[quote]Would you prefer there be fewer new items in favor of another ascension system? We all know how satisfying gearing on House of Wolves has been. Oh wait, it hasn't been satisfying at all! Once we ascended our favorites there is nothing to work towards.[/quote] Save for ToO weapons (which are highly coveted), Bungie did a very poor job of making HoW items appealing in any way. If there was a low adoption rate of new items, that is why. End game players didn't want to invest in poorly conceived guns.

Yes, but that is only in the context of an ascension system being available. Most weapons from The Dark Below were disappointing compared to their vanilla equivalents. From faction and Vanguard weapons to raid weapons. However, people used them because they had higher attack. If ascension had existed at The Dark Below, people would have kept using vanilla weapons in most slots, just like they do in House of Wolves. Conversely, if ascension did not exist in HoW, the elemental raid weapons from Skolas would be the most desired PvE weapons in the game and people would be using Queen's weapons and many others.

An imbalance of "overpowered" weapons can only negatively effects PvP play. Fun fact; every gun [i]ever[/i] released will [i]always be usable in the Crucible[/i]. Your whole point about balancing weapons becoming "exponentially" harder? Keeping current gear capped at 365 [i]does nothing to fix that issue[/i]; they're still gonna need to balance them! :P It only hurts PvE players, whereas letting players continue to utilize their favorite gear has literally [i]zero[/i] negative effect, on anyone.

That is a good point. But the counter to that is that you didn't see that phenomenon in The Dark Below. I saw very few people using vanilla weapons in regular Crucible once TDB weapons became widely available (I started playing in January so didn't see launch). I think they can hedge their bets that if the PvE players move to a new suite of weapons, that they will supplant the old weapons in PvP. They are also adjusting perks such as field scout that are fairly unbalanced in PvP (such as a Jolder's with Field Scout enabling a good player to have heavy a long time). Contrast that with the PvE experience in House of Wolves. Could I get into a Skolas group with kinetic primary weapons from PoE? In fact, serious endgame players rarely use anything except for elemental primary weapons. That means Bungie would have to either make them more widely available (causing players to complain that "scrubs" get them) or provide some incentive for new players to run legacy content. The latter change would be a huge mistake, as the progression system in House of Wolves is already a mess. It's often suggested here that new players should be required to run VoG etc, but that would be a disaster. The [i]only[/i] way ascension would work in the future is for the Etheric Light equivalent to be as rare as something like Crux of Crota, only available after a long period of conquering the new endgame content. Integrating Etheric Light into the overall progression system in HoW was a mistake. It's wide availability made it so active endgame players quickly ascended all their favorites, rendering Skolas irrelevant in less than a month as serious endgame content, while simultaneously being an additional barrier for more casual players in trying to max out the gear they had attained.