Is anyone else experiencing "New Gear Bottleneck"? (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Thursday, November 05, 2015, 14:15 (3401 days ago) @ narcogen

What this means is that I find myself getting some really cool looking weapons and armor through drops or arms day packages, but I scrap them because infusing them up to usable level is just too massive an investment in time and materials. I've reached the point where I buy arms day packages purely as a way to farm legendary marks and weapon parts, since I'm always short on both.

I can't imagine that this is the play-loop Bungie had in mind when they designed the end game.

I think they play loop Bungie had in mind was you scrapping weapons that you might think are cool in order to save only the ones you KNOW are cool. I think Bungie wants variety.

But isn't that a direct contradiction? I'm scrapping interesting looking weapons (variety) in favor of pumping resources into my Hung Jury (Fatebringer 2.0?). If the desire was to encourage greater weapon variety, wouldn't that involve a system where I order arms day weapons and actually keep/use them instead of scrapping them instantly?

I think what Bungie is struggling with is a social problem rather than a technical one. They are looking for a technical solution, but there may not be one.

The question is-- why are you upgrading the Hung Jury if these other guns are interesting?

Because I need to upgrade something in order to do the activities that I enjoy. So I picked my favorite primary (not based on popular opinion... after trying many weapons in the early days of TTK I quickly came to favor Hung Jury). I got a couple high level primaries from the raid, but didn't like them nearly as much. So in order to play the content I enjoy, I need to either stick with the raid weapons that I don't like purely because of their light level, or sacrifice 2 or 3 into infusing my Hung Jury up in level. I chose the latter because I'd rather use a weapon I enjoy, but the process of leveling it up to 307 has taken 6 or 7 raids over several weeks. It is such a tedious process that the idea of leveling up any other primaries is simply not appealing. So instead of weapon variety, I'm confined to using the 1 primary I've invested in.

I think Bungie is against weapons that are so OP that everyone has to have them (like Gjallarhorn became) not because they make the game too easy but because they make it monotonous when everyone has the same weapons.

I agree with this completely, but I'm not sure how minimizing our ability to upgrade gear to endgame levels accomplishes that.

I think they are hoping that the weapon pool is diverse enough, and there is enough parity, that when people are pushed to choose one weapon over another, not everyone will make the same choice, leading to greater variety in the field and amongst fireteam members.

But what I'm saying is that parity is an extreme chore at the high levels, because bringing just 1 primary up to 310+ is such a huge undertaking. I have a diverse weapon pool down in the 280s and 290s, but I can't use any of those weapons for my favorite activities; namely Trials and the Raid (especially hard mode). So I look at my inventory and see all this gear that I can't use, then I get new gear that looks really interesting but it's level 275 or something like that and I just say to myself "It will be months before I can level this up to the point where it is useful to me, I'm better off just scrapping it for parts". And that sucks, IMO.