One argument against this (Destiny)

by Claude Errera , Monday, June 19, 2017, 17:01 (2804 days ago) @ Cody Miller

This is why In JRPGs at least, beating the super bosses often give no, or an inconsequential reward. Because, what's the point of a better item? You just did the hardest thing in the game.

The most frustrating thing I can remember doing in Destiny happened recently during a VoG run. I was with a group of people who'd already done it several times; it was my first time at 390. We got to the Atheon challenge, where everyone needs to shoot one oracle.

I had no weapons that worked well at shooting oracles. (Due to some stupidity on my own part, I had no special or heavy ammo, and was 3 or 4 minutes away from synthing either - and there's no way to 'pause' that encounter; once you wipe, it begins again, on a timer, so unless everyone wants to sit and get killed 3 or 4 times, you play it.)

Everyone else had oracle-killer weapons. (They drop regularly during the raid - I'd just been supremely unlucky in that I'd gotten zero weapon drops during the Templar fight.)

I was the cause of a large series of team wipes, as I went in, looking for 'my' oracle to kill (the team I was playing with assigned an order to oracle destruction, but since I had no clue how they spawned, I shot at whatever one was visible when I came in) - I couldn't kill any oracles at all. (Whatever weapon I was using - probably a max-impact scout - took more than a clip to kill an oracle, but it would get destroyed by one of the other players before I could finish it. So I'd be left with the last one, and I couldn't kill the last one fast enough to keep us from wiping.)

This problem DISAPPEARED once I got a Vision of Confluence. It didn't diminish - it DISAPPEARED. It was a nearly insurmountable problem (caused by a specific situation, yes, and one that I'd created myself, but still, in that context, nearly insurmountable) that became a trivial annoyance with the addition of a single gun - one that only dropped during the raid.

Before ANYONE has oracle-killer weapons, that section is doable, because we all take about the same amount of time to kill one (and because we usually have access to higher-damage weapons like snipers and heavies), but it's still hard, and I'm pretty sure most teams wiped a bunch of times trying to get the timing down. If you play as a regular team, you usually get those oracle-killer weapons together; almost everyone gets at least one weapon drop, and almost all the VoG weapons have that perk. But even if you're not in the same extreme situation I put us in (where 1) I had no oracle-killing weapons, 2) I had no heavy or special, and 3) I was much, much slower at killing oracles than any of my teammates), it's still hard, and easy to screw up, until you get VoG weapons. King's Fall showed us that when precision is required most of the time, many players will simply choose to not play - raids are fun unless everyone has to be 'on' 100% of the time. Oracle perks keep VoG FUN - as cheapLEY's video today showed, even the 390 version of the templar can be 3-manned. (In contrast, if we're running Oryx on KF, and we're only 1 or 2 rounds in, we'll wipe if someone dies, rather than try it with 5, because it's just easier.)

So just because you just did the hardest thing in the game, there's nothing that says you'll have more fun going forward if you get a gun that makes it a little easier. ;)