WSTE-M (Destiny)

by Durandal, Thursday, July 27, 2017, 06:50 (2764 days ago) @ Cody Miller

I played throughout and my impressions were as follows:

D1 Beta: High RoF ARs were too strong, there was no point to HCs, Scouts.
D1 Launch: Suros had range, damage, and healed you. Combined with Shoulder Charge on a titan and why would you use anything else? Fusions like PI could kill, at range, and were common.

I used my Hunter with a shotgun, TLW and blink exclusively at this time.

Bungie nerfed ARs, Hunter lightning grenades, Fusions, they dropped from wide use in the crucible. Thorn, TLW started to be more common. Then Felwinter's Lie appeared, and everyone started shotgun sniping.

CE dropped, and pulses got a buff. Shotguns started getting nerfed. HCs started to become more common.

HOW dropped, and Thorn+firebolt grenades became a thing. People hated it.

Oryx arrived, and HCs were nerfed into the ground. You couldn't hit someone reliably outside of shotgun range. High ROF ARs and snipers, or TLW were back in full force.

The key thing in all of this was that Special weapons each inhabited the same performance space as primaries, but were better in every respect. The only real tradeoff to special weapons was ammo scarcity. Even within special weapon archetypes there was imbalance, with generally low impact weapons suffering from lack of any real reason to take them over their high impact counterparts.

I think that is why Bungie added the range bands on weapons, in an attempt to carve out more differences to make the weapons feel more unique. It is an approach I've seen in other games.
Looking at how BF, GoW, TF or CoD handle weapon types they don't draw the distinction that Bungie did in making Special weapons substantially better then primaries at the same range.

In pushing all the special and heavy into one "power" slot, Bungie is basically returning to the more common PVP balance we see in most FPS games out currently.