[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*