Mini Rant: Big Problem! No two guns are ever the same. (Destiny)

by dogcow , Hiding from Bob, in the vent core., Friday, July 24, 2015, 15:16 (3647 days ago)

This is in response to a post by cheapLEY in the "A great idea, actually..." sub-thread.

You know the easiest way to fix this right? All they have to do is get rid of random perks. Make every version of Party Crasher exactly the same. Every version of All Fate is the same, etc. Every gun will be exactly the same as everyone else's gun.

I think that would go a long way toward making every gun feel unique, and everyone would know exactly what they're going up against.

To keep variety up, just have more guns as loot.

I like this idea. Weapons are a sort-of information overload for me. There are entirely too many with entirely too many combinations of perks. What makes 2 weapons with different names any different from each other when EACH FREAKING GUN EVEN WITH THE SAME NAME IS UNIQUE?

I had an interesting experience last night while running the VoG. Someone (Cyber, Vortech? I forget which.) mentioned to me, "Hey, I have that exact same sniper rifle as you, the scopes are different, but it's essentially the same gun, oh and it's void damage, not Solar." Aside from Exotics & Vendor weapons, when does that ever happen? Never! There are over 60,000 different possible rolls on the FINAL BOSS (over 80k if kinetic damage is a possibility, not sure if it is).

Another interesting thing I heard when someone got a drop (paraphrased):
Person A: "Hey, I just got a X, is it any good?"
Person B: "It's decent."
Person C: "Well, what are the perks? It might be good, it might not be."

How is it that a NAMED GUN might be good or might be bad? It should just be known. I think that's part of what makes the raid weapons nice, you know that they will be good or not without having to see if you got lucky with the roll on it.

Back to the vast number of possible rolls on guns. TDYK can have over 7000 different rolls, Final Rest II (Fusion rifle) has over 552k possible rolls (if it can any of the 3 damage types, not including kinetic). Multiply these by the number of different guns and you have a CRAZY HUGE number of test cases when thinking about weapon balance. There is NO POSSIBLE WAY to test this by hand. The only way to test is to run simulations with each combination of gun and look for outliers, but really, your simulation better be shockingly good for this to work, and it even then it won't find strategies like emptying to the final round shot that found success in ToO.

I'm not against perks, or having random rolls, but it should really be toned down to the point where the name of the gun actually has meaning. Comments like, "Matador 64, Party Crasher +1? Well, they're good if they have X perks" shouldn't exist IMHO. It should be "Matador 64? Sweet shotgun!"