Thoughts on Weapons Balance (Gaming)

by Durandal, Monday, July 31, 2017, 11:47 (2673 days ago) @ Blackt1g3r

Bungie tried to have a "mid-tier" set of weapons, but couldn't reliably slot them in between the primaries and the heavy weapons.

I think they could have leveled out shotguns and snipers to be equal to primaries, but it would have been tough and would have changed the feel of the guns tremendously or resulted in significant overlap and redundancy with the various primaries.

How would you balance shotguns vs. AR and HCs for example? Snipers vs. Scouts?
DPS would have had to come down, and that would have driven many of the "pro" players away from those guns. Keeping the damage, but reducing the ammo would make the guns unusable in PVE.

Sure, you could have added scope charge time for snipers and made the shotguns like the low impact archtype where you had to be 5 feet away for a OHK, but most players would (and did) object to that.

So D2's implementation is about the best you can do while still maintaining the feel of the D1 weapons.