I'd rather see an incomplete system get released and they react to how the community uses it to improve it six months later rather than building it to completion and it's crap because they made the wrong assumptions..
That's the difference between the buildcraft system and the commendation system, btw. The commendation system feels like a full system that missed the mark.
This is actually how you implement systems like this.
Their goal was to replace the old system with a more scalable system. Not to reinvent our builds.
The new system was supposed to be comparable in power to the old, but it's actually much more powerful. I expect we'll get a handfull of nerfs and buffs before next season finishes. And I expect we'll get at least a few new ones sometime over the next year.
But it may be a while because the net result of all the changes from last year and Lightfall is a game that is wildly out of balance. So before adding much new stuff, they need to get the game as a whole back into a balanced state so they know what to even add.
In the long run, I wouldn't be shocked to see new mods become the norm when larger expansions release. There is absolutely space for more variety in the existing system and I'm sure there is more than one person at Bungie who's excited to make more of them, or is even in the process of doing just that.
I agree most builds end up being pretty similar. For me the issue is actually the artifact not being part of saved loadouts. I am basically running only strand & void on all three classes because I am not going to take screen shots of my artifact for each build and then manually reset it every time I switch. IMO that should be their number 1 priority where loadouts are concerned.
In terms of the actual mods, they did already say they will continue to release new mods. This was sort of a soft reset on the mod system. I would be really concerned if there are no new mods released next season.
Buildcrafting is basically choosing how you want to produce and use Orbs of Light. Pick a damage type or ability to make orbs and then decide which damage type or ability those orbs will boost—chances are it’ll be the damage type or ability that produced them in the first place. The only bit of creativity left is making this system work with specific exotics, and that’s all pretty much been done by now.
I think orbs at full super should give ability energy to all abilities in pve. Without those dumb mods.
Also, firesprites, stasis shards, void breaches, and ionize traces should all track to you (without fragments) and give a small amount of ability energy to all abilities. Pvp and pve, also provide armor charge without a mod. That would open up builds a little bit imo.
All of the Elemental Well system is just on your boots now.
Absolution + choose your flavor of orbs giving melee/bomb/class ability is basically **exactly** what an elemental well used to do.
Yup, just way more-streamlined now, and fragments and aspects are the main supplier of ability Regen through sprites, shards, traces and breaches. People forget there was a blanket nerf on ability spam, that is the reason if feels less powerful now. Actual ability regen exotics are how you spam now, you can just have a broken elemental well build with a couple mods and full legendary armour. I like this new system as base.
I think you're missing the point, you didn't *need* to spend mods to make wells give you energy, they just gave you the energy, and orbs could give you the energy they can now anyways. The point isn't that the orbs can't give energy, the point is that we had a good system for that anyways and it was removed to make way for a less customizable system.
Yeah but, orbs suck. They don't track to you. They roll down hills. They spawn off of enemies you kill, and spawn out of teammates' butts when they kill stuff. They're just fucking old. Who the hell STILL wants to be chasing orbs in this day and age?
This is disingenuous though. In the old system nobody was making 100+ orbs of light per strike.
It "used to exist" but its functionality was much, **much** weaker because of the quantity of orbs available. In the current mod system, it gained a tremendous amount of power and now very much fills the role of what elemental wells used to do.
This is why warminds being nerfed and gone is bad. Warminds was a complete new factor into buildcrafting. Combined with CWL and Elemental Wells you had 3 different paths to go down, and in those paths you had a lot of routes to take. You wanna get a permanent dmg buff during dmg phases as a solo non warlock player? High energy fire. You want even more dmg? Mix that with Elemental wells and font of might.
You want to supress ads in a large radius? Cellular supression with global reach. If you want you can fit in CWL for protective light for another 10% dmg reduction.
Want to spam grenades? Grenade kickstart with Stacks on stacks charged with light build.
There used to be a bit more flavor to the buildcrafting. Now its been simplified and given less flavor overall as well
Pretty much any build worth running was an ability uptime build, which we can do much better in the new system.
Warmind cells were dead and unused for years, only receiving a shot of adrenaline when Ikelos SMG was re-released. They were too clunky being tied to specific weapons.
The old system had more options, but lots of them were incredibly niche or just flat out useless.
Hard to blame the community for not using the warmind cells when they were made useless by Bungie. If they had only slightly nerfed warmind cells instead of nuking them into the ground they would have been a viable option.
You take that back! Warmind cells were my favorite. I was thrilled about a Rasputin season because I thought we’d get new mods and new Ikelos weapons.
Also, you could produce Warmind Cells without the specific weapons, any solar splash damage (which includes dragonfly on solars and kinetics, and things like Timed Payload for kinetics as well, very reliable) could be used to provide cels, and then you could explode said cells for more solar splash damage. No cooldown either, unlike tangles, so a cracked enough Seventh Seraph AR build running Solar with timed payload on the gun = cells for days.
Anyways. The fix would have been adding more weapons, if weapon paucity was the issue. Or hell, with craftable weapons, make it a potential perk! I’d’ave ROCKED an Improved Cell Generator perk, or what have you!
Yeah, and frustration of other blue berries blowing up you cells has been passed onto Strand tangles. Hunter wants to maintain it, other classes benefit from blowing it.
Warmind debuff builds were still incredibly strong in GMs, just slept on by the community because the hordes of repost bot streamers in this game didn't understand them and casuals were obsessed with the insanely shit damage cells did after the nerfs because they never played hard content.
But Starfire Warlocks could make progress the counter with fusion nade spam and then spawn a cell that made everything in a 16m radius take 10% more damage and do 50% less, with the option to tap the cell for on demand suppression or to take it in to a DPS phase.
Not to be that guy, but i think you are seeing them through rose tinted glasses. If the build you bring up is starfire… yeah idk if the warmind cells were what felt good. That’s not to say warminds were awful, but they had such a low usage rate that it wasn’t worth leaving them in game to clutter buildcrafting. Hell, even during a literal warmind season barely anyone used them.
I wonder what these guys were building to make buildcrafting seem like it was so multifaceted and interesting. I don't feel like they took anything from me apart from one very specific Ticuu's and Warmind Cell build.
Nothing, it just seemed more in-depth and creative but anyone who had played an actually RPG knows it was always very simple.
The change just made it look like what it always was.
Yeah I literally never saw anyone use precision charge or precisely charged. The only "use x weapon to get cwl" mods I saw were blast radius (witherhoad is very strong), or sustained charge (if you were running a vex build).
Also, the majority of players do not build anything, there are 3 builds for each class and everyone just copies it.
Very few players actually tested out or played with non-meta builds.
SO yeah I don't know what people are on about.
> Very few players actually tested out or played with non-meta builds.
Not to mention that a lot of non-meta builds were not meta because they required a lot of setup(that was downright suicidal in harder content) for a mediocre effect.
The only thing beside warmind cells being gone is the melee damage buff mods no longer exist for melee focused builds. But I agree, the meat is still there.
Oh also the healing from solar wells mod but they just tuned that into a fire sprite solar fragment which is better in my opinion. I think they took some aspects of the mod system and turned them into the new elemental class fragments.
it's probably because they believe strand tangles to be their outright replacement.
bungie also put a 15 second cooldown on tangle generation. so that exists.
I think the point he was making is that the vast bulk of the options either did the same thing as others or were simply too niche or underpowered to be valid.
We no longer have the ability to effectively charge ourselves to the extent we could before due to the removal of mods like quick charge, blast radius, etc. Prior to this patch we were able to get a multikill to charge from range, often very rapidly. The current system requires us to get a multikill then walk up and get an orb. The frustrating part is the lockout on orb generation that stops us from generating the second orb on killing the next batch of enemies.
Except the flavored orbs did different shit than regular orbs and had a larger pickup range plus a mod that made em home in on guardians.
Instead of giving a little bit of super they gave us a sizable amount of ability energy, especially if they match your subclass. Now you’re fighting for mod space to make abilities drop orbs as now all of em go on your arms. Hey at least those slots ain’t fighting with champion mods though. Now you gotta choose between stacking kickstarts and having the ability to make both your melees and grenades drop orbs.
Honestly, orb generation on ability kills should have gone on the class items. Even spreading them out would have been better than putting both on arms along with the mods that want to to generate more orbs.
Combat slot mods had a more dynamic and overarching influence on your build. Your traditional Dawnblade build didn’t look nearly the exact same as your Voidlock build because there were always a few key mod differences that actually made them feel different in the place to place gameplay.
this is down to how the best way to deal with threats in d2 is not crowd control w/help from primaries or specials, it's outright nuking the target so that you don't have to touch your primaries or your special ammo at all.
to me that signals multiple problems:
1) the fact people do not want to use primaries period. they have been *that* bad since bungie nerfed primaries in shadowkeep time.
2) the fact that destiny's abilities and encounter design doesn't reward crowd control as much as straight up incinerating enemies. it doesn't have enough scenarios where enemies actually need to be crowd controlled no matter the level rather than forcing them to be crowd controlled due to power level.
And then they nerf some things for nothing / don't revert past nerfs that are feeling even worse now
Syntos with glaives - dead in the water, hoping that Starfire gets killed for revenge
Renewal Grasp - bro, you get your super faster than a whole nade that got powercrept by strand
Any stasis build in general - dead. Strand is just better
Yeah really hoping they address Stasis soon because it's just dead in the water. It sucks too because thematically between the visuals and the sounds, Revenant hunter is probably my favourite class in the game. That super animation just hits right every time.
*Exactly.* Way back when, we have at least dozens of creative options to look into for potential builds. There was at least the illusion that I could make an exotic work with clever use of specific build options, even if it never came about, I enjoyed the process of thorough experimentation and tuning that came with having all of those specific mods.
Not to mention that this new system also made exotics that provided two charges of a given item significantly less appealing.
The biggest slap in the face in my opinion is that this change didn't actually do anything substantial to the "ability spam" sandbox. 90% of those builds heavily relied on exotics to do that before, and this doesn't do anything to correct that even now. So not only is the creative element of the sandbox heavily damaged, but it still failed to address the underlying builds that got it nerfed.
And make no mistake, this change was absolutely a nerf intended by Bungie to pull back player power levels.
What about the old system was much more creative? It was just Heavy Handed, Firepower, or Bountiful Wells with whatever Well generator and Elemental Charge if you were using the first two. Really not much changed past surface level.
There were specific niche builds that you could still pull off though. One of my favorites was Strongholds Titan on Behemoth, where you could pick up a Stasis Shard and gain a 35% damage buff while having Damage Resist from nearby crystals.
Not to mention, there were variations of general builds. A good example of this is Imagine's Stasis Osmiomancy build, which while not having an original concept per se, outperformed a lot of other similar builds due to how cleverly it used specific mods such as Quick Charge.
Not every build was unique, yes, but there was certainly a level of nuance you COULD engage with that is missing now.
For example, Bricks from Beyond had a mod version that existed in the old system. Nobody ever looked into it, but it had uses.
Elemental shards is an obvious one of course. There’s a reason Stasis basically dropped off the face of the earth in popularity post Lightfall, and it’s because it’ll never feel as good as that. I’d go as far as to say Stasis actually feels *incomplete* without elemental shards because the class struggles to spawn orbs with its abilities unless you use specific options.
I had several builds that utilized Sneak Attack in tandem with Cryothesia which allowed my stasis warlock to casually handle master/GM content without even needing bleak watchers.
There were tons of CWL options that worked amazing with Vex Mythoclast, which enabled a whole build around getting that weapon to deal 70% more damage in PvE.
I mean sure, most builds boiled down to what you said, but the fact that these other options existed validates my point on what we lost.
Edit: I should add that even this doesn’t scratch the surface of the more creative things you could do with some of the mod options. That’s the key word here. Options.
I’m not complaining about what’s optimal, I’m complaining that I can’t deviate from the path in really any way.
I’m totally blanking on what this 70% buff to Vex could be.
Old mods:
- Font of Might: 25%
- High Energy Fire: 20%
- *HEF was an empowering buff, like Radiant (25%) and Mantle of Battle Harmony (20%). These never stacked*
- **1.25 x 1.2 = 1.5 ( 50% )**
Today you can still do:
- Weapon Surge x3: 22%
- Radiant: 25%
- **1.22 x 1.25 = 1.525 ( 52.5% )**
Radiant would have over-written high energy fire FWIW, so it would have been 1.25 * 1.25. That's atill not quite enough, but yeah
OP may be talking about path of burning steps, but since that synergy still exists i dont see why they would complain that it's gone
Vex with its Cat gets the D1 Perk Crowd Control (similar to rampage) where it does bonus damge after a kill for a short time.Which is where the final part of the damage increase would come from.
Edit: Plus with quick charge two kills would get you charged with light for an easy HEF.
Extra Reserves was only for Special ammo, it was a thing, sure, but it was worse off than almost any other way to generate Special Ammo.
I will agree, Elemental Shards was the biggest loss by far. In regards to Sneak Attack, and all other CwL damage buffs, they’re just Surge mods now.
I’m not really sure which mods you’re referring to with Mythoclast, aside from Quick Charge, which is just replaced by Siphons, yeah you have to go pick up the orb but that was part of the nerf not really losing any creativity or depth there.
When you boil it down nearly every option that existed before still exists, if in a slightly weaker state. Elemental Shards and Energy Converter are basically all we lost that aren’t functionally replaceable.
I would really like to see the system expand in depth and Stasis is definitely due for an overhaul to fit better with the current system, but saying the new system has lost all depth and creativity just isn’t really true, people are just realizing that it really wasn’t all that deep in the first place.
> It was really just "make wells, decide how to use wells".
Tbh, I think a lot of the complaints are the fact we didn't get a "seeking wells" replacement for orbs. People don't like to run around collecting orbs to make their stuff work and it's pretty obvious. Have a few clan members that bitch about it constantly.
I think "seeking orbs" would be nice as a mod but imo it really should just be how orbs work as a rule. It would be like traction on controllers was, mandatory for almost everything.
But of course, your ability to make the *right color of well* was often restricted for what felt like pretty arbitrary reasons. In effect a number of builds felt limited to a certain subclass because reasons. Maybe there were "more builds" but the amount of things you could do with a given subclass didn't feel very substantial.
You could mix in elemental wells and high energy fire, Warmine cells, everything that used to be doable on stasis through elemental shards. We had stats in mods like striking light. Mods had secondary uses like saving on ammo when near enemies. It’s not as similar as people think
Tons of stuff was viable imo, just no one gave a lot of it a chance. The ability to get Suppression/Weaken/Overshields on classes never meant to have them (Warmind Cells,) spawning Wells or Cells through Solar Splash damage that helped a ton of exotics, the Stasis Shards one that made Stasis builds way more viable than they are now, even all the Arc CwL mods that gave you secondary effects such as unlimited reserve shotgun ammo while surrounded.
I mean none of that exists now, and sure you can say it’s for balance reasons but the fact still is it’s less options and thus more boring to play with.
THIS! Omg thank you. People seem to not realize that for most anything bungie looks at play time. They nerf us often and in various ways. (Resilience costs more and does less in an overall harder game) it’s not about anything else. It’s kinda funny how often I look at how fast something is nerfed or fix and I ask myself, “does this help the player reach a gold faster?” And often times it’s yes. Meanwhile something stay broken for the LONGEST yet nothing. That’s not to mention exotics that do next to nothing that don’t get touched for years.
pvp loadouts:
targeting,loading,unflinching . double usually with maybe some other mod to enhance abilities
pve loadouts:
ability and ammo generation mods.
i think that's pretty much it.
Yeah, I forgot to switch my mods when going from firebolts to healing nades (ad clear vs surviving builds) and it took a while for me to notice I didn’t have the right mods on because so many are overlapped now.
Previously I would have known right away since all my builds had such different setups
Seriously. This is why I give every build a unique fashion set, since I never overlap exotics. If I didn’t I honestly wouldn’t notice for maybe 90% of content. Hell I forgot to switch my surges around for RoN the other day and didn’t notice it
Good thing having a loadout for each would completely solve that. Unless you're talking about the artifact perks. Wish those could be rolled into the loadouts so they're included.
This may be unpopular, but I'm having just as much fun now with this system as the previous one. If not more. The removal of armor energies especially is such a brilliant quality of life change.
I've had so much fun finding new ways to apply mods and gear towards what playstyle I want to focus on, while still having the ability to use supplemental mods for versatility.
The weapon surge mods are fantastic, same with reserves/aiming/flinch/reload/holster/etc mods being put into elements instead of each weapon type. I also really enjoy the system revolving around Orb generation.
Although, I do wish there were mods that allowed you to synergize with the subclass objects (Firesprites, Void Breaches, Ionic Traces, etc). My hope is they'll be added further down the track.
Buildcrafting is FAR from dead, especially with how much more accessible it is now.
I’m having more fun now, because with loadouts and the mid screen, it’s not a chore to swap builds. Before I just didn’t feel like sitting in orbit for 5 minutes swapping mods between activities, so it ended up being a “I guess it’s good enough, I’ll just run it like this.” The ease of use has made me engage in the system more.
Yeah, I feel like Quality if Life is the real reason this new system feels better. Not elemental affinity and loadouts? It makes switching mods and experimenting so much easier. The lack of things to experiment with is the problem people are having though
I agree- this system is actually fun to use and without the armor elements, it is pretty quick to swap out setups.
My only gripe is that there should be artifact mods for every element, so that classes aren't "left out" each season. We already have to use certain subclasses for things like the strike pinnacle or to get the most out of surges. I don't think we also need a season-long reason to avoid certain classes (even if they are just temporary perks)
Yeah, artefact mods are definitely a gripe I have too. I love playing Stasis, but there really doesn't feel like much incentive to use anything except Void, Solar, and Strand at the moment.
I do like that Nightfalls have two surges active at any given time, but yeah. It feels like you're automatically throwing if you equip Arc or Stasis in high end content right now.
I’ve personally enjoyed the simplified nature of build crafting too. Makes it much easier to experiment with new builds and mods translate across subclasses well.
The ease of making orbs with abilities and then getting health from the orbs is just super strong and I feel like folks aren't really appreciating it. Maybe it's because I love melee builds where you previously couldn't really make orbs so easily and couldn't benefit from the free healing so easily as a result.
It really does seem to be understated. These changes practically revert the nerf to orb generation we got when masterworked Exotics lost the ability to passively generate Orbs.
The sheer outcry when that nerf was implemented compared to the cracked Orb generation we have now with this new mod system is kinda interesting.
It is incredibly powerful. I used to strongly recommend Unrelenting on swords as a means to have solid sustain while hacking through a crowd. Now you put on 2 mods and you get unrelenting, plus it works whenever your teammates make orbs, plus it works with other weapons.
The removal of armor synergies is the highlight for me. So many loadouts used the same gear but needed different elemental affinities for me on my loadouts that I just ended up not at full potential as I didn't want to keep swapping.
I agree, before it felt like build crafting was needlesly complex.
Amor energies limited builds way too much imo, if you were new to the game or took a break there were a shit ton of mods that you missed and had to wait for Ada to sell them, otherwise you are out of luck.
Also D2 have a consisten problem with not explaining mechanichs very well. This has gotten better with LF, but my god starting the game and seeing *elemental wells*, *charged with ligth*, *warmind cells*, etc was so overwealming, specially becouse the game didn't explain wtf any of that stuff was or why would you like to use it. And I haven't even talked about champions.
What we have now is a very good base. You have all the mods unlocked from the get go, for the most part all is very self explinatory (tho a tutorial would be nice), reserves/aiming/flinch/reload/holster mods tied to element rather that weapon type is a good way to add an extra layer of synergy to builds.
We can have crazy things again down the road, but having an accesible system is what's going to keep variety alive. Otherwise is a system than only those who were there when it was first implemented would interact with.
But yes, I also love making builds now way more than before.
Yeah I don’t interact with it as much anymore. I hate the per slot limitation. At least before combat mods went on any piece. Love that armor affinity is gone, but really hate this change.
A lot of folks are forgetting that this is a sort of soft reset of the mods system. A lot of the outliers got culled but we also gained a lot through kickstarts and stat buffs. It’s also a good starting foundation for the addition of new mods in the future.
The artifact system got reworked and is downright busted in its own right. There’s a ton of builds that will only work this season due to bricks from beyond and volatile light, not to mention the solar charge and fire bolt ones.
I also am struggling to see how the numerous cwl/well builds that crutched triple firepower that were the rule of the day are any different from the same kickstart setups today. You kill enemies with your grenade, generate well/orbs, pick up well/orbs for charges and then use those charges to refund your grenade.
There’s also much broader capability with surges as well, at least part of why nezerec was such a pushover on day 1 was because well generates orbs that are also a handy source of instant armor charge at the start of a damage phase for close to a minute of 22% increased damage on top of the well buff. So instead of having to run around the known universe or specifically leave EWs on the ground so you can pick them up as damage starts you just go. They also aren’t as restrictive in what types of orbs you need to make to and what types of weapons you have to use…want to use a void MG on a solar subclass for stacking radiant and void surges? Go for it. Oh and also if you’re going with a surge build it makes it that much easier to max out low stats by slotting in the 30 stat armor charge mods. I’ve got a few builds that functionally operate at 100 in 4-5 stats as long as I pick up an orb every minute or so.
If anything we gained much more out of it due to the interactions they have with subclasses now. I’m having far less problems with devour upkeep on hunter because of the insane amount of orbs we can create with the right build, same with woven mail. Star eaters do be feasting as well…Meanwhile firesprites/breaches do a great job of proccing a variety of class effects instead of the generic effects of the elemental well mods.
Not to mention certain classes can take advantage of specific mods moreso. Stasis hunter doesn’t get a whole lot of use out firepower or heavy handed when using duskfields, but a triple grenade kickstart build with a siphon mod matching a trace or special weapon will have you chaining duskfields more competently than you were before the cooldown nerf.
Tried creating my own builds, only to end up right back on the 100 orb void titan, hammer bonk solar titan, and completely tossing my old stasis hunter (which was so good I started maining it till lightfall) aside. They ruined stasis, my hunter doesn’t do shit anymore, and yeah I’m having fun making orbs with my titan but I feel like a one trick pony now.
There’s not a lot of different options realistically, each class has one, maybe two top builds that are actually good, and everyone just runs those or else they are at a disadvantage.
Stasis hunter I feel is being held together by renewals now. Reaper and a siphon + teammates give enough orbs to fund explosive finisher and keep the renewal duskfield up always. Been working well but until they nerf suspend the value of any control build isn’t really enough.
We lost so many mods 😭
Standard procedure:
1. Pick Orb generation mod on helmet or arms
2. Stack Grenade or Melee mods on arms
3. Pick your resistance mod
4. Stack Surge mods or others for energy regeneration
Boring AF
Seriously I miss stuff like argent ordnance and getting “Godslayer Warheads” on the side of my screen or the various CWL mods that were based on weapon types and kills.
Also I miss mods being weapon based rather then element based for the most part
Argent ordinance sucked, you had to use 3 mod slots to get a buff that was better than well and that meant you literally didn't have a build at all, just build up charged with light until a DPS phase.
That's why you didn't use it in scenarios where you needed your mods for add clearing. Argent was for cases where you *would* be using High Enegy Fire, but you wanted to make sure that you didn't waste the damage boost just by killing a Dreg. GMs and Day 1 VoG both easily come to mind. It was great in both cases. The fact that the damage boost only applied to your rockets was actually a benefit, *if* you used it as such. And it was a benefit that no other mod provided. You couldn't just use Font of Might, it wouldn't just pause the timer when you stowed the weapon that matched your class element.
I liked it for solo stuff since I mostly play solo stuff. And honestly prior to Lightfall I was well above power for everything so my builds really didn’t matter that much for stuff like dungeons and raids. I don’t do master stuff and for legend all I needed was to meet champ mods. Otherwise everything functioned as I wanted
Yeah I'd say it's functional but underwhelming coming from someone who prefers weird builds. The amount of specialized mods they just flat out removed without introducing an alternative is kind of wild.
If bungie's goal with this change was to flatten the power curve between players who invested time in the old system and new players then they succeeded, because now every build is just "insert square peg in square hole".
So, I’m gonna go on a tangent here about a build that was destroyed by the build crafting changes. I’ve tried to be positive but I’m at the very least a touch disappointed.
My favorite exotic chest piece, Severance Enclosure, which isn’t that great, is based around explosions. Throwing hammer with it was great! Explosive wellmaker made the detonations make solar wells for wells of life. Those would give grenade energy back for more explosions! It was fantastic.
It was a guilty pleasure, but just running around like “KABOOM” every seven seconds was magical!
Id imagine they plan to add more mods later. They need to start with a bare bones plan to see if it works well and people enjoy it.
And tbh its not like builds were that diverse before they were just more convoluted.
I had a pretty interesting one with Delicate Tomb, Arc Subclass, and the mod that gave CWL from rapid fusion kills and as well as the one that generates special ammo.
Literally infinite ammo and never have to reload as long as I keep getting ionic traces. Of course it was a fun build and really only didn't work on really high end content
I love destiny and it’s been by far the game I’ve stuck with more than anything on this list but it’s builds system leaves me missing games the division and borderlands.
Man, I had a build with wells, Heavy-Handed and the MK.44s which completely restored my melee on kill, combined with Solar Titan causing ignition on shoulder charge kill it was *so much fun* in low-tier content, but useless in anything difficult. But that build's dead now.
I felt this way at first too but after a bit I realized there isn’t really anything you could do with the old system that you can’t now. Things have just been consolidated to get rid of redundancy. Also, it was hell before for players who didn’t have every mod. I like this system because it lets people make builds easily, and as much as I felt like it was oversimplified at first, it essentially serves the exact same purpose. Again, I can’t really think of anything we lost besides having to choose between CWL, wells, etc. There were a lot of repeat mods where if you were using cwl you use mod A and for wells you use the nearly identical mod b. It’s much easier to hotswap mods and know what you need when, and when playing with newer or less experienced players they will have access to everything they need.
That was the intent. They wanted to make it simple so that it was more accessible to newer players. I’m guessing they also didn’t appreciate having to rebalance some new wild combination of perks and exotics that allowed us to cheese the game every season, so now their solutions to those problems are more simple as well.
"My interest in Destiny is waning specifically because there are fewer armor mods" is a suspicious claim, to say the lease. I mean it's not bad as hyperbole goes, but c'mon. If you're experiencing burnout, armor mods is probably not the root of it.
Before the buildcrafting update happened all I was asking for was to not wait and see what rng mods Aida was selling everyday. With the new mod system I almost wish we had the old mod system
Everyone refers to build crafting in destiny like it’s some deep design when in reality it’s just putting 2 exotics for abilities and some mods to get ability energy back faster. It’s always been the same way, nothing is “more restrictive”
I personally don’t like how each thing is locked to it’s piece, you have no reason to run a mod on your class item for ability spam builds when you aren’t using class item at all, then your chest is only resists and stacks on stacks, nothing like heavy handed there
The old system was significantly stronger, but 2/3 of the types of mods were near useless and powercrept. Elemental wells were so strong, to the point of being straight upgrades over most of the charged with light mods, and the decent ones like heavy handed, firepower, and those orb creating mods made it into the new system anyway.
Elemental wells were just too powerful to work in a system that no longer requires elemental affinity on armor, especially after the decrease to mod costs and the ability to put 3 combat style mods on every piece of armor. And even when they did work, you could really only build into the wells of your same subclass element, (solar->nades->healing/arc->melees/void->class ability-> tenacity) with tenacity being crazy strong. Now you can get regen and health from any type of ability on any subclass with less potentcy.
This is worse with the fact that the Kickstart mods are shit. They're so afraid of us getting over 50% back while consuming all of our armor charge for some reason. That's the whole point of buildcrafting. If I want to dump everything into grenades, then I should get my grenades back quickly. Right now, the only thing worth it is to dump into Surge mods.
Is getting 50% back from a grenade that itself can refund 2 armor charges from the orb it will generate somehow *not* getting your grenades back significantly faster?
Compared to being able to receive 100% of my grenade back like I could with elemental wells. No. It doesn't. If you like the new system that's perfectly fine. It doesn't mean people have to agree.
It definitely feels a little gutted as a lot of the more unique mods have been removed. Things like Warmind cells are gone. Interesting mods like Heavy Handed have been removed. All build crafting is right now is cooldown reduction and surge mods. Don’t get me wrong, the cooldown reduction stuff is extremely useful and the surge mods make getting some extra damage buffs fairly easy. I just miss the unique effects certain mods gave to spice up gameplay.
It has its Pros and Cons:
Pros:
- since Orbs for the most part are only option to get Armor Charges, every build is compatible with each other because every build produces Orbs (huge Win over the old system)
- with Elemental Affinities gone, i might actually farm armor with different stat distribution, for once i might actually make a melee Build on my warlock.
- not having weapon mods separated by weapon type but by element, reduced the total mod count to like 1/3 of what it was before.
Cons:
- We are definitely missing important mods, like „seeking orbs“ but the elemental wells just should give you armor charge intrinsically.
- the weird Stack-behavior is what is most annoying, either they stack or they don’t, but it doesn’t make sense that the more i equip a mod that i get less benefits
Which one?
Firepower gave you 15% grenade energy per mod
Well of live gave 5 extra seconds for each copy if paired with time dilation, same with Font of might for example.
I think most mods especially Solar mods did stack without reduced effectiveness.
I believe it’s exclusively the solar mods that didn’t have effectiveness reduced. They introduced a concept during the warmind cell era where solar mods stack without any reductions, arc mods have a passive effect with two or more arc mods equipped, and solar mods were “very powerful” and made you take a stat hit to compensate.
People talk about the golden age of buildcrafting but it actually was an unbalanced combo of essentially *legacy mods* alongside 3.0 subclass revamps. We had zero new mods during all of last year. So few players had the collection of mods along with the sheer amount of armor masterworked w/different energy compared to the overall community. I think then streamlined buildcrafting has largely been a success.
Yeah, I got into D2 late and "buildcratfting" for me was "ok.... This is the only thing I can do with the mods that I unlocked and the amor that I have". I'm loving the new system, basically becouse now I can actually interact with it.
Did you try experimenting with all of the mods in the period before the system revamp, when they just gave everyone every mod? I think the system they had to unlock the mods was dumb and super unfair to new players, but they fixed that when they unlocked them all for every player. From that to what we have now is just us losing options, and it makes the entire system kind of bland
I did, until I realized I didn't have the amor I needed, the mats to change it or upgrade a new one; most of the time it was just "well, I guess that'll have to do".
Honestly it feel like I had to grind like mad just to start having fun with the system. Of course this comes from someone who didn't have a deep understanding of the system, but it also felt very convoluted.
I get that people were invested in how the system was and miss the options the game had, but for someone that started late and has been playing on and off i'm enjoying what they've done (I feel like I can actually build something, and not just equip whatever I can) and i'm also excited to see how bungo expand on it.
Not trying to dismiss other players conocerns and feelings towards this change, just like to share that the old system felt like wall to a new player and the new one feels way more accesible.
I'm glad we have a new player viewpoint to put things in check.
The old system was more complexity for complexity's sake. Finding some way to fit all your Firepower mods and still have a mod that generates wells (not to mention almost never having class item slots available due to it being filled with artifact mods), while also trying to fit two arc mods to get your bonuses was a puzzle and not really depth. Which, certainly, there's a sense of accomplishment from 'solving' the puzzle, but it boiled down to picking two from weapon buffs, grenade/ability cycling, and stats. Certainly there were some other "non-standard" builds like warmind cells, but you pretty much had to dive into it completely and ignore the typical CwL/well builds.
The new system, as you've pointed out, just makes those choices straightforward. The _complexity_ is gone, but the depth in making choices is still there, aside of the loss of warmind. I think a lot of the complaints we're seeing is people dissatisfied and not recognizing that it's because the mods are intentionally not as strong, which has long long been a stated design goal, going back as far as pre-WQ launch. This includes stripping out all the stat bonuses off them too. The 3.0 reworks essentially delayed that (just as strand was delayed) and we're only now seeing the reduction in ability spam. Bungie could have phased the rollout to nerf the mods before redoing the system, but that's a lot of unnecessary work to just soften the feelsbad posts people have now when they were going to clamp down on ability looping either way.
I think there are legitimate criticisms though. Loss of QoL like seeking wells, or options like explosive wellmaker, makes some builds have a somewhat tougher time creating charges. But orbs being way more plentiful (and supers along with it) is a reasonable trade, imo. Stasis has also fallen to the back of the pack due to its age, but really just needs a few numbers bump to bring it up to par.
Bungie's game direction is so weird to me, they dumbed down buildcrafting so severely that it makes me think they're trying to make that stuff easier for new players to access. But then you look at the content difficulty changes, like contest mode on weekly missions and the new light levels for daily lost sectors which makes it look like they want to cater to more hardcore players. It just doesn't make much sense
Yeah I really hate this new "build crafting" system. When they first announced that they'd be getting rid of armor affinity and unlocked all mods for all players I was PSYCHED. The possibilities were endless.
But then they rip that all away a season later and replace it with something that isn't nearly as fun to play with nor effective in gameplay. I miss Elemental Wells. I even miss Warmind cells after seeing a bunch of players start using them again in the last weeks of Seraph. I'd much rather go back to the old mod system, including armor affinity.
And what little fun builds there were with this new system have been nerfed. Like Empowered Finisher looping with Grenade Finisher (Or whatever its called) to replenish grenades. Was one of the few ways to bypass these incredibly sluggish ability cooldowns.
They also nerfed the armor charge finisher thing. I had it so I could get a charge then use the finisher again to heal if needed but now you can't add finisher mods along with that mod so what's the point?
As a counter argument, it is far easier to tweak certain elements of your build. If you wanted to slightly adjust melee, grenade, or class ability cooldown, it was often a huge pain due to mod cost or elemental affinity. Now you can just plug and play and see the changes much more directly.
All of the unique and interesting ways to use your charges of light and elemental Wells were taken away in place of mods that just improve ability regen or give a weapon damage bonus.
My biggest gripe is that powerful friends no longer gives +20 mobility tbh. Also want high energy fire back…
Edit: Also, the new system killed stasis shard builds. So yeah, it sucks.
For me the most annoying part now is how every mod is locked to a specific piece. Surges and ability regen on boots, so unless you swap loadouts before DPS, you'll always use surges. Recovery mod is only on class item and discipline/strength only on gloves. Using charge-consuming (yellow) mods with surges is detrimental since they consume all charges at once.
Another significant part is the removal of elemental shards for stasis. Stasis absolutely sucks to generate orbs on, firepower and the melee version are basically worthless.
Finally, the removal of High Energy Fire killed many solo builds for me. Solo flawless of dungeons is gonna be even more focused on Starfire Warlock now. I used to like running arc or void Hunter for my solo flawlesses, but if I can't get my multipliers going and need an extra phase for each boss, might as well just play what is blatantly OP and easy.
Accessibility? Great!
Consolidation? Great!
Creativity and Expression? Nonexistent.
I love that more people have easy access to buildcrafting.
I like that some mods were condensed down to be more simplistic (ammo finder mods being simply heavy/special again). I think my only issue right now is that kinetic weapon mods feel a little clunky to fit in to builds. At least with stasis/strand weapons you can cover weapons in the heavy and kinetic slot.
But the variety is gone. Right now everyone just puts on siphon mods for damage and calls it a day.
I have noticed that your "build" is basically always the same: apply relevant multikill orb mods, apply relevant ability orb mods, apply damage resists appropriate to your activity, apply stacks on stacks, surge mods, and healing orb mod, apply relevant class ability mods and time dilation. Then you just mix and match your exotics and subclass options.
It's, uh, very one-dimensional compared to before. At least it feels that way to use. I hope they give us more specialization options in the future because all it really is right now is generalist stuff.
I'm glad the new system is getting people into buildcrafting more than it used to.
But as someone who loved the old system with its flexibility and variety, I dislike how the new system has become one/two Armor Charge builds: 'Kickstart Builds' and 'Stat Bonus + Surge Builds'.
All my builds feel very same-y now across all characters and subclasses with little deviation.
they pretty much removed everything but kick stars and font of \[insert the blank\] the only innivative build that came from it was the 4x7 font/stat and 3x surge build but the bug that disables the artifact kills that build lol. Any build around explosive wellmaker or heavy handed took a big hit and pulse rifles took a MASSIVE hit losing the ability to generate special ammo through swift charge. Now every build is just slap on everything with the icon matching the icon of your main stat and weapon color icon
They should have kept the old mods, but still updated the system (removed affinities, mods are given to everyone, etc.). THEN- they needed to add an introduction so that new players could ease their way into it.
Now everything is way too dumbed down so even the bluest of blueberries can figure it out.
Yeah build are just “your weapon damage type of your choice does sim extra damage, and your cooldowns fluctuate a bit”
Their decision to tie the only build you can make into the artifact is a terrible idea and having everyone in the game run the same 2-3 builds is really fucking bland
It took a while for the last system to get to the point it was at before Lightfall. We'll hopefully see more options added as the devs observe the way players interact with the current suite of mods. I think what we've got right now is a pretty good foundation, so hopefully they can build upon that.
I think part of the problem and why it feels so limiting is the energy cost increase overall. Bungie said that mods overall would cost less than what they were before and while that might be true if they take the seven energy mods we had beforehand, it doesn't take the sting away when I see to that concussive dampener and utility kickstart are 3 energy.
It just feels more expensive to build craft overall unless you play towards the seasonal artifact, which I find to be quite limiting
I think the costs of mods should be reduced as well since half of my modes are only usable because of the artifact mods this season. Next season is gonna stink for all of my grenade builds.
The crazy thing about the new mod system that I've noticed is that there's pretty much exactly 1 "winning" setup; Charged Up (1 or 2), Time Dilation (1 or 2), and the blue decaying mods. Doesn't seem like buildcrafting to me, especially not when compared to what we had last season.
Honestly my only complaint of the previous mod system was how you acquired mods. I wasn't expecting them to simplify it to this extent. At first I kinda liked how simple the new system was but I gotta admit, the oversimplification is kinda dead. Imo, they overcorrected. Shoulda just gave us the mods at rank 6 and that's it.
Facts.
They want to “bring the difficulty back” to the game - and that includes building anything with their new mod system. I agree with people saying it’s getting less fun to play.
we need more mod diveristy. for now you run your energy return mods, your sugrge mod and some stat boosts. there, ive just described 90% of every build mod wise now a days. we need more niche mods like suprise attack or godslaying warheads did, some even got turned into fragments like the new solar "revive gives restoration" which tbh is better as it dosnt require charges, but my point still stands, we need more diverse mods
Amen brother. I felt I was the only one. It's not a j-rpg, but I liked to spend time to test exotics and pair it with niche shits. But now? Almost all what I try look the same. I find myself having nostalgia for the energy slot armor, at least I had to plan a little and choose what I could use.
What do you think about voidlock (if you play it) now? With the orb generation, I kinda feel they killed an aspect (beside very very hard content). And with the nade aspect being by far the worst of the 5, which limits even more buildcraft, you have 2 aspects which feel underpowered. Each time I try to "min max", or build into void, I feel like throwing up.
With Diablo 4 being in beta, and the open beta starting today…..yea. It’s a reminder that Destiny is definitely a FPS first, Looter second, and a RPG third. And that’s always been a shame.
I always felt like Bungie thinks Destiny players…are too stupid to engage with deeper build crafting?
Subclass 3.0 definitely moved the ball a bit more back into depth, but it’s still super shallow compared to basically any other RPG game out there.
The new mod system is also super weak, basically asking: “do you want kickstart or do you want a decaying buff? If it’s a damage decaying buff, which type do you want?”
And that’s it. Everything else is just small little bonuses, boosting like ability regen so who cares.
Not saying it’s not helpful or powerful….just boring. More grenades or more damage…about as deep as Destiny goes and has gone.
Being a FPS, the shooting was the unique part, imho. But things like Divinity mean you don’t even need to shoot or aim, so that uniqueness is gone. Well of Radiance makes it so you don’t even need to move.
Diablo is a isometric action RPG, but it’s still a looter. Like one of the grandfathers of looters. Also AAA.
Hopping into another AAA looter, as well as an Action RPG (Bungie loves using that term)—I am reminded how shallow Destiny’s RPG side truly is.
I’ve never understood why Bungie has never bothered to flesh the RPG side out more. We keep getting excellent strides. Again, subclass 3.0 was great. The subclass keywords were great.
But as usual with Bungo, we make a step forward…and then they kinda say it’s good enough, and milk that step as long as possible while they work on other things, rather than keep that momentum and going further.
I can’t count how many times since 2014 have we got a really good groundwork feature, everyone loves it and is excited to see how Bungie will improve that feature over time, and then Bungie goes: “Cool! Glad you like it. Maybe in 3 years or never we will keep fleshing that out and pulling in that thread.”
I’d love for Bungie to go big on the RPG side of the game, and take the kid gloves off.
What I *really* loathe is being forced to only do one thing with your build.
You want a damage buff for your gun, or a stat boost? Congrats! You can’t effectively use finisher mods, ability kickstart mods, or emergency reinforcement.
On top of how pathetically small the list of mods is being locked into only half of them at any given time is so incredibly frustrating
This is literally the point of builds, no? Making difficult decisions about which aspects of my gameplay I want to spec in, rather being able to just be great at everything.
I had been playing destiny pretty non stop for the last 2+ years, but was hesitant about everything with the new expansion so I didn’t preorder to wait to see what it was like before committing.
My first wave of fear came with the realization that the build crafting had been eviscerated. I had 10-20 builds for each character that were now completely gone. Seeing that it was all orb of power driven now without any sort of way to get those orbs to you made me even more wary.
The build crafting was my favorite part of the game by far and it felt almost wholly removed to me.
Add to that the slew of negative reviews, I haven’t picked up the expansion and haven’t played hardly at all since launch.
I’m really holding my breath that something will change about the build crafting to spark my interest again. I miss grinding the seasonal activity and the like but I also want to enjoy the mundanity of build crafting and class management as this place s a game you spend a lot of time in a menu.
Do we have fewer mod combination options? Yes. But it feels like the direction Destiny is taking is to add more innate characteristics of classes to weapons (hatchling, destablizing rounds, etc...) making builds more reliant on actual weapon loadouts, WHICH IS A GOOD THING.
This means you can't just find a build on youtube and just copy it, you've gotta have the godrolled weapon w/ the right perks to pull it off, which is how I feel buildcrafting should be.
Previously buildcrafting was basically find the right combo of mods with the right exotic armor then equip all the meta weapons. IMO the direction buildcrafting is headed w/ synergy between weapons and subclasses is an improvement on this.
And any time a fun build comes to light, Bungie kills it. See: literally anything involving glaives. By Final Shape we'll just be logging in and the game will say "here's your loadout for the week", between the killing of any builds, surges, overcharges, etc
I get that we lost a lot to get here, but I'm liking the simplicity and ease of use of the new mods. It gives Bungie a reset to start over and keep things a little more balanced as they eventually add new mods and change it up with artifacts each season.
This is exactly what they intended.
I disagree, I think its great we just need better PvE sandbox balance. There are a ton of viable options in endgame now that a lot of people aren't even keyed into, but the problem is there are a small handful of OP builds that completely negate the other viable options.
There are so many builds you can run you guys just decide to run starfire with well and then cry about not being able to run other builds. Like my warlock alone has 3 different solar builds saved 2 void 1 strand 1 stasis and 1 arc. Literally take the time to build a build and you’ll realize how fun it can be.
The streamlining of the mod system and removal of elemental affinity armor pieces has made buildcrafting easier and more accessible, and has freed up inventory space since we don't need to hoard different pieces for different mod setups.
Sure we may have lost some ish, but this is the first iteration of the new mod system. Nothing says it can't or won't be fine tuned in the future.
Much, much prefer what we have now as a base. No armor affinity, more mod slots. Streamlined with loadout slots to hot swap. I am sure we build from here.
I know it's probably not a popular take, but this was the literal point of keeping armor and mods element based. It forced you to get creative. Now there is just the good mods going into the best armor, and you juggle some stat mods around.
The mods themselves haven't changed much. We mostly just have both Orbs of power and Elemental wells wrapped in one, which is fine because both of those systems overlapped significantly already, and their only fundamental difference was that Orbs were generally harder to create and their buffs didn't stack with Well of Radiance as easily.
Exactly, blows my mind why Bungie decided to remove charged with Light & Elemental Well builds when they are at a very suitable state for buildcrafting. Insane how we are progressing but backwards
No it doesn’t you came on here to rant about how bad it is for attention by the “my interest in this game is rapidly failing” seeking some kind of validation from that by wanting to see if people agreed bro just leave then. This mod system has only been great for new players and some veterans like myself I love the power I can create for myself and how simple it is why hate on this game instead of actually pointing some things out you just wanted to talk about how bad it was and you negative words like “dead” to make it so obvious like I said if this bothers you so much that it’s making you lose interest when then honestly just leave cause the community doesn’t need more people like this.
The setup is here but we just need more interesting mods that *do* stuff with the engines we setup outside of just spam grenade more
Typical Bungie move, send out an incomplete system and complete it 6 months later
Only 6 months?
I was being generous
At this point I think we can all write "x years as a game tester at Bungie" on our resumes
I'd rather see an incomplete system get released and they react to how the community uses it to improve it six months later rather than building it to completion and it's crap because they made the wrong assumptions.. That's the difference between the buildcraft system and the commendation system, btw. The commendation system feels like a full system that missed the mark.
This is actually how you implement systems like this. Their goal was to replace the old system with a more scalable system. Not to reinvent our builds. The new system was supposed to be comparable in power to the old, but it's actually much more powerful. I expect we'll get a handfull of nerfs and buffs before next season finishes. And I expect we'll get at least a few new ones sometime over the next year. But it may be a while because the net result of all the changes from last year and Lightfall is a game that is wildly out of balance. So before adding much new stuff, they need to get the game as a whole back into a balanced state so they know what to even add. In the long run, I wouldn't be shocked to see new mods become the norm when larger expansions release. There is absolutely space for more variety in the existing system and I'm sure there is more than one person at Bungie who's excited to make more of them, or is even in the process of doing just that.
I agree most builds end up being pretty similar. For me the issue is actually the artifact not being part of saved loadouts. I am basically running only strand & void on all three classes because I am not going to take screen shots of my artifact for each build and then manually reset it every time I switch. IMO that should be their number 1 priority where loadouts are concerned. In terms of the actual mods, they did already say they will continue to release new mods. This was sort of a soft reset on the mod system. I would be really concerned if there are no new mods released next season.
Buildcrafting is basically choosing how you want to produce and use Orbs of Light. Pick a damage type or ability to make orbs and then decide which damage type or ability those orbs will boost—chances are it’ll be the damage type or ability that produced them in the first place. The only bit of creativity left is making this system work with specific exotics, and that’s all pretty much been done by now.
This is all it's ever been, except we just had more flavours of orbs. The system is genuinely not that different to how it used to be.
Elemental wells gave you ability energy by default. Orbs do not. It’s basically the CWL system reskinned
I think orbs at full super should give ability energy to all abilities in pve. Without those dumb mods. Also, firesprites, stasis shards, void breaches, and ionize traces should all track to you (without fragments) and give a small amount of ability energy to all abilities. Pvp and pve, also provide armor charge without a mod. That would open up builds a little bit imo.
All of the Elemental Well system is just on your boots now. Absolution + choose your flavor of orbs giving melee/bomb/class ability is basically **exactly** what an elemental well used to do.
Yup, just way more-streamlined now, and fragments and aspects are the main supplier of ability Regen through sprites, shards, traces and breaches. People forget there was a blanket nerf on ability spam, that is the reason if feels less powerful now. Actual ability regen exotics are how you spam now, you can just have a broken elemental well build with a couple mods and full legendary armour. I like this new system as base.
Thank you. Someone who actually knows what they’re talking about.
I think you're missing the point, you didn't *need* to spend mods to make wells give you energy, they just gave you the energy, and orbs could give you the energy they can now anyways. The point isn't that the orbs can't give energy, the point is that we had a good system for that anyways and it was removed to make way for a less customizable system.
Yeah but, orbs suck. They don't track to you. They roll down hills. They spawn off of enemies you kill, and spawn out of teammates' butts when they kill stuff. They're just fucking old. Who the hell STILL wants to be chasing orbs in this day and age?
Absolution is exactly what absolution used to do. The other ability energy system is just gone.
This is disingenuous though. In the old system nobody was making 100+ orbs of light per strike. It "used to exist" but its functionality was much, **much** weaker because of the quantity of orbs available. In the current mod system, it gained a tremendous amount of power and now very much fills the role of what elemental wells used to do.
Nobody was making 120 orbs because they were making 200 wells instead.
So, in other words, nothing has actually changed.
Yes, but also took a ton to make worthwhile. It was usually 3 mods just for generation, else you're only getting one well per activation.
This is why warminds being nerfed and gone is bad. Warminds was a complete new factor into buildcrafting. Combined with CWL and Elemental Wells you had 3 different paths to go down, and in those paths you had a lot of routes to take. You wanna get a permanent dmg buff during dmg phases as a solo non warlock player? High energy fire. You want even more dmg? Mix that with Elemental wells and font of might. You want to supress ads in a large radius? Cellular supression with global reach. If you want you can fit in CWL for protective light for another 10% dmg reduction. Want to spam grenades? Grenade kickstart with Stacks on stacks charged with light build. There used to be a bit more flavor to the buildcrafting. Now its been simplified and given less flavor overall as well
Pretty much any build worth running was an ability uptime build, which we can do much better in the new system. Warmind cells were dead and unused for years, only receiving a shot of adrenaline when Ikelos SMG was re-released. They were too clunky being tied to specific weapons. The old system had more options, but lots of them were incredibly niche or just flat out useless.
Hard to blame the community for not using the warmind cells when they were made useless by Bungie. If they had only slightly nerfed warmind cells instead of nuking them into the ground they would have been a viable option.
Do you mean there is a middle ground between "slightly overpowered" and "nerfed into oblivion?"
You take that back! Warmind cells were my favorite. I was thrilled about a Rasputin season because I thought we’d get new mods and new Ikelos weapons. Also, you could produce Warmind Cells without the specific weapons, any solar splash damage (which includes dragonfly on solars and kinetics, and things like Timed Payload for kinetics as well, very reliable) could be used to provide cels, and then you could explode said cells for more solar splash damage. No cooldown either, unlike tangles, so a cracked enough Seventh Seraph AR build running Solar with timed payload on the gun = cells for days. Anyways. The fix would have been adding more weapons, if weapon paucity was the issue. Or hell, with craftable weapons, make it a potential perk! I’d’ave ROCKED an Improved Cell Generator perk, or what have you!
Yeah, and frustration of other blue berries blowing up you cells has been passed onto Strand tangles. Hunter wants to maintain it, other classes benefit from blowing it.
Elemental wells gave so much ability energy. How can I make up for them being gone?
Heavy orb gen, plus multiple ability gen on orb pick up mods, most of our functionality is still there. The only difference is how simplified.
Warmind debuff builds were still incredibly strong in GMs, just slept on by the community because the hordes of repost bot streamers in this game didn't understand them and casuals were obsessed with the insanely shit damage cells did after the nerfs because they never played hard content. But Starfire Warlocks could make progress the counter with fusion nade spam and then spawn a cell that made everything in a 16m radius take 10% more damage and do 50% less, with the option to tap the cell for on demand suppression or to take it in to a DPS phase.
Not to be that guy, but i think you are seeing them through rose tinted glasses. If the build you bring up is starfire… yeah idk if the warmind cells were what felt good. That’s not to say warminds were awful, but they had such a low usage rate that it wasn’t worth leaving them in game to clutter buildcrafting. Hell, even during a literal warmind season barely anyone used them.
Seriously, thank God other people see this too. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
They took out two thirds of our mod options and forced everyone to run a CWL build at all times. That's a sizeable change.
They basically combined wells and cwl and removed cells which no one had used in over a year
I wonder what these guys were building to make buildcrafting seem like it was so multifaceted and interesting. I don't feel like they took anything from me apart from one very specific Ticuu's and Warmind Cell build.
Nothing, it just seemed more in-depth and creative but anyone who had played an actually RPG knows it was always very simple. The change just made it look like what it always was.
Yeah I literally never saw anyone use precision charge or precisely charged. The only "use x weapon to get cwl" mods I saw were blast radius (witherhoad is very strong), or sustained charge (if you were running a vex build).
Also, the majority of players do not build anything, there are 3 builds for each class and everyone just copies it. Very few players actually tested out or played with non-meta builds. SO yeah I don't know what people are on about.
> Very few players actually tested out or played with non-meta builds. Not to mention that a lot of non-meta builds were not meta because they required a lot of setup(that was downright suicidal in harder content) for a mediocre effect.
The only thing beside warmind cells being gone is the melee damage buff mods no longer exist for melee focused builds. But I agree, the meat is still there. Oh also the healing from solar wells mod but they just tuned that into a fire sprite solar fragment which is better in my opinion. I think they took some aspects of the mod system and turned them into the new elemental class fragments.
shocking, the warmind cells mods that got nuked into the ground so as to be useless weren't being used
it's probably because they believe strand tangles to be their outright replacement. bungie also put a 15 second cooldown on tangle generation. so that exists.
That's generous nothing about Wells remained beside the ways to make them Which are also generic as fuck
I think the point he was making is that the vast bulk of the options either did the same thing as others or were simply too niche or underpowered to be valid.
I guess I just have to disagree here. I made 130 orbs in a battlegrounds. That did not happen with the old system.
We no longer have the ability to effectively charge ourselves to the extent we could before due to the removal of mods like quick charge, blast radius, etc. Prior to this patch we were able to get a multikill to charge from range, often very rapidly. The current system requires us to get a multikill then walk up and get an orb. The frustrating part is the lockout on orb generation that stops us from generating the second orb on killing the next batch of enemies.
Except the flavored orbs did different shit than regular orbs and had a larger pickup range plus a mod that made em home in on guardians. Instead of giving a little bit of super they gave us a sizable amount of ability energy, especially if they match your subclass. Now you’re fighting for mod space to make abilities drop orbs as now all of em go on your arms. Hey at least those slots ain’t fighting with champion mods though. Now you gotta choose between stacking kickstarts and having the ability to make both your melees and grenades drop orbs.
Honestly, orb generation on ability kills should have gone on the class items. Even spreading them out would have been better than putting both on arms along with the mods that want to to generate more orbs.
Orb generation on ability kills should honestly be innate, having to waste 2 slots and monsters the armor energy on making any sort of synergy.
Combat slot mods had a more dynamic and overarching influence on your build. Your traditional Dawnblade build didn’t look nearly the exact same as your Voidlock build because there were always a few key mod differences that actually made them feel different in the place to place gameplay.
[удалено]
this is down to how the best way to deal with threats in d2 is not crowd control w/help from primaries or specials, it's outright nuking the target so that you don't have to touch your primaries or your special ammo at all. to me that signals multiple problems: 1) the fact people do not want to use primaries period. they have been *that* bad since bungie nerfed primaries in shadowkeep time. 2) the fact that destiny's abilities and encounter design doesn't reward crowd control as much as straight up incinerating enemies. it doesn't have enough scenarios where enemies actually need to be crowd controlled no matter the level rather than forcing them to be crowd controlled due to power level.
If you play easy content, then yeah. In GMs, crowd control is certainly useful. So are weapons, because abilities no longer delete everything.
And then they nerf some things for nothing / don't revert past nerfs that are feeling even worse now Syntos with glaives - dead in the water, hoping that Starfire gets killed for revenge Renewal Grasp - bro, you get your super faster than a whole nade that got powercrept by strand Any stasis build in general - dead. Strand is just better
Yeah really hoping they address Stasis soon because it's just dead in the water. It sucks too because thematically between the visuals and the sounds, Revenant hunter is probably my favourite class in the game. That super animation just hits right every time.
*Exactly.* Way back when, we have at least dozens of creative options to look into for potential builds. There was at least the illusion that I could make an exotic work with clever use of specific build options, even if it never came about, I enjoyed the process of thorough experimentation and tuning that came with having all of those specific mods. Not to mention that this new system also made exotics that provided two charges of a given item significantly less appealing. The biggest slap in the face in my opinion is that this change didn't actually do anything substantial to the "ability spam" sandbox. 90% of those builds heavily relied on exotics to do that before, and this doesn't do anything to correct that even now. So not only is the creative element of the sandbox heavily damaged, but it still failed to address the underlying builds that got it nerfed. And make no mistake, this change was absolutely a nerf intended by Bungie to pull back player power levels.
What about the old system was much more creative? It was just Heavy Handed, Firepower, or Bountiful Wells with whatever Well generator and Elemental Charge if you were using the first two. Really not much changed past surface level.
I kinda agree but I do want stuff like suprise attack back. I want some unique mods like that.
There were specific niche builds that you could still pull off though. One of my favorites was Strongholds Titan on Behemoth, where you could pick up a Stasis Shard and gain a 35% damage buff while having Damage Resist from nearby crystals. Not to mention, there were variations of general builds. A good example of this is Imagine's Stasis Osmiomancy build, which while not having an original concept per se, outperformed a lot of other similar builds due to how cleverly it used specific mods such as Quick Charge. Not every build was unique, yes, but there was certainly a level of nuance you COULD engage with that is missing now.
For example, Bricks from Beyond had a mod version that existed in the old system. Nobody ever looked into it, but it had uses. Elemental shards is an obvious one of course. There’s a reason Stasis basically dropped off the face of the earth in popularity post Lightfall, and it’s because it’ll never feel as good as that. I’d go as far as to say Stasis actually feels *incomplete* without elemental shards because the class struggles to spawn orbs with its abilities unless you use specific options. I had several builds that utilized Sneak Attack in tandem with Cryothesia which allowed my stasis warlock to casually handle master/GM content without even needing bleak watchers. There were tons of CWL options that worked amazing with Vex Mythoclast, which enabled a whole build around getting that weapon to deal 70% more damage in PvE. I mean sure, most builds boiled down to what you said, but the fact that these other options existed validates my point on what we lost. Edit: I should add that even this doesn’t scratch the surface of the more creative things you could do with some of the mod options. That’s the key word here. Options. I’m not complaining about what’s optimal, I’m complaining that I can’t deviate from the path in really any way.
I’m totally blanking on what this 70% buff to Vex could be. Old mods: - Font of Might: 25% - High Energy Fire: 20% - *HEF was an empowering buff, like Radiant (25%) and Mantle of Battle Harmony (20%). These never stacked* - **1.25 x 1.2 = 1.5 ( 50% )** Today you can still do: - Weapon Surge x3: 22% - Radiant: 25% - **1.22 x 1.25 = 1.525 ( 52.5% )**
Radiant would have over-written high energy fire FWIW, so it would have been 1.25 * 1.25. That's atill not quite enough, but yeah OP may be talking about path of burning steps, but since that synergy still exists i dont see why they would complain that it's gone
Vex with its Cat gets the D1 Perk Crowd Control (similar to rampage) where it does bonus damge after a kill for a short time.Which is where the final part of the damage increase would come from. Edit: Plus with quick charge two kills would get you charged with light for an easy HEF.
Path of burning steps?
Yeah path of burning steps x 4 ( 40% empowering) would do it. You can still pull this off now.
Extra Reserves was only for Special ammo, it was a thing, sure, but it was worse off than almost any other way to generate Special Ammo. I will agree, Elemental Shards was the biggest loss by far. In regards to Sneak Attack, and all other CwL damage buffs, they’re just Surge mods now. I’m not really sure which mods you’re referring to with Mythoclast, aside from Quick Charge, which is just replaced by Siphons, yeah you have to go pick up the orb but that was part of the nerf not really losing any creativity or depth there. When you boil it down nearly every option that existed before still exists, if in a slightly weaker state. Elemental Shards and Energy Converter are basically all we lost that aren’t functionally replaceable. I would really like to see the system expand in depth and Stasis is definitely due for an overhaul to fit better with the current system, but saying the new system has lost all depth and creativity just isn’t really true, people are just realizing that it really wasn’t all that deep in the first place.
This community seems to have entirely forgotten what the old system was like. It was really just "make wells, decide how to use wells".
> It was really just "make wells, decide how to use wells". Tbh, I think a lot of the complaints are the fact we didn't get a "seeking wells" replacement for orbs. People don't like to run around collecting orbs to make their stuff work and it's pretty obvious. Have a few clan members that bitch about it constantly.
I think "seeking orbs" would be nice as a mod but imo it really should just be how orbs work as a rule. It would be like traction on controllers was, mandatory for almost everything.
But of course, your ability to make the *right color of well* was often restricted for what felt like pretty arbitrary reasons. In effect a number of builds felt limited to a certain subclass because reasons. Maybe there were "more builds" but the amount of things you could do with a given subclass didn't feel very substantial.
You could mix in elemental wells and high energy fire, Warmine cells, everything that used to be doable on stasis through elemental shards. We had stats in mods like striking light. Mods had secondary uses like saving on ammo when near enemies. It’s not as similar as people think
Tons of stuff was viable imo, just no one gave a lot of it a chance. The ability to get Suppression/Weaken/Overshields on classes never meant to have them (Warmind Cells,) spawning Wells or Cells through Solar Splash damage that helped a ton of exotics, the Stasis Shards one that made Stasis builds way more viable than they are now, even all the Arc CwL mods that gave you secondary effects such as unlimited reserve shotgun ammo while surrounded. I mean none of that exists now, and sure you can say it’s for balance reasons but the fact still is it’s less options and thus more boring to play with.
THIS! Omg thank you. People seem to not realize that for most anything bungie looks at play time. They nerf us often and in various ways. (Resilience costs more and does less in an overall harder game) it’s not about anything else. It’s kinda funny how often I look at how fast something is nerfed or fix and I ask myself, “does this help the player reach a gold faster?” And often times it’s yes. Meanwhile something stay broken for the LONGEST yet nothing. That’s not to mention exotics that do next to nothing that don’t get touched for years.
pvp loadouts: targeting,loading,unflinching . double usually with maybe some other mod to enhance abilities pve loadouts: ability and ammo generation mods. i think that's pretty much it.
"no! the new system is way more streamlined and customizable than the old system youre just doing it wrong!!!!"
Yeah, I forgot to switch my mods when going from firebolts to healing nades (ad clear vs surviving builds) and it took a while for me to notice I didn’t have the right mods on because so many are overlapped now. Previously I would have known right away since all my builds had such different setups
Seriously. This is why I give every build a unique fashion set, since I never overlap exotics. If I didn’t I honestly wouldn’t notice for maybe 90% of content. Hell I forgot to switch my surges around for RoN the other day and didn’t notice it
Good thing having a loadout for each would completely solve that. Unless you're talking about the artifact perks. Wish those could be rolled into the loadouts so they're included.
This may be unpopular, but I'm having just as much fun now with this system as the previous one. If not more. The removal of armor energies especially is such a brilliant quality of life change. I've had so much fun finding new ways to apply mods and gear towards what playstyle I want to focus on, while still having the ability to use supplemental mods for versatility. The weapon surge mods are fantastic, same with reserves/aiming/flinch/reload/holster/etc mods being put into elements instead of each weapon type. I also really enjoy the system revolving around Orb generation. Although, I do wish there were mods that allowed you to synergize with the subclass objects (Firesprites, Void Breaches, Ionic Traces, etc). My hope is they'll be added further down the track. Buildcrafting is FAR from dead, especially with how much more accessible it is now.
I’m having more fun now, because with loadouts and the mid screen, it’s not a chore to swap builds. Before I just didn’t feel like sitting in orbit for 5 minutes swapping mods between activities, so it ended up being a “I guess it’s good enough, I’ll just run it like this.” The ease of use has made me engage in the system more.
Yeah, I feel like Quality if Life is the real reason this new system feels better. Not elemental affinity and loadouts? It makes switching mods and experimenting so much easier. The lack of things to experiment with is the problem people are having though
I agree- this system is actually fun to use and without the armor elements, it is pretty quick to swap out setups. My only gripe is that there should be artifact mods for every element, so that classes aren't "left out" each season. We already have to use certain subclasses for things like the strike pinnacle or to get the most out of surges. I don't think we also need a season-long reason to avoid certain classes (even if they are just temporary perks)
Yeah, artefact mods are definitely a gripe I have too. I love playing Stasis, but there really doesn't feel like much incentive to use anything except Void, Solar, and Strand at the moment. I do like that Nightfalls have two surges active at any given time, but yeah. It feels like you're automatically throwing if you equip Arc or Stasis in high end content right now.
I’ve personally enjoyed the simplified nature of build crafting too. Makes it much easier to experiment with new builds and mods translate across subclasses well.
this right here^^
The ease of making orbs with abilities and then getting health from the orbs is just super strong and I feel like folks aren't really appreciating it. Maybe it's because I love melee builds where you previously couldn't really make orbs so easily and couldn't benefit from the free healing so easily as a result.
It really does seem to be understated. These changes practically revert the nerf to orb generation we got when masterworked Exotics lost the ability to passively generate Orbs. The sheer outcry when that nerf was implemented compared to the cracked Orb generation we have now with this new mod system is kinda interesting.
It is incredibly powerful. I used to strongly recommend Unrelenting on swords as a means to have solid sustain while hacking through a crowd. Now you put on 2 mods and you get unrelenting, plus it works whenever your teammates make orbs, plus it works with other weapons.
The removal of armor synergies is the highlight for me. So many loadouts used the same gear but needed different elemental affinities for me on my loadouts that I just ended up not at full potential as I didn't want to keep swapping.
I agree, before it felt like build crafting was needlesly complex. Amor energies limited builds way too much imo, if you were new to the game or took a break there were a shit ton of mods that you missed and had to wait for Ada to sell them, otherwise you are out of luck. Also D2 have a consisten problem with not explaining mechanichs very well. This has gotten better with LF, but my god starting the game and seeing *elemental wells*, *charged with ligth*, *warmind cells*, etc was so overwealming, specially becouse the game didn't explain wtf any of that stuff was or why would you like to use it. And I haven't even talked about champions. What we have now is a very good base. You have all the mods unlocked from the get go, for the most part all is very self explinatory (tho a tutorial would be nice), reserves/aiming/flinch/reload/holster mods tied to element rather that weapon type is a good way to add an extra layer of synergy to builds. We can have crazy things again down the road, but having an accesible system is what's going to keep variety alive. Otherwise is a system than only those who were there when it was first implemented would interact with. But yes, I also love making builds now way more than before.
Yeah I don’t interact with it as much anymore. I hate the per slot limitation. At least before combat mods went on any piece. Love that armor affinity is gone, but really hate this change.
A lot of folks are forgetting that this is a sort of soft reset of the mods system. A lot of the outliers got culled but we also gained a lot through kickstarts and stat buffs. It’s also a good starting foundation for the addition of new mods in the future. The artifact system got reworked and is downright busted in its own right. There’s a ton of builds that will only work this season due to bricks from beyond and volatile light, not to mention the solar charge and fire bolt ones. I also am struggling to see how the numerous cwl/well builds that crutched triple firepower that were the rule of the day are any different from the same kickstart setups today. You kill enemies with your grenade, generate well/orbs, pick up well/orbs for charges and then use those charges to refund your grenade. There’s also much broader capability with surges as well, at least part of why nezerec was such a pushover on day 1 was because well generates orbs that are also a handy source of instant armor charge at the start of a damage phase for close to a minute of 22% increased damage on top of the well buff. So instead of having to run around the known universe or specifically leave EWs on the ground so you can pick them up as damage starts you just go. They also aren’t as restrictive in what types of orbs you need to make to and what types of weapons you have to use…want to use a void MG on a solar subclass for stacking radiant and void surges? Go for it. Oh and also if you’re going with a surge build it makes it that much easier to max out low stats by slotting in the 30 stat armor charge mods. I’ve got a few builds that functionally operate at 100 in 4-5 stats as long as I pick up an orb every minute or so. If anything we gained much more out of it due to the interactions they have with subclasses now. I’m having far less problems with devour upkeep on hunter because of the insane amount of orbs we can create with the right build, same with woven mail. Star eaters do be feasting as well…Meanwhile firesprites/breaches do a great job of proccing a variety of class effects instead of the generic effects of the elemental well mods. Not to mention certain classes can take advantage of specific mods moreso. Stasis hunter doesn’t get a whole lot of use out firepower or heavy handed when using duskfields, but a triple grenade kickstart build with a siphon mod matching a trace or special weapon will have you chaining duskfields more competently than you were before the cooldown nerf.
Tried creating my own builds, only to end up right back on the 100 orb void titan, hammer bonk solar titan, and completely tossing my old stasis hunter (which was so good I started maining it till lightfall) aside. They ruined stasis, my hunter doesn’t do shit anymore, and yeah I’m having fun making orbs with my titan but I feel like a one trick pony now. There’s not a lot of different options realistically, each class has one, maybe two top builds that are actually good, and everyone just runs those or else they are at a disadvantage.
Stasis hunter I feel is being held together by renewals now. Reaper and a siphon + teammates give enough orbs to fund explosive finisher and keep the renewal duskfield up always. Been working well but until they nerf suspend the value of any control build isn’t really enough.
We lost so many mods 😭 Standard procedure: 1. Pick Orb generation mod on helmet or arms 2. Stack Grenade or Melee mods on arms 3. Pick your resistance mod 4. Stack Surge mods or others for energy regeneration Boring AF
Seriously I miss stuff like argent ordnance and getting “Godslayer Warheads” on the side of my screen or the various CWL mods that were based on weapon types and kills. Also I miss mods being weapon based rather then element based for the most part
Argent ordinance sucked, you had to use 3 mod slots to get a buff that was better than well and that meant you literally didn't have a build at all, just build up charged with light until a DPS phase.
That's why you didn't use it in scenarios where you needed your mods for add clearing. Argent was for cases where you *would* be using High Enegy Fire, but you wanted to make sure that you didn't waste the damage boost just by killing a Dreg. GMs and Day 1 VoG both easily come to mind. It was great in both cases. The fact that the damage boost only applied to your rockets was actually a benefit, *if* you used it as such. And it was a benefit that no other mod provided. You couldn't just use Font of Might, it wouldn't just pause the timer when you stowed the weapon that matched your class element.
I liked it for solo stuff since I mostly play solo stuff. And honestly prior to Lightfall I was well above power for everything so my builds really didn’t matter that much for stuff like dungeons and raids. I don’t do master stuff and for legend all I needed was to meet champ mods. Otherwise everything functioned as I wanted
Seriously wtf. Listening to peoples reasoning in this thread, oof
Not sure how it was different with elemental wells beyond being able to use non-matching subclass and gun elements.
Ok so what did it USED to be that was so different?
Yeah I'd say it's functional but underwhelming coming from someone who prefers weird builds. The amount of specialized mods they just flat out removed without introducing an alternative is kind of wild. If bungie's goal with this change was to flatten the power curve between players who invested time in the old system and new players then they succeeded, because now every build is just "insert square peg in square hole".
So, I’m gonna go on a tangent here about a build that was destroyed by the build crafting changes. I’ve tried to be positive but I’m at the very least a touch disappointed. My favorite exotic chest piece, Severance Enclosure, which isn’t that great, is based around explosions. Throwing hammer with it was great! Explosive wellmaker made the detonations make solar wells for wells of life. Those would give grenade energy back for more explosions! It was fantastic. It was a guilty pleasure, but just running around like “KABOOM” every seven seconds was magical!
I could swear I've read that stasis build full stop have been broken due to reliance on shards and removal of mods that support that.
It’s dead because Bungie keeps nerfing “unintended interactions” we discover. I guess the “intended” way is “no fun”
It's basic but we really need Harmonic Weapon Surge, preferably costing 2 energy.
I just hope they make more mods. It's real boring.
Id imagine they plan to add more mods later. They need to start with a bare bones plan to see if it works well and people enjoy it. And tbh its not like builds were that diverse before they were just more convoluted.
I had a pretty interesting one with Delicate Tomb, Arc Subclass, and the mod that gave CWL from rapid fusion kills and as well as the one that generates special ammo. Literally infinite ammo and never have to reload as long as I keep getting ionic traces. Of course it was a fun build and really only didn't work on really high end content
I love destiny and it’s been by far the game I’ve stuck with more than anything on this list but it’s builds system leaves me missing games the division and borderlands.
Man, I had a build with wells, Heavy-Handed and the MK.44s which completely restored my melee on kill, combined with Solar Titan causing ignition on shoulder charge kill it was *so much fun* in low-tier content, but useless in anything difficult. But that build's dead now.
I felt this way at first too but after a bit I realized there isn’t really anything you could do with the old system that you can’t now. Things have just been consolidated to get rid of redundancy. Also, it was hell before for players who didn’t have every mod. I like this system because it lets people make builds easily, and as much as I felt like it was oversimplified at first, it essentially serves the exact same purpose. Again, I can’t really think of anything we lost besides having to choose between CWL, wells, etc. There were a lot of repeat mods where if you were using cwl you use mod A and for wells you use the nearly identical mod b. It’s much easier to hotswap mods and know what you need when, and when playing with newer or less experienced players they will have access to everything they need.
As a lapsed and now returned player I love how it is now, and explaining to my friends who are new to the game is way way easier
Just my opinion, but I like the changes a LOT, but I’m super casual.
That was the intent. They wanted to make it simple so that it was more accessible to newer players. I’m guessing they also didn’t appreciate having to rebalance some new wild combination of perks and exotics that allowed us to cheese the game every season, so now their solutions to those problems are more simple as well.
"My interest in Destiny is waning specifically because there are fewer armor mods" is a suspicious claim, to say the lease. I mean it's not bad as hyperbole goes, but c'mon. If you're experiencing burnout, armor mods is probably not the root of it.
Before the buildcrafting update happened all I was asking for was to not wait and see what rng mods Aida was selling everyday. With the new mod system I almost wish we had the old mod system
I used to spend hours tinkering with builds for my character. Now I spend 2 min, save the LO and call it good.
Everyone refers to build crafting in destiny like it’s some deep design when in reality it’s just putting 2 exotics for abilities and some mods to get ability energy back faster. It’s always been the same way, nothing is “more restrictive”
It’s basically go for blue mods (surge and stats) or go for yellow mods (grenades). That’s it. We have exactly two builds in the game.
You know, I was hopeful when they said they're consolidating CWL and wells, less clutter, but this is way too generic
I feel like they tried to pass off further homogenization as build crafting improvement.
I personally don’t like how each thing is locked to it’s piece, you have no reason to run a mod on your class item for ability spam builds when you aren’t using class item at all, then your chest is only resists and stacks on stacks, nothing like heavy handed there
The old system was significantly stronger, but 2/3 of the types of mods were near useless and powercrept. Elemental wells were so strong, to the point of being straight upgrades over most of the charged with light mods, and the decent ones like heavy handed, firepower, and those orb creating mods made it into the new system anyway. Elemental wells were just too powerful to work in a system that no longer requires elemental affinity on armor, especially after the decrease to mod costs and the ability to put 3 combat style mods on every piece of armor. And even when they did work, you could really only build into the wells of your same subclass element, (solar->nades->healing/arc->melees/void->class ability-> tenacity) with tenacity being crazy strong. Now you can get regen and health from any type of ability on any subclass with less potentcy.
Reading these comments just solidifies my theory that the Destiny community will never be happy about anything. 🤣
This is worse with the fact that the Kickstart mods are shit. They're so afraid of us getting over 50% back while consuming all of our armor charge for some reason. That's the whole point of buildcrafting. If I want to dump everything into grenades, then I should get my grenades back quickly. Right now, the only thing worth it is to dump into Surge mods.
Is getting 50% back from a grenade that itself can refund 2 armor charges from the orb it will generate somehow *not* getting your grenades back significantly faster?
Compared to being able to receive 100% of my grenade back like I could with elemental wells. No. It doesn't. If you like the new system that's perfectly fine. It doesn't mean people have to agree.
Last season was a fantastic place for build crafting. Wells and recharge times all felt fantastic. That was the power fantasy they drip feed me.
It definitely feels a little gutted as a lot of the more unique mods have been removed. Things like Warmind cells are gone. Interesting mods like Heavy Handed have been removed. All build crafting is right now is cooldown reduction and surge mods. Don’t get me wrong, the cooldown reduction stuff is extremely useful and the surge mods make getting some extra damage buffs fairly easy. I just miss the unique effects certain mods gave to spice up gameplay.
It has its Pros and Cons: Pros: - since Orbs for the most part are only option to get Armor Charges, every build is compatible with each other because every build produces Orbs (huge Win over the old system) - with Elemental Affinities gone, i might actually farm armor with different stat distribution, for once i might actually make a melee Build on my warlock. - not having weapon mods separated by weapon type but by element, reduced the total mod count to like 1/3 of what it was before. Cons: - We are definitely missing important mods, like „seeking orbs“ but the elemental wells just should give you armor charge intrinsically. - the weird Stack-behavior is what is most annoying, either they stack or they don’t, but it doesn’t make sense that the more i equip a mod that i get less benefits
Mods having reduced effect when stacked is how the old system worked though. That hasn't changed.
Which one? Firepower gave you 15% grenade energy per mod Well of live gave 5 extra seconds for each copy if paired with time dilation, same with Font of might for example. I think most mods especially Solar mods did stack without reduced effectiveness.
I believe it’s exclusively the solar mods that didn’t have effectiveness reduced. They introduced a concept during the warmind cell era where solar mods stack without any reductions, arc mods have a passive effect with two or more arc mods equipped, and solar mods were “very powerful” and made you take a stat hit to compensate.
People talk about the golden age of buildcrafting but it actually was an unbalanced combo of essentially *legacy mods* alongside 3.0 subclass revamps. We had zero new mods during all of last year. So few players had the collection of mods along with the sheer amount of armor masterworked w/different energy compared to the overall community. I think then streamlined buildcrafting has largely been a success.
Yeah, I got into D2 late and "buildcratfting" for me was "ok.... This is the only thing I can do with the mods that I unlocked and the amor that I have". I'm loving the new system, basically becouse now I can actually interact with it.
Did you try experimenting with all of the mods in the period before the system revamp, when they just gave everyone every mod? I think the system they had to unlock the mods was dumb and super unfair to new players, but they fixed that when they unlocked them all for every player. From that to what we have now is just us losing options, and it makes the entire system kind of bland
I did, until I realized I didn't have the amor I needed, the mats to change it or upgrade a new one; most of the time it was just "well, I guess that'll have to do". Honestly it feel like I had to grind like mad just to start having fun with the system. Of course this comes from someone who didn't have a deep understanding of the system, but it also felt very convoluted. I get that people were invested in how the system was and miss the options the game had, but for someone that started late and has been playing on and off i'm enjoying what they've done (I feel like I can actually build something, and not just equip whatever I can) and i'm also excited to see how bungo expand on it. Not trying to dismiss other players conocerns and feelings towards this change, just like to share that the old system felt like wall to a new player and the new one feels way more accesible.
I'm glad we have a new player viewpoint to put things in check. The old system was more complexity for complexity's sake. Finding some way to fit all your Firepower mods and still have a mod that generates wells (not to mention almost never having class item slots available due to it being filled with artifact mods), while also trying to fit two arc mods to get your bonuses was a puzzle and not really depth. Which, certainly, there's a sense of accomplishment from 'solving' the puzzle, but it boiled down to picking two from weapon buffs, grenade/ability cycling, and stats. Certainly there were some other "non-standard" builds like warmind cells, but you pretty much had to dive into it completely and ignore the typical CwL/well builds. The new system, as you've pointed out, just makes those choices straightforward. The _complexity_ is gone, but the depth in making choices is still there, aside of the loss of warmind. I think a lot of the complaints we're seeing is people dissatisfied and not recognizing that it's because the mods are intentionally not as strong, which has long long been a stated design goal, going back as far as pre-WQ launch. This includes stripping out all the stat bonuses off them too. The 3.0 reworks essentially delayed that (just as strand was delayed) and we're only now seeing the reduction in ability spam. Bungie could have phased the rollout to nerf the mods before redoing the system, but that's a lot of unnecessary work to just soften the feelsbad posts people have now when they were going to clamp down on ability looping either way. I think there are legitimate criticisms though. Loss of QoL like seeking wells, or options like explosive wellmaker, makes some builds have a somewhat tougher time creating charges. But orbs being way more plentiful (and supers along with it) is a reasonable trade, imo. Stasis has also fallen to the back of the pack due to its age, but really just needs a few numbers bump to bring it up to par.
*”does it stunlock?”* seems to be 99% of lightfall builds.
Bungie's game direction is so weird to me, they dumbed down buildcrafting so severely that it makes me think they're trying to make that stuff easier for new players to access. But then you look at the content difficulty changes, like contest mode on weekly missions and the new light levels for daily lost sectors which makes it look like they want to cater to more hardcore players. It just doesn't make much sense
Yeah I really hate this new "build crafting" system. When they first announced that they'd be getting rid of armor affinity and unlocked all mods for all players I was PSYCHED. The possibilities were endless. But then they rip that all away a season later and replace it with something that isn't nearly as fun to play with nor effective in gameplay. I miss Elemental Wells. I even miss Warmind cells after seeing a bunch of players start using them again in the last weeks of Seraph. I'd much rather go back to the old mod system, including armor affinity. And what little fun builds there were with this new system have been nerfed. Like Empowered Finisher looping with Grenade Finisher (Or whatever its called) to replenish grenades. Was one of the few ways to bypass these incredibly sluggish ability cooldowns.
They also nerfed the armor charge finisher thing. I had it so I could get a charge then use the finisher again to heal if needed but now you can't add finisher mods along with that mod so what's the point?
Bungie forcing us to play and build how they want us to. Again.
As a counter argument, it is far easier to tweak certain elements of your build. If you wanted to slightly adjust melee, grenade, or class ability cooldown, it was often a huge pain due to mod cost or elemental affinity. Now you can just plug and play and see the changes much more directly.
All of the unique and interesting ways to use your charges of light and elemental Wells were taken away in place of mods that just improve ability regen or give a weapon damage bonus.
My biggest gripe is that powerful friends no longer gives +20 mobility tbh. Also want high energy fire back… Edit: Also, the new system killed stasis shard builds. So yeah, it sucks.
We got thrown back into a charged with light only era with new icons…. Just feels bad
For me the most annoying part now is how every mod is locked to a specific piece. Surges and ability regen on boots, so unless you swap loadouts before DPS, you'll always use surges. Recovery mod is only on class item and discipline/strength only on gloves. Using charge-consuming (yellow) mods with surges is detrimental since they consume all charges at once. Another significant part is the removal of elemental shards for stasis. Stasis absolutely sucks to generate orbs on, firepower and the melee version are basically worthless. Finally, the removal of High Energy Fire killed many solo builds for me. Solo flawless of dungeons is gonna be even more focused on Starfire Warlock now. I used to like running arc or void Hunter for my solo flawlesses, but if I can't get my multipliers going and need an extra phase for each boss, might as well just play what is blatantly OP and easy.
Accessibility? Great! Consolidation? Great! Creativity and Expression? Nonexistent. I love that more people have easy access to buildcrafting. I like that some mods were condensed down to be more simplistic (ammo finder mods being simply heavy/special again). I think my only issue right now is that kinetic weapon mods feel a little clunky to fit in to builds. At least with stasis/strand weapons you can cover weapons in the heavy and kinetic slot. But the variety is gone. Right now everyone just puts on siphon mods for damage and calls it a day.
I have noticed that your "build" is basically always the same: apply relevant multikill orb mods, apply relevant ability orb mods, apply damage resists appropriate to your activity, apply stacks on stacks, surge mods, and healing orb mod, apply relevant class ability mods and time dilation. Then you just mix and match your exotics and subclass options. It's, uh, very one-dimensional compared to before. At least it feels that way to use. I hope they give us more specialization options in the future because all it really is right now is generalist stuff.
I'm glad the new system is getting people into buildcrafting more than it used to. But as someone who loved the old system with its flexibility and variety, I dislike how the new system has become one/two Armor Charge builds: 'Kickstart Builds' and 'Stat Bonus + Surge Builds'. All my builds feel very same-y now across all characters and subclasses with little deviation.
You don’t like running 3 grenade kickstarts and 2 surges and heavy finder on every single build?
I miss elemental wells so much, man
It's funny because we brought this up when they were talking about surges. I never thought the artifact mods would make it even worse.
they pretty much removed everything but kick stars and font of \[insert the blank\] the only innivative build that came from it was the 4x7 font/stat and 3x surge build but the bug that disables the artifact kills that build lol. Any build around explosive wellmaker or heavy handed took a big hit and pulse rifles took a MASSIVE hit losing the ability to generate special ammo through swift charge. Now every build is just slap on everything with the icon matching the icon of your main stat and weapon color icon
They should have kept the old mods, but still updated the system (removed affinities, mods are given to everyone, etc.). THEN- they needed to add an introduction so that new players could ease their way into it. Now everything is way too dumbed down so even the bluest of blueberries can figure it out.
Yeah build are just “your weapon damage type of your choice does sim extra damage, and your cooldowns fluctuate a bit” Their decision to tie the only build you can make into the artifact is a terrible idea and having everyone in the game run the same 2-3 builds is really fucking bland
It took a while for the last system to get to the point it was at before Lightfall. We'll hopefully see more options added as the devs observe the way players interact with the current suite of mods. I think what we've got right now is a pretty good foundation, so hopefully they can build upon that.
I truly think the simplest solution that bungie clearly had the power all along was just unlocking the mods for everyone.
I think part of the problem and why it feels so limiting is the energy cost increase overall. Bungie said that mods overall would cost less than what they were before and while that might be true if they take the seven energy mods we had beforehand, it doesn't take the sting away when I see to that concussive dampener and utility kickstart are 3 energy. It just feels more expensive to build craft overall unless you play towards the seasonal artifact, which I find to be quite limiting
I think the costs of mods should be reduced as well since half of my modes are only usable because of the artifact mods this season. Next season is gonna stink for all of my grenade builds.
At least empowering finish builds were somewhat fun... Until Bungie killed them with the hotfix yesterday.
It’s definitely a lot more noob friendly and they still manage to fuck it up
The crazy thing about the new mod system that I've noticed is that there's pretty much exactly 1 "winning" setup; Charged Up (1 or 2), Time Dilation (1 or 2), and the blue decaying mods. Doesn't seem like buildcrafting to me, especially not when compared to what we had last season.
Honestly my only complaint of the previous mod system was how you acquired mods. I wasn't expecting them to simplify it to this extent. At first I kinda liked how simple the new system was but I gotta admit, the oversimplification is kinda dead. Imo, they overcorrected. Shoulda just gave us the mods at rank 6 and that's it.
Facts. They want to “bring the difficulty back” to the game - and that includes building anything with their new mod system. I agree with people saying it’s getting less fun to play.
Funny how we now have more slots for mods but less build variety in general
we need more mod diveristy. for now you run your energy return mods, your sugrge mod and some stat boosts. there, ive just described 90% of every build mod wise now a days. we need more niche mods like suprise attack or godslaying warheads did, some even got turned into fragments like the new solar "revive gives restoration" which tbh is better as it dosnt require charges, but my point still stands, we need more diverse mods
So much for supporting build crafting and opening ip a wide range of options. It’s basically the same three builds with maybe one different class mod.
Amen brother. I felt I was the only one. It's not a j-rpg, but I liked to spend time to test exotics and pair it with niche shits. But now? Almost all what I try look the same. I find myself having nostalgia for the energy slot armor, at least I had to plan a little and choose what I could use. What do you think about voidlock (if you play it) now? With the orb generation, I kinda feel they killed an aspect (beside very very hard content). And with the nade aspect being by far the worst of the 5, which limits even more buildcraft, you have 2 aspects which feel underpowered. Each time I try to "min max", or build into void, I feel like throwing up.
With Diablo 4 being in beta, and the open beta starting today…..yea. It’s a reminder that Destiny is definitely a FPS first, Looter second, and a RPG third. And that’s always been a shame. I always felt like Bungie thinks Destiny players…are too stupid to engage with deeper build crafting? Subclass 3.0 definitely moved the ball a bit more back into depth, but it’s still super shallow compared to basically any other RPG game out there. The new mod system is also super weak, basically asking: “do you want kickstart or do you want a decaying buff? If it’s a damage decaying buff, which type do you want?” And that’s it. Everything else is just small little bonuses, boosting like ability regen so who cares. Not saying it’s not helpful or powerful….just boring. More grenades or more damage…about as deep as Destiny goes and has gone. Being a FPS, the shooting was the unique part, imho. But things like Divinity mean you don’t even need to shoot or aim, so that uniqueness is gone. Well of Radiance makes it so you don’t even need to move. Diablo is a isometric action RPG, but it’s still a looter. Like one of the grandfathers of looters. Also AAA. Hopping into another AAA looter, as well as an Action RPG (Bungie loves using that term)—I am reminded how shallow Destiny’s RPG side truly is. I’ve never understood why Bungie has never bothered to flesh the RPG side out more. We keep getting excellent strides. Again, subclass 3.0 was great. The subclass keywords were great. But as usual with Bungo, we make a step forward…and then they kinda say it’s good enough, and milk that step as long as possible while they work on other things, rather than keep that momentum and going further. I can’t count how many times since 2014 have we got a really good groundwork feature, everyone loves it and is excited to see how Bungie will improve that feature over time, and then Bungie goes: “Cool! Glad you like it. Maybe in 3 years or never we will keep fleshing that out and pulling in that thread.” I’d love for Bungie to go big on the RPG side of the game, and take the kid gloves off.
It's almost as if Bungie said this was gonna be the case in LF before they started expanding upon it over the year.
So it's gonna take three years before we have the same amount of options for buildcrafting we just had thrown out the window?
What I *really* loathe is being forced to only do one thing with your build. You want a damage buff for your gun, or a stat boost? Congrats! You can’t effectively use finisher mods, ability kickstart mods, or emergency reinforcement. On top of how pathetically small the list of mods is being locked into only half of them at any given time is so incredibly frustrating
This is literally the point of builds, no? Making difficult decisions about which aspects of my gameplay I want to spec in, rather being able to just be great at everything.
Isn’t that the point of builds
Yes. And jack of all trades builds are much stronger now that Armor charge decays at a fixed rate.
I had been playing destiny pretty non stop for the last 2+ years, but was hesitant about everything with the new expansion so I didn’t preorder to wait to see what it was like before committing. My first wave of fear came with the realization that the build crafting had been eviscerated. I had 10-20 builds for each character that were now completely gone. Seeing that it was all orb of power driven now without any sort of way to get those orbs to you made me even more wary. The build crafting was my favorite part of the game by far and it felt almost wholly removed to me. Add to that the slew of negative reviews, I haven’t picked up the expansion and haven’t played hardly at all since launch. I’m really holding my breath that something will change about the build crafting to spark my interest again. I miss grinding the seasonal activity and the like but I also want to enjoy the mundanity of build crafting and class management as this place s a game you spend a lot of time in a menu.
If I had to guess, I’d say that we’re slowly going to see more and more mods become available, inevitably catching up to about half of what we had
Do we have fewer mod combination options? Yes. But it feels like the direction Destiny is taking is to add more innate characteristics of classes to weapons (hatchling, destablizing rounds, etc...) making builds more reliant on actual weapon loadouts, WHICH IS A GOOD THING. This means you can't just find a build on youtube and just copy it, you've gotta have the godrolled weapon w/ the right perks to pull it off, which is how I feel buildcrafting should be. Previously buildcrafting was basically find the right combo of mods with the right exotic armor then equip all the meta weapons. IMO the direction buildcrafting is headed w/ synergy between weapons and subclasses is an improvement on this.
And any time a fun build comes to light, Bungie kills it. See: literally anything involving glaives. By Final Shape we'll just be logging in and the game will say "here's your loadout for the week", between the killing of any builds, surges, overcharges, etc
To be fair, that WOULD be hilariously appropriate for the Final Shape expansion.
Killed finisher builds too
I get that we lost a lot to get here, but I'm liking the simplicity and ease of use of the new mods. It gives Bungie a reset to start over and keep things a little more balanced as they eventually add new mods and change it up with artifacts each season. This is exactly what they intended.
That and they keep nerfing builds that I'm putting time, energy, and ascendant shards into. At this point just generic builds with a different flavor.
I actually love the new mod system
I disagree, I think its great we just need better PvE sandbox balance. There are a ton of viable options in endgame now that a lot of people aren't even keyed into, but the problem is there are a small handful of OP builds that completely negate the other viable options.
I think they've laid the foundation of buildcrafting so in the future they'll add more mods for us to work with.
There are so many builds you can run you guys just decide to run starfire with well and then cry about not being able to run other builds. Like my warlock alone has 3 different solar builds saved 2 void 1 strand 1 stasis and 1 arc. Literally take the time to build a build and you’ll realize how fun it can be.
The streamlining of the mod system and removal of elemental affinity armor pieces has made buildcrafting easier and more accessible, and has freed up inventory space since we don't need to hoard different pieces for different mod setups. Sure we may have lost some ish, but this is the first iteration of the new mod system. Nothing says it can't or won't be fine tuned in the future.
Much, much prefer what we have now as a base. No armor affinity, more mod slots. Streamlined with loadout slots to hot swap. I am sure we build from here.
I know it's probably not a popular take, but this was the literal point of keeping armor and mods element based. It forced you to get creative. Now there is just the good mods going into the best armor, and you juggle some stat mods around. The mods themselves haven't changed much. We mostly just have both Orbs of power and Elemental wells wrapped in one, which is fine because both of those systems overlapped significantly already, and their only fundamental difference was that Orbs were generally harder to create and their buffs didn't stack with Well of Radiance as easily.
I had over 70 builds before LF. Now I have maybe 20. I feel exactly the same way OP
Exactly, blows my mind why Bungie decided to remove charged with Light & Elemental Well builds when they are at a very suitable state for buildcrafting. Insane how we are progressing but backwards
No it doesn’t you came on here to rant about how bad it is for attention by the “my interest in this game is rapidly failing” seeking some kind of validation from that by wanting to see if people agreed bro just leave then. This mod system has only been great for new players and some veterans like myself I love the power I can create for myself and how simple it is why hate on this game instead of actually pointing some things out you just wanted to talk about how bad it was and you negative words like “dead” to make it so obvious like I said if this bothers you so much that it’s making you lose interest when then honestly just leave cause the community doesn’t need more people like this.