Not sure why I even care anymore, but eh, I'll sound off too (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Friday, July 17, 2015, 15:33 (3517 days ago) @ Funkmon

My gut reaction was that blanket nerfing everything is good, but - as I've said before - Bungie is applying nerfs to *base stats* instead of doing their balancing around the maxed out, perfect rolls. It's backwards and will not be effective at creating a balanced PvP experience. Also, I believe lag is the number one thing they need to fix. I don't know how you can tell if weapons are balanced when one person gets to keep shooting for 5 seconds after they've been killed. Below I'm going to break down my feelings about where the weapons will be and how the changes will effect them.

A word of warning: This is going to come off pretty negative sounding. Even though I think that the overall changes will be better than what we have right now, I think they're still not going about weapon balance correctly and I think the net result will be a less varied battlefield in terms of weapon loadouts.

Also, this is all too little too late as far as I'm concerned. It's been longer since 1.1.1 than it was from 1.0 to 1.1.1 and the current pvp imbalances are (as you can easily see from the graphs) just absurd. Bungie should have been rolling out their "little tweaks" every week, just fudging a few numbers here and there until weapons felt right. They're demonstrating a lack of understanding of how PvP plays in this game, a lack of understanding with regards to how players' minds operate when it comes to weapon builds, and a lack of understanding about how to treat players who have been spending vast quantities of resources to build up current weapons which are about to be dramatically changed.

I'm disappointed Bungie hasn't been communicating their awareness of these issues, their plans for these issues, or (frankly) their lack of understanding of these issues in the last 5 months. I don't believe the changes are going to fix things like Thorn being OP (the simple fact of the DoT effect preventing shield regen makes it highly desirable in PvP, especially elimination modes like ToO) or shotguns being king of close range. I think the ARs still need more buffs. Pulse Rifles and Scout Rifles are going to be preferred to sniper rifles at long ranges, and fusion rifles will not be very popular.

Here's how it sounds like weapons will actually work at various ranges:

Very close range: Shotguns are king, hand cannons and fusion rifles effective
Close Range: Hand cannons are king, shotguns and fusion rifles effective
Mid range: ARs are king, pulse rifles, scout rifles, hand cannons effective
Long Range: Scout Rifles are king, pulse rifles and sniper rifles effective. I don't think the hand cannon nerfs go far enough, so hand cannons may still be effective at long ranges as well.
Very Long Range: Sniper Rifles are king, scout rifles and pulse rifles effective

Which means everyone will be using either a shotgun and blink (to close the gap and eliminate mid-range encounters) alongside a PR or SR, or will be using a sniper rifle alongside a hand cannon. This is based simply off of where these weapon classes are designed to be effective. I know Bungie said they want ARs to be effective at close range but there's no world where an AR is more effective than a one-shot kill shotgun or fusion rifle. The purported "ideal range" for ARs also overlaps with hand cannons, which we all know are better. The nerfs to hand cannons are not nearly enough to make them as bad as ARs in close ranges, so the result is that ARs will remain garbage with the possible exception of the exotics. If you noticed, this means I think the current meta will be the same after the 2.0 changes. Exact weapons may shift a tiny amount (but Thorn still OP), but basic loadouts and play, despite all of the changes, are going to look very similar.

TL;DR: Ugh. Small, incremental changes is the way to go, Bungie. Also, you should balance from the ideal state, not the base models. And Thorn's DoT is the thing that makes it good in ToO. Nerfing DoT damage doesn't change the fact that it prevents shield regen for a very long time.