Let's talk PvP Weapon Balance (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Tuesday, June 21, 2016, 05:14 (3171 days ago) @ electricpirate

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

This slower movement speed when shotgun is held doesn't affect sprint though, which is your primary movement speed in pvp, so it's almost a negligible adjustment. Also, a thing we did in CoD was cap your look sensitivity with certain guns, so if you picked up the BAR, you were turn-speed capped to 3, regardless of what you had it set to. In fact, only the knife let you turn at speed 10; all other weapons were capped in some way (even dual pistols capped at 9, but since few people set their look speed to 10, not many people knew they weren't max speed weapons).

Anyway, Bungie has been slowly (painfully slowly) tweaking things like ADS speed (one of the recent patches made snipers take 2 frames longer to ADS)... but that sort of super minor tweak needs to be performed waaaay more often than once every 6 months if they ever hope to achieve balance.

I like to point to Mass Effect 3 as a great example of not only how to handle new content in a microtransaction environment, but also how to balance their multiplayer. Weekly changes. Occasionally wildly experimental, with an added bonus bounty if you used the weapons being experimented on. Yes, the meta shifted more quickly than Bungie's meta does, but they were constantly getting closer to the balance that they wanted.