Hey guys, i'm opening the 999th thread on the same set of nerfs, so i'm aware some of what you're about to hear will be a duplicate of other threads - i apologize for those duplications. I believe the upgrade i can provide is to write all of this down in a calm and constructive manner from a game design perspective, so that maybe some of it gleans an adoptable perspective for the devs. Believe me, i want to shout a whole bunch about how i'll no longer feel powerfull in a game that's supposed to be a power fantasy, but that's been done by enough other people. And i'll put my money where my mouth is and simply leave back to where i came from, if these changes turn out as bad as they sound on paper. That's not what i want to discuss here though. I want to go deeper. Everyone is upset because Bungie is attacking the Exotic refill perks that everyone uses. They have a point there. Absolutely everyone uses them. People specifically raid-recruit people to do one and exactly one of nine Warlock subclasses. People look for exactly one, maybe two hunter subsets and one titan subset, if at all. That does sound like a problematically stale meta. Why is it happening? Well, the one thing every single one of these has in common (discounting the two big damage bursters nova bomb and nighthawk gunner) is that they have buffs and debuffs. They give guardians additional damage scaling and they reduce enemy damage output. Hm, that's curious. People tend to only focus on debuff based builds in RPGs if the enemies they go up against are really REALLY strong. Is that really the case? Why do players feel obligated to tether everything under the sun and stand in wells of radiance constantly? Well these planned changes are gonna hammer away at some symptoms but i believe the core of these issues runs a lot deeper and is actually connected to the other main massive gripe i have with destiny. So lets talk about difficulty. What are the three types of difficulty that Destiny currently provides its players in PvE activities and why is the strongest one of them so rare? I believe there are currently three types of difficulty that accumulate everything thrown at the player under them in varying intensities. 1) Timers. These scale all the way from having 5 minutes to make a public event heroic to having 35 seconds to complete a bridge section in Reckoning. In itself this isn't necessarily a bad mechanic - however failing exclusively and especially repeatedly to this type of difficulty is unsatisfying. I think anyone who's ever lost on a Reckoning bridge half a dozen times in a row because noone on the team of blueberries was playing Warlock can attest to that. 2) Coordination and puzzle objectives. While these are mostly limited to raids (Last Wish and Scourge offer some exceptionally coordination-heavy mini segments such as most Scourge encounters with a map or the Shuro Chi elevators. This is a really fun kind of difficulty, however it sort of enforces the necessity to have voice communication via an LFG or Discord, since ingame voicecomms are spotty at best and often flat out disabled due to NAT issues. Still, i believe the coordination tasks in Destiny are the most fun in the entire game. Coordination necessity is why i love the heck out of Gambit despite normally despising PvP gameplay - and where it is provided in Destiny, the game really shines. If anything, this type of challenge is a bit too rare, probably because it almost always excludes activities from solo play, unless your name is Gladd. And now for 3) the biggest offender in my eyes. Light scaling. Ugh. Light scaling is a mechanic which increases enemy damage against you and decreases your damage against enemies, based on how high your light level is compared to the encounter you're currently running. Correct me if im wrong, i believe the maximum scale here is from -40 light (below which you only produce "immune" instead of damage) to +40 light (at which point most enemies will barely hit you for more than 10% of your shield) This naturally causes any new content (which typically is light capped at 10 light below the absolute maximum for the respective season) to be "hard" because you cannot go further than +10 light above said content. So once the next season hits and we all are able to go over 730 power (aka 40 above Reckoning T3) those snipers on the bridge will no longer two-tap you. In fact i believe you'd even be able to take three hits from them without going down. Simply because a singular number's cap went up. That is bad difficulty design. Not only is the grind to get up to a new cap exceedingly boring and intentionally forces you to use crap gear instead of your hard earned favorites, or to spend excessive amounts of masterwork cores on infusion you're unlikely to have if you didnt play year one (that's my other BIG problem with destiny, but it's a seperate topic so let's leave that out here). Additionally, even once you've finally reached the new cap for the season after 2-3 weeks of painstakingly ticking off every powerfull drop on the map and infused all your gear back up, tadaa you're now just barely 10 light above the newest released content for that particular season. Enjoy getting slapped around by redbars until the next quarterly power raise by 50 makes that content a breeze. To quote one of the masterpiece games of the decade which suffered from a similar level scaling issue: "This cannot continue! This cannot continue!" (bonus points if you understand the reference). We need a different type of enemy difficulty and we need it fast. If all the challenge Destiny is going to offer is weekly checkpoints to increase and grind up a singular number that only stays valid for 3 months and doesn't even really help in whatever the newest content is, if the only ways players can ever really fail is 35 second timers or getting twotapped by red bars in a supposedly power fantasy game... If we are forced to grind three to four dozen hours to get to max level every season with unenjoyable random gear until we drop gear at the new cap that we then need to spend an annoying as heck to grind currency to infuse our actual favorites... To then still feel utterly powerless as snipers twotap us because ha ha we're only 10 light above this new content... Well i expect im not going to be the only player who will leave Destiny if this is the core experience you want to offer players. You've already PROVEN you can do better, with exceptional instanced content like the raids, like the secret missions and even those suffer from this but you made them balanced around it! You wanna rip all the meta bandaids off? Fine, go ahead, do it. But fix the way light scaling makes me feel like i'm in that game IRL keeling over after taking a single hit. It doesn't feel worth the grind already. If you're telling me you're about to make the 80% of the time i spend getting up to scratch every season even more unenjoyable for the purpose of making the few things your design made mandatory feel less mandatory... you're going to fail, spectacularly. I'd put good money down right this instant that the next season we're gonna see an even tighter meta than we have right now. People are going to want to run nothing but two wells of radiance and one tether in every single 3 player PvE activity, so the wells can take turns recharging. You havent made it impossible to keep up a constant well just yet, so why not, it's still going to be "necessary" to survive what light scaling does even at max level. I hope you see what you've been trying to present as difficulty has been thoroughly rejected and isn't whatsoever enjoyable to the PvE focused portion of your playerbase. We crave those moments of the coordination category, particularly because they give us a break from all the boring seemingly artificial failures. I challenge you and anyone listening to go and play Reckoning Tier 3 with Blackout against the Knights without the Super recharging exotics. You go do that and see if it's fun. See if your failures FEEL deserved. Or if they feel cheated, frustrating, powerless. What are my suggestions to fix this? Simple - throw light scaling in the garbage can of design, or AT LEAST the artificial +10 capping for each new season. If we earn our maximum level let us feel at least a tiny bit powerfull. Oh and if you'll excuse one direct jab at you - i know you know light scaling is broken and unfun. I know you know because you'll be locking down basically all significant light upgrade collectables for the beginning of the new season to force the raid challengers to try and beat the raids final encounter at roughly the maximum of -40 light, just to make it that little bit "harder", when in actually it's not harder, it's just artificially more bullet spongy and less forgiving on hits taken. Personally if i was a first hour raid challenger i'd immediatly storm into the black armory stuff to grab the powerfull frame for 2 forge ignitions to jam up my light that tiny bit at any cost before going into the new raid - i believe it'd be worth more than already starting attempts. Sending in a different clan squad to collect "how to do it" intel while the "A-Team" grabs as many powerfulls as you guys leave on the map for us normal mortals. The fact that i believe that's not only viable but the best strategy to approach a new raid speaks more than a thousand words about the unhealthy spot that type of difficulty scaling is in. Oh and for the people who merely play 30 hours a week and not 70... try to think about the average experience we have over the total hours we spend in the first month of a new season. If 70-80% of those feel like a dayjob because we're trying to inch up a singular number while using gear we don't want to use... maybe it'll tell you why all of my friends refuse to play Destiny with me anymore. What do you prefer?