Taken King and Elemental Primaries (Destiny)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Friday, August 21, 2015, 13:54 (3381 days ago)

I think moving forward, there should be no legendary elemental primaries. I was thinking about how elemental primaries had an effect on the game, and while I might be in the minority here, I don't think it's positive.

I think having an elemental primary really pushes out a lot of difficulty and strategy. If you play through the game from the start, you'll see that special weapon management is far more important than it is now. Captains, Wizards, and shielded Cabal can be tricky. Wizards especially have a tough shield, but low health. So the key is to get their shields down quickly, then finish them off. This is where having a solar fusion rifle absolutely shined. With elemental primaries though, you've got something like Vision of Confluence that just eats wizards up, and since it has so much ammo you can just use it the whole time. Same thing with Fatebringer on captains.

In particular this pushes out specials. I use snipers pretty much only for bosses, and in special circumstances like the boomers in Crota's End, or the distant Hydras on Winter's Run (all of those situations are element agnostic). Fusion Rifles I rarely if ever use in PvE. Shotguns are so good, you really don't need to match elements to be successful.

Without elemental primaries, the special and heavy slots would be much more interesting I think, especially on nightfalls where you have multiple shield types to deal with.

Speaking of nightfalls, with an elemental primary, nightfall is and easy affair. Without one, it's rather hard. Again, with no elemental primaries, I feel like choice of special and heavy would be a bit more complex, given they would be your only burn source. Try doing this week's nightfall without a solar primary, and you'll have a tough time! Didn't Bungie always say nightfalls were supposed to be some of the hardest challenges?

If there are elemental primaries in TTK, I think they should be exotic. At least then, the substantially beneficial perk of elemental damage comes at the cost of another exotic. The current elemental primaries are great weapons even if they didn't have the element. And because they are legendary, I often don't see a huge benefit to picking a primary exotic in PvE.

In my opinion, the game would be much more interesting if year one elemental primaries were phased out, and replaced with nothing.