Bungie has tried to address this by making secondary weapon ammo more scarce. It has not had the proper effect. Same with heavy ammo. Now, when one team is winning the map control game, they are flush with rare ammo and are able to kill the enemy team with OHKs all day. The other team, stuffed down into a corner, has really very little hope of coming back since they simply cannot compete with all of the OHK options.

It used to be if you killed a guy who was using a special or heavy, they dropped their special and heavy. This ended up not being to people's liking, as getting heavy kills often meant you just got more heavy and dominated longer.

But when special and heavy is scarce, you can starve the other team as you say.

The solution? Enemies will drop their special and heavy ammo if you kill them with a weaker class of weapon. If you kill someone wielding a heavy with either a special or a primary, they should drop their box. Kill a special wielder with a primary, and they drop their box. Kill a special wielder with a heavy? Nothing for you. See how it goes? This is slightly more progressive than your suggestion of primary only.

This completely prevents the positive feedback previously associated with ammo drops, but it now gives the team who is down a chance to turn things around with good plays.

Your suggestion is a good one, even though I thought of it first. :-p

Did you? well done. I think it's a solid idea as well. I'm not sure i like getting heavy if you kill them with a special.. OHKs are OHKs either way you slice it, and I'm more concerned about making primary weapons more... primary.

Your suggestion is a good one, even though I thought of it first. :-p

- No text -

I would suggest that in PvP only we are able to choose a primary and a secondary from our Primaries + sidearms. Combine all of the OHK weapons into a power weapons category.

This would completely shift the gameplay back to being focused on weapon skill rather then just getting that one shot that dominates everything else.

Now with secondary/heavies being combined into one slot. You make it where the ammo is even more scarce. Let special/heavy drop once or twice per match. Give each weapon the max of one magazine no exception. Snipers/Shotguns/Fusions could get buffed to a base of 5-6 rounds of ammo. Heavies would get 2 rockets max, and one magazine of MG. The kicker on this is you then have to choose what you want when that ammo drops. You get one or the other only, never both at the same time.

Would you keep or lose sniper/shotty ammo when you died?

For crucible I like the idea of having 2 primaries and putting OHK weapons in a special third slot. If we weren't dropping our ammo on death I think I'd expect to keep shotgun/sniper/fusion ammo between deaths, but not rocket/machine gun/sword ammo. Also, I think ammo for your second primary should be somewhat limited. Perhaps ammo would go with which slot the gun is in, so green ammo would be required for your second primary, and purple for your OHK weapon.

I don't like this solution for PvE. I'd hate to chose between sniper ammo and heavy ammo in PvE. You might be able to convince me if green ammo made any second primary shoot elemental damage, maybe.

First off. Let me state that I strongly feel that PvP and PvE should be completely divorced from each other. That way they can balance the weapons individually.

Interestingly, Elite: Dangerous does this with their CQC multiplayer mode (as opposed to killing other players in open play). I find CQC fun, but it's sort of game-breaking because of the split. There are special weapons, ships, and equipment that don't exist in the main game even if they are clearly superior to the weapons and ships that are. It also has a special progression mode that is completely different from the main game. In order to encourage players to participate in this mode you can earn money, but to keep players in the main game from being annoyed they made it so the monetary rewards are extremely low until you've sunk in a lot of hours to rank up and "prestige" (seems similar to how crucible rewards were historically low). They also reward players with a special location that you can only visit when you fully rank up once in that mode (similar to the lighthouse but not as cool - it does give easy access to all weapons, ships and equipment in the game but there are other places that do the same thing). In theory, CQC is a "sport" within the real game world, but the connection is very tenuous so it barely feels like the rest of the game. Finally, because everything is balanced differently in this mode it feels a little wrong. The ships fly a bit differently, and the weapons behave differently. It's not good for newer players because when they switch between this mode and the open play mode they have to re-learn some thing which are often subtle differences.

I think Destiny would have similar issues. One of the design goals of Bungie seems to be that they want you to have to earn things so you feel like they are "your weapons" (ignoring whether that works as intended or not). How would you do that in a separate Crucible mode? Bungie's current approach is to share weapons between modes and try to make them feel similar in the two modes. An alternative would be to make the crucible have a fixed set of weapons and ignore the idea of progression entirely. You could have special "Crucible" weapons that you don't get to use in the main game but you unlock by playing the crucible. The main problem with those approaches is they are game-breaking. If your guardian is "training" to fight in the Crucible, then why wouldn't they use those same weapons in the rest of the game?

110912

I keep thinking back to a post you made months ago (I think it was you), talking about how the CoD series has tackled certain weapon-balance issues by making certain weapons affect the player's base movement speed. That has always seemed like an elegant, effective, and logical solution to some of these problems. Carrying a sniper rifle or a machine gun should slow down the player a little bit. It would certainly help address the issue of run-and-gun snipers and shotgunners being so dominant, while placing a non-DPS-related emphasis on using primary weapons.

errrr.... shotguns and heavy machine guns do slow you down. HMGs since I've been playing, and the 2.1 update slowed movement while holding a shotty

Here's the notes from december:

Slower ready/put away time for all shotguns
Additional recoil on weapon fire for all Stability values
Slower reload speed for all Reload stat values
Slower time to Aim Down Sights speed for all shotguns
Slower movement speed when shotgun is held. Walk and Aim Down Sights movement is affected. Sprint is unaffected

These discussions always make me feel a little bit like I am playing a different game from everyone else. I agree with handling improvements on primary weapons. I agree that something should be done for the ammo economy (I like the overall Primary > Secondary > Heavy drop discussed elsewhere) and haven't really noticed current scarcity of special being a problem in maining a special weapon on the occasion.

However, I don't feel like I get OHK by specials everytime I come against them. Outliers (quick/no-scope from snipers mostly) are irritating to be sure, and there are ways to counter that (slower/delayed scope-in for snipers or no precision when hipfired, as two examples) with design changes. However, in most encounters where I lose to a special weapon it is because I made a bad play. Such as sticking my head out into active sniper lanes. Or trying to close with an enemy around a corner who is unsurprisingly packing a shotgun. Or being in the open/traveling a predictable path and I get caught by a Fusion rifle.

However, if I'm running a primary weapon I tend to avoid the niche situations where the Special weapons are designed to excell. I don't have much issue with them and I usually win those engagements by playing to the strengths of my weapons and the design of the map. And often enough if someone is poor in their aim with any of the OHK Specials even when they have advantage in positioning I often find one can hold their own. A missed sniper shot or shotgun blast that only partially connects might leave me an easy mop up, but I win a fair number of the engagements. At least fair enough I don't feel they break the game. And often enough when I just don't quite land enough splinters of a Fusion Rifle burst I know it's my fault when I get finished off by a primary.

You're not playing a different game at all. I'm not walking around being OHK'd by everything I see. That being said, I don't like that the current OHK capability of snipers and shotguns (and supers and rockets and fusion rifles) can still deliver ultimate punishment to you if you don't make a mistake. I can get the complete drop on a dude, but it takes so long for my primary to kill him that he can turn all the way around and shotgun my face. That simply shouldn't be possible. Now, it wouldn't be problematic if special ammo wasn't so scarce, but when you get into situations where you have no special, you're really screwed in this game right now. "secondary" weapons are everyone's go-to guns. They're not specific role weapons at all - they're playstyle defining, and they certainly aren't of secondary nature compared to primaries.

CoD gets around this by making shotguns and snipers primary weapons as well, and restricting secondaries to anti-air or pistols, as well as by giving all guns a faster TTK so that one mistake on either side of a shootout is fatal.

But Destiny doesn't have this. You can land 4 shots with MIDA on a sniper and he can still OHK you even though you were lighting his world on fire. That's not something I can do, because I suck a sniping under duress, but it's been done to me plenty of times, often by snipers who weren't even facing me when I started firing. Similarly, the range on shotguns with god rolls is so large that it doesn't matter if you're backing up the whole time you're firing because they can still close the gap and OHK you. This dramatic power gap is the issue I have. The prevalence of OHKs in destiny is part of what makes destiny's pvp exciting and compelling. I'm not advocating removing them. You'll note I didn't suggest a single nerf to any weapon's ability to OHK. Rather, I want to see a lessening of the gap between primary 2+ second TTKs and secondary instant TTKs.

I fully agree. If primary weapons were more generally suited across the board, you'd be able to select them based on feel rather than simply because it complemented your secondary weapon well. While I don't mind a little strategy in loadout selection, the current meta is limiting. I think adding your suggestion of making primaries more generally suited would help push the meta back towards primarily using primary weapons, and using secondaries as role-specific guns.

And here's the issue: To make primaries balanced, Bungie has steadily nerfed the best performing weapons to bring them more in line with the worst performing ones. This means that your average TTK with primary weapons is in the 2-3 second range, which is an eternity. I know some guns are theoretically a 1.33 TTK, but that's a fantasyland that only Luminosity and RealKrafty will actually be able to visit. For the rest of us mere mortals, TTK is higher.

1.333 second optimum ttk would be far and away the worst TTK in the game. The only thing that's remotely near that slow are Medium ROF pulses. DOP is .86 seconds, Mida is .9, Hawksaw is 1. 3 shot bursts.

Optimum TTKs are almost all sub second, average TTKs probably about 1 to 1.5 seconds. 1 Second is a lot of time to keep a sniper from getting a bead or to stop a rushing shotgunner.

Here's a full TTK breakdown: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1L7FV9l4hXo2tHD3XlFUp854XvJIwTKFIPvASLduPPS4/edit#gid=0

I think to underscore how far off base the TTK discussion about weapons gets, Mid ROF autos are considered garbage, while fast ROF are considered part of the Meta. The difference in TTK? 4/100s of a second.

I will say though I entirely agree with this sentiment:

- First, ADS aiming needs to be fixed. The camera bounce should exactly match the bloom pattern of hipfire, and all bullets should always go where the reticle is pointed. There should be no hidden bloom effect that could possibly result in "phantom" bullets. All shot adjustment should be visibly communicated in the camera and reticle bounce while ADS.

My mistake. I've read the TTK docs, but clearly remembered them incorrectly.

Even so, I think my point about fantasyland is valid. Most of us will never be in situations where those TTKs come to pass, whereas we've all had a one shot, one kill snipe or shotgun moment (or 12. Per game). For example, my shiny new Lyudmila-D is capable of a 2-burst kill (0.64 sec TTK?). However, at the range I need to be at in order to land those shots, totally ignoring the fact that I have to perfectly time my trigger pulls to attain perfect RoF, I've eaten a shotgun blast before the third round left my gun. So the practical TTK is a three-burst or four-burst kill, depending on range. So what reason does destiny give us to use our primary weapons instead of secondary ones? The worst possible reason: Because we don't have any ammo for the gun we'd rather be using.

As yourself: If you had unlimited ammo, but could pick only one primary or secondary weapon, which would you choose? For me it would be a shotgun, hands down. Sniper would be my second choice. Then I'd consider a pulse rifle. That's backwards and broken, when the "role specific" weapons are more generally useful than their primary counterparts. Ironically, primaries appear to be more role specific than the secondaries these days.

I like all of these suggestions. I'm not 100% on locking down stats permanently, but I think any long range shotgun needs to be a 2-shot kill, even with headshots.