[*] That nova bomb is a f&*king joke. http://xboxdvr.com/gamer/BeardFade/video/34321862
[/list]

I will have much more to say about this soon-ish. I would simply like to make mention that after 4 days of play, I have decided to call that version - and by the heavens it better be a version - of the Nova Bomb; the "Indoors" Nova Bomb.

Also - I WISH the tracking was that good in PVE. All my Nova Bomb casts seem to only go around the thing I'm trying to drop. Yes I know about the shooting thing. Meh.

I now return to my PVE world, and such.

Honestly, I love playing with y'all, but they are killing the fun out of PvP for any of us who aren't God-like players.

My wife agrees. Don't take her sniper rifle, make it easier for her to contribute to the team even as a less skilled player, don't take the fun away Bungie.

If you're on PS4, add me. I'm a west coastie and a very late night one at that. "Kahzgul" on PSN. If you're on Xbone, well, we can always play Titanfall 2.

Hunter notes:

- My grenade seems to reset to scatter grenade every time I launch the game. F that. I want my tripmines.
- The dodge that resets your melee is awesome to give you a 2nd throwing knife. Speaking of which, exploding throwing knife seems better than most grenades.
- Golden gun seems fine to me. It doesn't last long, but that's because it has a spec for 6 rapid fire shots vs. 3 slow ones. I assume this is a locked-in spec for the beta only, and we'll be able to choose other things in the real game. The wording makes it seems so, anyway.
- We still have the best jump by a country mile. No, I don't know how a country mile is different from a normal mile.
- The default gear is *awful* for pvp and has zero resilience. Even just one item with resilience made a huge difference to my survivability in pvp.

In general, though, 4v4 doesn't make any sense to me. The base pve game is 3v3. The raids are for 6. PvP should evenly accept teams along those lines, which is to say, multiples of 3. 4v4 is weird, and means if you want to pvp and then go to pve one of your friends is just SOL. In fact, even if both teams want to leave together, 2 people are SOL. it's pretty crappy. I really hope they add a 6v6 mode back in. And 3v3. I'm okay with them keeping 4v4, because it makes more sense for objective based gameplay to have even numbers of players, but it's really weird to split the playerbase in uneven groupings this way.

Weapon balance from beta can't be trusted at all. The game is months of development past this point, and I guarantee they've rebalanced it several times in that span.

I don't like how when you zoom out, there's a delay with getting your radar back. Other than that, I don't have many complaints at the moment.

I wanted a thread devoted to PvP in the Beta, since frankly, that's all I care about. Sadly, all I have is a list of gripes.

• Hunters feel weaker than ever before. No blink strike. A practically useless Golden Gun. Awesome. But at least we all get dodge, right?

Hunter is the one class I haven't tried in the Beta, so I can't speak to that.

[*] The radar is more useless than ever. So glad they got rid of the elevation information. As if there was an overload of information before.

I didn't have trouble with it myself, but you're far from the only person I've heard from who isn't digging the new radar. Hopefully it'll get tweaked.

[*] Sniping sucks. I'm pretty sure everyone else is happy, but given that I've run NLB/sidearm (and the sidearms I've gotten suck, too) exclusively for the better part of a year, it really sucks to know I may only get a handful of chances to even do it. Ever. It's a joke. God, I miss Y1 Destiny and ammo. Now I legitimately have to defer power ammo to someone who wants to play with something more practical, or who is superiorly skilled. Way to kill the fun, Bungie. Let's have less people participate, feel powerful, etc. Good job.

So I know we're on complete opposite sides of the fence on this one, but good riddance as far as I'm concerned. Sniper rifles did nothing but harm PvP in Destiny, IMO. I'm so sick of every single sightline being covered by 2-3 enemy snipers, just sitting back and hard-scoping. At best, it sucks all the fun out of a match because you know the entire game is going to be spent sitting and hiding, trying to outsnipe the enemy team. It's the most boring possible gameplay. And at worst (when you're up against a highly skilled team of snipers) it is just a rage-enducing slaughter as you get sniped from every possible angle, at any range, non-stop.
Bungie never figured out how to balance snipers such that they wouldn't dominate at long, medium, and close range. I'd be happy if they were just obliterated from the PvP game all together.

[*] I know people think 6v6 is too many. But number discrepancies/AFKs are far worse to experience in 4v4s. In 6's, a person missing from action was only a 16.7% difference. Now, it's a 25% difference. Also, there's no where to hide a bad player. Because they make up a greater portion of the team, their poor performance is a bigger factor. Which leads to.

I think 6v6 was too many in D1 for several reasons. Most of the maps weren't large enough, abilities and supers were too rampant, and the scenario of going up against 5-6 snipers just crushed map flow. With how the D2 Beta plays, I'd be curious to try 6v6. With fewer supers and grenades, plus fewer snipers, it might actually be fun now. But we'd certainly need larger maps.

[*] Solo play sucks even more. "Well, play with friends Beard!", I hear you say. To which I say, "I'm on the West Coast, which has a smaller number of players around to play by the time I'm ready. You East Coasters are going to bed before I'm done with dinner."

Yeah that's going to be an issue, I think. So much of it will come down to the nuances of matchmaking, and how party size/skill level is factored in. I share your concerns, but there are flip-sides. If I go into D1 as a solo player and go up against a party of 6, that is typically worse for me than going up against a party of 4 (all other things being equal). I still stand a chance of outplaying a team of 4 (unless matchmaking has put me and 3 other random against a party of 4 equally or higher skilled players, in which case wtf are you doing matchmaking?). But those chances are way smaller against a party of 6.

And while playing with a full group isn't always easy, it's easier to get a group of 4 together than a group of 6. And even if you don't have a full group, you and 1 friend can jump in together and bam: half your team is now coordinating well, which is more than most of the teamed you're likely to get matched against.

We'll just have to wait and see how this part shakes out.

Honestly, I love playing with y'all, but they are killing the fun out of PvP for any of us who aren't God-like players.

I don't see it that way myself. I think they're shifting the focus of the combat towards primary weapons and away from ability spam. I like having diverse abilities to play with, but too often in D1 I felt like supers and abilities and special weapons would dominate the flow of the game. I like giving players who are at a disadvantage tools or possibilities for turning the tide. But I'm not a fan of outplaying an opponent only to have them hit their "win button" and kill me, which happens all the freaking time in D1. So I think shifting the emphasis a bit towards primary weapons is a good thing at any skill level.

But hopefully they'll include some form of Mayhem variant (maybe a touch less insane than Mayhem in D1) that features faster cooldowns and more power ammo for those who enjoy that side of the game.

I think the focus on gunplay is a batter base PvP experience.

A couple things I'd personally like to see tweaked:
· I do think super energy could charge a little faster
· I wish more people could get Power Ammo at once (maybe it 2 or it divides between 3)
· Join in Progress needs to be fast. 3v4 games turn ugly pretty quickly.

So, I invested some more time, with people, into the Crucible. Has some conversations about how people were feeling. In general it helped refine my reasoning for the things I don't like in D2 Beta Crucible.

I've already been critical of nerfing cool downs as well as power, at least one of these may be rectified through aspects of the gear system that we do not have access to in the Beta. However, while I do think that a degree of additional power for grenades would have merit (albeit I am fine with stickies still not being a one-shot on a Guardian with higher resistance) that is mostly from cases of feeling like they aren't even good for finishing a Guardian off as they retreat behind cover from a gunfight.

So, with a substantial focus on gunplay (as it takes 3 uncharged melees or 2 with a charged melee to kill without any shots fired, and an SMG can outpace 3 melees in damage/grenades seem very situational in lethality) the purpose of abilities is diminished in both frequency and power. But what is the purpose of those abilities? Melee is best when used in conjunction with a weapon. As are grenades. However, I think that the most important things for grenades to be able to do is aid in controlling combat flow.

For Control it seems in most cases the best strategy is just to roam around as a group, when you find a target, team shot and there is nothing they can do. If they have a friend, one person peels off for a flank and you counter most of the class ability play. Highly simplified, but still important. I'd like to see grenades stay as a support/mop up action, so they don't need crazy damage increases, though some grenades may need more tinkering than others. But what they can do is help you break up those team clusters that roam the map, or allow you to zone off a doorway, or at least delay being challenged through a doorway. These are great tactical uses of your abilities. My problem is when I get to use these only a handful of times during a game and it really makes it feel limited.

The gunplay is solid and feels good, usually. There may be some hit registration stuff, delayed damage specifically, that irks me. Both on receiving and dealing. It is refreshing to still pickup a kill as you are pretty sure they rabbited away. But it definitely feels bad when know you had full cover and still get finished off. The gunplay itself gets replaced by coordinated fire, though. It loses the quality dance of a 1v1 when you are on either end of team shooting, and given that roaming CFs are more effective than a lot of tactical flanking means that you see more of that.

So, tl;dr ver.

- Gunplay feels good.
- Team shooting is more dominant/less interesting play.
- Grenades should be able to more reliably split groups through either a threat of frequency or power.
- Health Regen is already delayed enough that you are still relatively easy to mop up if you can't get support.
- It will be nice when specs vary due to gear (as it anticipated) so that I don't run into 4 games in a row where not a single super gets used/are all used within about 10 seconds of each other in the last minute of the match.

but given that I've run NLB/sidearm (and the sidearms I've gotten suck, too) exclusively for the better part of a year

Wow. That seems pretty short sighted of you. Especially since Destiny 2’s Freedom Slots were announced a few months ago.

but they are killing the fun out of PvP for any of us who aren't God-like players.

You don’t have to be god-like. You just need some practice. It’s still a ton of fun. ‘Course it would be more so for you right now if you hadn’t tried to turn Destiny into Sniper Pro Elite III or whatever.

I'm pretty sure everyone else is happy...

Not gonna lie, I’ve been anticipating this day with a good deal of glee. Instead of cursing the hard scoped snipers, I’ve silently smiled knowing that soon they’d have to relearn how to play. Great to hear that confirmed.

I've been liking the PvP because it relies more on gameplay than gunplay.

D1 gunfights = bang bang...I'm dead..I thought I had him, darn.
D2 gunfights = bang bang bang...uh oh, im losing this, gtfo, live to fight.

It's also tough to judge the weapons so far because everyone is using the same loadout and we don't know how good these weapons are compared to the full platter we will get in the game.

Across the board, (supers, grenades, melees, abilities etc) I wish cooldowns were a bit quicker, or the action were more significant. 6 shots golden gun is nice...but damn...it lasts, what.. 7 seconds? guh. Grenades are just worthless. Melee is fine but the melee ability, worthless. (I've only played solar hunter so far btw)

It needs some tweaks but I've enjoyed the PvP.