Actually, if you ignore the Halo aspect of Destiny, this game was not the first successful attempt at doing such a thing. The first ever console online game beat it to the punch decades ago back on the old Sega Dreamcast, a game series called Phantasy Star Online with its second incarnation Phantasy Star Universe. They managed to achieve practically everything and in many ways Destiny is an attempt to TRY (its thus far failing horribly at doing so...) and recreate that experience. That aside, the guns weren't being altered to match the encounters. The encounters were being altered because of poor QA on Bungie's part. There were plenty of people who played the Alpha Build of the game and got to see it (myself included) who had made mention of the general bullet sponge nature of said bosses. Yet nothing was done to rectify this. No, simply put PvP has been the one thing consistently impacting the weapons of Year 1 because people demand nerfs or buffs and so a game that was originally balanced was made unbalanced and continues to do so. Just like now you see people complaining that class abilities like Shoulder Charge for Titans need to be nerfed because they died from it in the Crucible. And instead of these changes ONLY impacting PvP,, they are carried over to the PvE side of things as well. Etheric Light did nothing wrong. It gave people a choice and something to do. In fact the majority of House of Wolves was spent by people farming the stuff to pick and choose weapons and armor to ascend. It was possibly the first real time anyone actually felt as if they had real variety in the game. Honestly, in my opinion Reforging is just bad. It takes away the power of the developers to be creative with weapon elements and perk combinations to design unique builds.