My personal point of view is:
- Year 1 had plenty of bugs and silly issues in many aspects of the game, which took a great deal of time for Bungie to fix, some of these fixes and quality of life adjustments are still ongoing
- Year 1 had the most content by far - the expansion model used in year 1 was infinitely superior to the utterly pathetic drip feed of content in year 2 and 3. TTK was large, and RoI was medium - neither were anywhere near enough to last a year. Dressing the tower up for a few weeks with some silly cosmetic items and SRL are not meaningful content. I hope for the sake of the game that with Destiny 2 they go back to the model of base game plus small 2 small expansions during each year plus big expansion at the end of each year
- In year 1, raids were hard - and the loot was worthy of their difficulty. You got awesome quality gear which gave you light level advantages you couldn't find anywhere else and abilities also (such as elemental damage primaries). Nowadays raids are almost entirely meaningless - you can get to max light by grinding almost any piece of content in the game, light level itself hardly makes any difference compared to the year 1 level system in pve, and the weapons are almost entirely garbage. They've nerfed the crap out of raids and all the rewards from them in favour of whatever proportion of players hate raiding/never raid, and at the loss of the more hardcore players
- I give zero craps about how many raids are 'viable' at any particular point in time - this is only relevant to players who start playing post a certain DLC launching. For the many players in year 1, the fact that VoG and CE stuff could be ascended to max light didn't give any incentives to play VoG and CE again as they had already played both to death and obtained all of the gear possible from those raids
- Every expansion has had a different crucible meta, with plenty of pros and plenty of cons. Much of what individual players enjoyed probably depends on their playstyle and preferred weapon classes. By the end of year 1, handcannons and shotguns dominated everything. A series of changes in year 2 eventually saw pulse rifles come out on top (though MIDA had a few months in the sun), sniping had never been easier due to the reduced TTK on most primaries - people cried lots so sniping was made a lot harder - now we're back to a mostly shotgun meta, with high rof pulses and some very limited HCs being viable also. That's not all weapon nerfs though - a good deal of the reason that shotguns work so well in Destiny is that the vast majority of maps prominently feature corridors/corners/tight spaces as opposed to wide open spaces, and the movement abilities in Destiny allow players to close enormous gaps even in the open with limited risk of being killed before getting into shotgun range.
- Overall, I enjoyed year 1 the most by far - mainly because there was an enormous amount of content, but also because drop rates were low and good items were worth grinding for (both raid gear and exotics).
As something of an aside, I think Bungie have spent far too much time reading the forums here and trying to respond to noise than actually making good calls themselves about what needs adjusting. Players will always sob endlessly about any weapon/ability that kills them in crucible, any item that they want but hasn't dropped within a week of the new content releasing (hello Icebreaker), or really, absolutely anything that doesn't suit their personal style of gameplay 100%. Rather than trying to appreciate that Destiny has an enormous amount of content designed to appeal to a very broad audience in different ways, if they don't like PvP, rather than just accepting that a good number of players do, they scream and cry that it should be removed from the game, or it's rewards nerfed to dirt. All of it's bounties and rewards mechanisms should be adjusted so that performance is utterly irrelevant - lose the game, come last with 0 kills and 40 deaths - no worries you still progress your bounties, collect an iron medallian, get an equal shot at rng loot, etc.
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