I've seen this popping up recently, and there was just a post within the last day or so talking about giving Whisper infinite ammo. I still don't ever see this happening again - the combination of Whisper + Divinity is just too easy of a mix to allow infinite ammo generation without breaking the game.
Here's my suggestion instead, and it involves Whispered Breathing. For those who aren't aware, Whispered Breathing is a perk that comes from completing the catalyst on Whisper. Its essentially a modified & upgraded version of Box Breathing -- Box Breathing requires the player to ADS for a short time, and then buffs precision damage, accuracy & range on the next shot. Whispered Breathing takes this a step further, by keeping the buff active as long as you keep ADS'ing, whereas Box Breathing would require you to ads and wait after each shot. My rework of the Whisper Catalyst:
Whispered Breathing: Aiming Down Sights for a short time activates Whispered Breathing. Rapidly landing precision shots builds stacks of Whispered Breathing, granting bonus damage. Failing to rapidly land precision shots resets these stacks.
My suggestion is to essentially take the logic of Cranial Spike - the Dead Man's Tale perk - and apply it to Whispered Breathing. First, ADS to proc Whispered Breathing - this part doesn't change. Then, as you start landing your precision shots, stack up a buff that starts at x1 with the first shot, and caps at around 'Whispered Breathing x5 or x10'. The initial Whispered Breathing buff would be much lower, but as you chain precision hits it would stack this buff and increase damage significantly. The idea here is pretty straightforward: If you max out the Whispered Breathing stacks, it should turn Whisper into the best DPS gun in the game.
Now, there obviously has to be a catch to prevent this from breaking the game, and that's where the "Failing to rapidly land precision shots resets these stacks" part comes in. My version of this perk would have a very unforgiving reset timer -- if you fail to consecutively land rapid precision shots, your stacks of Whispered Breathing will reset and need to be built up again. I don't know exactly how this would be timed, but I'd say there should be around .25-.5 seconds max between precision hits, or the perk would reset. This means that if you either A.) Miss a precision shot, or B.) Take to long to aim/line up your shots, you'll have to start over and will lose out on damage. The potential damage of Whisper would skyrocket, and if you had Sniper Reserves x2, and had a perfect damage phase where you land every round consecutively as a precision shot, there's no reason it shouldn't be the best DPS in the game. I want to note that the timer is a key aspect to help balance the gun against Div -- when we have a gun that can create a massive crit spot, a perk to this degree should require a constant bombardment of damage. If we look at an encounter like War Priest, yes, Div is a big solution to the crit problem, but the fact that the boss moves around and hides behind rocks would fight against this timer and make it difficult to maintain optimal dps through an entire damage phase. The goal here is to turn Whisper into a high-skill, high-risk weapon with a very high potential reward.
I think change would naturally balance out in the modern game. When we look at older bosses like Oryx, its important to acknowledge that they have primitive designs. These bosses have huge crit spots and remain stationary, so you can use just about anything to DPS them. Because of this, they shouldn't be the standard for balancing dps weapons. If we look at our last 6 new raid bosses - Consecrated Mind, Sanctified Mind, Atraks, Taniks, the Abomination, Caretaker, and Rhulk - they all require a significant amount of movement from players during damage phases. This was a conscious decision from Bungie to counter Well of Radiance & move away from the "Sit, Point, Click" DPS phases that had become normal. I think the changes I suggested for Whispered Breathing would significantly reward highly skilled players, as it carries the potential to out-damage just about anything, but the lack of forgiveness would prevent it from becoming the end-all be-all DPS method that we've seen at times with Gjally, OG Whisper, and Anarchy/Mountaintop. Obviously the numbers aren't flushed out here, and I'd leave it to the devs to balance everything out and apply the proper buff amounts. So yea, let me know what you think about this. I think its a fair option that could revive a formerly great exotic, without becoming totally broken.
-
Yes but now dumb it down to 5 sentences so I , and probably Bungie, can understand it.