I want to preface this post with the statement that; I really enjoy Destiny 2, Bungie... mostly. But as I said in the title, the Loot Drops for weapons in Destiny 2 are lackluster at best, and I'm being generous with my adjectives.
But, Bungie; do you know what would fix that and all-but erase the Loot Drop boredom overnight?
Having Perk rolls reintroduced into the Weapon Loot Tables.
This is kind of the same situation that happened when Luke Smith removed Elemental damage from Primary weapons in D1.
They removed said damage, with the thin excuse (read: lie) that it was it "increase weapon variety". It backfired spectacularly, and only led to much less variety of weapons used.
So in D2, they just said "screw it" to random perk rolls, all under the thin veneer of "reducing meta and grind for the 'god roll' weapons".
Again, and even more so than in D1, this is backfiring spectacularly.
With every weapon dropping with the exact same build; once you receive one Nameless Midnight, you've received [i]EVERY[/i] Nameless Midnight. Everyone keeps getting the exact same weapons (name-wise) in their Loot Drops, and once you see the name, you immediately know that it's going to be used for deconstruction/infusion. Because once you've gotten one of them, you know what every weapon of the same name will have as a Perk loadout.
Since the available weapon pool is so low (there's really not that many different weapons in this game...), and the Perks are always exactly the same, this leads to weapons with the worse Perk builds being immediately discarded, and only the weapons with the best Perk combos are being used on both sides of the game (i.e. Uriel's Gift, Nameless Midnight, Tarantula, etc.).
Bungie themselves, due to a severe case of tunnel vision, has created a strictly defined "Meta" where only a handful of the 100+ available weapons are even remotely usable in D2.
Not to mention, it creates a severe lack of excitement for the Player, as you know that most likely, you're going to get the exact same weapon in your loot drop or from an Engram, that you've received 20+ times already.
While there were numerous issues with balance (for PvP, PvE [i]never[/i] had any issues with weapons that were a bit [or even by a large amount] overpowered. They just made the PvE side really damn fun...) with the weapons in D1, one of the things that kept the Loot Drops even nominally exciting was that there was randomness and a sense of mystery to what you would be getting in your loot drop.
"My Dead Orbit Scout just dropped! Does it have the God-roll of Firefly/Third-eye/Extended Mag? Gods I hope so! Or it could have *insert Perk combo here* instead, which would also be awesome !!!"
That type of mystery in the drops made grinding activities for Loot not only fun, but kept the players coming back for more, again and again, in hopes that they'd get the Perk combos that they wanted.
In Destiny 2?
Once you've received on weapon, there's zero need to grind for another one, because it will be the exact same thing, with not a chance of variation.
The static Perk Loadouts for weapons in Destiny 2 erases the incentive to grind activities for weapons.
And that's a sad thing to admit about a game that I'm having so much fun with, but that the Loot Drops make me wonder if it was worth my time or not.
I really enjoy Destiny 2, Bungie. But randomly rolled Perk loadouts for weapons definitively needs to make a return.
And beef up weapon damage across the board while you're at it, Bungie. Even the Legendary and Exotic weapons hit no harder than harsh language, and are almost as effective...
-
Bump.
-
Bump.