It's like you just want Destiny to be Halo 3 2017 and Beyond: The Game. It really doesn't work in Destiny. You've got recharging grenades, supers, varying gear stats, varying gear itself, perks that change the gear, different movement abilities (really fast moving abilities at that, making Halo TTK painful if you want to kill someone titan skating).

It's like they realized that Destiny wasn't originally built to be a Halo clone. So they slowed it down. They neutered it. Movement speed, ability regen, and TTK. Destiny 1 TTK was perfectly fine -- a nice intermediary between the kill times of an actual twitch-reaction shooter (CoD) and the kill times of a slower game. (Halo) The problem was that Bungie never was able to balance the game's OHK weapons and its underpowered primary weapons, but playing Destiny at least felt like a unique experience. D2 might very well be more balanced -- a supposition I agree with 100% -- but at a cost. It's lost everything that made D1 fun and unique. It's generic. It's bland. The skill gap is completely gone and there's still no dedicated servers so it's not like MLG or eSports can come save it.

Destiny 1 TTK was light speed. Everything about D1 PVP was hard to swallow from any self-respecting hardcore H2 or H3 player.

Games aren't supposed to play like Halo. Halo was a great franchise, but a mock-up is a mock-up. D1 was quite a piece of work but it at least was its own game.

My concern is that the competitive community is very serious, but their inputs towards this game are all counter productive. None of them have any idea what type of game they really want and half of them want it to be a more casual experience. For the dedication competitive players, their seriousness is wasted if their handle has no chance of ever being viable from a hardcore standpoint. I'm simply citing the historical best-case scenario (halo 3) as an example of how a console skill gap should work. There's no feasible way Destiny could ever properly emulate it (the game mechanics differ too much), but it has set the standard of how impressive console FPS games are capable of being on the main stage. A place many of us with controllers instead of M+kb have forgotten exists.

Hold up....D1 NEVER had a skill gap. Especially now. You know how easy it was to go flawless in trials just using grenades and melees? Super freakin easy. Zero skill gap in D1. D2 will actually have skill gap, hell PC will be where all of the skilled gun play will be, Skilled movement 100% on console.

Okay, so instead of me rehashing myself again I'll simply copy and paste what I said in a different thread where I explain the skill gap that D1 had and what D2 did to lose it: [quote]No skill gap = no competitive factor. There's several things that established the (decaying) skill gap that D1 had: 1) Radar/Map awareness. Keeping a steady eye on your radar and being able to retreat from a gunfight without having to route all your pathfinding through both your visuals and logic (moving around the map without having to take time and establish your position first) was something good players can do, and bad players can't. 2) Movement. D1 guardians are fast and mobile, but only the best players could utilize it to its full capabilities, whereas bad players were utterly two-dimensional and slow when it came to movement. Good players use their vertical space, and can turn a losing engagement into a winning one simply by moving around and doing the unexpected. 3) Gun skill. I know, laugh at me, and your laughter is somewhat justified -- I'll explain why I have this up here a bit later. There were people that do crutch on shotguns, or sidearms, or stickies, or whatever excuse you want to make for them. But there were good players that were good because of their primary shot. Bungie kinda took away any reason to engage in a 1v1 primary battle with their continued, uncompensated nerfs to primaries, but winning your 1v1 engagements goes a long way towards making you a good player. 4) Reaction speed/reflexes. Having good reflexes is vital to a good player's skillset. The good players are able to react quickly to developing scenarios before the situation becomes bad for them. The bad players can't think quickly enough to get out of there, or they don't realize the oncoming negative scenario at all, which leads me to my last point: 5) Combat foresight/game IQ. In other words, anticipatory skills and play-reading ability. The players that can anticipate generally do well. They don't often find themselves in troublesome situations, they're hard to pinch, and they can be a nightmare to fight against even when they're outnumbered. Bad players merely play a reactionary play style, which can be disastrous for their level of play if they also have poor reflexes. Now, D2 has eliminated all 5 of those. Radar/map awareness. Slowing down the game has negated the need for radar awareness as all you need to do is prop yourself up with teammates in a long sight line. Movement. This is a big one. D2 guardians are very clunky with their movement. A general lack of aerial accuracy on guns removes the benefits that three-dimensional play provides, and slow primary TTK allows you to get behind cover even with slow pathfinding and no map awareness. Gun skill. Yes, D1 didn't exactly have a lot of it. But people are simply deluding themselves by thinking that D2 does. It's simple: teamshots. Teamshotting isn't necessarily bad for gameplay, but the whole act of firing in a group almost completely negates the need for individual gun skill. Reaction speed. Once again, D2 plays slow. People with slow reflexes have plenty of time to make their move -- people with fast reflexes find that they have no benefit from thinking quickly. Combat foresight. Another big one. Something I noticed a lot in the beta was a very distinct lack of tactical knowledge and play. As I said, teamshotting isn't necessarily bad, but when 90% of the engagements in any given game are full-team shootouts on the same damned sight line, the whole benefit of combat foresight and anticipation and reading plays is completely lost. D2 might be much more balanced (and by extension, less rage-inducing) but I fail to see where the game is supposedly "competitive".[/quote] Yes, D1 was hardly competitive by itself, but it at least had something resembling a skill gap. D2 does not. It masquerades as a "competitive" game that supposedly requires "gun skill", even though it really doesn't, and all the other things in D1 that set apart good and bad players have been castrated and watered down so that no one can "git gud" with them.

There is literally no skill required to play D1. Its LB and you win. D1 never resembled something that was truly competitive. Yes D2 is about positioning, lane control, and [u][b]team work[/b][/u]. D1=lone wolf mania D2= cooperative play. What other games that are competitive require you to do quite heavily? Just about the majority of all the e-sports games.

I'm glad I didn't re-type that whole post over again because it's quite clear you cherry-picked what you wanted to hear out of it and ignored almost the entire post.

I actually read the whole thing but the majority of it became invalidated by you saying D1 has/had a skill gap when in fact It never did. Not a single part of D1 had any skill required to do. Y1 just have Suros, a shotgun with shotpackage, Thorn, Last word, and (for a week or two) Vex mythoclast and you win. Y2 Sniper, pulse, or Doctrine and you win. Y3 Clever Dragon, Shotguns, sidearms, or sticky nades and you win. D1 was stupidly easy for its entire life span.

[quote]I actually read the whole thing but the majority of it became invalidated by you saying D1 has/had a skill gap when in fact It never did.[/quote] Oh. Ok. "I read the whole thing but I close my mind to anything that doesn't agree with me." That explains the cherry picking, thank you. And in light of that, you're not worth arguing with. Enjoy your "competitive" D2 experience. Bye

Dude I've seen you on so many threads just talking about how you basically want Destiny to be halo. [b][i][u]Go play Halo and stop ruining it for the rest of us.[/u][/i][/b]

Every game should be on halo 2 & 3's level of console skill gap in competitive play.

Year 1 had plenty of skill gap. It doesn't have to have extremely slow paced gameplay in order to have skill gap or be competitive.

Riiight because it isn't a space magic shooter right? It's not COD or battlefield. The game is worse than it's ever been and it's now that way forever.

If it becomes a re-skinned halo 3, then I will be happy.

Go play Halo 3 then. Stop trying to force every game to become Halo 3.