I think the new direction Bungie is going in regards to elemental primaries is two giant steps backwards. This might end up long so bare with me.
What I think should've been done in the place of removing elements from primaries was to have a drop from the hard raid that allows you to put an element on any primary for a rather steep price. And in an effort to make the environment still a challenge they should've boosted enemy shields in a couple of ways. Make all shields maybe 25% stronger as well as [i]reducing[/i] the damage of using the wrong element against the shield all while keeping kinetic the same across the board. You see what I just did? I increased the value of Kinetic weapons as it could handle any and all shields the same way while using, for example a solar weapon against void shields would bring down the damage significantly. This still brings that factor of making smart choices with your weapons while still allowing for elements in a way that's not as dominant as in year 1.
I cannot shake the feeling that Bungie is scared to make the players of this game too powerful and it's a damn shame. No other game in history has seemed to have a problem with making players ridiculously strong. It's a game for goodness sake let me do crazy shit.
This has never been more obvious than with the changes made to perks in 2.0 that they kinda blindsided us with reducing all of their effectiveness. And don't even get me started with the raid gear. Those guns are god awful and have no more use than infusing into other guns. Crazy how raid weapons in year 1 were the most sought after in the game because you knew what you wanted and how you could get it and it made playing the raid worth it. I'm not playing this raid for the gear. I'm playing it for the number attached to the gear which in turn allows my character to reach a higher level, but for what exactly? So you can raise the cap again in a month and repeat the process? That's just silly and obvious that you want your players to meaninglessly grind with no true end goal other than "hey I'm the highest level possible in the game... For a week."
The main counter argument in favor of no elemental primaries is that it allows for more variety in choosing a weapon. Let me be the first to call bullcrap on that. I'm willing to bet quite a bit of money that the vast majority of players right now are using the vendor version of Hung Jury for all high level content right now. Simply because it's an [b]easy to obtain gun that packs quite a punch with perks that are really good[/b] (see year 1 raid weapons) Those who aren't using it have been blessed by RNGesus with a better gun which to be honest there simply aren't very many of. The "variety" is a total myth when there will always be a "best gun" regardless if there's an element on it or not.
TL;DR: Elemental primaries need to return in a less dominant way than in year 1. Elemental infusion is a start
Let me know what you guys think of this. I'm genuinely curious to see the results.
Happy Hunting
Edit 1: Let me use an analogy.
Say you have a product that has sales going crazy good for a year. After a year you make a change to that product without letting anyone know ahead of time. 7 hours later you find out through a poll that half of the users of this product don't like the change you made. That would be catastrophic don't you think? Some food for thought
Edit 2: The poll isn't biased because the opposition to my views still has a clear choice. Meaning the data is still accurate
Edit 3: People seem to forget that it wasn't just the burns on raid weapons that made them unique. Fatebringer was the [b]ONLY[/b] year 1 hand cannon with firefly and VoC was the only scout with full auto up until House of Wolves. The burns were just an extra to top it all off
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[b][u]BUTTHURT I SUMMON YOU[/u][/b]
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https://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/166334306/0/0 This is a post i just made about how we can still have elemental primaries and have weapon variety.
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Go bucks
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Lol the people voting for variety are the ones that won't do the raid, so they wouldn't have had a chance at then anyway.
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I love my elemental primaries i havent had to use kinetic primaries since vanilla destiny first came out..... RIP my elemental primaries.
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The raid weapons on HM at least should have elemental primaries
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You're suggestions are good ideas but as of right now I like how it is.
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Yeah only having one elemental year 2 primary is a huge letdown and a step in the wrong direction. Readers ask yourself this, when have you heard anyone complain about having too many elemental primaries? Never, and only have you heard concern of bungie taking them away. Also, when we were told year one legandarys were being left behind most were kinda having a hard time letting them go but minds were somewhat put at ease with the promises of better weapons I'm ttk. So far the only better legandary weapon I have found is 1k stare over ldr and that's debatable because it can't have field scout. Field scout, we loved it and they took it. It's all messed up. Rant could go on and on but I'm done. You get the point.
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Bungie says no more elemental primaries. Then why did they make zhalo supercell have arc damage?
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Maybe also have some more primaries with elemental aswell? Id still appreciate a boosted dificulty VOG And CE with updated look but im not going to get too hung up about that. I just feel like that would add a little more game time for the people that would enjoy to play them.
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Lel tldr
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I would like some options for an elemental primary. They should not be god tier like last year though. It was kinda funny getting like 11 different legendary handcannons and immediately just tossing them into my vault forever. It's an odd problem. My thought is that perhaps we could have exotic primaries with elements like the Supercell.
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I would only ever use burn primaries before in PvE. Now I do vary my primary so I understand the decision.
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Edited by Ap0ll0 3ntity: 10/24/2015 4:59:57 PMThere should be 3 consumables for each element that drop and is almost an exotic drop rate that allows to add an element depending on which one you got, infusing it into your weapon would be costly such as an exotic shard 2500 glimmer 15 weapon parts and 10 ledgendary marks
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Temporary elemental burn buff sold by xur that last for 12 hours or x amount of deaths.
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Elemental primaries are the standard: a reward for the endgame content. Those who disagree are butthurt non-raiders and/or PvP trash players who don't even play the actual game.
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it's not as much as no element as it is no real reward for endgame activity
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If you don't like the way year 2 is going, stop playing the game. Simple as that.
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from what im seeing now is, its okay. but atleast put a perk that is related to the raid. putting a coccoon on all the raid gear is somewhat useless coz reloading is just a simple thing on a guns. not unless its like the "Ice Breaker" that regens ammo. #bungie pls think of something else tho the whole Y1 is just a beta now come the Y2 still lacking.
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At first I was disappointed, but I understand why Bungie wants to make more of their weapons viable. If you need to pop an enemy's shield then just switch to your special or heavy, pop it then finish them with your primary. It really isn't that hard.
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Increasing shields by 25% is a buff for kinetics? As soon as you start losing primary ammo for switching primaries, maybe, there would be some tradeoffs. We may see them again, the only place they really matter are Nightfalls, which are comically easy.
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Before it only made two primary weapons viable, Fatebringer and Vision of Confluence. People that didn't manage to get a Fatebringer used Fang of Ir Yut. Now, every single one of the Cocoon weapons is viable in the raid and outside of it as long as you take advantage of Cocoon. We need more abilities like Cocoon to make things viable rather than just a flat elemental damage perk on there. It was stupid, made weapons with cool perks like Cocoon completely useless, you had to use that weapon just because of the Elemental damage the perks on the gun were a side bonus but the main reason to use that gun was the elemental bonus, and that shouldn't happen. And remember Vision of Confluence and Fatebringer were the weapons of the first raid. So they remained the best weapons for a solid year which is also retarded, they overpowered the weapons by giving them the best perks and slapped elemental damage on them. They didn't know what they were doing and they learned. It was a necessary change that needed to happen to stop people from using one or two weapons out of many. "Elemental Crystals" wouldn't work either, because they weren't just putting other primaries to shame. They were making it so that secondary and heavy were only used on bosses. You could just blaze through every activity with just your 2-3 primary weapons, it's stupid. Exotics are the reason we should feel "Crazy powerful" not legendary weapons.
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Or you could use old raid weapons to infuse their elements into new weapons.
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Great decision. It's cool to see so many varieties of weapons people use
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[quote]What I think should've been done in the place of removing elements from primaries was to have a drop from the hard raid that allows you to put an element on any primary for a rather steep price. [/quote] I originally thought being able to purchase an element for weapons or adding/changing elements through infusion would have been a good idea. However, towards the end of HoW, I realized how much I liked my kinetic primaries that I had reforged and ascended, being able to pick and choose various elements to add to those weapons would have ended up as a huge grind. I would have wanted to have 3 of each of my favorite primaries with different elements, which would have driven me slightly mad. [quote]And in an effort to make the environment still a challenge they should've boosted enemy shields in a couple of ways. Make all shields maybe 25% stronger as well as [i]reducing[/i] the damage of using the wrong element against the shield all while keeping kinetic the same across the board.[/quote] I appreciate your attempt to balance things between elemental damage and kinetic damage. Shields being stronger would further reduce the appeal of kinetic weapons. Having the wrong element for a shield never stopped people from shooting it anyway. If worse came to worse, they would switch to a secondary, heavy or ability to bring down the shield, then go back to their mismatched primary. Even on the match made nightfall a few weeks ago, we largely ignored the shield colors when using secondary and heavy weapons. [quote]I cannot shake the feeling that Bungie is scared to make the players of this game too powerful and it's a damn shame. No other game in history has seemed to have a problem with making players ridiculously strong. It's a game for goodness sake let me do crazy shit. [/quote] They made us too powerful in the beginning of year one and have been pulling back on the reigns ever since. While it's entirely reasonable to let players lean towards the OP side of things in single player games, it's a dangerous game to play with an online RPG-type game. If certain specs or weapons are considered to be OP, then everyone will flock to those. If they boost other weapons and specs to compensate, then you find yourselves in the territory of "power creep." Power creep can feel good at first, but after a sustained creep, enemies have to be increasingly deadly to counter players who can easily destroy everything. Enemy quantity and damage output ends up being increased and you end up with something like PoE where you're surrounded by hobgoblins that can almost 1-shot you. No one liked that, but it was in response to players having perfectly rolled weapons and OP load outs. We really needed a baseline reset where certain weapons were removed entirely (Gjallarhorn) and reforging was a thing of the past. I miss my Gjallarhorn and my perfectly reforged scout rifles, but I also don't miss feeling pigeonholed into using 1 roll on a weapon and 1 exotic heavy over all others. Aside from a handful of endgame quests, the game's challenge was retuned for players not having exactly what they wanted. If we had the ability to min/max in TTK the way we could in HoW, the difficulty would have started with Fear's Embrace, instead of ending with it. [quote]This has never been more obvious than with the changes made to perks in 2.0 that they kinda blindsided us with reducing all of their effectiveness.[/quote] Also, the harsh nerfs in year two also fixed some issues where everyone was forced to use a certain weapon or use a certain soft exploit to remain viable. That's a problem that often crops up when developers lower the bar, rather than starting fresh. For example, if you wanted to be competitive in PVP, you were stuck with Thorn, long range shotguns and Final Round snipers. The route many games would have taken would be to nerf all all weapons to the point where only the fore-mentioned ones were still good, so even the casual players would be forced to use that specific load out. [quote]And don't even get me started with the raid gear. Those guns are god awful and have no more use than infusing into other guns. Crazy how raid weapons in year 1 were the most sought after in the game because you knew what you wanted and how you could get it and it made playing the raid worth it. I'm not playing this raid for the gear. I'm playing it for the number attached to the gear which in turn allows my character to reach a higher level, but for what exactly? So you can raise the cap again in a month and repeat the process?[/quote] I have mixed feelings about the raid gear. The armor is all pretty good and has raid specific perks like it should. The weapons are pretty hit or miss. The auto rifle is straight garbage, but the machine gun, scout and pulse rifle aren't bad. Though, these weapons are designed to be used together. Dump your reload into stability where applicable and make use of cocoon to reload your weapons passively. They are also all anti-taken weapons, giving you around a 25% damage bonus to taken. I would start to argue that I would like more options for viable non-raid gear... But that's exactly what we got. If we get a 320 raid auto rifle, infuse that into your favorite non-raid primary and bask in it's glory. Select weapons from VoG were nearly exotics, in some cases lacking the normal weaknesses that balance normal exotics. Fatebringer being a perfect example. Everyone wanted that gun and it was an absolute beast. Therefore devaluing so many other weapons in the game. That was a mistake, a mistake they've carefully avoided in each expansion. TDB weapons were essentially normal legendaries with burns, which made them preferential over non-raid weapons for the elemental properties alone. But often times people would still use kinetic weapons with better perks. In HoW, the raid weapons were all but garbage, if you could get a drop from Skolas with an element, it was still a mediocre weapon. The trials weapons were really the only decent weapons in HoW (for PVP and PVE) and that irritated me as a primarily PVE player. The nature of Destiny and other online RPG games is the incremental difficulty scale of PVE endgame content. They keep adding new challenges for us to overcome and we get better gear for facing those challenges. I don't understand the mentality of 1 tier of gear across all endgame content. I assume that's a FPS perspective, rather than an MMO perspective. I think WoW has 4 tiers per raid now, match made, normal, hard and mythic. Each with its own slightly better gear. They release about 3 raids a year... So that's 12 tiers of gear (per expansion) to Destiny's 8 total. [quote]The main counter argument in favor of no elemental primaries is that it allows for more variety in choosing a weapon. Let me be the first to call bullcrap on that. I'm willing to bet quite a bit of money that the vast majority of players right now are using the vendor version of Hung Jury for all high level content right now.[/quote] It's true, they gave us a god roll PVE weapon from a vendor. If you look around, most of the vendor rolls are pretty good unlike many of the previous atrocities they offered us. However, many people [i]are[/i] using a variety of scouts, pulse rifles, exotics and even some auto rifles in PVE. As opposed to 1 or 2 solid raid weapons and maybe a lucky roll from a drop. I personally prefer Doom and NTTE over Hung Jury at the moment. If nothing else, Doom 1-shots most mid level taken, where as Hung Jury does not. [quote]The "variety" is a total myth when there will always be a "best gun" regardless if there's an element on it or not. [/quote] There really isn't a "best gun" right now though. We've got some metas in PVP and PVE, but there are multiple weapons that fit the bill and hold up against other weapons in the same category. In closing, I for one am happy that there are no elemental primaries and I truly believe that it allows us a long term upgrade path for our favorite weapons, without having to factor in elements into the mix. I agree that some weapons are better than others, but the balance is better than is has been in the past. Each weapon now fits into it's intended role much better... But that makes me want to keep more weapons around for their niche functions, which is in direct conflict to the weapon parts nerf. *ponder*
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Bring back elemental primaries, leave them just as effective as they were before, and allow them to give their element to any kinetic weapon they're infused into.