[u][b]Introduction[/b][/u] I started playing right in the beginning and even though I dropped out for while, I came back after the release of the Dark Below and had the most fun ever again. For a while. At the moment my enthusiasm is a bit lacking again, even Raids get boring if you do them again and again. I still play here and there and am currently waiting for the release of House of Wolfs. As I said, in Destinys said I got pretty bored of the game twice. And in the last few weeks, I was thinking about why that is the case. And I think the problem is not mainly the repetition and the grind. Every Destiny player knows, that's what it is. I think the main problem is these kind of artificial barriers and restrictions, which ultimately just annoy - at least - me. In the end, there are a few things, that always come back to my mind and seem to be at the root of all evil. And today I've tried to write some of them down, in the expectation, I'm not the only one who sees these issues. These points are: 1. [url=https://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/122024134]Finding People to play / Matchmaking[/url] 2. [url=https://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/122024134]Exotic Items Design Flaw[/url] 3. [url=https://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/122024177]Companion App / In-Game Inbalance[/url] Since each of them are a bit lengthy, I've seperated them into multiple threads, which should simply discussion, if one starts at all. In this part I'm talking about Exotic Items Design Flaw I've tried to bring some structure into my topics. Each consists of a problem description, a proposal and a Conclusion. Since I'm a software engineer myself (although not located in the games industry), I'm getting kind of specific in my proposals, also in the hope, a bungie employee who sees these threads, can see, that it wouldn't be that hard to do ;) [u][b]Exotic Items Design Flaw[/b][/u] [u]Problem: Exotic limitations[/u] You certainly know what I'm gonna talk about here... Yeah, it's exotics and their annoying limititions to only wear one weapon/armor at the same time. First of all, this should not be a rant. But let me you a little story about why I think Bungie decided to implement this limitiation how it came to that. Of course it just happens like that in my imagination, but I think the general idea is not too far off. In the beginning they thought about interesting weapons. They decided to implement two kinds of legendaries, the normal one, with decent stats and fun, but not that game changing perks. They called them legendaries. And they created even better legendaries, with pretty much even stats (compared to legendaries), but really game changing perks. And now we have our Exotics. I don't think they had this limitiations at that point. I don't think they implement it to annoy us, and I think they loved full-out exotic chars in PvE activities. I mean, imagine how fun it would be with a full set of exotic armor and weapons and all their uber-awesome perks, fighting your way throught the vault of glass. Sure, you'd be totally overpowered against legendary only char, but who cares? you wanna kill Atheon, the rest doesn't matter... But then they started playtesting the cruicible and at some point started to check, how the different level gear impacts the "skill" of players. And here's what I think they noticed: They could send chars with only green gear against chars with only blue, even against fully legendary chars, and even if the levels were wildly disappropriate, it didn't really matter. They completely even out the weapons and abilities. The only thing that some impact were perks like faster melee, or super regeneration on grenade kills, but it didn't really change the flow of the game. But then they let some chars with legendaries only against some chars with exotics only. If you know some stats, legendary gear has, you can assume how that ended... The full-blown exotic team has probably beaten the pants off the legendary only team. Some perks are so game changing, they will totally change the game and it will be really unfair, to play with a level 5 green only char, against a full blown level 32 exotic guy. What were their options? Removing the oh so awesome perks from exotics, and only incrase damage/armor? meh... Boring exotics Removing Exotics completeley? Even more boring Limit Exotics to one per armor/weapon? Yay, we still got cool exotics (so that's what they did) I think there would have been another possibility: Builds (If any Bungie employee sees this, it would be awesome if you could give us some insight into this design decision) Antoher problem with exotics is the sheer overpoweredness of some weapons, especially Gjallarhorn. In end-game PvE content, expecially Crota's End, every player that has Gjallarhorn is basically force to use it. This means a massive reduction in different builds and leads to high level chars always ending up with the same weapon, at least for heavy weapons. [u]Proposal: Builds[/u] To solve this problem, players should be able to create different builds, consisting of gear and subclass. Each build could be designed for a specific task, e.g. a high-void build for VoG, a Gjallarhorn Build for CE and a Cruicible build, well, for Cruicible. Now the clou would be, that you could specify a build as a PvE or a PvP build. The PvP builds would have the same limitiations like they have at the moment, so you're only allowed to carry one exotic weapon/armor piece simultaneously. Of course you'd be allowed to use your PvP builds in any PvE situation as you like. PvE builds on the other hand wouldn't be subject to this limitation. You could use every exotic gear at your disposal and would be able to build the most overpowered character you possibly can. Imagine the fun you'd have in raids and strikes. In this case, of course, you wouldn't be allowed to use the build in a PvP situation and would be force to switch, before entering the cruicible. To integrate this into the current UI, I was thinking about using the current character screen. Another column of up to five squares to the side of the screen, to switch between the builds. Pressing Y (on XBox) would switch between PvE/PvP builds. Changing the build wouldn't automatically change the stored builds, only when you store it to a specific slot. Now, you may be thinking what happens when you switch gear to another char, maybe even with the companion app. I want to point to my other thread [url=https://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/122024177]here [/url]. Basically I'm describing there, that it should be possible to switch gear between characters not only over the companion app at any time, but also in game. If that would also be possible, this ongoing changes in inventory would actually be no problem at all. Maybe you'd have to switch weapons on another char, so he doesn't have no weapon equiped at all. Anyway, there would be ways to solve that. [u]Conclusion[/u] If players would be able to create different builds for chars, each designated to either PvP or PvE, I think this would massively increase the fun we had with Destiny. - There would be an increase in different player builds (Especially since Exotics are really rare and almost noone has exactly the same.) - Players would have more motivation to go for even more exotics. After all, they can actually use them, even if they got Gjallarhorn. - The Exotic limitations, probably implemented to balance PvP, wouldn't affect PvE anymore and allow players to build some real Guardian Heroes, while PvP balance would still be maintained