BEST CHANGE IN YEARS YES YES YES!!!!!
Finally the Raid race will be 10 times more fun both for viewers and competitors, SOOOO GOOD. @Destiny2Team THANKS!!!
Hi! Haven't done one of those in a bit, but going into The Edge Of Fate I would like to give some feedback on where the game is at rn sandbox wise, both for new and endgame players. (This is gonna be a long read). Tagging @Destiny2Team just in case.
The main issue I see with the game rn is how daunting and unfriendly it is for new players to get into it, or even for more casual players or ones that just wanna mess around with fun builds, especially when it comes to endgame.
It doesn't seem like Bungie is planning to "reset" us anytime soon, or make a sequel, and if the game is gonna continue for years we need to make sure activities don't keep getting harder and harder for the sake of countering specific power creep.
To put it in simpler words, the game is currently strongly increasing HPs values to counter crazy ability spam such as a Titan having infinite Consecrations, and also highly inflating damage enemies inflict to counter overtuned stacking DR. You can see this in many places, but some easy ones are the 2 minibosses in the new Sunless Cell GM for example, taking ages to kill if you aren't using top meta options, or on the Dread as a whole, with Strand Subjugators randomly 1 tapping you or Weavers and Attendants doing insane DPS if you aren't stacking DR.
That, to me, but also to many others and especially less experienced players, is not fun. The game should not try to solve power creep by power creeping the activities, otherwise you end up making 95% of the sandbox feel terrible.
This isn't easy to solve, but I do think certain changes could be made to mitigate the issue, but before getting into this and to hopefully stop at least some uninformed comments, I wanna point out that this is NOT a convo about the difficulty of the game. I do NOT think the game should be harder, quite the opposite for the most part. We had some of the hardest content in the past couple years with Salvation's Edge and Vesper's Host Day 1 despite the insane power creep, so that should be clear.
What I think we need:
- When it comes to damage taken, the difference between having DR and not having DR needs to drastically go down, and with that so does the damage certain overtuned enemies inflict. It does not feel good to get 1 shot by some random ads, and it also feels weird to facetank a full room taking 0 damage cause you have Amplified, Frost Armor, and 100 Resilience etc...
I would suggest either strongly tuning down most DR sources, or, even better, tuning down the way they stack. The second option would be preferred so that more casual players that don't fully grasp the system could still get strong benefits by running DR options, but it wouldn't be able to be abused by those that know how to, plus it would not force devs to overtune encounter or design mechanics that bypass DR like the Lightning in Puppeteer (which btw is terrible without a visual tell imo).
On top of this I also think some really overtuned instances of enemy damage could be tuned down across the board. I already mentioned some related to the Dread, but there are definitely more across the game. Most importantly though, this would assure they aren't forced to add more of those issues going forward.
Side note: I agree that melee builds need some DR and I love the concept of strong active DR. It has a good skillgap to it and it doesn't make you invincible. By active DR I mean while you are casting the ability or shortly after. Bungie has already added it to plenty of melees but I would love to see even more of it! The only active DR that could use going down a bit is Sword/Glaive block. It's not super gamebreaking usually since you gotta hold the action, but imo the concept of on demand invincibility is just wrong.
- When it comes to damage we inflict and enemies HPs instead, I would say the weapons sandbox is not in a bad state. Heavies are mostly fine, specials are a bit undertuned when it comes to Bosses/Majors damage. Specials being strong is fun, look at Lord of Wolves rn! Ofc that's overtuned but you get the point, it is fun to have effective weapons without having to worry about ammo 24/7 or to be able to run Eager Edge. Primaries on the other end, especially legendary ones, are terrible against most things, but they have been needing massive buffs for years.
What is bad though, and what makes primaries feel useless, is the fact that certain specific builds provide infinite high damage abilities, and HP values are starting to get really inflated to counter those. High damage abilities are fine, but they should be limited in use. Example: a Solar Hunter getting a melee back on a kill is fine. A Titan clearing 25 majors with 1 Consecration and fully charging Super + Transcendence in 15 seconds from 0, basically getting another melee 8+ charges easily, is not (btw casting Glacial Quake or Bladefury refunds all your melees charges lmao why). I will expand on Super and Transcendence regen later on, since I consider it top 3 PVE balancing issues rn.
To try and mitigate this, I would suggest to decently buff most primaries especially against non redbars. They should still ofc be worse than a special or a heavy, don't get me wrong, but they could be doing idk 1/2 or 1/3 of the damage, not like ~1/20 lmao. Specials need buffs but not anything crazy (and please give Glaive like double damage on their shots lmao, I don't even really like them but noone will even use them seriously if their primary shot is terrible).
And yeah, stop making Bullet Sponge enemies. It usually doesn't even make the game harder, it's just boring depending on the build. No point in making a GM enemy have super high HPS if I can just sit in the back of the map with a scout. Add tanky enemies when and if needed, but within reason.
Abilities is a weird one cause the sandbox is just so doomed in that regard lol. They nerfed regular regen methods, especially armor related ones, which ended up only making worse those builds that were already pretty bad, while the top builds that had infinite powerful abilities just due to unrelated effects where mostly untouched.
The main thing that needs to happen here is, if we want to keep those high damage abilities, specifically tune them to not have infinite uptime. Examples: Make Speaker's Sight strongly lower your nade regen. Make Transcendence only give you 1 melee charge on cast. Remove the ability to refund all your Titan melees on Super cast etc... the truly broken ones aren't really many, and if those strong abilities won't have permanent uptime, there will be no need to add an Ogre in a GM that can withstand 30 Synthos Consecrations.
On top of that, some of the Armor Mods could be rebuffed, so that less strong builds that don't have a "cheesy" way to get infinite uptime can shine more.
Very quick side note, but I really hope they reconsider their announcements for Armor 4.0. Start being reworked is cool, stats going up to 200 is cool! Stats giving RNG chances of getting extra grenades or melees is NOT cool. Imagine you are in a serious pvp fight and you lose cause your opponents gets lucky and throws 2 nades at you. Hope they end up deciding for a different effect that does not involve RNG.
- Now let's talk about damage based regen, such as Super and Transcendence regen. Damage based Super regen was introduced in Season of the Lost I believe, and to this day I would consider it a top 5 worst changes that ever happened in Destiny's history. Anything that gives you resources without requiring some form of action usually ends up being a balancing issue. Having to kill enemies or take tradeoffs to get energy was cool! You do x action, you gain y benefit. Now you can cast your Super at the start of a damage phase, dps, and by the end of it you might have gotten your Super back with 0 investment on your end. On top of this, due to the way it is coded (which is one of the worst systems I've ever seen), certain damage instances give you insane regen while certain others give almost 0.
Made up example cause I don't know the actual numbers: if Sniper rn is meant to give ~2% on hit, a Fusion will give (2% x number) of bolts cause the regen is purely hit based but they have the same base scalar (yes there is some scaling tied to damage buffs and stuff, but I don't wanna overcomplicate it. @TheAegisRelic has a good video on it if you are curious). What this basically means is that certain weapon types or abilities end up giving you your full super in like 10 seconds just for damaging a Boss (which isn't a tradeoff, that's your main objective lmao), while others don't, and that is both a balancing issue cause players are strongly suggested not to run those weaker regen options, and also a power creep issue cause players can get basically infinite Supers by abusing the system with SMGs, DOT etc...
On top of all this, something that many don't consider is how this impacts the hardest endgame. With regen being hit based and not actually damage based, if enemies have more HPs and you need more or stronger hits to kill them, your regen will absolutely skyrocket in those situations. This is why you see players getting their full Super/Trans in 1 Consecration when doing a GM, while it doesn't do anything anywhere near as broken in regular play. This should not be the case and I think we can agree that even if this system is to be kept, killing an acolyte in a GM or in a patrol should result on the same super being regenned. You being underleveled should not mean more Super is being regenned on a similar HPs pool.
I do not think the system needs to be completely scrapped, but it for sure needs to be reworked to actually be damage based, be somewhat consistent between difficulty options, and most importantly be consistent between weapon types/abilities (ofc more tuned to the lower end, you should never end a damage phase with more than 50% of your Super back if you casted it at the start). This would also by proxy partially fixing Prismatic Titan, cause not having infinite Transcendence uptime by just doing 1 melee and throwing a Glacial nade would at least make you think about your melees a little bit. Ofc if all this ends up happening regen based on kills and regen based on time would need to go up a bit to compensate.
Ok, we are at the end. I didn't really discuss anything too specific outside of completely broken stuff like LoW, Speaker's Sight or Prism Titan cause I feel like this broad discussion covers almost everything without going in depth.
Friendly reminder that Bungie does not make changes because I ask so, but I think even if just some of this feedback could be received before the next expansion that could benefit the game plenty. As always feel free to discuss down here and please keep it civil, I'll try to reply to many like I always like to do! I'm not an enemy, I just want the best for the game and I would love to see it be both more approachable and varied in strategies while providing content for all types of players.
Thanks for reading if you got here!
Been playing a ton of D1 on an alt account lately. Found this cave on Venus that I completely forgot had a ship schematic in it.
Love little hidden things like this.
You do realize you’re a kid or really you’re a probably almost 30 or in the middle of your 30s masquerading as a kid who plays video games for living in the community has really pumped your head up when your career path has no retirement and no one that’s been doing it for 20ys