TLDR: The long TTK makes consistency too important, balancing very difficult, the meta too dominant and loadouts too important compared to the players' skill. Due to the effort of implementing a properly balanced shorter TTK, this is an unfixable issue and a mistake, that should simply be avoided in an eventual successor of this game. The radar makes the gameplay campy, restrictive, monotone and boring. It severely reduces the importance of game sense, map knowledge in particular. A classic minimap only showing the enemies' position when they make noise could work a lot better and be implemented with reasonable effort and a few balancing adjustments. --- In my opinion, the combination of a long TTK and radar has wasted every potential there is for a competitive and fun PvP from the very beginning, provided by the fast and fluid movement and great gunplay. [u][b]First the radar:[/b][/u] With a few exceptions, it always shows you the direction and approximate distance of your opponents. It is reliable enough to shape the entire gameplay, but, due to ways to bypass it, unreliable enough to cause frustration. The knowledge of each others' positions usually provokes a teamfight around a chokepoint. Catching an enemy by surprise is rarely possible. Flanks are predictable and at best serve as a distraction, giving the rest of the team an opportunity to act. Decisions regarding positioning are majorly based on the information the radar is providing people with, not map knowledge and educated guesses of the enemies intentions. Overall, the radar severely reduces the gameplay's variety. It creates very repetitive scenarios and heavily reduces the importance of game sense, map knowledge in particular, for the outcome of the match. These issues are enhanced by in-air-accuracy, which eliminates verticality from the gameplay and makes the enemy positioning even more predictable. Ironically, it was introduced to indirectly nerf Stompees, an exotic that was able to generate a surprise effect through verticality despite the radar. The predictability and lack of any surprise effect make teamshooting the most effective way to deal with a threat. Most fights are not decided by skill differences but by the amount of players facing each other. The quality of teammates becomes just as if not more important than your own capabilities, because these are irrelevant, when you are outnumbered. This promotes very defensive gameplay, since a coordinated push, in which you manage to single out enemies and outnumber them as a group, is harder to pull off - especially without communication - than letting the opponents walk into your entire team's sightline. [u][b]Now to the long TTK:[/b][/u] The long TTK obviously makes teamshots even more essential. While a shorter TTK makes it possible to kill people before they can react due to the surprise effect and peeker's advantage, a long TTK, especially in combination with the radar, almost guarantees, that the opponent has time to react and deal some damage himself. Two people dealing double the damage of just one opponent is logically all the more impactful. Another problem is the difficulty it causes in balancing. A long TTK and the lack of opportunity to trick people with good positioning and - due to incredibly forgiving hitboxes and bullet magnetism - movement makes consistency incredibly important. Regarding weapons, every minor stat bonus becomes relevant. The longer the TTK and especially with aiming as easy as in D2, the more significant the loss of the slightest amounts of damage can be. A little more range, a little less recoil,... becomes important and can have an impact on the outcome of a fight, especially, when factors like a surprise effect are missing. This and the lack of gameplay variety make the meta very limited and dominant. Where a lower TTK and more diverse gameplay not only provide a much wider selection of viable weapon types, it also makes minor disadvantages less impactful and enables good players to shine with every weapon, even if they are not regarded the best. In D2, the loadout is just as important as the players' abilities to a frustrating point, where your performance feels irrelevant, because the match seems decided by each players' loadout from the start, especially in SBMM lobbies, where the skill levels are already very similar. This drastically reduces the competitiveness, not just because of questionable skill requirements but also the fact, that the way you acquire the tools to use rarely have a connection to PvP and also should not really have one, because that would provide us with another Not-Forgotten-Scenario, where the best players got an even stronger weapon to use to create a larger gap between the top ~5% and the rest. Regarding abilities and exotic armour, permanent advantages are generally much more favourable than temporary ones, that have to be activated in a specific way. The lack of opportunity to kill an enemy fast without receiving hits yourself makes it more desirable to give yourself advantages, that are also active for the first fight, not just after. This shows in the community's general preference of exotics like Ophidian Aspects and Peacekeepers or ability packages like Solar Warlock with Icarus Dash. People have also developed their preference towards these advantages regarding weapon perks, like Zen Moment and Quickdraw. Of course this is just a tendency and advantages, that require a kill or other advanced requirements to make use of, are not automatically bad. It remains a cause of reduced sandbox variety and the meta's dominance though. Altogether, minor stat differences being that impactful lead to the necessity of very careful balancing, because the slightest change could change the hierarchy. Balancing perks, exotics and abilities is always risky, since on one hand, those advantages locked behind requirements need to be worth choosing over permanent ones, but on the other hand, requirements too low could make the resulting stronger advantages too common and oppressive. A popular advantage for the latter was One-Eyed Mask a few years ago. One kill rewarded the titan with an immense advantage for the next fight. Also, permanent advantages could be way too strong, which has been more common so far, for example in the case of Anteus Wards or Stompees. My claims about weapons were obviously focussing on primary weapons. After Y1 made clear, that primaries alone would make PvP not just bad, but entirely unplayable, special weapons were introduced. These and the ammo economy brought a ton of issues with them. For years, specials have completely dominated PvP. There was plenty of ammo to enable people to use them exclusively and while certainly enabling more aggressive playstyles due to the faster TTK or rather instant kill, the radar and netcode made fights with them trade fests. Especially with shotguns, aim was secondary and lag as well as ghost melees felt more impactful towards the fight's outcome. Now we reached the opposite experience, where ammo is a lot rarer and you have to use your primary to get some. I personally do not like this new economy, because it is unpredictable, whether an enemy has ammo or not, and you are given the choice of either taking the risk of dying/trading or playing very defensive to avoid any of that. Before, we at least had the option to reliably bait out enemy ammo and adapt our playstyle to the currently known economy. I think, there is not an optimal solution for the special ammo economy. The point is, that special weapons in PvP were not necessary in the first place, because the long TTK and radar was what caused the campy gameplay of Y1. PvE aside, special weapons are just a suboptimal tool to dampen up its effects. [u][b]Possible solutions:[/b][/u] For the long TTK, there just is no realistic solution and the only hope is, that Bungie does not repeat its mistake in an eventual successor. While at least providing a little more variety and a less dominant meta, Momentum Control shows, that the solution is not as easy as to just reduce the health by around 50%. It would take an entirely new sandbox and at best the transformation of special weapons into primary weapons to pull this off in a way that actually provides improvement compared to the current situation. This is simply not worth the effort for a part of the game that already managed to sustainably scare off a large part of the community. I believe, the radar could be changed though. In my opinion, a classic minimap, that only shows players that are making noise (shooting/abilities, maybe boosted jumps) would work a lot better. It leaves room for more open engagements, that are not exclusively centred around chokepoints, makes flanks more of a threat, rewards good map knowledge about popular routes and positions and most importantly makes it possible to make use of the surprise effect and counter teamshots a little this way. A few adaptations would be required to make it work without major issues though. Foot steps need to be louder and more directional to make it possible to hear enemies in the direct vicinity, not loud enough though to effectively act as a replacement of the radar and provide you with precise information about the enemies' movement. Invisibility would most likely need some nerfs to accommodate for the fact, that there would be no radar left to give you the hint of where to look more thorough. Of course this alone would not fix PvP, not in D2 and not in a possible successor. There are many more issues that negatively impact the experience, most prominently connection issues, reward structure and generally the incentive to play, even as someone focussed on PvE, without making it mandatory. I just believe that this would be a good step.