Much of this feedback has stemmed from my own musings over current gamepay balance prompted by seeing some of the community responses following lightfall. In general I think the subclasses are in a reasonable place in terms of gameplay feel and fun factor with the armour and subclass changes over the past year. In terms of general game difficulty build potency is perhaps a touch too high - personally I really enjoyed the difficulty spikes introduced with lightfall and felt reasonably challenged but not to the extent I felt my playing experience was anything beyond casual. With an overall push in the sandbox toward more conscious build decisions with subclass choice, ability selection, exotic selection and the armour mod system being central pillars of this process I feel the updates to the system have really set up an ability landscape that has set foundational rules. Coming from a background playing mmorpgs is something I really enjoy and engaging with. That said, I think the system needs some standardisations with how the different pillars interact, with my key issues being the following: -[b]In game benefits on an ability level basis are poorly communicated.[/b] While cost (in terms of cooldown) is somewhat confusingly labelled for individual abilities standardised metrics for ability damage are not presented. For new players, there is an accessibility barrier when no information (e.g. standardised damage, area, duration etc.) is presented to allow them to make conscious choices in build design. -[b]The cost/benefit relationship across most abilities is not intuitive.[/b] Not all grenades are going to be equally comparable. With that said, an individual players choice is going to boil down to what is the cooldown of the ability (cost) and how much damage is it doing (benefit) with the intuitive assumption that cost α benefit. When cost is the only metric provided, players rely on this assumption for assessing ability worth but for the most part these values seem arbitrary when comparing abilities with similar functionality. As an example, magnetic and fusion grenades both function as primarily single target grenades with a high degree of magnetism, and have a small amount of splash damage. When looking at damage, magnetic grenades deal around 15% more damage than fusion grenades and yet are priced with a 45% greater base cooldown. These cooldowns make less sense when considering more disparate abilities like melees – does ball lightning really warrant a cooldown almost 25% longer than thunderclap given the damage potential of either? Arguments could be made that cooldowns also account for additional interactions but given these are often accounted for by various aspects/exotic descriptions for consistency the individual cooldown should reflect the base capability of the ability. Collectively this non-linear correlation between cost/benefit for abilities is a big driver for why many abilities can feel underwhelming to both new and experienced guardians alike. -[b]The cost/benefit relationship across most aspects is not intuitive.[/b] Similar to abilities, the costing of many aspects relative to effect strength is often unintuitive. While I think having a variety of costs can create space for meaningful build decisions, I do feel current costings aren’t intuitively aligned with aspect strength as individual aspects are more often balanced by effect strength, synergies, internal timers, etc. The best examples for me are those aspects granting slide activated alternate melees. Consecration as a gold standard offers great gameplay feel, lots of potential synergy to specific fragments, internal synergy with other aspects and feels adequately priced against other aspects available to solar titans. Tempest strike and lightning surge in comparison offer poorer gameplay outcomes (beyond some cheesy pvp shenanigans), poorer fragment synergies and yet are all costed the same. Tempest strike comes with an added fixed cooldown. Similar parallels can be drawn with those aspects that alter grenade functionality with the cost of chaos accelerant being a prominent example. Again, this unintuitive balance between aspect strength, cost and other balancing metrics I feel contributes a large part to how certain aspects are received and general gameplay feel. -[b]Armour system could use an option for generating orbs from generic ability damage not attributed to melees/grenades[/b]. While previously these damage sources were derived from niche interactions, or were covered by other mods, the introduction of strand has brought these damage sources more into the limelight. Such a mod would alleviate some of the pain points experienced by stasis and strand users (warlock specifically, but presumably this would also apply to kills generated using drengrs lash) as well as opening synergy with specific exotics like khepri's horn, bombadiers etc.