Tourists, Collectors, and Hobbyists (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Sunday, December 03, 2017, 19:08 (2624 days ago) @ Claude Errera

This fact is not lost on me, and I did point out that Destiny muddies the classic mid-game with the endgame by having power (I think I said above 250) be basically meaningless.

Now, is your time spent during the end game to power up further too fast or easy?

That being said, end game is not about powering up. This is an important distinction. Endgame is where optimization occurs. Conflating that with power level makes it confusing for players to know what's actually a better choice: Power level 250 gun with great perks or power level 260 gun with crap perks? The answer is to keep BOTH in Destiny, the 260 so your engrams are higher power, and the 250 for actual use

If power above 250 is basically meaningless (I don't think it is, but you argued it was just a paragraph above this one), the answer is "shard the 260 one because the better gun is high enough." (Or just infuse the higher one into the lower one! Why keep both?)

Most people I know, including those that really have no clue what they're doing, do this - they find a gun they like, and they stick with it, infusing higher guns into it. Whether you understand the "obtuse mechanics" of leveling or not, this is trivial to understand, and works for almost everyone. I haven't heard ANYONE say "man, I wish I'd saved ____" - which doesn't mean nobody is saying it, just that it's not a fantastic example of a 'representative player'.

I thought about this when I wrote it and decided it would be cumbersome to go into the whole detail "you got a hand cannon that's 260 but you prefer to use the scout that's 250 so you can't infuse because technically they're different classes of weapons" in order to not muddy the main point that I was making about power level vs. weapon feel/perks. Obviously you're right and infusing the higher one into the lower one is what you'd do if they're the same class, so I left all that out with the hope anyone reading it would assume the guns to be a different class by virtue of me not presenting infusing one into the other as an option. Sorry if I made the wrong call. Sometimes we all get so stuck on the details we don't see the forest through the trees in our discussions here.