Mandatory vs Optimal (Destiny)

by kapowaz, Wednesday, August 06, 2014, 22:24 (3559 days ago) @ Cody Miller

I'd imagine certain abilities will be mandatory in the same way the Plasma Pistol was mandatory on legendary. Sure, you can do it without one, but it'd be a lot harder.

Then that's not really mandatory, just optimal; what I'm talking about (which I'm 99% certain Bungie has decided against) is a system of literally requiring that classes fulfil a certain role. For example, Bungie has also decided not to implement a healing class: the closest they get to this is with the ability to revive, but every class can do this and so there's no need for a specific role. This makes sense because the smaller your group, the more versatile and less-specialised you'd want character classes to be. You can afford to have several dedicated healers in a group of 25, or a single dedicated tank in a group of 5, but with only 3 in a Strike this becomes problematic: if that person happens to be down at the moment you need their role special ability, you all fail.

Being able to help shield your buddies from massive damage periodically is obviously useful, but in order for that to cross the threshold into becoming mandatory they'd basically be saying: you can't choose to use fist of havoc, sorry. They'd also be making a decision to punish you for not having your super available at the right time, which in turn would discourage use of your super so as to ensure you do have it available at the right moment later on. I can't imagine that's something they'd want.

Being able to change your talent on the fly also doesn't really help, since changing talents mid-action is slow and cumbersome: much like any inventory-based activity, it's best done when nobody else is waiting on you.

I'm sure lots of optimal strategies will arise for harder content, and they will involve exploiting damage-type weakness and using specials in a way that synergies between guardian class abilities. But Destiny is an action game; these things will arise organically, and change from one run to the next. For all the ways in which Destiny shares DNA with an MMO, this is one of those cases where (for me, at least) it doesn't.