So with master GoA being the single source of newly introduced artifice armor, let's talk about the problems of the armor system as a whole, because artifice armor only makes them worse. Suffice to say, I don't know what the armor design team's goals and priorities are, so it's possible that the current system is 100% in line with what they want, but I'll just list the problems as they are visible, in hopes that maybe someone on armor team sees this. Let's also get another thing out of the way: I'm assuming here that the general paradigm of grinding for armor is positive reinforcement, i.e. that armor should be desirable on its own merit and not for any other reason, like it having an expiration date and thus players needing to constantly grind for new armor. I also can't do exact math, because I don't know what probabilities are to get various totals on armor. I'm assuming it's non-linear, i.e. not equal chance to get 48 or 68 total, but either a bell curve, with middling totals being most probable, or an S-curve, with probability of higher totals decreasing exponentially, then flattening as it approaches lowest values. With that, let's start with the most obvious problem: it's too random, with lots of wasted numbers. Unlike weapon stats, where, say 53 stability is marginally more effective than 52 (and those stats aren't random, btw), in terms of your total stats anything that doesn't end in a 0 or 5 is literally wasted, and 5+ can only be made less useless by sacrificing 1-2 of 50 mod energy points. It's hard to say how exactly useless a single piece of armor with, say, 14 on a stat is, considering you can always get lucky and get other pieces that round it up, but I can confidently state that having an armor where totals all end with 0, i.e. a set with zero wasted points requires almost an inhuman amount of armor grind (with very few sources having guaranteed high total rolls, and even fewer being farmable), with luck also being a factor. Now I'm sure Bungie's armor design team has (or can have) telemetry to see how exactly bad this problem is. With full set of 68 stat masterworked (so 80 totals) armor you can have 80*4 + 12 = 332-ish total before mods, plus 50 with mods, plus 40 with powerful friends and radiant light = 422-ish, which means with perfect distribution you're supposed to be able to have 3 out of your 6 stats maxed, 2 of those likely being strength and mobility, and 2 lowest ones at only 18 (4*4 from minimum on masterworked pieces + 2 from masterworked class item, which also means 16 of those points are wasted). Now since you can't get 4 stats to 100, you surely can get 3, right? Without +20 mods, (-40), without minimum parasite stats (-18*3), you should have about 328 points to allocate between 3 stats, which leaves about 8.5% leeway for you to do so, and yet how many players have armor sets with three 100 stats? In addition, you can have up to 9*6 = 54 total stat points wasted, which is around 12.8% of your total allocatable 420 points. So there are 2 data points Bungie could look at here: how much of the player population percentage has at least 1 armor set with three stats being 100; and how many of the allocated stat points are wasted compared to total allocated stat points an all existing armor. Bottom line here is: very, VERY few players even try to get armor sets without wasted points. Most people just play with what they have, with very coarse tuning with mods. Add to this the fact that statistically vault space gets ever more valuable, because new items are constantly being added to the game while new vault space isn't, so one can't exactly keep adding armor pieces to their inventory, hoping to get some good distribution. Add to this the fact that due to elemental polarity of armor, you generally need 4 full sets with various elements, so if you wanted perfect distribution on all sets, multiply the necessary time investment by 4 (yes, addition of stasis polarity made things worse). Add to this the fact that ascendant shards are quite scarce, the way to farm them has a fairly low yield and requires players to repeatedly complete harder versions of nightfalls (an even more tedious version of an already tedious strikes we completed hundreds of times), and masterworking exotics requires not even 2, but 3 shards. So with all of this, Bungie's armor design team should be able to calculate: how much average play time does a player require to get 1 set of fully masterworked armor with zero waste and good distribution? How much more to get 4 of those sets? How much more to get at least 1 piece of each exotic armor with proper stats to fit with the sets? How much more to get 4 of each with different polarities? And now add to all of this the artifice armor. Its advantages aren't mind-blowing, but if you wanted to secure those advantages, you'd have to re-grind all 4 of your armor sets (and this right now only comes from a single source, but I'm hoping that more sources will be added in the future). The solutions to these are simple, but I'm not sure Bungie wants them. In fact I'm not sure what Bungie wants for us at all. Obvious solutions would be: 1. Make armor stats roll 1-10, instead of 2-100. Most of those numbers don't do anything and are a waste. Let them always roll with values that actually affect something, or maybe make the stats affect cooldowns with every point, not with increments of 10 point. 2. Remove elemental polarities from armor altogether, or make swapping polarities very affordable. 3. Make masterworking materials easier to acquire, including enhancement cores, prisms and ascendant shards. Current armor system basically says [b]"it's technically possible to get the stat distribution you want, but it's walled behind such a nasty randomness that you would require possibly tens of thousands of hours to get it"[/b]. Same with some recent weapons that have huge perk pools, and remember how one of the recent hotfixes revealed that there's actually an insidious weighted curating system that assigns different probabilities for different perks? Like, you're more likely to get bad perks than good ones, which is why bad perks exist in the first place, I assume? How many people even caught wind of that? Now why are things the way they are? Did Bungie get here by accident, making tactical improvements but not seeing the big picture? Or is Bungie trying to make people spend more hours playing the same content, but also doesn't want bad press, so they use ungodly randomness to accomplish this while maintaining plausible deniability? Do they want certain things to be technically achievable in the game, but also so astronomically improbable that absolute majority of players will never have them? Do they want us to accept the thought of [b]"There are many things in the game that you will never have because of the randomness"[/b]? Or are they just super short on workforce, so they can't fix those things, even though they'd like to? I don't know, and without Bungie specifically stating what their goals and impediments are, it's hard to tell. All we know is that right now most of us will never have wasteless stat distribution on our armor, or even 2/5 rolls on bottom dollar or servant leader, and that's not exactly a good thing. You might make an argument that maybe they just want variety of roughly equally viable rolls at least on weapons, but the existence of different probability for different perks means that Bungie knows that there are more and less desirable perks, and specifically wants more desirable ones to be more rare. Why? I don't know. Could there be a good, honest reason for this, which is different from the most obvious explanation of "it's just to inflate playtime, because that's the most obvious effect"? I'm not sure. Either way, I don't envy the players that will now start grinding the hell out of master GoA, trying to get new sets of artifice armor. I'm not even gonna try because that will just burn me out very quickly and for a very long time. P.S. Bungie, if you're reading this, please bring back Breachlight. There was no reason to kill it, and it was a huge reason I enjoyed playing the game. :(