Until now, I've been low enough Light Level to just stick to the sort of normal difficulties (and have been doing old content anyway). But I did a GM Lawless Frontier mission the other day. It was still fine, I didn't have any trouble surviving or getting through it . . . but holy shit, my guns feel like they're doing absolutely nothing. Heavies feel like they're doing very little to bosses (I tried both a Linear Fusion Rifle and a Machine Gun, no idea what the current meta is), and primary ammo weapons feel like they're just tickling anything that isn't a red bar.

Are we just in a complete ability meta right now? I ended up just using the Praxic Blade because it felt like it was the only thing that was doing any damage to enemies, and even that wasn't coming close to my throwing hammer with Wormgod Caress and Roaring Flames.

Are we just in a complete ability meta right now? I ended up just using the Praxic Blade because it felt like it was the only thing that was doing any damage to enemies, and even that wasn't coming close to my throwing hammer with Wormgod Caress and Roaring Flames.

More or less. Praxic Blade and abilities for just about everything. Maybe Tier 4/5 weapons with the right combo of perks. I'm running Prismatic with a suppression grenade with the weakening fragment on, just to make sure my weapons do enough damage; but running a tight build that maximizes uptime for abilities and spits out elemental pickups means you can chain together effects like suspend/freeze/blind and almost always close to melee distance, so...

Praxic Blade may have broken the overall meta.

Not just exotic/legendary or swords/guns, but the entire weapon meta, because it will always be more advantageous to have the option to deflect shots over really any other exotic weapon benefits. Survivability alone kind of obviates most other things. Most seasons I'll settle on a couple choice weapons to play the seasonal artifact game with, and cycle through armors until I find something that synergizes just right; but this season it's been Stronghold/Praxic Blade always. Everything else makes me feel squishy, and with that combo, I'm nearly unkillable. I've died more to missteps and missed jumps than anything else. YMMV.

~m

I just logged in today for the first time since the first week or two of the final shape release. One of the first new weapons I received was a pulse rifle that shoots missiles. Not sure when that happened. I’m not excited to learn the new armor and weapon tiers and what stats matter now. But the game still feels great to play.

My friends list was completely empty of DBO players online, but hope to see some of you on there again

I just logged in today for the first time since the first week or two of the final shape release. One of the first new weapons I received was a pulse rifle that shoots missiles.

Did Bungie hire BOLL?

Bungie has been letting us get more and more powerful for quite a while, and it's pretty out of control. And now they are afraid to reign anything in because of those actions are usually perceived by the player base as anti-fun, and they really can't afford to alienate any more players with the massively reduced population post-Edge of Fate. This has left power level deltas their only tool for making any content challenging, but that is a very blunt force instrument. The lack of effectiveness of primaries at high power deltas is the result of that - the power deltas expose whatever is lagging behind in the power creep race.

I'd pinpoint Beyond Light and Stasis as when the creep really started. It was so much better at ad control than anything we'd had before, and it gave the player base a real taste for being able to kill 10+ enemies at once, which then required Bungie to increase the ad density of encounters to make them even remotely challenging. This back and forth has continued, except that it's always tempered by the fact that ad density is fairly limited by the game engine, whereas HP increases don't come at that cost, but are extremely negatively perceived by the player base.

Then the 3.0 versions of the other subclasses made them all as powerful as Stasis. Then we got new weapon perks that interacted with the subclass verbs. Then the weapons got more perks, and enhanced perks. Then we got Strand, which was also released fairly overtuned. Then exotic primaries got damage increases. Then Final Shape came out, which added the Prismatic subclasses, which added a whole bunch of combinations of subclass abilities and exotic armor abilities that were previously not possible. Now, finally, if a weapon doesn't have fully enhanced 3 perk options in every column, it's basically worthless.

One of my favorite loadouts post-Final Shape is using Gwisin Vest on my Hunter, with Prismatic. I can go invisible basically whenever I want, almost always have Destabilizing rounds on void weapons, regain health on melee kills, and burst DPS with Golden Gun. That is almost unthinkable power even going back to Beyond Light or Witch Queen. Now, it's not even a top tier loadout!

You're not wrong. The era of Elemental Wells was ridiculous for ability uptime, and I'm not sure the game ever really recovered from that.

It has to be difficult to deal with for them. I don't know what the answer is to fix it, because as frustrating as it is for primary guns to feel sort of useless, I'd also be annoyed if they brought the ability side of the game down too much, because, let's face it, it's really freaking fun. I'm still just rocking a basic ass Solar Titan throwing hammer sunspot build with Wormgod Caress, and it's just so fun. Throw in the shotgun from Season of the Haunted with Incandescent, and I just make sunspots for days and it's a blast.

Korny and I ran the Dual Destiny mission so I could get the exotic class item, and it really just reminded me how freaking good Destiny is when it's on it's A game. It's such a good mission with good ad density for fun fights and fun puzzle mechanics to figure out and manage without being overbearing or annoying. Granted that's just an on level mission, so guns feel totally fine there, but it was like perfect Destiny.

We've been there for a while, but I think we're really at the point where Destiny 3 needs to happen to move forward. I know most won't like it, but we need a real reset without the expectation of carrying all the old baggage forward.

- No text -

- No text -