They are pushing swords and liner fusions this season. And even those mods don't seem exciting.

Laughs in Vex Mythoclast with catalyst

I have a feeling merciless is gonna be broken with a certain artifact mod…hint, hint

While its well known bows are junk and the ppl picking them up this time around clearly never knew how bad they were last time around. We got some awesome sh!7, breach and clear on solar abilitys and voops(granted the voop one takes a sec to stack up). OL melee that retriggers and a few other fun/good mods. its the season of the voops man so crack out your 1k voices. That being said I do find 2 down sides. The first being the lack AB choices, its auto rifle or erianas vow so thats stifling to say the least. The second might be what your complaining about, the cost of mods went [b][i]WAAYYY[/i][/b] up. So having flexibility with is out the window with combat mods or 10-20points of stats get the axe. I must say though this problem can be overcome by superior gear, but your then looking at tier 31.5-5[equivalent to tier 32] or tier 32 with out compromising stats or combat mods. For reference the player avg for armor is tier 27-28. But im also one of thoes lucky few with multiple quad 100 stat sets so i was un-phased by this.