So this is posting an amazing response to a post someone made about a video datto did on destiny Pvp balancing Credits to the user kellygreen2 [quote]That.....missed the mark. I'll give Datto the benefit-of-the-doubt and assume that he missed the mark because he was playing "Devil's Advocate" for the entire video. Here's why it missed. 1. If he were just talking about PVE, he'd have a legitimate point. The Y1 raid weapons, and several exotics were absurdly overpowered. Gjallarhorn did 2.5x the damage of any other rocket laucher in the game. Black Hammer would just keep creating ammo out of thin-air as long as you kept hitting crits. Allowing it to do monstrous rates of DPS. With burn modifiers, the raid primaries (in Y1) would do TRIPLE the damage of any kinetic weapons. This led to a ridiculously wide "delta" between players of the same level who had the game's best weapons...and those who had the game's average weapons. That creates a tuning nightmare for the developer (see "The Division" patch 1.3). Nerfs had to be made to encourage some build diversity...and to allow a more consistent level of challenge for everyone in the game. The nerfs also allowed Bungie to change the design of their boss fights so that everything wasn't so -blam!-ing bullet-spongy. On the whole PVE has been better for it. Because Bungie could control BOTH sides of the equation. Player power.....but also enemy power. But you can't do this in PVP. 2. With a few notable exceptions (OG Vex Mythoclast, OG Pocket Infinity) NONE of the game's Y1 weapons were absurdly overpowered in PVP. Elemental primaries were just ordinary weapons in PVP. Black Hammer was a sluggishly handling sniper, whose DPS perks had no real impact on the game. GHorn was considered a waste of an exotic slot in PVP. No, what you had was just a weapon system that----on the whole----was well-tuned. But played FASTER than Bungie wanted....and where primary weapons OVERPERFORMED because there were no damage drop-offs with range. With some exotic weapons that had perks that made them frustrating to fight against. The reason why PVP had no real build diversity in Year One was simple. Three things go into building a meta. One. The weapon is ideally suited for the combat most commonly faced. Two. The weapon has some advantage that allows the player using it to either kill faster or survive better. Three. THE WEAPON IS EASILY OBTAINABLE AND EASY TO USE. So the metas formed around exotics in PVP...and exotics and raid weapons in PVE....because the game's loot system was so stingy with legendary drops in year one. We now dismantle more legendary gear in a couple hours of play than we'd get in two WEEKS of play in year One. Pluse both raid weapons and exotics were fixed rolls. So they were far more practical than the low probability of getting a perfectly rolled legendary weapon. We only have legendary weapon metas because the game has become far more generous with loot....and all the game's exotics have been nerfed.....hard. Suros dominated the meta because Focus fire made it very stable. Its exotic perks gave the bottom half of the magazine ***escalating damage*** with each successive bullet (before it got nerfed) as well as healing the user. It was easily obtainable because Xur SOLD it early in the game, and it could drop in NFs and raids. ARs in general dominated because they were stable. Did good damage, and had no damage drop-off over range. But as long as Suros' exotic perk hadn't proc'ed in a PVP fight, weapons like Shadow Price and Grim Citizen could easily compete. As could HCs like Lord High Fixer and The Devil You Know in the hands of a skilled player. But then the exotic HC came to dominate because Bungie deliberate BROKE ARs as a group by double nerfing them in Feb 2015. Pulse rifles were still underpowered at that point...and SRs were still handicapped by the small map sizes. So HCs took over because they were simply the weapon class with the next-fastest TTk. Not because they were intrinsically OP. The argument that Thorn killed too quickly was always a bullshit argument. THE FASTEST KILLING WEPONS IN THE GAME AT THAT TIME WERE THE LAST WORD AND HAWKMOON. The Last Word because it you could get its hip-fire bonus to proc while ADSing....and Hawkmoon if you started getting multiple bonuses proc'ing on the same bullet. HAWKMOON COULD EASILY TWO-TAP AND OUTGUN THORN HEAD TO HEAD...AND EVEN ONE-TAP A WOUNDED PLAYER. RARELY EVEN ONE-TAP SOMEONE FROM FULL HEALTH IF ALL THREE BONUSES PROC'ED FOR A SINGLE 'Golden BB". (I did this three times in Y 1) But Hawkmoon never got the hate that Thorn did despite being able to routinely outgun Thorn. Thorn was hated because of BURN. Hawkmoon would Two-tap you....kill you quick...and let you quickly respawn and get back into the game. Thorn would two-tap you....AND THEN LEAVE YOU TO HELPLESSLY DIE FROM THE BURN. While the person who killed you was free to walk away, and not give you any chance to retaliate. No matter how many ways Bungie tried to nerf Thorn to slow its TTK, people always BITCHED about it. Until they finally realized that the TTK was never the issue...and they just went ahead and BROKE Mark of The Destroyer. So that people could just ignore the burn and fight through it. THEN...and only then....did the bitching stop. 3. It misses the mark because Bungie nerfed things because they were trying micromanage how the game was played....not because just because they wanted build diversity. On MULTIPLE occasions Bungie Sandbox employees stated in interviews that they were making changes to the Sandbox in a effort to SLOW DOWN THE GAME and to promote a slower, more TEAM-ORIENTED style of play. Despite the fact that they built a game with augmented mobility, powerful player abilities that naturally wanted ot play fast. So Bungie didnt' nerf everything because everything was OP. They NERFED everything because they wanted the Crucible to play less like Call of Duty and Titanfall....and more like Halo 3. The problem was that the game had NONE of the design features that would support that kind of play. Halo had Spartans that moved slowly, predictably, and in two dimensions. Destiny had Guardians who moved fast, unpredictably, and in all three dimensions. Halo had Spartans that basically entered the arena with equal load outs. Destiny had Guardians who stepped in with loot from the game's RPG, and the ability to make specific builds. Halo had no weapon choice. You had to force your primary weapon to fit the situation until you manage to gain possession of something more powerful . Destiny allowed people to freely choose what weapons they brought in. swap out weapons in mid game...and decide when they wanted to use them OHK weapons in Halo were short-lived power-ups. OHK weapons in Destiny were an intergral part of the game's balancing. Spartans had one weapon and a grenade. Guardians had three weapons, grenades, a charged melee attack AND a super. Bottomline, you can't force Destiny to play like Halo simply by nerfing all its weapons. But Bungie tried. ...and they unbalanced the game. Creating a structural advantage for anyone armed with a special weapon (because the game's primaries were rendered underpowered and unable to keep up with play) that has dogged the game ever since. It has dogged the game ever since because Bungie couldn't control both sides of the equation like they could in PVE. They couldn't nerf player movement speed without breaking in the game...and they couldn't take away player choice. So with each nerf, people would just choose the NEXT fastest-killing method. So the meta would just shift...but the game wouldn't play any different in any fundamental. way. So Bungie tried to force the issue by first damage nerfing all the games special weapons. Then when they couldn't keep damage nerfing them....they tried handling-nerfing them.....then with Patch 2.5.0.2 they finally hit wall. They couldn't nerfe the game's special weapons any more without outright breaking them....and they were unwilling to buff the game's primaries to allow faster game play. So they tried to take away player choice....and starve the weapons of ammo and get them out of people's hands that way. But once again....people werent' going to give up that advantage that Bungie themselves put into the game. So people resorted to special-weapons-as-primaries. Ammo-regenerating specials...and Sidearms. Anything that allowed them to circumvent the ammo restrictions. So here we are now with a broken game. That still won't play like Halo. Where almost all the games weapons feel bland and frustrating to use....and where game play has been forced into a very narrow range of "Bungie approved" play-styles. That very few people enjoy playing anymore. TLDR: Datto misses the mark here. The Sandbox isn't where it is in PVP because everything was OP in Year On. The Sandbox is where it is because Bungie went to war with its own game. Trying to force a game that was designed NOTHING like Halo, to play LIKE Halo. They fought that war because they believed that they could do it by simply nerfing everything, and making the playspace less lethal. But player movement speed, player weapon choice, and weapons that bent-and-broke rules conspired to keep that from ever happening. But instead of heading community warnings about this. Bungie put their heads down, stuck their fingers in their ears....and did it any way. ...and got the exact result so many of us predicted they would. A broken game.[/quote]