Ok so a few things. Yes abilities were too dominant and its good they're getting addressed. However....this isn't it... [b] Nerfing the entire ability sandbox pretty much is not the correct approach and just reverts back to the old D2Y1 philosophy that was hated by most. [/b] I want to start by saying that separating the ability and super cooldowns is marvelous. This will allow for much better design of new abilities and overall balancing of current ones. However with that added functionality now the fact that something like shoulder charge won't OHK is crazy. Make it harder to use and the cooldown longer, make it take longer to activate, or have damage scale up based on sprint duration. Not using these new tools appropriately is just lazy. Another thing that makes no sense is removing the one shot abilities from Warlocks and Titans while giving Hunters a new one and leaving the old ones alone. Its just hypocritical in design and a blatant oversight. I think the pass at exotic armor for abilities is too hefty, though I understand the reason. However with a 50% nerf to all the mods and lots of neutral game perks I disagree with such aggressive changes to these exotics. 66% on Shinobu's Vow? Let's try 30% and go from there. While build crafting is being heavily encouraged and there's now more room for it, build crafting also becomes a lot less fun, more tedious, and in many instances now just not rewarding enough not because of the ability itself but actual uptime. Moving onto super regeneration, some of it really makes little to no sense. Why is Silence and Squall T4? why is the tier system 5 tiers with things seemingly haphazardly tossed into a tier? A better way would be melee, ranged, and support with their own tiers based on ease of use, power, and playstyle of the whole subclass. And as for dealing with supers between modes, I think a better solution to waiting for supers in Trials would be to scale it based on said mode, we already know that can be done anyways. So for Trials, disable passive regens and make it based on dealing damage. Problem solved. Because anything past this is just disabling abilities and that's a full stop no. However for something like Clash or Control it just sucks a lot of soul and fun out of things and makes what are supposed to be casual modes, less casual. These modes should have passive regeneration. Make Control slower since its objective based and games can be quickly closed out via objective and leave things untouched in Clash. I understand trying to appeal more gunplay to the audience and I'm all for it, abilities are critical to the game. We have Mayhem, add a mode that is SWAT with no abilities like people have been asking. Create some new modes, I've seen some interesting ideas. This way you don't have to take these massive swings that ruin certain aspects of the game if there's already a certain type of play or version of the game exists to follow another gameplay philosophy. We wouldn't feel the need to demolish some of these abilities or weapons as we have needed to in the past if people had playlists that fit more of what they were looking for that handled that for them. All in all, I see this patch being maybe 6 or 7 steps forward then 30 or so steps back. I expect PvP to become extremely team-shot oriented again and for people to stop venturing out looking for engagements. I also expect this to make a lot of people just drop PvP as it seriously damages part of the game's PvP identity. With Halo Infinite out I must say this was a bad time to take this big of a pass. Certainly think waiting until Witch Queen and just addressing the immediate issues for this one would have been better timing wise. [b] A leap and still somewhat drastic change was needed to the ability sandbox, however this is too drastic and reverts a lot of really positive changes that have been made in making abilities feel better. [/b] To put it simply, I think there's just a lot of shortsightedness being put on display here with this upcoming balance patch and its extremely disappointing to see some staple things that finally had a good position in the game being uplifted and so much good work being undone. I'm certainly a little concerned for PvP going forward once again. What optimism I started to feel for Crucible in Witch Queen is now gone.