Not sure what kind of balance you'd want for that. (Destiny)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Saturday, October 03, 2015, 06:05 (3435 days ago) @ narcogen

Quite frankly, there are a bunch of things that could be done.

Making Ward of Dawn able to effectively protect against other Supers would be a huge start. Right now it's just a big "aim here to kill me" beacon because most Supers can kill the bubble and the people inside from a safe distance. Either the bubble should actually be indestructible (like its description says!) or it should force an enemy to use most of their Super to break it. Right now Hunters and Sunbreakers can break it with only half their Super.

Some other options I discussed were:

- Changing the Defender's melee ability to provide some kind benefit upon a hit rather than only upon a kill. As it stands now the charged melee of a Defender goes almost completely unused in the Crucible while several other subclasses get things like overshields, health regeneration, cloaking, and damage over time from mere hits on an enemy.

- Have Ward of Dawn fall to the same amount of damage as now, but let it have a death delay where things like Nova Bomb and Fist of Havoc would not immediately strip the people inside of their protection.

- Ward of Dawn could suppress Abilities of enemies who enter making running into it and throwing flaming hammers at the ground until the Defender dies (a thing that really did happen to me last night even with Armor of Light on) a thing of the past. We now have a Hunter Sublass who's aimed, tracking Super suppresses abilities at a distance. Why not let the Defender put up a very obvious, completely stationary suppression field?

- Ward of Dawn should not generate any orbs by simply being cast and should instead allow anyone in it or under its effects to generate orbs of light (up to the normal 8 maximum) and kills within it or under its effects (Armor of Light, Blessing of Light, Weapons of Light) should count as Super kills for the Defender. This would eliminate the hugely unfair issues where Defenders cannot earn "Get Super Kills" type bounties while getting rid of people overlapping bubbles "Bubble Bro" style to generate an unending chain of bubbles.

- Add to this my experience of having gotten to play against a vastly accelerated number of Supers last night and I'd also like to see the Defender's Suppression Grenade detonate either on impact or after a much shorter delay. Right now it is very very very hard to Suppress an enemy's Super. The long ranged one's like Golden Gun or Hammer of Sol require such perfect timing to stop and things like Bladedancers move so quickly and randomly that the Suppression Grenade's long fuse makes it extremely difficult to correctly place the grenade.

Yes, it would be very hard to perfectly balance all the subclasses, but the perfect is the enemy of the good. I think a few minor tweaks to the Defender could make it into a powerful but fair defensive class instead of a massive liability, like my fireteam kept telling me I was last night. The fact that they were totally right, that I was causing us to lose games because I could easily double my kills by switching subclasses to Striker or Sunbreaker, only further proves that the situation is drastically and unavoidably broken, even for a very experienced Defender who was actually trying to play up any and all strengths his Subclass had.