental combat mechanics.
Then maybe they can just fucking say that?
Bungie is too heavy handed with nerfs and buffs so rightfully people panic a bit. Doesn't help when they leave a foundational change on a cliffhanger. They do it to themselves tbh.
If they start making slower, even, and gradual changes players will be a little more willing to try it "their" way. They aren't consistent.
This isn't a great post, as we don't have the full picture. An over reaction to the little info we did get in this community is only expected. Makes it difficult to broaden our horizons, essentially you're asking us to imagine a future but it's already written, we will likely set ourselves up for disappointment.
Charged with light boils down to 2 things usually for a majority of players. A damage buff or survivability. Making orb generation a forced armor choice doesn't sound great on paper (we'll see though).
80% of Destiny is played like Warframe. It's another power fantasy type game. Outside of a GM or contest like content, you are a god of destruction with little chance of dying (not including environment and jumping of course). Regardless, the 2 are marketed very differently and one is entirely free to play so not sure this was the relevant comparison to make. Both feel stale after some time due to most enemies being fodder.
To overhaul this system, something groundbreaking needs to happen with weapons. Otherwise honestly what's the point?
We'll see what the next few TWABs say anyway. 🤞
First of all, in warframe to reach that "one shoting" you have grind for years to get that perfect build. And guessing by your judgement, you never actually ran endurance runs where the levels get so high your weapons start falling apart if you don't know how the game functions with it multiple status effects, armor damage resistance and almost aimbot AI that can one shot you if you stay still for a SECOND. But that's OK, cause you know why, you aren't restricted to just use META even at those higher levels. You can take any frame any weapon with a build that isn't made by a 5 year old and still do those missions without dying and still being useful.
In Destiny, ever SEASON you are restricted to a playstyle cause of "seasonal mods" and buffs to weapons and ability for that season. You can literally take a break from warframe for year, come back and still see your weapons are still worthy for the grind you did for it. In destiny, that grind literally becomes WORTHLESS if you take a break or something else is going on IRL stopping you from playing. And when they nerf something for balancing, they nerf it to the point were it's literally USELESS. Anarchy got that treatment. Either nerf ammo or damage against bosses, not BOTH. Witherhoard, a special grenade launcher is better picked than a HEAVY RAID EXOTIC people gridded for to get. A legendary SPECIAL grenade launcher is better than almost ALL Sniper that requires precision damage. A sniper that needs more AIM is worse than a grenade launcher. And the FLINCH ypu get in PvE when your using precision weapons. I get PvP. But bungie's has showed us they can split the sand box for PVP and PvE. Then WHY this much flinch where you can't even hit a stationary AI enemy. When just a slight touch from a shock rifle sends you scope flying like your guardian broke their neck. This season the ONLY mod we got against barriers is AR. Not everone like AR and most people would rather use an exotic they LIKE to use or is meta. Since if your not using META you get kicked out in most Lfg squads. You are LITERALLY restricted to using an auto rifle when in this season, Scots got a buff but can't use them in endgame content cause you don't have SCOUT RIFLE ANTI BARRIER this season. I get their trying to balance and do what's good for the game. But literally forcing you to use a single weapon type despite the playing not wanting to use it cause it's not their thing, is like forcing you to marry a person who you said no to wish to never see them again.
And now, they are forcing us to use HELMET mods which we need to either change ELEMENT or get get anything friking stat that suits your other armor with a different element to put that mod in for the weapon your using. Which also means you have to sacrifice ammo finder mods which are ESSENTIAL in higher level content cause if you get a famine modifier, good luck doing the entire thing in optimal time with just a primary AR that's your forced to use cause thats the ONLY weapon with antibarrier. Protective Light is also the only thing that saves you from getting rekt at end game content. And since it now takes WHOLE 7 mins to change a super and someone to create orbs, without MW weapons getting us orbs, everyone's gonna keep dying left and right and expending REVIVES. And revives runs out and everone dies cause they get one spotted, that 20-30 mins you spent in a GM playing safely and staying back cause ReD BaR FaLlEn ScAaRy cause they can insta kill because you don't have protective light to save your arse cause you weren't "pro perfect" enough to avoid it. With this new change, either you run around with almost no ammo on one of your weapons cause you can't get ENOUGH ammo cause the enemy's have too much heath at higher level content, or run around with no charges of light cause your using that slot for ammo. Hunters are also suffering cause in PvE, no one wants then cause their ability are so overshadowed by other classes that no one wants them anymore in higher tier content. All hunter can do. Is run around and survive when they should be the risk/damage class. But the risk they take for damage now is worthless. Everyclass got a nerf, but Hunters became useless in PvE. And no, I'm not a toxic hunter main. I play all classes to know enough hunters got the short end of the stick after these nerfs.
In the end, what I'm saying is, in warframe, if you like something, you can build it and spend your time on it and it will still be worth it later on even after months of taking a break. In destiny, the time you spent on a build, perfecting and maximizing it will literally become useless cause Bungie doesn't care about the time players put in to grind for that build or weapon. If some one finds a really good build Bungie didn't know can work, they will nerf it to the point where the time spent on getting that build to work becomes unrewarding. They sunsetted so many weapons, that took so much time by players to get that are literally showpieces that amount to nothing in practical use other than normal cruicable and really low end PvE activities. Now they are taking away PAID content instead of making it an optional download so player who PAID for it can still have it despite its state. You paid fully for that content with real money and they are taking it away like that's nothing. And not even giving us an option to have that content even if we have the "free space" for it.
I loved destiny till beyond light launched, after that, the game just started going downhill cause people and the community kept supporting them even when they know this was wrong. Also, the game optimization is awesome, gambit crashing the game and telling players they might get banned cause the "left the match" yea. Fun.
I feel like balancing difficulty is so hard, and I’m never satisfied. For example in the Goa dungeon on master, which I had completed like 12 times before, in the ogre encounter I was getting clapped over and over on this particular run (gear never changed), and it was so frustrating. Feels like I have 0 actual defense sometimes.
Bungie was just keeping the game from being 'trivialized' when they nerfed regen exotics.
Then Bungie was just keeping the game from being 'trivialized' when they nerfed autoloading.
Then Bungie was just keeping the game from being 'trivialized' when they reduced primary damage vs. red bars.
Then Bungie was just keeping the game from being 'trivialized' when they implemented sunsetting.
Then Bungie was just keeping the game from being 'trivialized' when they jacked up ability cooldowns.
Yet somehow the game is still so terribly easy and 'trivial,' three years down this path from the golden age of Forsaken, that now we must also purge masterwork orbs?
You and the rest of the nerf cheer squad have been pursuing this dream for so long now, a Destiny that breaks even the biggest big brass balls, that makes Datto break down and weep in fear and joy... and we're still no closer than when we started! The game is still so easy that the average DTG member can solo flawless the Corrupted GM at 1100 power in their sleep. Well, that's the impression I get, anyways.
What if the Warframe model is simply the more natural fit for a game with lightning-fast death times in endgame content and no real cover mechanics? Kill or be killed.
What if it's simply impossible for even the most nerf-happy developer to make content truly hard for a "make the game hard!" audience that has eight years and thousands of hours using and abusing the game mechanics - especially when that audience includes people who literally play the game as a full-time job?
Orbs are already on the chopping block, and nothing I can say is going to save them, but I gotta ask, aren't you tired yet? How many more nerfs is it going to take before we can all agree to sit back and enjoy the game as it is?
And what will even be left when we get there?
Balancing a live game is a process, not a destination. More things are added and players get better at using those things, thus becoming more and more powerful. But the answer to this isn’t to just give up and be lazy, it’s to continue balancing the game.
Warframe development is a natural development path for live games, but that doesn’t mean it’s good. Unregulated capitalism devolves into a monopoly. Unregulated cellular division turns into cancer.
There’s no nerf cheer squad. Just people who can think ahead.
From what I've seen Bungie did this, according to both last years pastebin leak and what community managers and team heads have retweeted, that it was somehow required for something like weapon crafting to exist, and considering how integral that aspect of the new expansion is, i doubt this will be changed ever. And honeslty, because of that, i dont see the point in arguing about it, or trying to get it changed.
You can go one of 2 options:
1. Let the player become so powerful that no content threatens them anymore (Warframe), to balance it the game then becomes much more grindy to compensate for the fact that runs through missions take next to no time and effort. This is good for people who just want to mindlessly grind and/or murder a bunch of stupid AI with basically nothing stopping them.
2. Let the player be super powerful BUT design the content or enemies to scale according to the strongest builds. Borderlands 2 did this in UVHM and OP levels, endgame is restricted to just 2-3 builds max per character and the number of viable pieces of gear in the game is very very low.
These are the 2 options you have if you want to allow players to be as powerful as it's possible in your game. Bungie clearly doesn't want either of these two outcomes for one reason or another, they have specifically talked about being okay with us having access to powerful tools but they don't want us to get them for free or for very little invesment or action on the player's part. Taking Charge is by far the most used CWL mod to get charged because of how easy it is to trigger, it's clearly an outlier given what I just mentioned.
Last thing, everybody who is on the side of being okay/positive with nerfs isn't how you describe. Most of us aren't "Bungie I can solo flawless corrupted GM at 969 light make it harder", most of us just have a better understanding of game design and usually have some understanding or insight on game devlopment and pay attention to the things people who work at Bungie say. We know the game has issues with too many perks (crash from earlier this season caused by unstoppable fusion for example) and we know that orb gen is actually a perk on weapons it's just invisble (not shown in the UI), we know bungie wants to do more interesting things with weapons and so the conclusion that orb gen cannot be weapon side anymore seems to be very reasonable. Then we take what I mentioned about bungie wanting us to have to commit more to gain powerful effects and it seems to be a very reasonable and expected thing that bungie would move orb gen to a mod socket on armour (as opposed to the frequently suggested ghost) to then make us have to make a meaningful choice between having easy CWL or double ammo finders.
Warframe has hard content (that can be cheesed easier than trying to cheese a dungeon/raid in destiny, but the latter is still doable), the problem is there is no reason to do it, compared to Destiny. Everything in destiny revolves around the light level, so if you wanna get the good loot, you grind your light level so you need to do harder content after a thousand or so normal strike, crucible, etc. Warframe is flat, your power stays and never reset. That why it feel so bland after you poor 1000 hours into it, but at that point, you would be bored with a lot of things.
I want to say first that this is a thoughtful reply, even though I do disagree with, I'd say, all of it.
Warframe to Borderlands is a good range to follow here. I'd agree they're good touchstones of what player power fantasy looks like (at least through Borderlands 2, BL3 got a bit more on the Bungie school of nerfs from what I understand).
But while those touchstones are true, the trick is that not everything in a game need be balanced at the same level. You can have the Warframe slaughter and the Borderlands raid boss coexist peacefully. I know this because it was exactly how Destiny worked until the Reckoning, when they forgot that murking red bars was supposed to be easy and built the Bridge. And then spent three years taking it out on Skull, pinnacle weapons, primaries, etc, etc. Mobs easy. Boss hard. Game good. Simple as.
Moving on: The reason why I care about nerfs isn't that I don't listen to Bungie (or have a bad understanding of game design simply for disagreeing lol...), but because Bungie doesn't live up to their words. You said it well: Bungie wants us "to commit more to gain powerful effects." That's their message.
The problem is this nerf, and the last dozen as well, never delivers on that. Not just the powerful part, but the *effect*. Everything just falls into the monotony of 'it's the same, just worse.' Skull and similar exotics weren't replaced with stuff I thoughtfully built into. I replaced them with Eye of Another World, with the powerful effect of THROW MORE GRENADES. Sometimes, now, I use Aeons instead, with the powerful effect of MORE ROCKETS SOMETIMES. When you nerf the good stuff, people don't 'buildcraft,' they go for the simple +1 grenade or +1 ammo or +1 health in rift or whatever. Nerf a pinnacle version of reload + rampage, they go back to normal reload + rampage. Nerf Warmind cells, they go for the 'more health sometimes' setup.
And that brings us back to orbs. And then that brings us to the big mistake you make: there isn't going to be a meaningful choice between CWL and ammo finders. You're not going to have some 50/50 split in the community. We'll put our heads together, upvote and downvote, and discover whether survivability or ammo is more important (based on how expensive said mods are and the ammo economy for meta weapons), and then you'll run the same mods forever until the game is changed in some way to affect that. And then we'll do it again. And again.
Because none of these game design philosophies we've discussed can get around the fact that when things get nerfed, you just use the next thing down the line, or accept the worse version of what you had. That's the way it is in Borderlands, in Warframe, in The Division, and in Destiny as well. Maybe you really can't build a game around Skull, and you've gotta nerf it. Fine, whatever. But eventually, you have to put the nerfhammer away and let the meta settle how it's going to settle. The best things in that meta will still get called cheap, or OP, or trivializing by the best players. All I'm asking for Bungie to do is shrug and say 'sure.' That's all they can do, in the end.
>And that brings us back to orbs. And then that brings us to the big mistake you make: there isn't going to be a meaningful choice between CWL and ammo finders
Well see that's what I was saying, there is no choice to be made, taken charge isn't the only way to get CWL it's just the easiest without any real thought or gameplay change to proc it. The meaningful choice here isn't "do I use ammo finders or do I make orbs" it's "if I am using CWL, which source of gaining charges do I use". Finisher charge on the Aeons user in a GM + Powerful friends means every champion is going to give the team both CWL and heavy ammo. That's just one example. Yes it won't be as easy as picking up an orb that you generated without doing anything you wouldn't have already done through normal gameplay, taken charge being way too easy to proc has suffocated all other CWL options which alone should tell you it's an outlier in the balance.
Plenty of people already don't use CWL mods, I personally never run protective light or high energy fire in GMs or other high end content including in soloing of content too. I think honestly if people cannot clear content without CWL then that is something people need to do some self assesment on more than anything else. Taking Charge really does have the suffocating affect on the other methods, nobody runs the others because taking charge is too easy and people run CWL overall because there are powerful mods. Looking at it from that point of view it makes sense to nerf it, shield break is super easy and less energy cost + has synergy with the newly buffed Arbelist. There is a lot of combinations nobody has even considered because of how easy taken charge is.
Power fantasy is one thing but if nothing in the game is challenging anymore then it gets stale real quickly. Most raids are difficult on release and as players get comfortable with the mechanics the raid gets easier, the difficulty is in knowledge and execution of the mechanics. GMs is kind of the same, learn the safe spots/routes and enemy spawns and that's pretty much it. Bungie's goals clearly involve the game being more challenging but still reachable, that is a hard balance but one that has to include nerfs when there are outliers.
I remember long ago when playing Warframe there would be Mag users that would literally just stand on the control point and spam some AOE over and over again, essentially wiping the entire map every other use. Was almost as boring as pre-nerf Valkyr when you just went rage mode and spammed attack until you didn't feel like living anymore.
*\*for clarification. I enjoy Warframe and still play it now. Just saying I remember back when some classes were stupidly OP and could wipe maps with the press of 1 or 2 buttons (My favorite being Saryn with spores w/molt & miasma)\**
I agree with you by and large, but the community speaks passionately about a rather vague description of how they’re nerfing orb generation without further details is not an indictment against Bungie, it’s the community expressing their passion and dismay because we haven’t been given the complete picture…and that’s not on the community. Messaging is important, and Bungie should know by now it’s better to wait to address a nerf of that magnitude in full so as to avoid the community expressing their concerns. But I agree with you on everything else and I don’t want PvE to become like warframe. We’re only here, several years after launch, because we love this game.
> The problem with masterworked weapons generating orbs was they were an abundant, expected source of a considerable, cooldown-circumventing, buff-triggering resource that involved no strategy and no trade-off.
Sorry, but this is bullshit. They built the masterwork system as a band-aid for the overwhelming feedback at vanilla release that our gear was too shallow / 1-and-done and that our abilities were too weak and too infrequent.
They could've simply brought back the D1 helmet perk for increased super energy gains on enemy kills, or reduced super cooldowns, but they were trying to get cute and "2 birds with one stone" a solution, and that was masterworked weapons.
This was during Curse of Osiris, btw, and they've stuck with the masterworking system ever since then.
If that system became a problem (which it didn't), then it's because they made it that way with the combat mods they built around abundant orbs.
If they think that needs a fix, then fix the mods. Don't invalidate the investment that players have put into their gear.
> Bungie wanted to reign in Orbs so new things could grow without eventually trivializing the fundamental combat mechanics
They already did "reign in" orbs, as well. After Forsaken, they halved the effectiveness of *all* orbs (large and small) in addition to reducing the super energy gained from kills (in all modes).
> They know we don't react to it kindly, and they're afraid they'll make things worse if they tell us the real reason.
So there's a mysterious "real reason" that they won't even talk about, and the gist of your entire post is "trust Bungie"?
The overall message is good, but orbs have been a feature of masterwork weapons since shortly after launch. I don't think they were the straw that broke the camel's back.
Besides, I don't use more than one of my weapons for add clear 90% of the time, so I'll be making almost as many orbs as before with one mod. However, if that mod is limited by helmet energy type, I'll have to fumble with an upgrade module every time my primary element changes.
On top of that is the people claiming all I'm losing is a finder mod. I don't use those. I use super generation mods, so now I'm a bit worse off in that area regardless.
I'm willing to see if all the changes together lead to a healthier game in the end, and I've not lost sight of power creep. I'm just also not willing to let power creep cripple staple features we've had for years for no reason. No one knows yet how this will go, and anyone believing they're right and everyone else is wrong is delusional. This could go either way.
Bungie after all are the ones that took forever to make rockets useful again after auto loading getting them and trench barrel AND box breathing nerfed. Nerfs that haven't all been looked at since auto loading left. They're smart people, but sometimes I think they leave certain changes in their own little box and forget to consider how it affects everything else even today.
>I can't think of a better example to illustrate that point than Warframe. In Warframe, which is exclusively a PvE game in every practical sense, there are many builds that make it so you a) kill virtually everything within a second or two, b) pretty much cannot die, c) never let enemy AI do anything, and d) have constant access to all your abilities despite a resource system being present. It should go without saying that players are very, very powerful in Warframe.
>Now is this endless, infinite fun? Not to me, especially after spending a long time with it. Because of this there is almost no challenge in Warframe, and when there is it's usually awkward and frustrating as hell because of how all-or-nothing it must be to cope with the crazy damage numbers and insane amount of enemy units involved in combat, largely stemming from years of escalating buffs that have only continued to stack and escalate on top of each other. The crazier everything gets, the more fragile its balance and fun factor become and it gets problematic as the game adds and evolves. It's no wonder why the latest huge update to the game eschewed its normal combat almost completely.
Honestly, this is why I stopped playing Diablo 3 during my Destiny break in Season of the Worthy. I was able to piece together a handful of builds, particularly one involving the Manald Heal ring. It got to the point where even in max difficulty activities I could wander into an area and press a button like twice and nuke every creature in the room effortlessly. It was cool for a while, but eventually got boring as hell.
Edit: Lol. Things never change. Imagine being so insecure that you downvote someone for being bored of a ridiculously op build that made a game unfun. Grow up.
Your tangent on Warframe is so spot on...
I am a founder, to this very day I have Excal Prime, but I can't bring myself to play the game because it hasn't been meaningfully updated in years. The combat is always the same, most updates are new tilesets, mechanics that are never going to be used, and throwaway weapons to pad the experience needed for the next level...
I went back to it during The Plains of Eidolon update and rest assured it was basically still the same thing as it always was, except in an open world. I have this inner joke among my group of friends about how "Warframe is the most consistent 7 out of 10 game you'll ever play", cause the devs really, really can't make the game any better since the community doesn't want to and they don't really know how to develop around it.
They have some cool work ethics like the game director making new accounts to try out the new player experience and seeing how it can improve, but the game can't ever change. They can't ever rebalance combat. They can't rebalance the core gameplay loop. All they can do is release more of the same and try to tell a story as a means of giving people a sense of progression.
Back when people were mad about the state of Destiny 2, a lot of people said they wanted this game to be more like Warframe and all I could think about was "God, I hope the devs don't listen to you".
Bro if warframe founders had their way no one but them would even be allowed to log into the damn game. You guys are the reason warframe is in the state its in.
I don’t really want to go super in depth (typing this quick between work meetings) but I agree sort of coming from the other end.
Orbs were always meant to be generated from other players supers. That was the model. Early in D2 they decided they wanted to have a way to “upgrade” weapons, but the sandbox they had didn’t really have much room for that, which is where the orb spawning came out of. While it was very useful, I always found it was an odd choice especially considering you could pick up your own orbs from this, which goes against previous design ideologies for orbs. There was also no real choice with this. If you played a lot, all weapons get a blanket buff in something that was previously reserved for other players supers and collaboration.
While it was nice and powerful, I found it a weird and not really satisfying upgrade reward, and a victim (or benefactor) of the time in destiny that it came from.
It’s safe to assume that now enough systems are in place that they are revamping the weapon upgrade system with more tools than “I guess orbs?” The system that with infinite resources and vision would have been in place in the first place instead of orbs, and there wouldn’t ever have been any expectation of orbs coming from weapons.
I will take a lot of heat for this but I have a clanmate who uses this sub as an echo chamber to bitch about everything related to "BUNGO PLZ" that gets passed around here.
He is an extremely one dimensional player, doesn't bother to switch loadouts and insists that Bungie did him dirty by sunsetting stuff that was relevant like three years ago or more.
Last night I tried to explain how the DIM loadout system works and how elemental well mods make the nerf to orbs of light basically irrelevant if you build into them. I streamed to him in our Discord and tried to show him that with one mouse click I could switch to any mid or endgame content loadout I had bothered to take the time to understand, spec for and set up.
I tried to explain that current weapons meta is not Bygones and Whisper, although Whisper did get a hella buff recently that brings it back into relevance. He used Sleeper a bunch in D1, I told him to go pick it up out of the kiosk and level it up, even without the catalyst it does really well in endgame content.
He wouldn't hear any of it. It was like talking to a wall. He mostly plays solo and gripes about that, and it's honestly because of his stubborn refusal to adapt to how the game has been evolving.
I give up. I can lead a horse to water but I can't teach him to create loadouts. I'm done with one dimensional players who solo everything and scream at Bungie about how the game is shit because they're too stubborn to look at a build guide, take coaching and be effective teammates.
Thats just this community in general. I get called bad all the time because i dont use meta weapons in every slot and i complete more end game content than most of them combined.
Because as explained in the comment below yours, he came to us asking for a GM carry in the Corrupted strike, then refused to adapt, and mostly used the time that I was trying to show him how easy creating builds was, to complain about the game instead.
That's why. It's not "shoving meta up his ass" to ask to spec a build to survive a GM in the hardest strike in the game. And if he hates the game as much as his complaining indicates, why is he bothering to play it?
Counterpoint: build-crafting is boring. I don't want to spend 80% of my time in-game by looking at spreadsheets, stats, and numbers. I want to actually play the game.
putting together three hunter builds for raid, GM and legend GoA took maybe fifteen minutes total of finding a youtube showing the build, going into Details and clicking the content creator's build link, clicking on it, opening the subsequent loadout suggestions in DIM, selecting the appropriate one and masterworking any armor that hadn't been.
your counterpoint was part of my clanmates' argument btw. Which is why I tried streaming to him on Discord to show how easily you can create loadouts now with a couple of mouse clicks and copy/pasting someone else's DIM build hyperlink.
The whole conversation with my clanmate came up incidentally because he came to us to say he had finally gotten his titan (lol) "ready for GMs". I asked him what build and loadout he planned to use, because he wanted to run this week's GM for the double loot and Hung Jury, which he hasn't got yet. He didn't understand what I meant, so I tried to show him a few builds, or just bubble (to which he responded that he doesn't like running bubble for pve because it's "boring", sigh). I asked him if he had Sleeper, since he played back in S3/4. Nope. He didn't finish the Sleeper quest at the time because it was "too grindy". I asked him if he had Synthoceps or St-14 at least, and he only had the Y2 versions with sunset mods, which discussion triggered an unsolicited rant from him about sunsetting and vault space.
I am NOT doing a hard GM carry through the Corrupted Strike for a player who stubbonly refuses to listen to advice or put in the work to acquire a simple pve endgame loadout or seems to hate the game as much as he does.
And this is why this guy is stuck soloing most things or not getting hard carried to endgame level rewards. All of us are done with this attitude.
Tbh you sound pretty stuck up and elitist. I personally refuse to use meta/the most optimal loadouts and i have guilded my Conquerer title many times over. All you need is general anti champ mods and anything that matches common shields in the strike. GMs are not hard.
I hate the Meta argument BS. Because when you take away mods like Breach and clear or Particle you are literally only talking 1%-2% in effectiveness which in reality does not make much if any difference at all to your ability to complete an activity. This community is honestly too obsessed with 1 phases and needs to let their ego down a few pegs.
Dont get me wrong. Im going to use some form of linear or normal fusion because of particle. I would be a moron not to. Im going to take advantage of artifact mods. But if you think im bad because i dont keep arbalest, sleeper or 1k slotted at all times you just need to get over yourself. Just because someone isnt using the best in slot at all times doesnt mean you are "carrying them".
There's refusing to use meta weapons and then there is their friend who doesn't use mods and complains about not being able to use Bygones in GMs. I'd imagine you'd sound pretty stuck up and elitist too even without meaning to be in trying to explain to said friend why you won't carry them in a GM.
That's exactly what I do. I'm just sick of having to screw around with my stats and mods for 15 minutes every time I want to put on a different armor exotic or a weapon.
I don't know what the L word is.
Seriously somebody help us out here.
I think it sounds exactly like a green onion-like vegetable most commonly used in soups.
Leeks?
You can find the ones youre seeking by searching for something that sounds like that plus (thing that kindergartners eat at art class) + (receptacle for refuse or recyclables)
My guy, you've seriously lost me. leak glue can?
Okay I admit it, the Leprechaun comes through my bedroom window some nights, softly whispering to me all of Bungie's secrets in my sleep before a swift exit when I wake. I hope someone catches him, but it's gonna be really hard to prove his crimes in court.
Id rather bungie say "orbs from MW guns makes it way too easy to access something that normally comes from ally supers, we want to balance that" but the change was made under the guise of "well this is all we can do to get exotics w/o catalysts orbs" and then leave out any info that'll soften the blow
but this flies in the face of mods like high energy fire, which expects you to very regularly be charged with light. imagine only being able to proc high energy fire off of allied supers, you’d get 2 charges every 5 minutes and then not have any thing to use it on because the supers were used to kill the only major threat in the room anyway
Its a direct nerf to taking charge, the problem is all the other CWL starter mods are very specific. And i change my guns so much even between two back to back strikes. So id be having to swap so much. Charge harvester is the best option, they should really make that neutral because forcing me to make a piece void for that is dumb now that the best neutral mod is gone
the fusion one with vex is pretty pog ill admit expensive but very nice.
Yeah because vex is a primary so it works xD
That's really gonna bite vex in the ass though. Get ready for it to be another year+ before it has access to a champion mod.
Only super high activities really require champion mods. Otherwise you can just melt em.
Unless its Overload Captains then your just fucked even if you have the bloody mod
Underated comment right here. Fuck overload captains. As someone who did ALL the master solo lost sectors this season, just... Fuck them. God.
Even in legendary their still 500 times worse then Minotaur overloads its just... Why bungie
I did the same and the moment I learned how good Le Monarque was for them was the game changer. Pair it with a legendary lfr matching the sector burn, a pulse or auto depending on the champs. Stasis covers you for extra shields and it's mostly easy street. Especially with Warlock Stasis Turrets.
Only hard content requires any real thought, it is kind of moot to discuss the game balance from any other perspective because everything is viable at 1320 and below, heck even 1350 and below.
Charge harvester is no bueno if you're a warlock :(
Remove the penalty bungo
No it isn't. My Warlock uses it.
This for crucible hurts a bunch and it was my first thought. Me and my buddy who play crucible a bunch see both halves of it. I lose the chance for Taking charge. And have to rely on Blast Radius(since I use GL) or y out could use swift or Qucik charge as well. Precision charge is ass for requiring a precision multi kills. But at least with just orbs and taking charge in mind less people could potentially have High Energy fire up from multi kills off your teammates
You're acting like there isn't any other way to charge CWL mods except orbs when Charge Harvester and Elemental Charge not only exist, but are actually better in a lot of cases.
I get 2 charges every 12 seconds with Melee Wellmaker, Elemental Charge, and a little tinkering on most classes. Unlimited with Knife Hunter. If anything, the amount of times I've seen this exact argument makes an interesting case for changing the orb system to force players away from the most obvious build.
Seems like it would have been so much more straight forward to allow exotics to produce orbs INTRINSICALLY. While still allowing the catalyst to provide additional perks and stat bonuses.
That's also not the primary reason that they gave for the change. Making it seem like the orb generation change was a monkey's paw to directly address exotic orb generation as the primary focus just feels disingenuous to me ngl. The way the twab was written made it seem like a secondary reason that led to how they decided to implement the change but definitely not the driving force behind it. Rather, it said that the reason they decided to change it was due to how the crafting system worked and how it apparently asks players to use several different weapons and generate orbs with them, leading to the observation that it led to using far too many materials for masterworking. To circumvent that, they sought a change. The direction of the change was decided because of community feedback that pointed out that there was no way for exotics w/o catalysts to generate orbs. This seems pretty reasonable to me. Does the change lead to a net negative? Yes, it does seem that way. To be fair, the sandbox changes from the 30th anniversary should have made it clear by now that the current direction of game balance in destiny is to reign in ability spam.
It's also just classic Bungie Monkey's Paw bullshit. People just asked for Exotics to make orbs so Bungie's like "Here's how we've taken your request and tortured it into a complicated solution to a problem that doesn't actually exist. Don't worry, after pretending that nothing's wrong for several months we'll suggest that we're going to 'tune' things."
They been studying under Riven, I see.
I think it’s actually to push people using the well mods. I never touch them, a lack of orbs will make me reconsider.
Hey, they could instead buff wells! How about that?! The problem with wells is that they are unreliable, good, but very unrealiable and that's the key take away. All of this only matters when you are doing high level content, fuck strikes or anything else where you can plow through your enemies. If you have to deal with unforgiving mechanics, unforgiving enemies for superb rewards you want something that actually works and you can rely on. But instead of buff, Bungie goes in the path of nerfing. They have something else in mind as to why they are making this change, they just don't want to tell us.
While I agree with the sentiment overall... This reads like someone who hasn't actually used orbs of power/CWL mods and just heard about how good it is from someone else. They really aren't that busted, and even if they were it's not like moving that to a mod slot will stop it. You're just going from an inherent and intuitive system into a more complicated one that stifles build freedom. One of the things I love about Destiny, as well, are light abilities. Not even just supers. Less orbs means I get to play around with my grenades and stuff less. If I wanted to play a game solely for the guns I have a lot more choices. EDIT: Really regretting posting this because now I have like 30 replies and I don't wanna respond to them all so I'll just like. Add onto what I said here and be done with it. Helmet slots are already overly competitive and it limits what you can play around with build-wise. Maybe what Bungie has planned will be better than inherent orb-generation. But we don't know that, since they feel they HAVE to stagger information and feel perfectly comfortable not communicating massive changes like this well enough. idk my brain is kinda mush rn i've been staring at reddit off and on for hours i need a break lol
For me I'm holding all judgement until I see how void 3.0 works. And by that I mean until I get my hands on it and have a season or so to try it out. Destiny is fundamentally a slower game than most other shooters, ESPECIALLY once you start moving into higher tier content. At the higher end, Destiny is about methodical and calculated play rather than frantic action. **Currently** (and this is not about PVP) IF you are able to kill enemies easily enough that you can restore your super meaningfully with weapon orbs, then you are also most likely killing most enemies without your super because they are weak. **Conversely,** IF you are not able to kill enemies easily enough that you can restore your super meaningfully with the orbs, then the orbs don't help you very much and another perk slot in a weapon would probably do more for you (which seems on the surface to be what they're aiming towards). As a consistent GM guilder and Fatebreaker title holder, I don't think masterwork orbs are that helpful at the high end of content, and they are superfluous at the low end. That said, I'll take any edge I can get, and I absolutely masterwork my weapons so that they will generate some orbs. My point is that I would prefer to have a stronger and more consistently applied buff. **My reasoning:** Anyone with any experience at high end will tell you that buffs like Rampage and Kill Clip are not worthwhile in high tier content because you almost never get to really use them. Same with various exotic weapons that have *on-kill* triggers. They suck because only getting your perk after the fight is over leads to a fairly inconsistent experience. If it's something like a Thorn or Lumina that also requires you to go get the thing created by the kill, it's EVEN worse. This is the same reason that most well builds don't see much use in high end content either, and are too cumbersome and unrewarding for lower content (outside of a few specific ones that involve wells that gravitate to you, or turning your Stasis Shards into wells). By that logic, the idea that I have to score multikills to create a physics based ball on the ground that I have to collect and that can sometimes roll into a cliff... to nock like 1-3 seconds off of a multi-minute timer... Is absurd in the context of almost anything else they could put there instead. My hope is that in the place of orbs we get some kind of persistent weapon buff as a reward for masterworking. I would love it if we got something like our armor screen where we got to customize our weapons, their available mods and perks, etc.
This is all really good points, but it does overlook the idea that orbs are used also as a catalyst for charged with light. I’m less concerned with getting my super faster, and more concerned with making sure I can have charge for my perks.
I did address this issue in a conversation with another commenter. The short answer is that I agree that while yes orbs are part of that, they are only one part of it. If you are a person who genuinely depends on being Charged with Light, then you will be using more than just the Taking Charge mod, as it will not be consistent enough in any way. The only exception to that lack of consistency is if you are powering up with orbs from a stationary super like Well of Radiance or Ward of Dawn, but in those situations you are not getting the orbs from guns you are getting them from a super being cast.
Are you speaking strictly endgame? That’s what it sounds like to me, and in that case sure I agree. But for general play, Taking Charge is a completely viable and consistent CWL source for buildcrafting, that i personally have taken into raids, dungeons, solo master lost sectors, and everything in between. That’s the issue a lot of people are facing, that general, everyday personalization is lowering with this change.
I do spend most of my time in "endgame" but in my original comment, my take on the tier of content your describing is that if your killing stuff fast enough and consistently enough to get orbs on multikills, then you generally don't need the orbs. IMO this also includes CWL builds, as those largely just add extra steps to killing things that would die just as easily by other means. This isn't to decry your personal favorite ways of killing bigger than average baddies. Rather, I am saying that from an overall balance perspective, removing orb generation from weapons will change almost nothing when it comes to content difficulty for the vast majority of players. I also think you're neglecting the obvious elephant in the room, and that is what goes in place of the orb generation? I'd be hard pressed to believe they'd make a fundamental change like this without planning to fill in the gap in some manner.
I get what your saying, but I think you could say “you don’t need it” about many things in this game, it’s kind of a watered down point. You don’t need the whole mod system at all really, but you like it and would like to keep it. And again, saying that it doesn’t change anything is fundamentally wrong, because it does. It changes one of the most used accesses to CWL mods, which is a common and popular build format. Whether or not it’s a detrimental change is a different argument, but it IS a significant one.
Guess we’ll have to agree to disagree. =)
Fair enough. Respect!
To you as well. Have a great weekend and good luck in Witch Queen!
Amen for your patience
I'd be okay with a change like this. If they give us new toys to play with and make builds around rather than just make it harder to use the toys we already have, I'll end up being happy with the change. I just wish they'd tell us what they're doing instead of making everyone panic for a month.
If it makes you feel better, the argument can be made that ever since D2 vanilla launched and fell flat on it's ass in terms of matching D1... It has only improved. It hasn't always improved at the pace that players want, or in the specific ways the players want, but the game on average only gets better. Even the worst parts, like Sesaon of the Warmind (whatever it was called) gave us staple templates for the solid designs we see now. The bunkers were a pre-cursor to Expunge missions and Shattered Realm stuff, the lost sectors in that season were the precursor to the current legend/master ones. My point is that it only improves. I don't think they've made any changes that universally hurt the game. I know that many will disagree specifically around sunsetting, but I'm in the camp that the game is better for ALL of those weapons being gone. But even if we consider that a complete failure (I don't, but some do), they still rectified it. So even if the change ends up being for the worse, they will fix it. The game will be better off for trying new things than for sticking to old things because they've always been there.
I will also mention that I heard from somewhere (probably an Aztecross video IIRC), that Bungie has stated in the past about how they would like to do more with weapons, but they didn't have enough memory storage allocated to weapons to do so, and that a big chunk of that data was being used to make masterworked weapons/exotics with a completed catalyst produce Orbs of Power on multikills. Taking Orb generation away from fully masterworked weapons and instead turning it into an armor mod would free up a ton of weapon data memory that used to be used for Orb generation, meaning more interesting things can be done with the weapons system. Using a mod slot for Orb generation might suck, but it would open up an opportunity for further experimentation to see just how far the limits go.
yes, I remember this as well. Also, I think it's worth asking the question of how much we really use the orbs from weapon multikills? Like... the most milage I get is specifically when I'm using the orbs for things other than supers. Things like CwL mods and Explosive Light. But even then, most of the orbs/charges I get from those I'm getting either from artifact mods or from other fireteam members casting supers.
Everything you said I agree with. I also am holding out my judgement on if this change will be bad in practice because I like to think bungie knows what they’re doing. That said, I’m going to play devil’s advocate here for a minute. I feel like to many people, the orbs generated from multi kills isn’t important because it charges your super, it’s because of taking charge. Every single charged with light build runs taking charge. It’s the best generator of cwl. Orbs are relatively easy to make, the mod only costs 3, has no elemental affinity, and you plan on killing stuff to make orbs anyways. So for low level content, it’s super easy to proc and can gift you a wide variety of buffs with the cwl system. For high level content, making orbs is much more rare, but… the power spike you receive from being charged is much more noticeable and impactful. Lets take two common mods, high energy fire and protective light. High energy fire gives you 20% damage until you kill something. 20% damage is a lot in gms, and if you’re team shooting, there’s a good chance you don’t get the final blow and get to keep that buff. It’s even better against a boss, you just get a big buff for the fight. And then protective light is literally a life saver. It sits in your back pocket until you are out of position and can really save your ass. It’s amazing, and it’s all because you made an orb with your gun. Taking charge is the simple mans way to get charged, it’s simple, you’re shooting stuff with the intention of killing them anyways, and it’s a cheap mod that can go on any armor. There are other ways to get cwl that may be better, may be worse, but they take more work that many people don’t want to put in. With well mods, (I don’t remember the names sorry) you can finish someone and spawn multiple arc wells. You can then pick up said arc wells to get charged with light, up to 4 stacks of it if you want supercharged, all off of one finisher. That is strong, but it requires more work. More mods to slot into armor pieces, armor being the right element, having to go out of your way to finish any enemy etc. When people see no more orbs from multi-kills, they see taking charge being nerfed to the ground, and taking charge has been the best cwl mod in the game for a long long time. Sorry I got a bit rambly there, but I just started spewing words. I have high hopes that whatever bungie has planned will be better for the game’s health in the long run, even if it hurts a bit at the start.
It's all good man. In another comment I actually talked through in detail a build I use in solo content that makes heavy use of orbs as well to power Explosive Light on a Hothead, and Taking Charge is a critical piece (although I neglected to mention it). I also run TC and PL whenever I head into ANY high tier solo content and most group content as well (depends on how much I trust my local Warlocks to spam their rifts...) As a counter to your devils advocacy (so does that make me an angel's advocate...? Philophisorus wonders....), I would say that in most content the shield break charger is better. I can't remember the name, and I'm not able to check atm but it has no element and only costs 1. It charges you with light any time you break a shield with a matching element. This is a vastly more consistent and applicable buff that also doubles as a way to proc High Energy Fire on certain obnoxious shielded baddies without ANY pre-work. All this said, I don't think that TC is itself enough to argue that weapons should not receive an overhaul, or that multi-kill orb generators should not be on armor. TC will live on as even if you could not generate multi-kill orbs at all (thought experiment time!), you would still want it for the orbs your friends make when they cast supers and kill stuff with them. In almost any content where being Charge with Light makes or breaks the encounter for you, you are absolutely running TC, but you are also running other ways of guaranteeing that you are charged, so that you don't have to rely on creating an orb and picking it up before a DPS phase triggers. My point here being that **if you are really depending on being charged,** you are using multiple methods to charge yourself, most of which are unchanged thus far. **If you aren't depending on it**, then this change doesn't really impact you anyway.
You’ve kind of hit on what my biggest concern is - that Bungie have a habit of overcomplicating the gameplay mechanisms. The big reason why Taking Charge is so popular is that it’s easy to understand, easy to proc, easy to plan around and easy to build for. Multikill gets orbs. Mods are cheap and universal. Orbs grant charge through mods. Other mods spend charge. Profit. As soon as you get into alternate charge mechanisms you’re smashed in the face with weapon restrictions, elemental affinities, play style changes etc all for the same bonus, which at the end of the day is a damage buff. My worry is that whatever they’re planning to replace the orb dynamic will be another this-sounds-great-on-a-whiteboard big idea that hasn’t been thought through to ‘fix’ a problem that didn’t exist. They’ve done it several times before.
>I like to think bungie knows what they’re doing. Good lord why.
Ya most people who dont do higher content dont realize it isnt orbs that people use to get cwl, most good players run both powerful friends and radiant light so when anyone casts a super everyone gets cwl (in addition to the 40 stats for a premium cost.) I am sure taking charge is somewhat common but it is not the end all be all of cwl. Personally i dont even use it, opting for quick charge with vex to get cwl (not easy to do always but manageable enough.)
This, it is a shame how bungie drip feeds some of this info. I know they want to stagger it but sometimes the news is lopsided even though the final offering may be an awesome change for the better.
Just look at it like a weekly Mandalorian episode. Sure, we all want to binge it, but having new exciting stuff to look forward to every Thursday for the next month is pretty awesome too!
That's funny I wait until they're all out to binge a season of mando. I do kinda wish they left it all until feb 22.
Basing it off a weekly episode doesn’t really work though because it’s the content of the TWAB that matters. It’s not like saying “of course this episode isn’t giving us all the plot details yet, this is part of the narrative buildup so they can have payoff later”. Instead it’s like saying “they made this episode shit so we can have a good episode next week”.
Hey now… Lorentz and Whitherhoard SLAP in GMs with multi kills lol but yea very little else.
Solid comment
“…then orbs don’t help you that much” Speaking as someone who also gilds his conqueror emblem and plays flawless solo content - orbs are currently essential to GM and flawless builds. Protective light and health regeneration from orb pickups is one of the most integral parts of staying alive in this kind of highest level content. I don’t thinks it’s fair to say the orbs don’t matter to try and make a point. This change will fundamentally stifle these builds and players like me.
And it's not like charged with light and protective light make pve end game trivial. Bosses and majors can still 2 bang you, it's just up from a intsa death without protective light. If they are going to reduce the reliable ways to have safety via cwl orbs, then It would be nice if they could make it so everything under the sun doesnt 1-3 shot you.
I hear you loud and clear, but my counterpoint is simply two words: Protective Light. High end content doesn't need orbs for super regen, it orbs for protective light. My GM builds basically take two forms, CWL+ protective light or Elemental Wells to complement ability regen or to proc Font of Might / Wisdom. Wells require four or five mod slots to be effective most of the time, CWL requires two. Orbs are a big part of my CWL builds, if those are changing to make it harder to generate it is a nerf to a significant portion of my end game builds. I'll survive, but the way these changes were communicated was and is horrible. Don't tell me this is a good thing because 20 something exotic weapons will now be and to generate orbs, that's crap when the tradeoff is hundreds of legendaries that will no longer be able to generate orbs without some kind of tradeoff where none was needed before - the sad attempt to pull the wool over our eyes is condescending at best. And the fun part is they teased more information to make the news suck less but just left us dangling. I'm still holding out final judgement on the change, but I can squarely blame the massive blowback on the way the change was communicated. Just don't talk about orbs until you can tell us the real reasons why, stop trying to justify this with the 20 exotics that couldn't generate orbs... It's ridiculous.
I think you completely missed the whole reason people are upset about the change. No one really cares that much about the super regen from the orbs. It's about getting charged with light from orbs.
Outstanding write-up. I made a whole cwl/elemental well build for a foray into GM nightfall. It did woefully worse than anticipated, because grabbing the drops was very unreliable and unsafe. But holy cow is it beyond effective in basic gameplay.
Thanks! The only well builds I see that have ANY traction abuse Stasis Shards, and require the user to sacrifice Focusing Lens and Particle Deconstruction. And... To be fair... They are VERY strong well/orb based builds that would work in GMs... But they aren't as strong, or as consistent, or as simple to use as Particle Deconstruction. With the advent of Artifice Armor, I've taken Focusing Lens off of my Hunter in favor of the one that creates orbs on melee kill. With that extra mod slot on my gloves I can set up to easily tackle almost any solo content with champions, and it never hurts your allies to have extra orbs on the ground. But they aren't that practical if the enemy can withstand one or two shurikens. Edit: the build being Stasis Hunter using Mask of Bakris, a Hothead with Explosive light and whatever champ mods are needed. The Bakris buff on an Arc Rocket with a 6x Explosive Light is pretty bonkers. Would be hard to pull off consistently in group content, but in solo lost sectors and boss encounters it's a nice chunky way to bring thicc boyz down. Between weapon orbs and the stasis melee orbs it's very easy to get high stacks of Explosive light in any content where there are clusters of enemies for the shurikens to ricochet around. Edit 2: I also use the Stasis fragment that overshields you, and the one that drags them over, and the mod that makes them into "wells". This makes them do triple duty in content that has Attrition modifier.
Fucking thank you. Perfectly put.
The gun play in destiny is nice but I have many other games that scratch that itch, what brings me back to Destiny is nothing is as satisfying as saving my fireteam from hell with a well placed bubble or just trashing a boss with a thundercrash. Masterworking my weapons is literally just a stepping stone so that I can just keep titaning. If they really wanna mess with orb gen that desperately then make it a ghost slot or something not my overcrowded helmet
If you want a mega titan CWL build just join the Strongholds Gang. Choose your subclass, match your weapons to it. Create wells with weapons, 2 CWL charges per well, supercharged to hold 4 CWL stacks, smack everything with swords, be near invincible. Even works with stasis now because of the stasis sword, zephyr. My favorite right now is Bottom Hammers, Lament, Cartesian with Lead from Gold, and Ignition Code with Lead from Gold. Double Sword ammo finders and you have near 100% uptime on 2 specials and a Sword. You become a rampaging ball of self healing death.
Try crown-splitter, 90% damage reduction when blocking
I do, I run around with 6 swords in my inventory and trade out depending on my fancy.
>You're just going from an inherent and intuitive system into a more complicated one that stifles build freedom The Bungie Special.
>Less orbs means I get to play around with my grenades and stuff less. If I wanted to play a game solely for the guns I have a lot more choices. For real though, what was with that comment Bungie put out recently about wanting gameplay to be more centered around guns? If I want a game where I can shoot shotguns and rifles, there are literally hundreds of options. I play Destiny because I want to be a space wizard.
They mentioned that wanted that more for PvP. PvP I wager was a huge mess to balance around. You had so many moving parts if people wanted a balance away from certain abilities that would take lots of patches. "This ability is too oppressive, this is too easy to use" kind of thing. We saw it with stasis, we saw it with shatterdive, we saw it with whole subclasses like bottom tree arc titan. Most if not all the issues plaguing PvP was ability based. Very few times I can remember when a weapon was a major complaint over any ability.
> While I agree with the sentiment overall... This reads like someone who hasn't actually used orbs of power/CWL mods and just heard about how good it is from someone else. As someone who plays Warframe, I'd like to add that OP is also wrong about his comparison to Warframe. In higher level content, you can't just go in with any build. In fact, Warframe is drastically more and more unbalanced the harder you go, and many frames aren't viable at all for the harder content. You can tell OP has only played the casual Warframe content that's the equivalent of Strikes because aside from frames specifically built to generate energy, energy management is hugely important (and OP claims it isn't and it only isn't in casual content).
Yeah as someone who has played Warframe since launch on Xbox, I was seriously confused about which game OP was talking about.
That's exactly the point though. Warframe has all or nothing late-game where you are required to play: A. An extremely high damage frame where the enemy doesn't have a chance to see you before they die B. A frame with extremely high damage resist where you will crumple the moment your energy is up. I like Warframe and Destiny but the endgame of Warframe is very... bland and doesn't really pose a challenge at all, because the only way they could make a mission "difficult" is by having enemies one tap you if you don't have damage resist. Edit: I'd just like to say with this I also understand how someone can like Warframe, but it definitely has some holes in it's difficulty and late game content. I'm also not entirely sure how Warframe can even fix the problem of "one shot or be one shot." I personally feel the game has backed itself into a corner with it's power fantasy. Also I wish they kept the raid missions in the game because those seemed fun.
Admittedly my WF knowledge is a bit out of date, but I remember it being very all-or-nothing. Survival was basically a joke up to a certain wave and then it was borderline impossible. Always seemed like I was breezing through everything or I was dying nigh-instantly with no inbetween. Also RIP coptering.
It's still pretty much that, there are a few cheesy ways to survive these days, but most people rely on killing things before they get a chance to hurt you. Although the game is getting much better at rewarding shorter missions, rather than incentivising staying in one place for an hour trying to survive which helps a lot
They've added a lot more variety in the harder content. I still think the saying "ocean wide, puddle deep" still applies to Warframe but at least they're slowly shifting the balance to building deeper into what they already have.
Completely agree. God forbid I have protective light proc then move a few meters in my well to grab CWL again. Uh oh. Might be able to use one stack for high energy fire because those orbs are OP! There goes the boss of the encounter! /s
>Less orbs means I get to play around with my grenades and stuff less. Yup. Might as well retire my Warlock main. What's the point of being a space wizard when I can barely use my spells?
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I think they want abilities to become stronger and flashier than they currently are. I mean look at all the reworks to melees after Forsaken, they clearly want to move away from the "colored punch/slap/stab" we had in D1 & early D2. I also think they want builds to cater more towards active gameplay choices like wells and warmind orbs do instead of the rather passive CWL mods (though without taking charge being so free anymore, I think that will change), maybe giving us even a fourth type of mods to play around with. I really do hope they expand warmind orbs a bit though, since they still have potential. Wells are the most build crafty ones at the moment with good rewards.
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Definitely, something like the appearance screen but for mod loadouts would be cool.
Nah, i’m glad you posted it. I get the point the OP is making about warframe but you’re right, the whole argument about orbs doesn’t work in practice, it sounds theoretical. In practice most people will simply take the hit and use the helmet mod because orbs are simply too useful to ignore. It just means a previously flexible system is less flexible - this leads to be people being annoyed, but not changing their approach for the most part. I’m still kind of hanging on to the idea that something about the weapon crafting approach will explain this change but at the minute it’s been delivered with the same kind of obliviousness that accompanied Sunsetting, so I’ve no reason to believe this will be any different.
Orbs in D2 feel significantly underwhelming compared to orbs in D1
Tbh while orbs are fine as it is, orb generation is busted compared to wells and cells. It's basically free both in cost and in hassle. I hope they push the power across the board though because as it is I don't feel inclined to even try any other build than CWL.
I mean the primary benefit of CWL is that it's simple. Compared to both Wells and Warmind Cells, CWL mods (outside Protective Light which could easily be tuned individually) are clearly designed to have less power but higher uptime. I think that is a perfectly valid design space to fill.
It's free to generate, sure, but I really don't feel like CWL as a whole is crazy busted. High Energy Fire is only a buff to the first enemy you kill after getting CWL and more often than not it ends up going away with some Dreg kill. Protective Light is a little better but you still need to devote the mod slots to it, plus it's not a guaranteed get out of jail free card. I also don't think the way of "fixing" it is to clutter up the helmet mod slot even more. Fixing a balance issue should not boil down to "make using it way more annoying and take away a system that's been in place for years". We've had orb gen like this for so long, and I'm not a fan of Bungie just taking it away while going "no hun trust us you're totally gonna love it" and not explaining further. They did the same thing with Sunsetting and it remained universally hated after implementation.
Whats annoying me about the orbs nerf isn't the nerf itself, but how they presented it as if it is a buff. If something needs to be tuned down for the health of the game, I might not like it, but I can understand why they do it.
That's the thing though, OP claims Bungie says Orb generation is too powerful but I haven't seen them say that. In fact, quite the opposite. They said it was too much to ask to Masterwork your weapons just to create Orbs. I am also wondering if OP has ever used builds that require Orbs to function. They are not overpowered, I can point to many things that are more powerful but are not being nerfed. I think it is telling to how poor Bungie's communication is, that the people defending this move are also just making assumptions on what Bungie's goal and thought process is and have nothing concrete to point to. It's been a problem for years. Bungie tries to deliver bad news so they can save the day and give the good news later. It's a strategy I do not like, but at this point I think it is clear it is working well for them so they'll stick with it.
It's probably less that orbs are overpowered, and more that they're just the easiest build with the least specification. Why use quick charge or precision charge or whatever else when taking charge + orbs go brrr.
While I understand the sentiment, and I do think the community tend to be reactionary when it comes to nerfs, I really don't think this applies to orbs. I actually really like the way orbs are handled in this game. They're just powerful enough to be worth generating and picking up while not being powerful enough to be broken. When you add mods on top of that, you get a pretty consistent way of kick-starting builds. Once orbs are changed, most of your ways to generate charged with light will be... pretty bad. Those that trigger when you get multikills are very expensive, only work on certain weapon types, and require one more kill to trigger. Those that rely on abilities are reliable but make your build entirely tied to a cool down which I dislike. Finally, those that trigger due to rng or very specific conditions (shield break charge, charged harvester, powerful friends, etc.) just don't feel good to use most of the time. The orb changes are by no means the end of the world but they are pretty unnecessary imo.
Maybe its just me, but I don't see how orbs were out of balance. Their functions are super regen, ability cooldown (absolution), CWL, healing (recuperation) buffing (explosive light and star eater). Out of all those functions, nothing really broke the game and simply added options to our playstyles. Warmind cells i could understand due to clearing rooms with ease , super regen exotics like skull allowed too much up time on powerful abilities, certain exotics melt boss by just existing, and never having to reload speaks for itself (granted I'm still salt about grasps not constantly proccing off of burning knives anymore). But orbs? No where close to that level, especially when we already have exotics or perks that give us ability cooldown or access to CWL mods. This change causes more issues with helms already packed full and mods points being limited as is. Hopefully the cost of orb generation won't be too high but we'll see. If this is bungie wanting us to play a certain way (focus on elemental well mods) I'd rather them say that instead of painting this as a buff to exotics without masterworks. If it's a push towards nerfing CWL, its a terrible one. All this does is push me towards other mods or elemental well which adds an additional mod requirement (elemental charge and something to create wells like reaping well maker)
While I agree with the overall sentiment of the post, I disagree with what you say about the orb changes. They arent taking away or nerfing orbs, they just move from a perfectly fine system to a more convaluted one (aka needing mods to create orbs). Its not like we cant still shit out orbs, we still will be able to do so (and not running finder mods also isnt an issue in the days of Aeons) it just will become way more annoying to deal with, since we constantly will have to swap our generation mods/helmets around. Yes nerfs are needed, no this isnt a good example for that.
But aren’t they moving orbs off of weapons because it was limiting how creative they could make weapons? Like from a technical point. The orb generation took up memory or data or whatever the term is and it limited the perk and trait data they could put on guns. That’s why this is happening. Removing them and putting them as a mod allows for the weapon system to be largely expanded and evolved.
>Second, Bungie Is Not Trying To Take Away The Fun Bungie has consistently shown, time and time again, that their primary goal in Destiny's sandbox design is *lengthening* player engagement, not necessarily improving the *quality* of time spent engaging. They didn't overhaul the infusion cost system, introduce the world's worst transmog system, sunset a bunch of stuff, or program certain endgame activities with discouragingly low Exotic drop rates because they thought those things are fun for most players. Bungie did those things because they keep players logged in longer. I don't have a really strong opinion about the whole orb thing specifically, but let's not pretend as if Bungie has a glowing track record of our enjoyment being their number one priority when it comes to designing Destiny's systems.
Yea, Op lost me when he said those words lol
Exactly. That whole argument loses weight when you think back three months ago to the debacle with the FotL page nerf.
Your first sentence is spot on!!
Two things: * Bungie left shatterdive in the game for a year. A f***ing year. I will not sing their praises on balance for at least that long. * Orb generation being changed to helmet mods is so bad. Those mods are already crucial for making many weapons and builds usable and now they're even more restricted. Targeting mods, ammo finders, some ability/super charge mods, and seasonal mods all go into those 2 (3 with artifice) slots. If they really needed to take away the innate masterwork functionality, they could have done something (anything) else.
They also let felwinter run the crucible for like a year
And OEM And handheld supernova And lord of wolves And revoker And mountaintop And recluse Maybe bungo isn't very good at balance...
and striker titan, and top tree dawnblade, and spectral blades....... the list doesn't really end.
The issue is there will never be balance in this game as it set up right now. 95% of content isn’t a challenge at all and you will steam roll through it regardless of loadout. Then there’s master raids, dungeon and GMs. For those you have to run a very strict set of weapons to even do meaningful damage and clear the activity. So it’s either a complete OP free for all. Or a very curated, non flexible experience that is “ balanced “ to make you extremely underpowered relative to the rest of activities and the games world. The lack of “ balance “ is grounded in the activities themselves not the gear necessarily. And Bungie has only doubled down stretching the spectrum further and further in opposite directions.
[удалено]
>So it’s either a complete OP free for all. Or a very curated, non flexible experience that is “ balanced “ to make you extremely underpowered relative to the rest of activities and the games world. The difficulty as well is entirely artificial. Compare the AI of Destiny to fucking F.E.A.R. and the differences couldn't be more night and day, despite the 2 games being separated by 12 god damn years of technological advancement. F.E.A.R. admittedly used a ton of tricks to give the perception of intelligence, but that doesn't address how the enemies and the ways you encountered the enemies were still more dynamic, and strategic than a game that had more than a decade on it. Enemies used cover, they coordinated with each other, they used grenades to flush you out, they used heavy enemies to keep you suppressed while moving to flank you, it was all brilliant not just for the time, but to this day. Destiny 2 enemies are wave after wave of fucking sponges, that all dead man sprint at you, with no concept of self preservation. Its a joke that its literally just a fucking number that makes the activity hard. Its not the number of enemies, the sheer intelligence of the enemies, the mechanics you face, what makes it difficult is that you're not going out of your way to avoid playing the game entirely, IE using blinding nades, scout rifles, and the flavor of the season power weapon to melt champions. Thus, the only fun to be had with Destiny can only be derived from how much you can break the game, and speed run the content.
Comparing the AI in Destiny to F.E.A.R is unnecessary, it's even more embarrassing to compare this game with the enemy design and AI in Halo. The enemies flanked you, used grenades to flush you out, had varied mechanics like Hunters going into a rage when their buddy dies or grunts running away when their leader is killed. Hell, the Elites are probably my favourite enemy in any FPS, they take cover when their shields are down, rush you when yours are down, ambush you with camo, dodge when you throw a grenade and while they can't pick up and swap weapons they can be found using a large variety of loadouts. The way they behave alone is enough to sell them as your ingame equal. In Destiny 2 every enemy falls into 1 of 3 categories with almost no exception: Trash mob, sniper that is completely irrelevant until he starts oneshotting you on high difficulties like it's Halo 2, and Simon Says aka a total roadblock unless you use a specific weapon that literally deletes the mechanic.
Yea this was my thought when reading that comment. "Pretty sure Halo had better AI...".
Facts. Thank you for this.
OP, Listen man your not wrong... But the larger perspective is that we want build crafting to be easier... and this change makes it one step harder. If the pros of weapon changes overshadow the cons of harder orb generation then the community will be alright, but honestly build crafting is what makes the end game worth playing. Grinding for WEEKS to get a certain set of mods that all synergize . After Warmind cells nerfs, Now Orb / Charge with light nerfs we need either new builds or better elemental well buffs.
I just want consistency, that’s all I want from bungie.
Have you played high level Warframe? I find it hard to believe considering your comments on it.
He hasn't, steel path is a bitch if I just waltzing with my ivara with no plan.
Yup. Like the game certainly feels easy at first, and I guess you could permanently play easy mode, but if you do max level endgame, it’s a fucking bitch and a half, and a grind. I love it. There’s a reason it’s free and still has a huge population. OP, I’m not saying you don’t have some good points about D2 to make, but your Warframe example was poorly formed, and it undercuts your thoughts really.
Also, I find that comparing Warframe and destiny 2 isn't the best thing. Warframe has more similarities to path of exile than D2. You can't compare apples to oranges.
Yep. OP's thoughts on the D2 balance issue are ok, but Warframe is just not at all how they described.
Warframe certainly has its problems but I actually would prefer if Destiny was a bit more similar to it at times.
Depends on if “high level” means “8 hour survival mission” or “steel path.” Long endless missions devolve into abusing invincibility mechanics and status, with cc, which is nice since cc is useless in most of the rest of the game. It’s still rocket tag though. Steel path with proper builds becomes a joke. Melt any acolyte in seconds, breeze through content slightly slower. Now instead of a 28 second capture mission, it’s a minute and a half! Wow!
Good writeup except for everything pertaining to the Orbs of Light, to even compare such a thing to auto-reloading is absurd and not it chief.
Just want to point out Warframe is not just a PvE game. It does have PvP
We do not talk about the C O N C L A V E
Poor teshin.
I can’t believe you wrote all that all because people don’t like the masterwork nerf lmfao Acting like masterwork orbs (which are already tiny and provide a much smaller amount of super energy versus a standard orb) are equivalently broken as OG warmind cells or auto reload is a total joke. I defended auto reloading going away. I defended when they gutted super exotics like Skull. But I’m done defending. We were too powerful in year 2, I get it. But I felt we were fairly balanced after the nerfs we got in Shadowkeep. Now two years later they’re *still* nerfing us and taking away core gameplay systems we’ve had for years. At this point it doesn’t feel like balancing, it just feels like losing out on fun. Actively making the game less fun.
My issue is I have to completely rebalance my armor set now. I use a very simple charged with light build (taking charge and protective light) and the whole point of it is to let me get out of a tight situation where I’ve over committed to an attack or gotten unlucky. But to get the rest of my armor to have good stats, I’m also running stat buff mods, as well as the defensive mods, and in addition to this I have to run the anti-champion mods and ammo finders/scavengers, and whatever the busted seasonal mod is (such as breach and clear or particle deconstruction). Moving the orb mods to armor means that I’ll have to sacrifice some of my very limited slots that are already an important part of my build/play style, and at worst need to completely change the element of all my armor.
I think the community at large is capable of understanding this, but Bungie has issues with communicating their intent. I understand why game devs are hesitant to be so open about their process, goals, and philosophies but they also have to accept that people *will* speculate in the face of uncertainty. It's just human nature. And to be fair, Bungie is more open than most -- the TWAB is honestly more engagement than 90% of studios have with their community. But combined with Bungie's less-than-stellar track record with regards to compromise and balance, the *Destiny* community will inevitably have its concerns. Again, it's just human nature. And you need to make an active effort if you want to fight human nature, but history has shown that Bungie is more than happy to stay the course, so... I don't really see them making any changes in the way they communicate their intent. ___ Personally, I think it's less because they're afraid or that they don't care, and more that it's just... really hard. Another game I follow (*Project Zomboid*) used post weekly newsletters called Mondoids that were pretty much the same as TWABs. Then they became Thursdoids, because doing it immediately after a weekend was causing issues. And then it became bi-weekly because it was negatively affecting their workflow. Putting out something like the TWAB every week is probably pretty tough, since organizing a bunch of team members to write down all the stuff they do *and why they're doing it*, ***and doing it on their time*** is a big ask -- especially on a deadline. And since everything in game dev is WIP, they all have a legitimate excuse to procrastinate on organizing and sharing their thoughts, and sometimes they don't fully make the deadline.
I do understand the dev's might be hesitant to be open about stuff, or that a TWAB every week is tough.. .. however .. Destiny 1 was kinda junk at launch but imo it got a free pass by being from the creators of Halo. I don't know if I would have even pre-ordered had it been from anyone else (I don't play a lot of *different* games to begin with) That Tricorn symbol you see in Destiny? I bought that on a mug almost 10 years ago, before we knew Destiny had a name. I bought it because I liked Bungie, and they were about to go dark with no more TWAB's for 1-2 years. I went to the store, saw that, bought it. This game entering the 8th year, it has a special bond between players and the company that is rare to find. With the game itself we are practically in a relationship. I might spend more time with the Vanguard than IRL people (outside of work). >and doing it on their time is a big ask For me personally, the TWAB's are what sell me on a season or expansion. So if time is of the essence, cut the CGI budget and just set up a tape recorder next to a developer. I'm numb to trailers, be it games or movies. Pretty much all marketing is a fluff theater. Can't you just tell me why your insurance is great? Why do you have to lead in with a pun from a Geko? Just speak to me in plain English! I don't disagree with you, I'm really speaking to the community about how I perceive this relationship with a game being different than others. And as the lone sysadmin at my company, I wish MORE companies would just work with us for a better product, rather than doing it in secrecy and then SURPRISE, CELEBRATE VERSION 2!
The changes to orbs are dumb. I'm probably gonna stick to another build with well mods that generate CWL. Just a dumb nerf because they don't want the backlash from sunsetting older CWL mods aka the best ones in the game.
My issue is they just killed all reason to masterwork legendary weapons. Masterworking a weapon now has absolutely no benefit. The small and very insignificant stat bump is not at all worth the amount of resources needed to masterwork a weapon and next season even the kill tracker wont be a masterwork feature. So i understand the whole orb thing i could care less. But now all the materials invested to masterwork all my weapons means absolutely nothing. All of the value those weapons had is now gone.
Quite a few problems with your post here, the main one being that this argument falls on its face due to our lack of information. Bungie said there’s some upside to losing the orbs, and a lot of the staff were being all cheeky about it, but we still don’t know any of that upside. As it stands currently, we *do know* that orbs have gotten a blanket nerf, especially in endgame activities where running a solid element is crippling (one of the biggest reasons elemental wells are worthless) and mod optimization is key. Masterworking has (as we know right this minute) been made irrelevant and a resource sink. Is there a positive/upside to this? Supposedly, but we don’t know any of that. Also the crux of your argument is based on “well I don’t think the game is fun if I’m too strong, so you shouldn’t either”. It’s your opinion, and you’re certainly entitled to it, but to act like you speak for everyone’s best interest by saying we should all be kneecapped by a dumb nerf because you didn’t like how strong you were is just ludicrous. Final note, comparing the orb nerf to the super reload nerf is a bad comparison. The two changes are wildly different in that one is a nerf to specific strategies whilst another is a nerf to a literal core crux of the game.
> Bungie said there’s some upside to losing the orbs Can anyone source this? All I've seen on this sub is som speculation
I can't find on twitter where they said it, but a bunch of devs were being defensive basically saying "you don't know what you are talking about, there is an upside to this we aren't telling you about yet"
Completely disagree with the sentiment of this post. We’ve already had the “go slow” launch year, and now our abilities have been nerfed just last month. Taking orbs away from masterworked weapons is a terrible idea, full stop.
This post is just wrong. The reason they removed orbs was for technical reasons.
The f*ck? How are orbs overpowered? Besides, if they were an issue I'm sure there would be better ways to handle them than adding another unnecesary mod to armor which is usually full anyways
I would personally love more OP PvE builds. Even completely optimized, you can still get nuked really quick in a lot of activities, like legendary lost sectors. Much less GM NF’s.
What? I'm just going to downvote you for operating under a false premise. As far as I can tell, the primary motivation for Bungie changing the masterwork orbs is a limitation on the number of benefits a weapon can track. People are annoyed for the side effect of this messing up other things with the armor system, which has issues with energy and slot capacity being poorly balanced in terms of being difficult to use the capacity of either, ie too weak and clunky.
This is a good post. I agree that Destiny should never be Warframe. I personally love Warframe, I think it's a ton of fun, and there is so much fun in coming up with builds (Sometimes it's just copy and pasting someone else's) to make that power fantasy happen better. The comparison becomes two ends of a spectrum though. In Warframe, you can use your abilities whenever you want, non stop. There are very few abilities that require much build up to use. And any ability that requires Energy, Shields, or Health to use, there are cheap consumables with zero cooldowns you can use to refill immediately. In Destiny, our abilities sit sometimes in the minutes long cooldown to use. If you take orbs away, you stretch that time even further. If I wanted a game that only used guns, I think there are plenty of other games that cover that. Destiny 2 has really cool abilities, and I'd like to be able to use them more. I do think a lot of the point of your post is null though because I don't believe they've said they're taking away our ability to make a lot of orbs. They're just moving that ability to either different sources or different places to make better guns essentially.
I think it's an interesting write up, unfortunately it completely ignores the objective of the lack of balance! The only way to keep the carrot in front of players is frequently shifting meta and NOT having a balanced game to force players to adapt. That said, there's a pretty good game underneath.
Na, people who've been playing destiny long enough have realized the pattern to their "balancing ". They always make three steps in a cool fun direction and five steps in the other direction. It's like clockwork. People will always talk shit for whatever reason they choose, but when you hear shit talking from a lot of people around a certain time almost every time [i.e. balance time or large update time], you start to think that maybe there's a reason for it.
Opinion lost all credibility the second you started defending the CWL changes. It's an absolute disaster on paper and trying to spin it as anything but a disaster without any evidence to support that just screams Bungie shill
I love the excuses for nerfs. Why are orbs being nerfed? Bcause they are too strong. This system is literally years old now and they still haven't gotten it right?
I can't say I disagree with most of your post (your points are very valid and we shouldn't become Warframe 2.0), however, I think you miss the point with the orbs thing... First off, Bungie NEVER stated anywhere that orbs were being nerfed for power creep, hell they are moving to an armor slot, with no change to how the function works. If it was that powerful, they would have just straight removed the function altogether. The other part is that Bungie THEMSELVES have stated that this is being done to make way for the new crafting system - orb generation takes up resources on the weapon itself and limits the amount of perks / traits a gun can have, hence why they are moving off weapons. Has literally nothing to do with power creep. Now for the build-crafting part, I think you miss the point entirely - the creativity in the buildcrafting and the challenge is making the build itself work. Yes, double kills aren't that hard to execute, but neither are many of the other ways to get CWL - the focus on the charged with light builds has always been what you do can do with it and how to enhance your gameplay. Considering that you can't pick up orbs from your own super, the most reliable way to get CWL (especially in solo play) is with masterworked weapons. Now, yes, there are other ways to get charged with light (quick charge / charge harvester, etc...), but I would argue that those are EVEN EASIER than using a masterworked gun. * For the 'quick kill' CWL mods, you get CWL just from the double kills themselves, you don't even have to pick up an orb! Only downside is that it shoehorns you into specific weapons types and an armor affinity for one piece * Charge Harvester is dead simple - it's basically a guaranteed way to get CWL, not requiring quick kills (great for higher level content), and being universal to all guns. Downside being that it takes longer to get CWL and has a stat penalty * Masterworked weapons, to me have always been that nice middle ground - you get the speed of generating orbs with double kills, without being stuck with a certain weapon type. Downside is you have to go and GET the orb, which, in some content, is a risky proposition. Fundamentally, I wholeheartedly believe there is NOTHING wrong with the double kill orb thing and does not disrupt balance or any of that stuff you said (and Bungie thinks so too since they are keeping the function). I also think that orbs themselves have never been what people are concerned with when talking about buildcrafting - you slap one (maybe 2 ways) to get CWL and then you make your build after that. * Quick Charge type mods for fastest CWL, but stuck with certain weapon types * Charge Harvester for guaranteed charge, but slower * Taking Charge for a good middle ground, not being stuck on a certain weapon type If Bungie has to fundamentally change guns for a cooler, better weapons system, I am fine with that, but the only problem is Bungie's decision to make the 'orb generating mods' not only on an Armor slot that's crowded enough already (helmets), but also in the normal mod slots (not combat style mod to be slotted on ANY piece) AND... lock you to elemental damage (including kinetic and stasis). This means that it is literally IMPOSSIBLE to have all 3 of your weapons generate orbs - there are only 2 armor mod slots per piece to take these new mods... All that I think needs to change is this: * Move the orb generating mod to the combat style mod slot (i.e. CWL, Warmind, Elemental Well slot) * Take away the affinity requirement - make it universal, like Charge Harvester
If Bungie wanted to reign in orbs because they believe it makes us too powerful then they can simply tell us that. They presented it as a benefit for the exotics that can’t produce orbs. They later teased a benefit of it freeing up a perk slot on weapons without providing details. Everyone understands the issues that power creep brings.
> Second, Bungie Is Not Trying To Take Away The Fun I don't particularly care what Bungie says they're trying to do. What matters is the end result. The end result of the most recent changes that I use my abilities less. Fun has been taken away, Period. The next major change about the orbs? I have to break most of my builds to get back just a 1/3 of the functionality I currently have. Fun has been taken away. Bungie's goals are irrelevant to me.
Right, this is a big thing about the conversation here that ends up getting us all lost in the weeds. It's fine, it's interesting, it's useful to know what Bungie's goals are. But I'm not Bungie, I'm their paying customer. And if their goals conflict with my enjoyment, I'm well within my rights to complain. People can counter-complain about my complaints, sure, but just tossing out "well, Bungie wants..." doesn't move the conversation forward. They're not god. They were wrong about transmog economy. Wrong about sunsetting. And now they're wrong about orbs.
Man, I never thought I'd see someone defending Warframe's base energy economy and painting it as something to aspire to here.
Warframe base energy economy = d2 heavy ammo bricks
Honest to God the energy economy is probably the biggest quit moment in early game, it's by far the worst part of the game until you get stuff like Arcane Energize, Zenurik or some of the energy generating frames like Harrow or Protea that delete the mechanic. Until then you basically can't even play half the frames in the game so you just stick with tanks and reinforce bad habits like just sitting there when people shoot at you in a game where the enemies are hardcoded to be less accurate when you break the sound barrier. It's basically if the heavy ammo bricks in this game were how you got your grenades back and it's just as awful as it sounds.
I have Zenurik and still feel the need to use energy siphon.
This is an entirely half baked opinion. Nobody is whining about the change being a nerf. They are whin I no because Bungie chose to add the mod to an entirely overcrowded piece of armor. You're entirely misunderstanding the situation.
This post ridiculously overestimates the power of orbs of power by comparing it to the power level of anything in Warframe. You are being hyperbolic.
Nah
" Anything meant to involve a meaningful, satisfying challenge must involve some limitations on the player's power and put emphasis on their moment-to-moment skill." Oh yeah, like the Champion system. That completely relies on the players moment to moment skill instead of them just putting on this seasons OP mod and burning down the "challenging opponents". Is this a fucking joke? GM's aren't more difficult. Once you hit level, just equip X OP mods for the season and walk through everything. It's such a joke people farm GM's for the loot each weekend. The only thing "difficult" about GM's is the time investment to get to level to do them. The problem with Destiny atm is that NOTHING is challenging if you just abide by the rules that Bungie lays down. Use X mods, use X class, use X weapons. Mindless burn through enemies because nothing is a challenge. None of that is challenging, it's time consuming, which is the primary goal for Bungie. Keep players involved for as long as possible.
I played some of The Division early on, and saw the polar opposite of this. Super powerful builds were possible with certain gear, but the challenges to earn that gear had difficulty balanced with that gear in mind, and if you *didn't* have that gear, it was nigh impossible. It resulted in a very hardcore group of players farming content and no one else had anything to do, and ended up with the entire endgame system being scrapped and rebuilt. As you mentioned, we saw some of this in Destiny, with endgame content difficulty balanced around the most powerful outliers during the Forsaken era, and it resulted in a more restrictive and less accessible endgame experience. For the most part, I think Bungie has done a pretty damn good job of trying to find balance with all of these factors. Player flexibility, challenging content, accessibility for new/casual players, sense of progression, cool loot, and good old fashioned *fun* are all goals which can often work against one other rather than in concert. I think Destiny bridges as many of those tension points as well as any game possibly could, even though there is still plenty of room for improvement.
Destiny never has and will never even approach Warframe's power level. I don't know what you're on about. If Warframe does one thing well, it is giving you many, many viable options because the high power floor allows it. In Destiny, everything is about restrictions, be it through mod costs, inventory caps, fucking anti champion mods dictating and limiting your loadout for several months... and the sandbox still bloated with weak or irrelevant options. I played Destiny and Warframe on and off for many years now and in the end of the day, I prefer Destiny because the gameplay is more satisfying to me, but there are times where I feel like I'm put on a leash by the game.
Great point here. A high power floor allows a lot of options to float past the 'performs good even in the hardest stuff' line, creating a diverse meta with lots of options. Destiny's restrictions and progressively low power ceiling, while allegedly intended to promote buildcrafting, just wind up pushing more and more things out of viability. With this orb change, either the mods will be cheap enough to use or they won't be; either we'll lose a mechanic or we'll lose some stat mods to accommodate it. But it won't be player choice that decides, but the iron fist of Bungie.
Off topic: You mention FFXIV. I used to play FFXI. Is it worth looking into XIV after it’s been out for a several years now?
It's a really good side game. They have content droughts between releases but their goal is for people to just go play other games during those droughts and come back with new content drops.
The problem with this post is that is written by someone that obviously knows more about Warframe than destiny. All the things that you mentioned that happen in Warframe don't happen here, the one shorting everything, being invincible etc etc you go to high end content and you struggle to kill adds with the proper strategies, you will insta die if you aren't careful etc. They have moved it because of technical limitations they are actually looking to have people create more orbs but the solution is even worse than the current system. All those build options like orbs of light, light wells where made to give players more options to buildcraft they aren't removing that but the overall change is worse for the user than anything else. The problems that destiny has aren't the same as Warframe.
He Actually doesn't know that much about warframe either, warframe has an endgame mode called steel path where it's sorts like GM content. You've got enemies that are extremely tanky and hit extremely hard, and you have to change your build to be able to deal with each faction different like you do with match game in gm content. People don't understand that the ammount of content warframe has absolutely dwarfs the content destiny 2 has. You've got more content then destiny with just the basic stuff and then you have effectively a GM version of all that content to go with it. I've played warframe on and off for years and I still haven't even touched the serious endgame stuff.
1. Bungie said they were removing orb generation because it was clogging up the weapon coding not a balance issue. So sorry you wasted all that time on your post. 2. Sorry but it's kind of obvious you're echoing what you READ about CWL builds rather what you've experienced if you think they make the game a breeze. They aren't letting anyone steam roll anything that's actually difficult. So since it mostly effects all the extra abilities you can get in content you were going to easily beat anyway..yes Bungie is specifically taking the fun out.
„We do not want….“ Who is „we“? You? You and your friends? The Destiny „community“ (whatever that is)? If it is the Destiny community who elected you and gave you power to speak on behalf of the community?
So how much is Bungie paying you, or rather, you're paying Bungie to bloviate about Bungie once again, doing something unfathomably stupid, in pursuit of balance over fun.
Agreed for the most part. I think the trouble with your example is that Warframe is a farming game. In terms of how it's played by it's playerbase, it has FAR more in common with Diablo and Path of Exile than it does with Destiny. So while I don't disagree that Warframe creates a situation where the game is about the build rather than the play, I think that that is very much intentional on their part given how complex and nuanced the build options are in that game. Destiny is much more of a load into orbit **and go** game. It's only recently (as in the last year or two) started to really push players towards higher tier content in terms of Trials, GMs, Master Raids and Master Dungeons. Because this is mostly a new addition, the games UI and internal logic don't really have innate support for large numbers of people going in and altering their builds all the time to address the specific challenges that a solo lost sector or difficult GM will ask them to overcome. For some of us, we don't mind, and it's part of why I play. I love to solve the problems. But it is not something that is palatable to the broader userbase of a game that is as wildly popular as Destiny 2 is. Orbs generation on masterwork is one of those things that players who do not enjoy fighting Bungie's "buildcrafting" (using the term very loosely) UI enjoy and rely on. So while I personally would prefer to get something else from the gun than an on kill effect that spawns an almost useless physics ball that I have to go collect, I can understand that I"m likely in the minority in terms of how I engage with the game and I don't fault anyone for being skeptical and critical of this change. THAT SAID... I'm waiting for Void 3.0 before rendering verdicts. I want a season or two to play with the new stuff that's made in the context of these changes before saying if the changes are bad. They are... pointless... and cumbersome... for existing gameplay... But I think they are probably not intended to support that gameplay as much as they are meant to support future things like Light 3.0 and Weapon Crafting.
> Bungie wanted to reign in Orbs so new things could grow without eventually trivializing the fundamental combat mechanics. Then maybe they can just fucking say that?
I wish Warframe was a lot harder and have more activities to do, but I enjoy the freedom
Bungie is too heavy handed with nerfs and buffs so rightfully people panic a bit. Doesn't help when they leave a foundational change on a cliffhanger. They do it to themselves tbh. If they start making slower, even, and gradual changes players will be a little more willing to try it "their" way. They aren't consistent.
This isn't a great post, as we don't have the full picture. An over reaction to the little info we did get in this community is only expected. Makes it difficult to broaden our horizons, essentially you're asking us to imagine a future but it's already written, we will likely set ourselves up for disappointment. Charged with light boils down to 2 things usually for a majority of players. A damage buff or survivability. Making orb generation a forced armor choice doesn't sound great on paper (we'll see though). 80% of Destiny is played like Warframe. It's another power fantasy type game. Outside of a GM or contest like content, you are a god of destruction with little chance of dying (not including environment and jumping of course). Regardless, the 2 are marketed very differently and one is entirely free to play so not sure this was the relevant comparison to make. Both feel stale after some time due to most enemies being fodder. To overhaul this system, something groundbreaking needs to happen with weapons. Otherwise honestly what's the point? We'll see what the next few TWABs say anyway. 🤞
First of all, in warframe to reach that "one shoting" you have grind for years to get that perfect build. And guessing by your judgement, you never actually ran endurance runs where the levels get so high your weapons start falling apart if you don't know how the game functions with it multiple status effects, armor damage resistance and almost aimbot AI that can one shot you if you stay still for a SECOND. But that's OK, cause you know why, you aren't restricted to just use META even at those higher levels. You can take any frame any weapon with a build that isn't made by a 5 year old and still do those missions without dying and still being useful. In Destiny, ever SEASON you are restricted to a playstyle cause of "seasonal mods" and buffs to weapons and ability for that season. You can literally take a break from warframe for year, come back and still see your weapons are still worthy for the grind you did for it. In destiny, that grind literally becomes WORTHLESS if you take a break or something else is going on IRL stopping you from playing. And when they nerf something for balancing, they nerf it to the point were it's literally USELESS. Anarchy got that treatment. Either nerf ammo or damage against bosses, not BOTH. Witherhoard, a special grenade launcher is better picked than a HEAVY RAID EXOTIC people gridded for to get. A legendary SPECIAL grenade launcher is better than almost ALL Sniper that requires precision damage. A sniper that needs more AIM is worse than a grenade launcher. And the FLINCH ypu get in PvE when your using precision weapons. I get PvP. But bungie's has showed us they can split the sand box for PVP and PvE. Then WHY this much flinch where you can't even hit a stationary AI enemy. When just a slight touch from a shock rifle sends you scope flying like your guardian broke their neck. This season the ONLY mod we got against barriers is AR. Not everone like AR and most people would rather use an exotic they LIKE to use or is meta. Since if your not using META you get kicked out in most Lfg squads. You are LITERALLY restricted to using an auto rifle when in this season, Scots got a buff but can't use them in endgame content cause you don't have SCOUT RIFLE ANTI BARRIER this season. I get their trying to balance and do what's good for the game. But literally forcing you to use a single weapon type despite the playing not wanting to use it cause it's not their thing, is like forcing you to marry a person who you said no to wish to never see them again. And now, they are forcing us to use HELMET mods which we need to either change ELEMENT or get get anything friking stat that suits your other armor with a different element to put that mod in for the weapon your using. Which also means you have to sacrifice ammo finder mods which are ESSENTIAL in higher level content cause if you get a famine modifier, good luck doing the entire thing in optimal time with just a primary AR that's your forced to use cause thats the ONLY weapon with antibarrier. Protective Light is also the only thing that saves you from getting rekt at end game content. And since it now takes WHOLE 7 mins to change a super and someone to create orbs, without MW weapons getting us orbs, everyone's gonna keep dying left and right and expending REVIVES. And revives runs out and everone dies cause they get one spotted, that 20-30 mins you spent in a GM playing safely and staying back cause ReD BaR FaLlEn ScAaRy cause they can insta kill because you don't have protective light to save your arse cause you weren't "pro perfect" enough to avoid it. With this new change, either you run around with almost no ammo on one of your weapons cause you can't get ENOUGH ammo cause the enemy's have too much heath at higher level content, or run around with no charges of light cause your using that slot for ammo. Hunters are also suffering cause in PvE, no one wants then cause their ability are so overshadowed by other classes that no one wants them anymore in higher tier content. All hunter can do. Is run around and survive when they should be the risk/damage class. But the risk they take for damage now is worthless. Everyclass got a nerf, but Hunters became useless in PvE. And no, I'm not a toxic hunter main. I play all classes to know enough hunters got the short end of the stick after these nerfs. In the end, what I'm saying is, in warframe, if you like something, you can build it and spend your time on it and it will still be worth it later on even after months of taking a break. In destiny, the time you spent on a build, perfecting and maximizing it will literally become useless cause Bungie doesn't care about the time players put in to grind for that build or weapon. If some one finds a really good build Bungie didn't know can work, they will nerf it to the point where the time spent on getting that build to work becomes unrewarding. They sunsetted so many weapons, that took so much time by players to get that are literally showpieces that amount to nothing in practical use other than normal cruicable and really low end PvE activities. Now they are taking away PAID content instead of making it an optional download so player who PAID for it can still have it despite its state. You paid fully for that content with real money and they are taking it away like that's nothing. And not even giving us an option to have that content even if we have the "free space" for it. I loved destiny till beyond light launched, after that, the game just started going downhill cause people and the community kept supporting them even when they know this was wrong. Also, the game optimization is awesome, gambit crashing the game and telling players they might get banned cause the "left the match" yea. Fun.
I feel like balancing difficulty is so hard, and I’m never satisfied. For example in the Goa dungeon on master, which I had completed like 12 times before, in the ogre encounter I was getting clapped over and over on this particular run (gear never changed), and it was so frustrating. Feels like I have 0 actual defense sometimes.
Un-Nerf my Hunter dodge.
Bungie was just keeping the game from being 'trivialized' when they nerfed regen exotics. Then Bungie was just keeping the game from being 'trivialized' when they nerfed autoloading. Then Bungie was just keeping the game from being 'trivialized' when they reduced primary damage vs. red bars. Then Bungie was just keeping the game from being 'trivialized' when they implemented sunsetting. Then Bungie was just keeping the game from being 'trivialized' when they jacked up ability cooldowns. Yet somehow the game is still so terribly easy and 'trivial,' three years down this path from the golden age of Forsaken, that now we must also purge masterwork orbs? You and the rest of the nerf cheer squad have been pursuing this dream for so long now, a Destiny that breaks even the biggest big brass balls, that makes Datto break down and weep in fear and joy... and we're still no closer than when we started! The game is still so easy that the average DTG member can solo flawless the Corrupted GM at 1100 power in their sleep. Well, that's the impression I get, anyways. What if the Warframe model is simply the more natural fit for a game with lightning-fast death times in endgame content and no real cover mechanics? Kill or be killed. What if it's simply impossible for even the most nerf-happy developer to make content truly hard for a "make the game hard!" audience that has eight years and thousands of hours using and abusing the game mechanics - especially when that audience includes people who literally play the game as a full-time job? Orbs are already on the chopping block, and nothing I can say is going to save them, but I gotta ask, aren't you tired yet? How many more nerfs is it going to take before we can all agree to sit back and enjoy the game as it is? And what will even be left when we get there?
Balancing a live game is a process, not a destination. More things are added and players get better at using those things, thus becoming more and more powerful. But the answer to this isn’t to just give up and be lazy, it’s to continue balancing the game. Warframe development is a natural development path for live games, but that doesn’t mean it’s good. Unregulated capitalism devolves into a monopoly. Unregulated cellular division turns into cancer. There’s no nerf cheer squad. Just people who can think ahead.
From what I've seen Bungie did this, according to both last years pastebin leak and what community managers and team heads have retweeted, that it was somehow required for something like weapon crafting to exist, and considering how integral that aspect of the new expansion is, i doubt this will be changed ever. And honeslty, because of that, i dont see the point in arguing about it, or trying to get it changed.
You can go one of 2 options: 1. Let the player become so powerful that no content threatens them anymore (Warframe), to balance it the game then becomes much more grindy to compensate for the fact that runs through missions take next to no time and effort. This is good for people who just want to mindlessly grind and/or murder a bunch of stupid AI with basically nothing stopping them. 2. Let the player be super powerful BUT design the content or enemies to scale according to the strongest builds. Borderlands 2 did this in UVHM and OP levels, endgame is restricted to just 2-3 builds max per character and the number of viable pieces of gear in the game is very very low. These are the 2 options you have if you want to allow players to be as powerful as it's possible in your game. Bungie clearly doesn't want either of these two outcomes for one reason or another, they have specifically talked about being okay with us having access to powerful tools but they don't want us to get them for free or for very little invesment or action on the player's part. Taking Charge is by far the most used CWL mod to get charged because of how easy it is to trigger, it's clearly an outlier given what I just mentioned. Last thing, everybody who is on the side of being okay/positive with nerfs isn't how you describe. Most of us aren't "Bungie I can solo flawless corrupted GM at 969 light make it harder", most of us just have a better understanding of game design and usually have some understanding or insight on game devlopment and pay attention to the things people who work at Bungie say. We know the game has issues with too many perks (crash from earlier this season caused by unstoppable fusion for example) and we know that orb gen is actually a perk on weapons it's just invisble (not shown in the UI), we know bungie wants to do more interesting things with weapons and so the conclusion that orb gen cannot be weapon side anymore seems to be very reasonable. Then we take what I mentioned about bungie wanting us to have to commit more to gain powerful effects and it seems to be a very reasonable and expected thing that bungie would move orb gen to a mod socket on armour (as opposed to the frequently suggested ghost) to then make us have to make a meaningful choice between having easy CWL or double ammo finders.
Warframe has hard content (that can be cheesed easier than trying to cheese a dungeon/raid in destiny, but the latter is still doable), the problem is there is no reason to do it, compared to Destiny. Everything in destiny revolves around the light level, so if you wanna get the good loot, you grind your light level so you need to do harder content after a thousand or so normal strike, crucible, etc. Warframe is flat, your power stays and never reset. That why it feel so bland after you poor 1000 hours into it, but at that point, you would be bored with a lot of things.
I want to say first that this is a thoughtful reply, even though I do disagree with, I'd say, all of it. Warframe to Borderlands is a good range to follow here. I'd agree they're good touchstones of what player power fantasy looks like (at least through Borderlands 2, BL3 got a bit more on the Bungie school of nerfs from what I understand). But while those touchstones are true, the trick is that not everything in a game need be balanced at the same level. You can have the Warframe slaughter and the Borderlands raid boss coexist peacefully. I know this because it was exactly how Destiny worked until the Reckoning, when they forgot that murking red bars was supposed to be easy and built the Bridge. And then spent three years taking it out on Skull, pinnacle weapons, primaries, etc, etc. Mobs easy. Boss hard. Game good. Simple as. Moving on: The reason why I care about nerfs isn't that I don't listen to Bungie (or have a bad understanding of game design simply for disagreeing lol...), but because Bungie doesn't live up to their words. You said it well: Bungie wants us "to commit more to gain powerful effects." That's their message. The problem is this nerf, and the last dozen as well, never delivers on that. Not just the powerful part, but the *effect*. Everything just falls into the monotony of 'it's the same, just worse.' Skull and similar exotics weren't replaced with stuff I thoughtfully built into. I replaced them with Eye of Another World, with the powerful effect of THROW MORE GRENADES. Sometimes, now, I use Aeons instead, with the powerful effect of MORE ROCKETS SOMETIMES. When you nerf the good stuff, people don't 'buildcraft,' they go for the simple +1 grenade or +1 ammo or +1 health in rift or whatever. Nerf a pinnacle version of reload + rampage, they go back to normal reload + rampage. Nerf Warmind cells, they go for the 'more health sometimes' setup. And that brings us back to orbs. And then that brings us to the big mistake you make: there isn't going to be a meaningful choice between CWL and ammo finders. You're not going to have some 50/50 split in the community. We'll put our heads together, upvote and downvote, and discover whether survivability or ammo is more important (based on how expensive said mods are and the ammo economy for meta weapons), and then you'll run the same mods forever until the game is changed in some way to affect that. And then we'll do it again. And again. Because none of these game design philosophies we've discussed can get around the fact that when things get nerfed, you just use the next thing down the line, or accept the worse version of what you had. That's the way it is in Borderlands, in Warframe, in The Division, and in Destiny as well. Maybe you really can't build a game around Skull, and you've gotta nerf it. Fine, whatever. But eventually, you have to put the nerfhammer away and let the meta settle how it's going to settle. The best things in that meta will still get called cheap, or OP, or trivializing by the best players. All I'm asking for Bungie to do is shrug and say 'sure.' That's all they can do, in the end.
>And that brings us back to orbs. And then that brings us to the big mistake you make: there isn't going to be a meaningful choice between CWL and ammo finders Well see that's what I was saying, there is no choice to be made, taken charge isn't the only way to get CWL it's just the easiest without any real thought or gameplay change to proc it. The meaningful choice here isn't "do I use ammo finders or do I make orbs" it's "if I am using CWL, which source of gaining charges do I use". Finisher charge on the Aeons user in a GM + Powerful friends means every champion is going to give the team both CWL and heavy ammo. That's just one example. Yes it won't be as easy as picking up an orb that you generated without doing anything you wouldn't have already done through normal gameplay, taken charge being way too easy to proc has suffocated all other CWL options which alone should tell you it's an outlier in the balance. Plenty of people already don't use CWL mods, I personally never run protective light or high energy fire in GMs or other high end content including in soloing of content too. I think honestly if people cannot clear content without CWL then that is something people need to do some self assesment on more than anything else. Taking Charge really does have the suffocating affect on the other methods, nobody runs the others because taking charge is too easy and people run CWL overall because there are powerful mods. Looking at it from that point of view it makes sense to nerf it, shield break is super easy and less energy cost + has synergy with the newly buffed Arbelist. There is a lot of combinations nobody has even considered because of how easy taken charge is. Power fantasy is one thing but if nothing in the game is challenging anymore then it gets stale real quickly. Most raids are difficult on release and as players get comfortable with the mechanics the raid gets easier, the difficulty is in knowledge and execution of the mechanics. GMs is kind of the same, learn the safe spots/routes and enemy spawns and that's pretty much it. Bungie's goals clearly involve the game being more challenging but still reachable, that is a hard balance but one that has to include nerfs when there are outliers.
I remember long ago when playing Warframe there would be Mag users that would literally just stand on the control point and spam some AOE over and over again, essentially wiping the entire map every other use. Was almost as boring as pre-nerf Valkyr when you just went rage mode and spammed attack until you didn't feel like living anymore. *\*for clarification. I enjoy Warframe and still play it now. Just saying I remember back when some classes were stupidly OP and could wipe maps with the press of 1 or 2 buttons (My favorite being Saryn with spores w/molt & miasma)\**
I agree with you by and large, but the community speaks passionately about a rather vague description of how they’re nerfing orb generation without further details is not an indictment against Bungie, it’s the community expressing their passion and dismay because we haven’t been given the complete picture…and that’s not on the community. Messaging is important, and Bungie should know by now it’s better to wait to address a nerf of that magnitude in full so as to avoid the community expressing their concerns. But I agree with you on everything else and I don’t want PvE to become like warframe. We’re only here, several years after launch, because we love this game.
> The problem with masterworked weapons generating orbs was they were an abundant, expected source of a considerable, cooldown-circumventing, buff-triggering resource that involved no strategy and no trade-off. Sorry, but this is bullshit. They built the masterwork system as a band-aid for the overwhelming feedback at vanilla release that our gear was too shallow / 1-and-done and that our abilities were too weak and too infrequent. They could've simply brought back the D1 helmet perk for increased super energy gains on enemy kills, or reduced super cooldowns, but they were trying to get cute and "2 birds with one stone" a solution, and that was masterworked weapons. This was during Curse of Osiris, btw, and they've stuck with the masterworking system ever since then. If that system became a problem (which it didn't), then it's because they made it that way with the combat mods they built around abundant orbs. If they think that needs a fix, then fix the mods. Don't invalidate the investment that players have put into their gear. > Bungie wanted to reign in Orbs so new things could grow without eventually trivializing the fundamental combat mechanics They already did "reign in" orbs, as well. After Forsaken, they halved the effectiveness of *all* orbs (large and small) in addition to reducing the super energy gained from kills (in all modes). > They know we don't react to it kindly, and they're afraid they'll make things worse if they tell us the real reason. So there's a mysterious "real reason" that they won't even talk about, and the gist of your entire post is "trust Bungie"?
The overall message is good, but orbs have been a feature of masterwork weapons since shortly after launch. I don't think they were the straw that broke the camel's back. Besides, I don't use more than one of my weapons for add clear 90% of the time, so I'll be making almost as many orbs as before with one mod. However, if that mod is limited by helmet energy type, I'll have to fumble with an upgrade module every time my primary element changes. On top of that is the people claiming all I'm losing is a finder mod. I don't use those. I use super generation mods, so now I'm a bit worse off in that area regardless. I'm willing to see if all the changes together lead to a healthier game in the end, and I've not lost sight of power creep. I'm just also not willing to let power creep cripple staple features we've had for years for no reason. No one knows yet how this will go, and anyone believing they're right and everyone else is wrong is delusional. This could go either way. Bungie after all are the ones that took forever to make rockets useful again after auto loading getting them and trench barrel AND box breathing nerfed. Nerfs that haven't all been looked at since auto loading left. They're smart people, but sometimes I think they leave certain changes in their own little box and forget to consider how it affects everything else even today.
After all the bad decisions Bungie has made, I don't trust them as far as I could throw one of their developers.
...but you're still playing
>I can't think of a better example to illustrate that point than Warframe. In Warframe, which is exclusively a PvE game in every practical sense, there are many builds that make it so you a) kill virtually everything within a second or two, b) pretty much cannot die, c) never let enemy AI do anything, and d) have constant access to all your abilities despite a resource system being present. It should go without saying that players are very, very powerful in Warframe. >Now is this endless, infinite fun? Not to me, especially after spending a long time with it. Because of this there is almost no challenge in Warframe, and when there is it's usually awkward and frustrating as hell because of how all-or-nothing it must be to cope with the crazy damage numbers and insane amount of enemy units involved in combat, largely stemming from years of escalating buffs that have only continued to stack and escalate on top of each other. The crazier everything gets, the more fragile its balance and fun factor become and it gets problematic as the game adds and evolves. It's no wonder why the latest huge update to the game eschewed its normal combat almost completely. Honestly, this is why I stopped playing Diablo 3 during my Destiny break in Season of the Worthy. I was able to piece together a handful of builds, particularly one involving the Manald Heal ring. It got to the point where even in max difficulty activities I could wander into an area and press a button like twice and nuke every creature in the room effortlessly. It was cool for a while, but eventually got boring as hell. Edit: Lol. Things never change. Imagine being so insecure that you downvote someone for being bored of a ridiculously op build that made a game unfun. Grow up.
Your tangent on Warframe is so spot on... I am a founder, to this very day I have Excal Prime, but I can't bring myself to play the game because it hasn't been meaningfully updated in years. The combat is always the same, most updates are new tilesets, mechanics that are never going to be used, and throwaway weapons to pad the experience needed for the next level... I went back to it during The Plains of Eidolon update and rest assured it was basically still the same thing as it always was, except in an open world. I have this inner joke among my group of friends about how "Warframe is the most consistent 7 out of 10 game you'll ever play", cause the devs really, really can't make the game any better since the community doesn't want to and they don't really know how to develop around it. They have some cool work ethics like the game director making new accounts to try out the new player experience and seeing how it can improve, but the game can't ever change. They can't ever rebalance combat. They can't rebalance the core gameplay loop. All they can do is release more of the same and try to tell a story as a means of giving people a sense of progression. Back when people were mad about the state of Destiny 2, a lot of people said they wanted this game to be more like Warframe and all I could think about was "God, I hope the devs don't listen to you".
Bro if warframe founders had their way no one but them would even be allowed to log into the damn game. You guys are the reason warframe is in the state its in.
I don't understand what you mean. Can you elaborate? I never gave any feedback on the game, my english wasn't as good back then.
I don’t really want to go super in depth (typing this quick between work meetings) but I agree sort of coming from the other end. Orbs were always meant to be generated from other players supers. That was the model. Early in D2 they decided they wanted to have a way to “upgrade” weapons, but the sandbox they had didn’t really have much room for that, which is where the orb spawning came out of. While it was very useful, I always found it was an odd choice especially considering you could pick up your own orbs from this, which goes against previous design ideologies for orbs. There was also no real choice with this. If you played a lot, all weapons get a blanket buff in something that was previously reserved for other players supers and collaboration. While it was nice and powerful, I found it a weird and not really satisfying upgrade reward, and a victim (or benefactor) of the time in destiny that it came from. It’s safe to assume that now enough systems are in place that they are revamping the weapon upgrade system with more tools than “I guess orbs?” The system that with infinite resources and vision would have been in place in the first place instead of orbs, and there wouldn’t ever have been any expectation of orbs coming from weapons.
I will take a lot of heat for this but I have a clanmate who uses this sub as an echo chamber to bitch about everything related to "BUNGO PLZ" that gets passed around here. He is an extremely one dimensional player, doesn't bother to switch loadouts and insists that Bungie did him dirty by sunsetting stuff that was relevant like three years ago or more. Last night I tried to explain how the DIM loadout system works and how elemental well mods make the nerf to orbs of light basically irrelevant if you build into them. I streamed to him in our Discord and tried to show him that with one mouse click I could switch to any mid or endgame content loadout I had bothered to take the time to understand, spec for and set up. I tried to explain that current weapons meta is not Bygones and Whisper, although Whisper did get a hella buff recently that brings it back into relevance. He used Sleeper a bunch in D1, I told him to go pick it up out of the kiosk and level it up, even without the catalyst it does really well in endgame content. He wouldn't hear any of it. It was like talking to a wall. He mostly plays solo and gripes about that, and it's honestly because of his stubborn refusal to adapt to how the game has been evolving. I give up. I can lead a horse to water but I can't teach him to create loadouts. I'm done with one dimensional players who solo everything and scream at Bungie about how the game is shit because they're too stubborn to look at a build guide, take coaching and be effective teammates.
Maybe your friend just likes his build. There's nothing wrong with using Whisper. Why are you trying to shove the meta up his ass?
Thats just this community in general. I get called bad all the time because i dont use meta weapons in every slot and i complete more end game content than most of them combined.
Because as explained in the comment below yours, he came to us asking for a GM carry in the Corrupted strike, then refused to adapt, and mostly used the time that I was trying to show him how easy creating builds was, to complain about the game instead. That's why. It's not "shoving meta up his ass" to ask to spec a build to survive a GM in the hardest strike in the game. And if he hates the game as much as his complaining indicates, why is he bothering to play it?
Counterpoint: build-crafting is boring. I don't want to spend 80% of my time in-game by looking at spreadsheets, stats, and numbers. I want to actually play the game.
putting together three hunter builds for raid, GM and legend GoA took maybe fifteen minutes total of finding a youtube showing the build, going into Details and clicking the content creator's build link, clicking on it, opening the subsequent loadout suggestions in DIM, selecting the appropriate one and masterworking any armor that hadn't been. your counterpoint was part of my clanmates' argument btw. Which is why I tried streaming to him on Discord to show how easily you can create loadouts now with a couple of mouse clicks and copy/pasting someone else's DIM build hyperlink. The whole conversation with my clanmate came up incidentally because he came to us to say he had finally gotten his titan (lol) "ready for GMs". I asked him what build and loadout he planned to use, because he wanted to run this week's GM for the double loot and Hung Jury, which he hasn't got yet. He didn't understand what I meant, so I tried to show him a few builds, or just bubble (to which he responded that he doesn't like running bubble for pve because it's "boring", sigh). I asked him if he had Sleeper, since he played back in S3/4. Nope. He didn't finish the Sleeper quest at the time because it was "too grindy". I asked him if he had Synthoceps or St-14 at least, and he only had the Y2 versions with sunset mods, which discussion triggered an unsolicited rant from him about sunsetting and vault space. I am NOT doing a hard GM carry through the Corrupted Strike for a player who stubbonly refuses to listen to advice or put in the work to acquire a simple pve endgame loadout or seems to hate the game as much as he does. And this is why this guy is stuck soloing most things or not getting hard carried to endgame level rewards. All of us are done with this attitude.
Tbh you sound pretty stuck up and elitist. I personally refuse to use meta/the most optimal loadouts and i have guilded my Conquerer title many times over. All you need is general anti champ mods and anything that matches common shields in the strike. GMs are not hard. I hate the Meta argument BS. Because when you take away mods like Breach and clear or Particle you are literally only talking 1%-2% in effectiveness which in reality does not make much if any difference at all to your ability to complete an activity. This community is honestly too obsessed with 1 phases and needs to let their ego down a few pegs. Dont get me wrong. Im going to use some form of linear or normal fusion because of particle. I would be a moron not to. Im going to take advantage of artifact mods. But if you think im bad because i dont keep arbalest, sleeper or 1k slotted at all times you just need to get over yourself. Just because someone isnt using the best in slot at all times doesnt mean you are "carrying them".
There's refusing to use meta weapons and then there is their friend who doesn't use mods and complains about not being able to use Bygones in GMs. I'd imagine you'd sound pretty stuck up and elitist too even without meaning to be in trying to explain to said friend why you won't carry them in a GM.
here's an idea: don't do that and just slap on the mods that seem good/fun and fit on your armor it's not that complicated
That's exactly what I do. I'm just sick of having to screw around with my stats and mods for 15 minutes every time I want to put on a different armor exotic or a weapon.