Current Destiny PvP: I must admit, it's growing on me (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Friday, April 14, 2017, 19:03 (2568 days ago)

Ran some Iron banner last night and I gotta say, the new pvp balance has grown on me quite a bit.

Last time I played, it was the worst PvP experience of my destiny life. Nothing but UR and NLB with sidearms, and I couldn't land any shots with my "allegedly still good" hand cannons.

Fast forward to last night, where I said screw it, I like Iron Banana, so I'm going in. I did some research first and found that the Hawksaw archetype is still good. Well hey, I have a great Hawksaw that i love! Let's do it. And it was a VAST improvement in player experience.

First: I only won 2 of 6 games last night. Didn't matter. I had fun the whole time and every game (but one) was competitive. Never felt the need to jump lobbies even after a 5k point loss. The matchmaking felt solid.

I didn't encounter a single UR or NLB all night. Lots of good primary weapon gunplay where the difference was often who landed more crits. There was a bit of lag, but it was short lived and the damage referee seemed to be doing it's job (if you hit someone lagging, they still took damage, the only risk was them teleporting away while your rocket was in the air, which did happen to me once). And I found that the special ammo was much easier to get to that last time i played.

I'm not sure if the last round of PvP I had was just unlucky to get matched with superpro players far above my skill level or what, but this time around felt good. Even in matches where my team lost by 5k points, it didn't really feel one sided. There were no moments at all where I declared shenanigans on someone killing me (possibly a destiny first for me). Most importantly, the guns felt right to me. Primary weapons were used primarily. Special ammo was common enough that you could usually pick some up, but not so plentiful that you could run your shotgun all day. When I died unexpectedly, it was always clearly someone's good shot or grenade, and not once was a killed through a wall or around a corner from the shooter.

So anyway, I think the game's balance has moved into a good place. The new nechrochasm is pretty awesome (I don't have it, but I certainly got killed by it enough to recognize it), hawksaw pulses feel great, some people tell me hand cannons are still good (I just don't have the practice with the new aim/range/whatever to land my shots), and scouts like MIDA or VoC are pretty good too. Specials no longer dominate, and as much as the losing all ammo for them sucks when you die, I've come to respect that decision.

I retract my earlier opinions of this pvp balance. It's pretty fun right now. And it feels pretty fair, too.