Your last sentence absolutely horrifies me. I've always based player skill first and foremost on firefight skill. As someone who was never fond of the "I know where the sword spawns, I get free kills" mentality, I found myself almost exclusively playing SWAT in Halo, or other gametypes without power weapons around the map, such as Snipers or Grifball. Those gametypes all force you to rely on your sheer ability, rather than the crutch of a power weapon. Now, does each power weapon have a strategy? Can it be difficult to figure out exactly where and when the weapon spawns? Yes and yes. However, giving a player an obscenely strong weapon like an energy sword, shotgun, or rocket launcher, which takes little to no skill to use, is ludicrous. I suppose the exception to this rule would be the sniper rifle, which is quite difficult to use, but can be extremely deadly in the right hands. I digress. Hopefully I made my point clear in that jumbled mess of thoughts. This is what happens when you go on the forum past midnight.

I think you mistake my point. I do agree with you that the the-bigger-your-gun-the-better-you-are method is rather absurd for proper strategy. While it is really enjoyable sometimes, it belongs somewhere more along the lines of Action Sack, and less in regular gameplay. I was thinking more along the lines of Team Fortress 2--a game where each class can be effectively countered with another. It makes it so that while there are clearly better weapons than others and players can spawn with any of them, there is always a way to beat them. With Destiny's class-building system, it will focus more on teams. If you are primarily using an assault rifle, a sniper might be the death of you(it varies from game to game, but there is usually some kind of circle-of-what-beats-what, like a giant game of rock paper scissors). However, if you or one of your teammates decided to use a shotgun, you could get close (rather than shooting from optimal assault rifle distance) and engage the sniper on your terms, up close and personal, where snipers tend to kinda suck. Likewise, if you were sniping and someone with a shotgun charged you, you would be pretty close to screwed, but someone with an assault rifle would have been able to beat them. However, an important thing to bear in mind with this is that since we will be able to spawn with snipers and shotguns and such, they will be significantly less powerful than in Halo. They will take actual skill and strategy, rather than just the "I have a big gun! You all die!" idea. With these circle of what-kills-want, it does mean that a new and inexperienced player will be able to to beat more powerful players due to weapon specializations, but it allows--and often demands--a much more coherent team effort. I actually really like this, but I know some people hate it. Plus, I would be quite surprised if Destiny didn't have multiple game modes, so you can probably just keep playing something like SWAT if that's your thing.