Don't let Prestige raid be my Hawkmoon (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Thursday, March 15, 2018, 13:01 (2522 days ago) @ Claude Errera

I’ve talked about this before, but D2’s weapon category breakdown (kinetic/energy/power) really is a fatal flaw for my long term enjoyment of the game.

I think it's definitely true for PvE, and even PvP as well.

The thing is, having two primaries doens't matter because they are the same idea of weapon. Low damage, high ammo, used for clearing ads. The three slots in Destiny were all very different. You had much more choice.

The thing that did need fixing was the reliance on snipers in PvE, since they were overwhelmingly the best option against bosses. But that could have been addressed without completely eliminating the special archetype.

How the crap was a shotgun or fusion rifle not the go-to weapon for Golgoroth? Sniper for the Warpriest makes sense, but you're right smack dab in front of Golgy, you could shake his hand if he'd let you. It seems obvious that a shotty to that huge gut would be the way to take him down, but nope.

I actually tried that - the range between the pool you had to stand in and his belly was great enough that you missed a huge amount of damage using a shotgun.

Also, wanted to put in a small argument about the fact that primary/energy are the same idea of weapon, above - I use energy weapons to rip down shields, something that you CAN'T do with a primary. (Occasionally, I forget that i'm not using my energy weapon when fighting a strong shielded enemy, and wonder why it's taking so many shots.) Yes, they're interchangeable once shields are down... but there are enough shielded enemies (especially in the current activities) that treating them as the same category doesn't make sense to me.

Here’s how it breaks down for me:

They’re interchangeable in terms of feel. A kinetic AR and an energy AR are identical in all ways, except the energy version gets a damage boost against specific enemies. So when I see an enemy with a shield, I’ll switch to my energy (doesn’t matter which element, really... since all energy weapons deal extra damage against shields of any type) but that’s all it takes. Nothing else about the moment-to-moment combat changes.
In D1, using any secondary weapon was a substantially different experience than using any primary weapon. Even if you take the elemental damage out of the equation, using a sniper or a shotgun requires a very different skill set than using an AR, SR, HC, etc. While playing D1, my brain would feel like it was switching gears any time I switched to a secondary weapon because I couldn’t approach combat with them the same way I did with my primary. But in D2, that doesn’t really happen. I don’t need to “switch gears”.

Now obviously, not all primary weapons in D2 are identical. So using a scout rifle and using sidearm are different experiences. The differences just aren’t as extreme as the differences between any D1 primary and any D1 secondary. And that adds to the feeling of homogenization that I get from a lot of Destiny 2’s combat. It’s not that there is no diversity, but I find the diversity has been cut back just a little in multiple different dimensions, and I find the cumulative effect quite noticeable.

I’m not trying to make the case that any of this is a problem. It’s just a difference that I feel between the two games, and I prefer the way things all balanced in D1.