On perks (Destiny)

by General Vagueness , The Vault of Sass, Sunday, June 21, 2015, 22:09 (3682 days ago) @ Cody Miller
edited by General Vagueness, Sunday, June 21, 2015, 22:20

I think overall, the decision to include ascension in tandem with the new perks is a major drawback.

The new perks simply aren;t as good. I'm talking about the perks that increase stats like range, stability, mag size, etc. They are even represented by an arrow pointing up, next to another pointing down. There are tradeoffs. Get more range, but you get less stability. Get more stability, but you get a smaller mag. Etc.

No field scout on HoW Scout Rifles instantly makes any legendary scout rifle in HoW not worth having, unless perhaps it's a ToO / PoE elemental primary. This is true because we have great Scouts like VoC, Fang of Ir Yut, Ghaleon's Demise, etc that have great stats and field scout. New ones can't compete, and if you can upgrade you old ones…

No new fusion rifle can even come close to my Purifier VII, Calming, or Plan C.

The Messenger, while a good pulse rifle, is just a slightly worse version of Three Little Words. Again, elemental is the only saving grace (or if you don't like TLW's sights or something).

The only new Legendary gun that I really like and use over old stuff now is BTRD-345, since its stats are incredible.

Granted, having perks be tradeoffs would have been the right choice from the start, but they didn't do that. So you have to keep going with that, or else you get what we have now: HoW Legendaries that are moted immediately since they cannot match up to what we already have.

All the old perks are still there though, and now they're available on all the new guns; at worst, the new perks are expendable, but the new guns are fine, and in fact better because you can get almost any combination of superior perks on them without having to wait for new ones to drop and hoping they turn out better.
Plus as you alluded to some of the new weapons have base stats that go beyond what existed before or match up with gear that was previously rare (case in point: Ill Will, Party Crasher +1, Matador 64).
Along with that, I think you're ignoring the interplay of perks. A lot of people like to have that one that reduces magazine size but buffs another stat along with final round and/or luck in the chamber (mainly on hand cannons and shotguns), because that means more rounds that do extra damage. I bet there are also people using some of the up-down perks to boost stats they care about and lowering stats they don't. It's similar to how some perks for rocket launchers (that go in the left column) give a big hit to stability and a noticeable boost to velocity or blast radius or both, and end up being the ones you really want, because stability doesn't really matter on rocket launchers. An example of this in action would be using a perk that lowers stability but raises another stat on a gun with a really low rate of fire, because the wait time between shots is long enough to adjust for even the wildest kick it can give you.