Talking pve here. Boss design stuff. Edit: I love seeing boss encounter ideas feel free to post yours here. Challenge mode is to come up with boss ideas where current Blackhammer/Gjallarhorn nuking would be ineffective. As anyone knows, Icebreaker is going to have a rediculously low dps that isn't even worth it. Black hammer is now basically a sniper with speed reload thereby making it nothing special. Gjallarhorn is a ranged weapon and it's getting an indeterminate amount of Wolfpack nerfing. It's been talked about to death. Salty or not nothings gonna change about it any time soon. Let's talk about why this was a problem in the first place. It's clear that you've (bungie hive mind) noticed that most players in high level content like to stay back and snipe and hide because everything is scary. Every nightfall strike is done with a sniper and or Gjallarhorn. What I think they fail to take into account is why people do this. I genuinely don't belive that every destiny player that uses those three weapons are maliciously lazy scum that gatekeep lfg with Gjallarhorn only posts. It's because of boss design. With the exception of psion flayers (I'll bring this up as an example of why they're amazing later) all bosses in destiny have the same structure: 1. A lot of health. When you talk about bosses in desitny you will always hear the words bullet sponge: if you were here the first couple of weeks, phogoth and good ol' Valus took [b]forever[/b] to kill. 2. Nonstop firing. Phogoth will shoot dps eye breath lazers as long as he can see you. Valus fires nonstop chaingun only to take a break for rocket spam. Nexus has huge AOE void blasts that warp around walls. Skolas fires endless scorch cannon before you can even run away from the door. 3. Anti-cqb Area of Effect ground pounds. Except for psion flayers razor's edge thing. Every boss has an aoe melee that stops you from getting too close by either outright one hitting you or physics-ing you harder than a pissed off phalanx into a wall, instantly killing you or ruining your health. You can kind of get around this by jumping in with a shotgun, taking a shot or two then jumping out but that aoe will pretty much instant kill you if you get hit by the physics blast into a wall. 4. Adds, both timer and health based. They show up. There are a lot of them. Some spawn on a timer meaning you are wasting your time if you're the only one on add patrol because by the time you kill them all another wave just spawned. Or they're health based like Skolas or Omnigul where the boss isn't that bad health wise but the add spawns make it so it becomes this super prolonged affair. These four things simply put discourage or even halt high action, run and gun, close quarters combat and completely reward camping and hiding. If you hide and snipe none of these four things hurt you at all and in activities like nightfall where death is punished by orbit or skolas where you have no checkpoints to fall back on and death had real punishments. So you either camp and live or shotgun rush and likely die. The psion flayers boss battle is actually only strike boss battle I believe is well designed. You have multiple targets and adds. You're rewarded for either hanging back or just blasting them with shotguns. The three shield types allow for some other weapon besides Ghorn to thrive. I only wish they were more agressive or ran toward the sniper perch for more "oh -blam!-" moments. Their ground pound doesn't blast you into another dimension accessible only by phasing into a box and the adds are neither negligible nor are they too demanding. Atheon is a great raid tier boss battle because it makes the group do other things before regrouping for boss dps. If atheon was made where when he teleported you he was also able to telport himself to mars or venus and blast you while you're trying to kill oracles then it would be a nightmare yet that's pretty much what skolas makes you do. High level boss designs should work more like these two encounters. For strikes having more little targets that are more mobile over big huge bullet sponges in a circle room and for raids have your huge titanic sponge but make players do other things separate from the boss altogether to do more damage to it. If you do this and maybe tone down the physics of boss ground pounds you may see more people willing to go all out run and gun without fear of wiping or taking taking a tediously lengthy amount of time killing one enemy. Long story short: if you want to change player behavior, you have to change the conditions for players to choose different tools instead of breaking or blunting their tools. If I need to dig a hole and you break my best shovel in half you aren't going to get me to use a hammer to dig a hole. But if you have me hammer a nail I could still use a shovel but I'd be better off using, you know, a hammer.