Yeah... that'll be interesting. Sounds like they were using the same regen health effect everywhere and forgot. I'd always suspected it was the same thing across classes and weapons. Cool to have proof of that. Interesting that No Backup Plan had that invisible perk... I thought they simply activated the overshield. Did not know they also kicked off healing...

Hopefully they can quickly do something like create a Hungering Blade specific regen effect and just change the shared one back to how it was. Or, to be more foolproof, maybe each item should have its own regen effect so future changes won't break everything else?

If I understand this correctly, you get the following benefits for any of the affected perks:

Immediately start Health regen
Does not immediately start regenerating Shields
Restores more Health per kill
Gives a flat amount of Health/Shield per activation

Affected perks:

• Transfusion (Striker Titan - kills with storm fist immediately trigger health regen)
  
• Cauterize (Sunbreaker Titan - enemies brought down by your fire regenerate your health)
  
• Lifesteal (Voidwalker Warlock - Damaging an enemy with Energy Drain immediately restores a significant portion of your health)
  
• Embrace the Void (Voidwalker Warlock - Killing enemies with Nova Bonb or any grenade triggers Energy Drain and restores your health)
  
• Ward of Dawn cast
  
• Red Death Perk (Each kill heals you and speeds up reloads)
  
• Suros Legacy Perk (The bottom half of each magazine deals bonus damage and has a chance to return health on kill)
  
• No Backup Plans (Shotgun kills trigger force barrier and Force Barrier's duration is increased)
  
• The Ram (Increased armor. All voidwalker melees trigger life steal on hit)
  
• Apotheosis Veil (gain increased health from orb pickups)

I suppose it comes down to the new distinction between health and shield behavior, but I"m assuming that it's just adding a delay to the shield regen since otherwise they would have said "Gives a flat amount of Health per activation" instead of "Gives a flat amount of Health/Shield per activation". If it's just a delay (and not a long one), this should be manageable.

Aside from it being 99% reliable to kill? I've always thought it's a bit strong.

This means it still holds the same total number of rockets but has to be reloaded between each one? If so, that seems fair. It's still very good at getting a kill in almost ridiculous angles.

Truth
Reduced Magazine size from 3 to 1

?!?!

I've been out of touch for about a month now, and I know Truth has always been powerful, but it takes an exotic slot which is quite costly....so was Truth really becoming that much more of a problem?

The biggest ammo count for rockets, tripod, Horseshoes, and 99.9% accurate tracking?

They should have nerfed it ages ago. Of all the gear that requires zero skill, Truth was above even MIDA.

Yes because everyone was running truth all the time in PvP and Trails. Oh wait, they weren't.

I actually agree. I've ALWAYS thought Truth seemed out of balance stats-wise, from the first day I got it. I mean, ALL of its stats are upper-tier, even without taking its tracking into account. Having a huge blast radius, or mag size, or reload speed are all fine, but usually you expect if one or two of those are good, the others will be reduced to balance it out. But Truth didn't do that. And anyway, Truth's reload is so quick that I doubt I'll really notice that much.

I'm (potentially) much more annoyed with the magazine changes to Universal Remote. It might be that the base damage increase combined with it still having precision damage will mean that it's just as effective with 3 rounds as it used to be with 5. We shall see. But if it isn't, it'll be another instance where a weapon I liked got ruined because it was a menace in PvP, which I don't play.

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In Y1 they buffed the mag from 1 to 3 in order to make it even remotely usable. Now everything is so bad that they had to change it back and it's still the best rocket in the game.

I'd argue that my iron banner vendor Tormod's Bellows is now the best RL in the game. 3 rounds in the tube, fast rockets with big explosions and G&H. It's pre-nerf Truth without the tracking. And it's legendary, so you can use an exotic in a different slot.

But the fact that this is so top tier also concerns me. It was purchased from an IB vendor over a year ago. That means the barrier to entry for players who missed it is incredibly high. You're talking about an insanely lucky roll on a legacy engram (or can you even get legacy IB guns from those engrams? I've never paid much attention to them, so I'm unsure)

I like aspirational PvP, but when the ability of have-nots to get into the upper echelon of gear is so extreme as to be practically exclusive, well, I don't like that very much at all. Your path to getting a good gun should not be "go back in time 16 months."

Of course I should probably just shut up so bungie doesn't read this and nerf the bellows as well. Lord knows they'd rather nerf an existing good gun than add a new better one.

I was just chatting with a former game developer in the UK about test driven development (we were talking specifically to web development). He told me he got so into TDD now because they never did it for game development.

Once you start TDD and writing unit tests, it's hard to go back, and you easily avoid this stuff because you see exactly what you broke with each change.

Just based on this observation, it seems they likely don't have unit tests to know when they break one. Testing does take up a considerable amount of development time, so they may feel they don't have that kind of time to spend. The trade off being you break things inadvertently and spend time later fixing what you broke.

They could probably hire a slew of interns to write unit tests for their code base and avoid this problem in the future.

Oh, I could see them having good test coverage with unit tests for their code, but not for the data that makes up the weapon/armor/ability stats(data?) <edit> and the cascading effects a change can create </edit>. I imagine that's really the root cause of these bugs. It appears they don't "unit-test" their data, looks like they should.

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They do briefly state that sidearms are unchanged right before talking about shotguns.

What they didn't make clear is if sidearms only got ammo from their intrinsic perk of ammo upon spawn or if they were completely left alone from losing any ammo upon death.

Like Replenish, RM's perk description doesn't say anything about using your reserve ammo.