No Attack/Defense/Light - Why and why not? (Destiny)

by Dan de Board , Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 16:37 (3331 days ago)

This is something I know a few people here have thought would be a good direction for the game to go in. I feel like there's good reasons for and against it.

The great thing about quantifiers like Attack, Defense and Light is that you can easily tell at a glance how good a person might be. A level 32 early in expansion content shows you that the player was good enough to run Crota hard, get their gear and level it up. Losing these quantifiers also makes it so you can't tell what's new in an expansion or what's desirable. Having the quantifiers takes a lot of the guesswork out of picking gear, because you know that you need to have xx A/D/L in order to be viable. It also gives people a reason to actually play the latest content, since they need the gear in order to remain relevant in the content. In short, these higher levels are a goal we want to reach, albeit a shallow one.

That said, if we take A/D/L away, it really changes up PvE. With no way to determine how good a piece of gear is outside of A/D/L, it all comes down to perks and rarity. The current system of rarity determining how many perks an item has (and what kind) works really well. Crucible (outside of Iron Banner) is great because it's all about the perks you have since it's a level playing field outside of player skill. With no A/D/L barrier, everyone can run the raids! That said, because of the way Destin is, we have to give players are reason to run the raids (outside of them being fun). This means that perks have to be raid specific (like a lot of firefly on stuff for Crota's End), or so good that they dominate in PvP as well as in PvE.

This whole situation is a real tightrope, what do you guys think?