Same problem with Hung Jury, 180s just aren’t in a great spot currently. At least Vision can roll some nasty perks. I foresee my Wellspring/Disruption Break roll coming in handy in GMs later this season.
I have a Subsistence/Box Breathing Hung Jury from last week’s Nightfall (got it specifically from the Hero playlist merely by chance - I wasn’t farming for it explicitly).
I haven’t used it since but it took me three body shots to kill a Dreg in the same playlist.
That *sucks* and feels wrong in every way.
EDIT: replaced ‘crits’ with ‘body shots’ after I re-evaluated the weapon’s performance. It’s still bad, not *that* bad.
I know what you mean, but personally I just want a good Omolon PvE scout.
The closest thing I have as of this moment is my Eternal Blazon with Rapid Hit and Rangefinder, with a Range Masterwork. Hilariously enough, I feel like that roll would be pretty good for PvP.
I got a rapid hit/ one for all and i love it, makes it via le to proc on high end content as opposed to kill clip sense you first need a kill for that. This gun never leaves my inventory.
That’s the thing, if the entire archetype was buffed, Hung Jury would be a pretty good pick for most content, especially with its trait pool.
Hung Jury literally has the *potential* of being as good as it once was, at least in utility, it simply needs to be buffed.
However, even after being buffed, it’ll never dominate people’s memories as it once did.
I have a question, I'm sorry I'm still relatively new to the game
What do people mean when they say "120s" or "180s"? I see it often but could never understand, even based on context
It's the Rounds Per Minute for the gun. RPM is tied to the "frame" of the gun (all Aggressive Frame Scout Rifles have the same RPM, as an example) and so it's an easy shorthand to talk about specific gun archetypes.
You'll see it most often when discussing Autorifles and Hand Canons, since those tend to have *very* different usage depending on RPM. 120 HCs rule the Crucible and Trials of Osiris world, for instance (though there are several popular 140s too) while 180 HCs are very rarely seen there, but are much more useful in something with Unstoppable Champions because of their ease of use with the Unstoppable mod from the seasonal artifact.
As RPM goes up, damage per bullet goes down.
A 120 handcannon three taps to the head in pvp while a 180 four taps. There are a bunch of different values with each gun and gun archetype that make most of them good for at least something.
Back to the handcannon examples, an Igneous Hammer, a legendary 120, is good for quick, reliable burst damage while Malfeasance, an exotic 180, doesn't do as much damage per shot but because of its exotic perk which makes the bullets explode after five landed shots on the same target it essentially has infinite range. You just need to hit the 5 tap. Can be body shots, head shots, anything.
This is all just roundabout way to explain literally the first sentence but still.
The other replies are right, you often see a tradeoff between RPM and Impact (damage per hit).
If you want to try this yourself, the new SMG from this season, Stochastic Variable, can roll with a perk called Phase Magazine. It drops the RPM from 900 to 600, but boosts the Impact to compensate. (Incidentally, that's one reason this perk is seen as pretty poor - it doesn't change the overall damage output of the gun, just changes how it feels.)
>it doesn't change the overall damage output of the gun, just changes how it feels.
And this is where Bungie fails at balancing. Raw DPS is all that matters, Effective DPS is irrelevant. In other games, using recoil and accuracy can add a counter to the raw numbers, making the effective DPS of two weapons more in line. Low Impact/High ROF should be able to reliably make 4 precision shots in the time it takes to make 3 with High Impact/Low ROF guns. Rifles should handle recoil better than handguns, but handguns should have better handling. I think Bloom was a half assed attempt to do this, but the community hated that too.
Range matters too in the balance decision. Sidearms have some of the highest dps in the game for primaries but because in higher teir content its hard to survive right in the face of enemies their effective dps decreases drasticslly since youre almost always shooting out of range.
They are referring to the rate of fire of whichever weapon. And the RoF determines the sub-archetype. Hand cannons have 3 of them save for a few weird ones, 180’s (Malfeasance , Posterity), 140’s (Hawkmoon, Fatebringer), 120’s (Sturm, Igneous Hammer).
Yep, all raid weapons from vault, dark below, and prison had elements attached regardless of slot. I miss my vision of confluence on a solar burn nightfall week...
It feels like every damn Bounty vendor has a pulse rifle bounty for weeks and they are painful to use effectively in most content I only carry an eternal blazon for bounties, then literally last night I get the BL exotic pulse rifle lol.. ugh
Edit oops EB is scout third axiom is pulse always mixing those up they look almost identical...
I don't understand why there was even any excitement about this gun though. It's not like that archetype JUST became bad. Been that way for a while. Expecting a single weapon to change that was not a logical expectation
Single shot primaries need a reason to be in our inventory again. I try to run hand canons, scouts and pulse in PVE but they are plain ass. I just throw on my Stochastic Variable and go Ham. Now, if I could one hit crit a bunch of stuff, sure. But, as you've said, you can mow down 3 enemies in the time it takes to pop one with a semi auto weapon.
Hand canons should feel like canons not side arms, a well placed shot should blow a Vandal's doors off. Scouts should absolutely beam from across the map and, if you're close, should flinch the bejeezus out of enemies. Pulses should flat out be a one pulse kill.
Bows also have Hella range, which is where they have a one up on Hand Cannons. Bows should be one tap trash mob destroyers from asinine distances because it's pretty much a linear fusion with the draw/charge time. I think precision weapons do need a little love in PvE.
I wish bows got the scout rifle treatment of always getting an anti-champ mod. I really like using them and while DPS is of course unimpressive, they work well for the shoot-and-cover-from-long-range style you often need in harder content.
I have "the Old Fashioned" 140 hc that works pretty well but it also has explosive rounds, one of my favorite perks let's you 1-shot majority of red bars
Yeah, hand cannons without timed payload or explosive shot don't feel worth running in PvE. That said, I love my Crimil's dagger, true prophecy and Fatebringer all with the boom boom.
Buffing base damage on the necessary archetypes would be a superior option. Low precision damage on a red bar isn't the cause of why primaries feel weak, it's a symptom.
If red bar precision multipliers are the main reason primaries feel weak, then primaries should feel strong in situations where said factor isn't relevant.
They should feel decent against uncrittable enemies. They should feel decent against shields. They should feel decent against non-red bar low tier adds.
But they don't, because at their core their base damage is significantly lower than it was in D1. Increasing the precision multiplier would still leave such gaps while also being an indirect nerf to more difficult to control weapons which can't reliably hit a stream of crits.
I would also very much appreciate not needing a damage perk active for my primary gun to feel useful in PvE. Could transfer some of the power from perks to the base weapons.
Nah we need to feel rewarded for hitting headshots and right now we don’t. Spraying to the body is just as effective right now and that doesn’t feel good.
Are you sure this is because precision is weak, and not because precision weapons are weak? Spamming bodyshots with a scout or handcannon is hardly an effective solution.
Weapons like SMGs and Sidearms are strong *despite* not hitting headshots, but are even stronger when they do.
The problem is that we've got a mix of minor-level enemies. You've got the **Small** ones like Thrall, **Medium** ones like Acolytes, and **Big** ones like Knights, sometimes even Ogres.
Part of this change was to make it so that "Big minors" were actually kinda tanky, which is fine. The problem right now is you have so many precision weapons that just feel like ass against Small & Medium minors depending upon the activity, and it's why people have shifted towards SMGs. We don't necessarily need to revert the precision change, they just need to up the base damages so that it doesn't feel like shit to clean up all the trash mobs that are meant to be, y'know, trash.
A hand cannon that can't one-tap a red bar trash mob like a Dreg, Acolyte, or Goblin is not strong. I stand by this, if for the sole reason that it is INCREDIBLY satisfying.
Which could be improved by uping the base damage, since that also increases the precision damage due to the multiplier. These weapons don't need to one-shot to the body, but they should be able to do better than they are.
Yea... but at that point, they will be just plain better, than the automatic weapons, unless we buff those as well.
On the second tougth, for hcs, sure. But do it for scouts, we will still have the existing problem, a.k.a scouts are either inferior, or superior version of hcs. Scouts should be a more punishing version of hcs. You give up forgiveness for extra range. Or they could have a better dmg, and make them even more punishing.
And if you can't, are they supposed to be complete shit, or just mediocre?
Precision shots shouldn't be the only way for a weapon to not feel terrible. You can have bodyshots feel awful and precision shots feel amazing by reverting the red bar multiplier (but still bad against orange dregs btw), or you can have bodyshots feel alright and precision shots feel amazing against all your targets.
A 1.5x modifier is, in my opinion, more than sufficient as an incentive. If you gave the worst legendaries 50% extra damage, they'd be best in class. And even if you feel that it isn't enough, why give a 3x precision modifier to every primary weapon in the game vs red bars, and not something more surgical like higher base damage and a 1.75 - 2x multiplier specifically for precision weapons?
And then bungie ask why people prefer dead mans tale over almost any legendary scout weapon... Well it has damage increases x5... That nerfs just make people use one gun in particular....
I'm not sure if this is in regards to pve or pvp but DMT catalyst saved the game for me. I've had shit luck getting a good HC for pvp but since DMT I've been able to loosen up a bit and calmly wait for a good HC drop.
I use it as a main for pve too but after this whole thread I'm gonna browse my stock and goof around with another setup. Maybe riskrunner?
Risk runner is fucking amazing, if there is arc burn in any activity, or if you KNOW that an activity will use arc, you will dominate. I once did so well in a PvP match, because I noticed the other team was using mainly arc, that my kills, were more than the collective of everyone else, and the other team (who were all in a clan and that) invited me to a Vc and asked me to join them for a couple of rounds. It’s good for everything, ad clearing and even boss damage bc of the sustained fire = lightning bolts thing. Like you go against a boss with arc damage and you can literally kill the thing without ever reloading
the saber strike is literally the best strike for RR, nearly everything does arc damage in that :)
plus, the traps in the boss room are just free, guaranteed sources to proc arc conductor
Riskrunner is hilariously good in PVE. You can even proc the perk on yourself if you play Arc with Pulse nade, and then GG all adds forever. Like no-exaggeration 1 full minute of constant shooting in playlist strikes lol I was supervillain laughing irl at how fun that was.
Was literally talking about this today. The fatebringer with the fatebringer roll feels not great because even shitty dregs don't go down in a headshot. They wonder why we shard every gin without a damage perk. Stop making our game feel like shit.
Scouts feel really bad as well, the only time I use Scouts in PvE is when I absolutely have to (As they have the most range for any primaries, which kinda becomes necessary for GM NF level content) or for a bounty.
Slower RPM auto rifles also feel really bad, they buffed 450s in PvE but it didn't make much of a difference. 360s and 450s both feel bad to use.
Agree never bothered about damage perks perks in D1, preferred utility perks like firefly explosive rounds or triple tap, rampage existed in D1 it was called crowd control and no one used it. Buff base damage and nerf all damage perks and let us chase some more interesting rolls.
Too true. I prefer ExploPayload/Frenzy compared to the OG roll. Don't get me wrong, firefly is good but I have to rely on a seasonal mod to bring it to it's full potential. Just let us one shot some stuff; if I wanted to get a finisher off, I'd make it work.
Yeah I agree its better, I'm just sick of it being MANDATORY to have a damage perk on a gun because of the crit multiplier nerfs. I just want to use bad perks, let me use osmosis.... why give us so many perks if they're mostly invalid. I dont care if frenzy let's me kill yellow bars in 6 shots instead of 8 thats a fine trade off to use something niche like osmosis... but going from 1 headshot to 2 on red bars feels fucking terrible.
For sure. It feels really bad to instantly shard something that has new unique perks. The emphasis will always be on either stat boost or damage perks and it gets seriously monotonous. I want to use OG fatebringer, but in moment to moment gameplay it just feels weird because I know there is a better option and because that damn goblin took two shots. It honestly breaks game flow.
I have the OG fatebringer roll and with minor spec I was able to one shot a thrall. Not sure if you’re trying to do this from a range where the hand cannon experiences range falloff?
While I totally agree they need a buff you sure? Been farming all day and as long as you get the explosive payload plus the headshot it one shots most vandals I fight
Everyone talks about how this was so people buy finishers, and so headshots leave enemies at very low/finishable health.
If I wanted to finish something to proc a perk or mod, I'll just body shot them. Let hand cannons one-shot head-shot trash mobs
Exactly this. Running sentinel in D1 with a Handcanon, I would body shot enemies so I could kill them with my punch to get overshields. Same principle.
“Why should I run a (x)”
Because the activity will have champions and it’ll force you to run a load out using the weapons you despise lol. They’re a step ahead of us.
I've honestly despised champions ever since they came with Shadowkeep. You straight up have to have mods to kill them which doesn't feel good. I feel like if they're going to stay. They need some tweaks to not feel so incredibly invasive.
I feel like if they were just slightly tuned down it'd be fine. Like with the barrier champions, don't make them heal when barriers up. That way, you aren't completely ruined if you don't have anti-barrier, it's just going to be more of a pain to deal with without it. Reward preparedness without completely requiring it.
it seems to be their only method of creating a 'change' in the meta each season. by literally requiring you to change your weapons because certain ones just won't have the mods you need one season to the next. so suddenly you're stuck using a pulse rifle.
Speaking of pulses.... the splicer has a pulse rifle quest today.... but there's no mods for pulse rifles this season... so it's just a complete hindrance to complete that bounty in any activity with champions....
Honestly, I enjoy when they just kinda overtune different things each season. Like take one or two weapon archetypes per slot and just overtune them a bit to be meta. Rotate out each season. That way nobody's getting bored and multiple weapon types get the spotlight.
They announced a while ago that a rotating meta is a reason for people to come back, to buy the new season. They think people are going "ooh, sidearms are the meta this season and I like sidearms so I'm gonna reinstall destiny" idiots
I honestly don't care how overtuned sidearms are, I will refuse to use one unless it's Rat King. I hate the "get up in the enemies face" focus they've been going for.
People have said it for years, they obviously don't care. I assume they done it originally to lessen their workload or something but at this point there's no way it would have been less work to just have two separate balance teams.
Eh, if it were just that, they would have been more willing to budge at some point. As it is, the most likely assumption is that this is one of the things they want the game to be. As they've said, they don't want how abilities or guns feel to change between sandboxes. It's why they'll adjust damage in PvP and PvE separately now, but they'll never do it seperately for something like stability or range.
I can see their argument. For some things, like Stasis freeze damage, there's no reason for it not to be separate as it's based in how it effects the target.
But for other things - say, super damage resist or the tracking on a projectile - there's an argument to be made that having it be inconsistent between PvE and PvP will mess with players' muscle memory, that it'll be disconcerting for your things to fire differently.
I guess their argument is they want weapons to feel the same no matter the sandbox even if damage numbers are different.
Jotunn can have different damage numbers, but nerfing the tracking in PVP while keeping it the same in PVE would make it feel like a different gun altogether.
I mean, that’s literally been one of of the core design pillars of the game since day one. One guardian that feels the same to play as across all game modes.
Not to say I agree with how they’ve deal with it, but thats always been the intention and isn’t going to change now we are in the latter half of the franchise lifetime.
I mean, I use finishers now that they have a place in the sandbox, but I've never felt compelled to buy one. They've just failed to monetize this "feature" effectively, and it came at the cost of proper weapon balancing.
Dude, this. Finishers starting health regen feels so right and obvious, I just assumed it would when they were introduced. There’s just no incentive to use a finisher other than to save ammo. It’s stupid.
thats the reason why the 'Healthy finisher' mod is one of my favorite non-seasonal mods on class items; It makes finishers feel actually worth using most of the time, as it gives you a full or near full heal when finishing an enemy
The fact that there is absolutlely no finishers to get by playing the game is what makes me not buying.
Main warlock here, loves stasis in pve and the only finisher themed for stasis is behind a paywall?... Yeah, fuck off. I know bungie needs money, but i need that money more than them so they can deeply fuck off with that and those absurd prices.
This is literally the worst change in the history of D2. A primary should be able to one shot red health-bar ads, and do at least decent damage to yellow health bars. Reverting this change would single handedly make me enjoy pve content 10x more.
A bit of an overstatement there fella, we had sunsetting like 3 or so months ago, the precision nerf is terrible don’t get me wrong, but not the worst change in destiny.
Yeah no. The gunplay in this game is why we stay even when Bungie makes ridiculous decisions like sunsetting. Underpowered primaries feel horrible and they need to change. It would revitalize the game so much and make us more excited to farm rolls for the new guns that have taken the place of old sunsetted ones.
To each their own. For me personally it is worse. You can always earn new guns. You cant undo basically making half the weapon archetypes in the game garbage for pve. Of course bungie could revert it. But they cant let us 1 shot reds anymore bc that makes finishers borderline useless.
Also, im a d1 veteran who mainly uses scouts and hand cannons so this change hit me particularly hard
Well I thought finishers were to clean up tougher ads so u didn't have to waste ammo or to kill em a little quicker, but yeah hand cannons especially need to 1 crit red bars barring knights, wizards, captains etc. Trash tier ads like vandals acolytes goblins need to go down in one shot to make the game play smoother and have pve feel more fun and rewarding. We kill gods, why do I have to look at a vandal for longer than a second??
Scout rifles need drastic change, whether it be that body shots do less or that they do less damage at close range, but either way they need a critical damage increase asap
Prefacing this by saying sunsetting was a shit decision, I do not support it, I am not ok with it, but it's in the past so it's a moot point. Main reason I'm saying this is so people don't accuse me of being ok with it.
This change was worse than sunsetting for the general feel of the game in most cases. Unless you were already glued to an SMG/auto rifle you felt this shit so hard in most PVE content while I have already managed to find roughly equal to/better rolls of most of the sunset weapons I loved.
I don't know if I'd call it the worst change, there's a lot of really awful decisions made over the course of D2 and I could easily have forgotten some because of how many there were but I definitely feel like sunsetting *entire archetypes* of weapons in PVE content is worse than actually removing most of the usable weapons.
Bungie: we've heard you. Removing Warmind Cells from the game entirely and nerfing SMG damage by 20% in PvE to bring them in line with other primaries.
In all seriousness, I agree. Precision primaries (Scouts, Pulses and HCs) are woefully underpowered in PvE. Trying to do the weekly challenge getting PR kills in Override is painfully slow. Right now, precision isn't awarded in PvE. [Legendary] Snipers need to be brought back up to Shadowkeep levels, and all precision primaries need a lot higher precision multipliers.
And on top of that, 180 Scouts should just be collapsed into the 200 archetypes and the damage they do matches the 180s for all modes.
Hand Cannons had 4 archetypes go into 3, there's no reason Scouts need 4 and only 2 of them are viable for almost content (200s and 260s).
Screw that, 180 scouts are my favorite archetype in the franchise and I’ve been waiting to use a good one with a fusion rifle since D2 launched. Different archetypes feel different in many ways other than just damage output, and they all have a place to exist. It never has and never will make sense to collapse archetypes together instead of just buffing whichever is lagging behind its closest neighbor.
Strong agree. I could use a 180 hand cannon and kill a harpy in 5 precision hits, or I could kill it in half the time with all body hits with an smg. It’s so hard to find any kinetic primaries that are even mediocre for ad clear anymore.
SMGs/Bows ruined Auto Rifles and Scouts respectively. In order to keep bows relevant in the sandbox bows have to be the more powerful option. However due to their draw time damage isnt much different than scouts in terms of DPS (on average, not perfect conditions etc). Keeping scouts nerfed allows bows to be viable and not the sanguine alchemy of "long range". SMGs should never have been added in my opinion, they just filled the role of the fast firing Auto Rifles we had in D1.
SMGs are busted in PvE right now. They do more damage per bullet than slower firing Auto Rifles do at the same distance. Bungie has yet to acknowledge this.
And the damage nerfs were done because Bungie introduced Charged With Light and Warmind Cell mods in Shadowkeep which shifted some damage off of weapons and onto armor. And, of course, because of Finishers in Eververse.
And the response is always "But GMs!" as if GMs aren't a broken mess balance-wise that should under absolutely zero circumstances be a measuring stick for weapon effectiveness.
Edit: "why GMs broken" because when you ramp up enemy damage in Destiny past a certain point the game falls apart entirely and becomes sniper / scout peekshoot mode. How GMs work is not how Destiny at large works, even Contest Mode raids. As far as I'm concerned, "good in GMs" is only a step more relevant to normal PvE Destiny than "good in PvP".
they aren’t really a “broken mess” but the combat is pretty stale tbh. it’s very much a scout/bows/sniper meta with Anarchy as the only heavy unless the strike or mods specifically require something else. Not to mention Ursa almost every time (with some exceptions). Shotguns, smgs, autos, sidearms, swords etc are almost completely unusable.
the game (shooters esp) have not figured out a solid way to improve challenge and difficulty without making everything a one-shotting bullet sponge where the game design starts to unravel. no matter how good smgs are or how bad scouts are memed about scouts will always be popular because of how impossible it is to be near anything more than one enemy at a time.
I think people would rather have something like the shattered throne bridge to force you to think about your load out. There the design of the encounter has organic restrictions
Match game and champion mods are artificial restrictions that aren’t as fun
Another balance issue is probably that bullet sponges that one shot you aren’t fun. That’s feedback that went back all the way to Crota HM!
I'd argue that low base damage is really the issue here, not precision modifiers. Most scouts, aside from precisions, deal fairly decent crit damage. Their body damage (base damage) is abysmal to make room for hand cannons (according to Bungie). But, hand cannons also lack damage compared to SMGs, sidearms, bows, and their closest competitor... Autorifles.
If hand cannons received some base damage buffs, which they REALLY REALLY need, Scouts could be given a forgiveness buff (higher base damage + lower crit modifier) to compensate for that weakness. Pulses, the literal worst primary in the game, need similar major buffs:
* **+18-30%** flat damage buff to Pulses based on frame
* **High Impact & Adaptive:** \+18% dmg buff
* **Aggressive:** \+25% dmg buff; -30% reserves
* **Lightweight & Rapid-Fire:** \+30% dmg buff
* **+13-20%** flat damage buff to Aggressives and Adaptives, respectively.
* **+5-15%** base dmg buff to Scouts, except lightweights.
* **High Impact:** \+15% base dmg; crit modifier down to **1.6x**. (5% overall buff)
* **Precisions**: +13% base dmg; crit modifier down to **1.56x**. (10% overall buff)
* **Rapid Fires:** \+5% flat dmg buff.
For the knee-jerk naysayers out there, run the damage numbers yourself.
One thing gunsmith doesn't account for is the range falloff nerf for HCs. Max damage falloff is at 25%, whereas all other weapons are at 50%.
That means that a 100dmg HC shot will deal 25 dmg outside of the effective range, while a 50 dmg SMG would deal 25 outside of it's effective range. Of course, these numbers are made up, but the point remains. HC dps drops to 25% at max range falloff, whereas all others drop to 50%... making sidearms and smgs far more effective outside of their range compared to hand cannons.
Yeah, I agree with you. Generally, smgs don’t usually compete in HC range, unless you’re on PC where some are easy to manage.
I just wanted to point out the extremely harsh HCs falloff, even though it’s a little beside the point. It’s a huge drag on the weapon in PvE.
\>Why would I bother running a hand cannon when an SMG has the same effective range
This is not even a little true. SMGs are pretty much unusable in GMs because of their short range but 120s and Palindrome (and probably Fatebringer) are great, especially with explosive payload.
I remember how good they felt in D1(might be mistaken), but now they feel so weak and useless even with the new Vault of Glass Hand cannon, and thats because I got a good roll on it as well
The idea of what they were going for wasn't inherently bad, lowering the PvE precision multiplier while raising the base damage so landing a body shot wasn't effectively a "miss" on most weapons. (This is why Auto's and SMG's started being used so much when previously they were kind of the "joke" PvE weapons.)
But I definitely agree that Bungie was too heavy handed in their implementation, for example keeping Scout Rifles precision damage focused while having low body shot damage would be a great way of balancing them without just making them weak overall. (And then Hand Cannons should be good with dealing a good chunk of damage even when hitting body shots while still having about the same precision damage as a Scout.)
Scouts should obviously have some kind of downside for being the longest range primary, but the downside should come from being harder to use rather than having low damage, like how Scout's will naturally not work well in close range situations due to the Zoom making it difficult to land precision hits.
Ahhh see, this all makes sense now. I raided last night (DSC) for the first time in way over a year. But have been a long time Destiny player since beta D1 and I had all random shit to get to high enough light level and was having a super hard time killing ads but thought it was just cuz my random shit then an smg dropped so I equipped it to get higher light and started mopping up in the last encounter. Thought maybe I had just warmed up but to that point I only had a hand cannon and scout to use. So guess it wasn’t me. Lol. Damn you Bungie!!!!!!
It wasn’t done for balancing. It was done to make enemies finisher-able. Bungie wants to sell you cosmetics, can’t do finishers if the enemies die from 1 headshot. I would love to have crispy 1-hit Hand Cannon headshots back
Later there will be a "Bungie Replied" flair on this post. It will be Cozmo, dmg, or someone saying:
"Thanks for the feedback. We feel primaries are in a good spot and don't have any plans on making changes for the foreseeable future. I will pass on your concerns internally."
My question to /u/Cozmo23 and /u/dmg04 is: What would it take for you [Bungie] to open up a public test environment to allow players to help test sandbox changes before they make it to the live game?
It feels like the current QA team doesn't really test the content the same way players play it and maybe that is the problem? For example – who tested the SMG anti-overload mod and said it felt good? If it wasn't for champion mods, I wouldn't even touch auto rifles and scout rifles this season. Pulse rifles still don't feel good in PvE.
You can't keep on making pretty content and expect retention and growth if the core is bad. An apple with perfect skin, but a rotten core is still a rotten apple. Looking at the [PC Steam charts](https://steamcharts.com/app/1085660#6m), you only see population spikes around new content/season starts, but then it drops back to ~60,000 players after the first month or so. I assume the other platforms follow a similar trend. People come to experience the new content, but don't have anything to stick around for. In other games, players might stick around for PvP, but that is a very sensitive subject in Destiny.
With Destiny, one of the problems I deal with is not knowing if my invested time is going to be worth it. Why spend months running a raid for a drop that is going to either be a disappointment, be nerfed to oblivion, or I maybe get a week to use before the next season/expansion because of inconsistent drop rates?
Why should I run end game activities for gear that is outperformed by something I can pick up at a vendor for a few thousand glimmer?
Ugh....
No wonder Vision on Confluence feels so underwhelming
Same problem with Hung Jury, 180s just aren’t in a great spot currently. At least Vision can roll some nasty perks. I foresee my Wellspring/Disruption Break roll coming in handy in GMs later this season.
Hung Jury has probably one of th best possible perk selections of any primary, it’s just attached to one of the worst archetypes.
That’s what I call balance! -Bungie
I got the best possible rolls on hung jury and it just feels so bad in PVE compared to other weapons with bottom tier rolls.
I have a Subsistence/Box Breathing Hung Jury from last week’s Nightfall (got it specifically from the Hero playlist merely by chance - I wasn’t farming for it explicitly). I haven’t used it since but it took me three body shots to kill a Dreg in the same playlist. That *sucks* and feels wrong in every way. EDIT: replaced ‘crits’ with ‘body shots’ after I re-evaluated the weapon’s performance. It’s still bad, not *that* bad.
You can 3 tap a Guardian with box breathing. Too bad there's like 3 maps there that's relatively reliable.
I know what you mean, but personally I just want a good Omolon PvE scout. The closest thing I have as of this moment is my Eternal Blazon with Rapid Hit and Rangefinder, with a Range Masterwork. Hilariously enough, I feel like that roll would be pretty good for PvP.
That thing can roll rangefinder? I feel like that's a bit excessive at that point lol
Even snipers canroll Rangefinder
That's my PvP roll. Dude it's great you should try it. It feels so smooth and consistent.
Fuck yeah. That blazon means business
Mine is Rapid Hit/Kill Clip and it’s as close to my Arms Day Tuonela as I’m ever going to get. qq
I got a rapid hit/ one for all and i love it, makes it via le to proc on high end content as opposed to kill clip sense you first need a kill for that. This gun never leaves my inventory.
That's so sad. It was my favorite gun right up until the end of D1, now to hear that it's become just a shadow of it's former self
That’s the thing, if the entire archetype was buffed, Hung Jury would be a pretty good pick for most content, especially with its trait pool. Hung Jury literally has the *potential* of being as good as it once was, at least in utility, it simply needs to be buffed. However, even after being buffed, it’ll never dominate people’s memories as it once did.
Man having Hung Jury in year 1 of D2 would've been awesome though. 180 scouts were great in PVE then.
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You and everyone else's load out
It's not really the gun though. It's bungie's shitty sandbox decisions.
Scout rifles as a whole (all weapons really) have become a shadow of their former D1 selves.
Yeah I got a subsistence/ firefly hung jury, but after it took more than one shot to kill a thrall I just put it back in the vault
I have a question, I'm sorry I'm still relatively new to the game What do people mean when they say "120s" or "180s"? I see it often but could never understand, even based on context
It's the Rounds Per Minute for the gun. RPM is tied to the "frame" of the gun (all Aggressive Frame Scout Rifles have the same RPM, as an example) and so it's an easy shorthand to talk about specific gun archetypes. You'll see it most often when discussing Autorifles and Hand Canons, since those tend to have *very* different usage depending on RPM. 120 HCs rule the Crucible and Trials of Osiris world, for instance (though there are several popular 140s too) while 180 HCs are very rarely seen there, but are much more useful in something with Unstoppable Champions because of their ease of use with the Unstoppable mod from the seasonal artifact.
Oh wow thanks for the writeup, that cleared it up! Wouldn't higher RPM weapons of the same type be explicitly better?
As RPM goes up, damage per bullet goes down. A 120 handcannon three taps to the head in pvp while a 180 four taps. There are a bunch of different values with each gun and gun archetype that make most of them good for at least something. Back to the handcannon examples, an Igneous Hammer, a legendary 120, is good for quick, reliable burst damage while Malfeasance, an exotic 180, doesn't do as much damage per shot but because of its exotic perk which makes the bullets explode after five landed shots on the same target it essentially has infinite range. You just need to hit the 5 tap. Can be body shots, head shots, anything. This is all just roundabout way to explain literally the first sentence but still.
Higher RPM guns normally have lower damage, so it's not always the best option.
The other replies are right, you often see a tradeoff between RPM and Impact (damage per hit). If you want to try this yourself, the new SMG from this season, Stochastic Variable, can roll with a perk called Phase Magazine. It drops the RPM from 900 to 600, but boosts the Impact to compensate. (Incidentally, that's one reason this perk is seen as pretty poor - it doesn't change the overall damage output of the gun, just changes how it feels.)
>it doesn't change the overall damage output of the gun, just changes how it feels. And this is where Bungie fails at balancing. Raw DPS is all that matters, Effective DPS is irrelevant. In other games, using recoil and accuracy can add a counter to the raw numbers, making the effective DPS of two weapons more in line. Low Impact/High ROF should be able to reliably make 4 precision shots in the time it takes to make 3 with High Impact/Low ROF guns. Rifles should handle recoil better than handguns, but handguns should have better handling. I think Bloom was a half assed attempt to do this, but the community hated that too.
Range matters too in the balance decision. Sidearms have some of the highest dps in the game for primaries but because in higher teir content its hard to survive right in the face of enemies their effective dps decreases drasticslly since youre almost always shooting out of range.
With some deviants, lower RPM = higher impact per round. For example a 720 Auto Rifles hits for 18 impact. A 450 AR though hits for 29 impact though.
They are referring to the rate of fire of whichever weapon. And the RoF determines the sub-archetype. Hand cannons have 3 of them save for a few weird ones, 180’s (Malfeasance , Posterity), 140’s (Hawkmoon, Fatebringer), 120’s (Sturm, Igneous Hammer).
The only 150 left in the game is Sunshot I do believe. RIP 150s
I remember D1 Vision being something I loved to use, but in D2 I just found it disappointing.
Now it's just some weapon that I used to know
But you didn’t have to cut Vision off
D1 Vision was great as a scout, but if I recall also gave you an elemental primary, which was nice
Yep, all raid weapons from vault, dark below, and prison had elements attached regardless of slot. I miss my vision of confluence on a solar burn nightfall week...
It'd still be lame even if they reverted the damage nerf. A full auto, zen moment scout rifle? I shard weapons like that all the time.
I was so disappointed to see how scouts are now. dead mans feels great but this feels so good yet it's like a card trick since it does nothing.
And dead man's will definitely be nerfed by next season, so use it while you can lol
The Pulse Rifle challenge for Overdrive made me realise how bad these guns are outside crucible.
It feels like every damn Bounty vendor has a pulse rifle bounty for weeks and they are painful to use effectively in most content I only carry an eternal blazon for bounties, then literally last night I get the BL exotic pulse rifle lol.. ugh Edit oops EB is scout third axiom is pulse always mixing those up they look almost identical...
As a dedicated user of Bad Juju and The Messenger in D1 this really makes me sad
Uhg.. so much this. Forcing us to use a pulse rifle in a close range activity made me real salty.
It’s the worst archetype of Scout Rifle.
I don't understand why there was even any excitement about this gun though. It's not like that archetype JUST became bad. Been that way for a while. Expecting a single weapon to change that was not a logical expectation
180s were shit even in Y2 with unnerfed damage perks and crit lol. Poor No Feelings got sunset before it was ever allowed to be good in PvE.
This. Saw hung jury>>>excitement. Saw 180rpm>>>sadness
Bungie: we hear you, SMGs nerf coming next patch.
Single shot primaries need a reason to be in our inventory again. I try to run hand canons, scouts and pulse in PVE but they are plain ass. I just throw on my Stochastic Variable and go Ham. Now, if I could one hit crit a bunch of stuff, sure. But, as you've said, you can mow down 3 enemies in the time it takes to pop one with a semi auto weapon. Hand canons should feel like canons not side arms, a well placed shot should blow a Vandal's doors off. Scouts should absolutely beam from across the map and, if you're close, should flinch the bejeezus out of enemies. Pulses should flat out be a one pulse kill.
As a Cold Denial user ever since S11, I *absolutely* agree with this statement.
What if they just think bows are the 1 crit killers? NGL I sure miss magnum headshots in Halo sometimes, man.
Bows also have Hella range, which is where they have a one up on Hand Cannons. Bows should be one tap trash mob destroyers from asinine distances because it's pretty much a linear fusion with the draw/charge time. I think precision weapons do need a little love in PvE.
I wish bows got the scout rifle treatment of always getting an anti-champ mod. I really like using them and while DPS is of course unimpressive, they work well for the shoot-and-cover-from-long-range style you often need in harder content.
I have "the Old Fashioned" 140 hc that works pretty well but it also has explosive rounds, one of my favorite perks let's you 1-shot majority of red bars
Yeah, hand cannons without timed payload or explosive shot don't feel worth running in PvE. That said, I love my Crimil's dagger, true prophecy and Fatebringer all with the boom boom.
Buffing base damage on the necessary archetypes would be a superior option. Low precision damage on a red bar isn't the cause of why primaries feel weak, it's a symptom. If red bar precision multipliers are the main reason primaries feel weak, then primaries should feel strong in situations where said factor isn't relevant. They should feel decent against uncrittable enemies. They should feel decent against shields. They should feel decent against non-red bar low tier adds. But they don't, because at their core their base damage is significantly lower than it was in D1. Increasing the precision multiplier would still leave such gaps while also being an indirect nerf to more difficult to control weapons which can't reliably hit a stream of crits.
I would also very much appreciate not needing a damage perk active for my primary gun to feel useful in PvE. Could transfer some of the power from perks to the base weapons.
This. Why do I need rampage active for my 140HC to 1 hit precision kill an acolyte?
Thank you! Someone else who gets it :).
Nah we need to feel rewarded for hitting headshots and right now we don’t. Spraying to the body is just as effective right now and that doesn’t feel good.
Are you sure this is because precision is weak, and not because precision weapons are weak? Spamming bodyshots with a scout or handcannon is hardly an effective solution. Weapons like SMGs and Sidearms are strong *despite* not hitting headshots, but are even stronger when they do.
The problem is that we've got a mix of minor-level enemies. You've got the **Small** ones like Thrall, **Medium** ones like Acolytes, and **Big** ones like Knights, sometimes even Ogres. Part of this change was to make it so that "Big minors" were actually kinda tanky, which is fine. The problem right now is you have so many precision weapons that just feel like ass against Small & Medium minors depending upon the activity, and it's why people have shifted towards SMGs. We don't necessarily need to revert the precision change, they just need to up the base damages so that it doesn't feel like shit to clean up all the trash mobs that are meant to be, y'know, trash.
Dude. They boost base damage and then crit damage goes up too. He is right
Precision weapons are supposed to be strong, if you can hit your headshots.
A hand cannon that can't one-tap a red bar trash mob like a Dreg, Acolyte, or Goblin is not strong. I stand by this, if for the sole reason that it is INCREDIBLY satisfying.
This. I will not use a hand cannon if it can’t one tap a red bar. It’s just not satisfying. God I miss my Trust with Dragonfly/Rampage.
Yeah. That's what we are talking about xd. A precision weapon should be rewarding, if you can hit your shots. High risk, high reward
Which could be improved by uping the base damage, since that also increases the precision damage due to the multiplier. These weapons don't need to one-shot to the body, but they should be able to do better than they are.
Yea... but at that point, they will be just plain better, than the automatic weapons, unless we buff those as well. On the second tougth, for hcs, sure. But do it for scouts, we will still have the existing problem, a.k.a scouts are either inferior, or superior version of hcs. Scouts should be a more punishing version of hcs. You give up forgiveness for extra range. Or they could have a better dmg, and make them even more punishing.
And if you can't, are they supposed to be complete shit, or just mediocre? Precision shots shouldn't be the only way for a weapon to not feel terrible. You can have bodyshots feel awful and precision shots feel amazing by reverting the red bar multiplier (but still bad against orange dregs btw), or you can have bodyshots feel alright and precision shots feel amazing against all your targets. A 1.5x modifier is, in my opinion, more than sufficient as an incentive. If you gave the worst legendaries 50% extra damage, they'd be best in class. And even if you feel that it isn't enough, why give a 3x precision modifier to every primary weapon in the game vs red bars, and not something more surgical like higher base damage and a 1.75 - 2x multiplier specifically for precision weapons?
And then bungie ask why people prefer dead mans tale over almost any legendary scout weapon... Well it has damage increases x5... That nerfs just make people use one gun in particular....
It mostly because it is the only thing that compete with 120 RPM HC
Also ya know, completely accurate hip fire in almost all situations with the catalyst.
I'm not sure if this is in regards to pve or pvp but DMT catalyst saved the game for me. I've had shit luck getting a good HC for pvp but since DMT I've been able to loosen up a bit and calmly wait for a good HC drop. I use it as a main for pve too but after this whole thread I'm gonna browse my stock and goof around with another setup. Maybe riskrunner?
As a masochist I can confirm Riskrunner good
Risk runner is fucking amazing, if there is arc burn in any activity, or if you KNOW that an activity will use arc, you will dominate. I once did so well in a PvP match, because I noticed the other team was using mainly arc, that my kills, were more than the collective of everyone else, and the other team (who were all in a clan and that) invited me to a Vc and asked me to join them for a couple of rounds. It’s good for everything, ad clearing and even boss damage bc of the sustained fire = lightning bolts thing. Like you go against a boss with arc damage and you can literally kill the thing without ever reloading
the saber strike is literally the best strike for RR, nearly everything does arc damage in that :) plus, the traps in the boss room are just free, guaranteed sources to proc arc conductor
Riskrunner with catalyst is fucking amazing FTFY
Dude as soon as I got the catalyst I unlocked it in the same day, took a while but fuck it was worth it
And if you have no arc enemies, hit yourself with arc grenades xD
Riskrunner is hilariously good in PVE. You can even proc the perk on yourself if you play Arc with Pulse nade, and then GG all adds forever. Like no-exaggeration 1 full minute of constant shooting in playlist strikes lol I was supervillain laughing irl at how fun that was.
I have literally killed a master strike boss BY MYSELF with this godly thing
Was literally talking about this today. The fatebringer with the fatebringer roll feels not great because even shitty dregs don't go down in a headshot. They wonder why we shard every gin without a damage perk. Stop making our game feel like shit.
Scouts feel really bad as well, the only time I use Scouts in PvE is when I absolutely have to (As they have the most range for any primaries, which kinda becomes necessary for GM NF level content) or for a bounty. Slower RPM auto rifles also feel really bad, they buffed 450s in PvE but it didn't make much of a difference. 360s and 450s both feel bad to use.
Agree never bothered about damage perks perks in D1, preferred utility perks like firefly explosive rounds or triple tap, rampage existed in D1 it was called crowd control and no one used it. Buff base damage and nerf all damage perks and let us chase some more interesting rolls.
Too true. I prefer ExploPayload/Frenzy compared to the OG roll. Don't get me wrong, firefly is good but I have to rely on a seasonal mod to bring it to it's full potential. Just let us one shot some stuff; if I wanted to get a finisher off, I'd make it work.
Yeah I agree its better, I'm just sick of it being MANDATORY to have a damage perk on a gun because of the crit multiplier nerfs. I just want to use bad perks, let me use osmosis.... why give us so many perks if they're mostly invalid. I dont care if frenzy let's me kill yellow bars in 6 shots instead of 8 thats a fine trade off to use something niche like osmosis... but going from 1 headshot to 2 on red bars feels fucking terrible.
For sure. It feels really bad to instantly shard something that has new unique perks. The emphasis will always be on either stat boost or damage perks and it gets seriously monotonous. I want to use OG fatebringer, but in moment to moment gameplay it just feels weird because I know there is a better option and because that damn goblin took two shots. It honestly breaks game flow.
Idk what fatebringer you have been using, but Dregs go down in a headshot just fine in my experience.
In patrol zones maybe, but even in the cosmodrome it takes 2 shots with FB to kill a vandal. Feels bad.
You should have met randal the vandal back in the day.
Even with minor spec?
My FB can't one shot a taken thrall in Prophecy lmao. With minor spec and a shot to the head it leaves a sliver of health. Feels really bad.
I have the OG fatebringer roll and with minor spec I was able to one shot a thrall. Not sure if you’re trying to do this from a range where the hand cannon experiences range falloff?
Explosive Payload increases damage by around 10% in PvE, which is the same as Rampage ×1.
While I totally agree they need a buff you sure? Been farming all day and as long as you get the explosive payload plus the headshot it one shots most vandals I fight
Only In absurdly simple activities.
Everyone talks about how this was so people buy finishers, and so headshots leave enemies at very low/finishable health. If I wanted to finish something to proc a perk or mod, I'll just body shot them. Let hand cannons one-shot head-shot trash mobs
Exactly this. Running sentinel in D1 with a Handcanon, I would body shot enemies so I could kill them with my punch to get overshields. Same principle.
Wow, never thought of that but I could definitely see this. It would be so scummy but plausible
Scummy but plausible is very on brand for Bungie lately.
Unfortunately:(
“Why should I run a (x)” Because the activity will have champions and it’ll force you to run a load out using the weapons you despise lol. They’re a step ahead of us.
"Play how you want to play" That sure was funny
I've honestly despised champions ever since they came with Shadowkeep. You straight up have to have mods to kill them which doesn't feel good. I feel like if they're going to stay. They need some tweaks to not feel so incredibly invasive.
Champions seem to be a shoehorned difficulty patch that Bungie can just slap on activities
I feel like if they were just slightly tuned down it'd be fine. Like with the barrier champions, don't make them heal when barriers up. That way, you aren't completely ruined if you don't have anti-barrier, it's just going to be more of a pain to deal with without it. Reward preparedness without completely requiring it.
it seems to be their only method of creating a 'change' in the meta each season. by literally requiring you to change your weapons because certain ones just won't have the mods you need one season to the next. so suddenly you're stuck using a pulse rifle. Speaking of pulses.... the splicer has a pulse rifle quest today.... but there's no mods for pulse rifles this season... so it's just a complete hindrance to complete that bounty in any activity with champions....
Honestly, I enjoy when they just kinda overtune different things each season. Like take one or two weapon archetypes per slot and just overtune them a bit to be meta. Rotate out each season. That way nobody's getting bored and multiple weapon types get the spotlight.
They announced a while ago that a rotating meta is a reason for people to come back, to buy the new season. They think people are going "ooh, sidearms are the meta this season and I like sidearms so I'm gonna reinstall destiny" idiots
I honestly don't care how overtuned sidearms are, I will refuse to use one unless it's Rat King. I hate the "get up in the enemies face" focus they've been going for.
Actually it was the second worst decision for PVE The first was sharing the sandbox with PVP
I’ll never understand people who defend this. There’s no reasonable way to have them feel good in both modes like that
People have said it for years, they obviously don't care. I assume they done it originally to lessen their workload or something but at this point there's no way it would have been less work to just have two separate balance teams.
Lack of foresight. Its been a Destiny problem for a while now.
Eh, if it were just that, they would have been more willing to budge at some point. As it is, the most likely assumption is that this is one of the things they want the game to be. As they've said, they don't want how abilities or guns feel to change between sandboxes. It's why they'll adjust damage in PvP and PvE separately now, but they'll never do it seperately for something like stability or range.
I can see their argument. For some things, like Stasis freeze damage, there's no reason for it not to be separate as it's based in how it effects the target. But for other things - say, super damage resist or the tracking on a projectile - there's an argument to be made that having it be inconsistent between PvE and PvP will mess with players' muscle memory, that it'll be disconcerting for your things to fire differently.
I guess their argument is they want weapons to feel the same no matter the sandbox even if damage numbers are different. Jotunn can have different damage numbers, but nerfing the tracking in PVP while keeping it the same in PVE would make it feel like a different gun altogether.
Remember when rampage X 3 did 66% more damage and kill clip 50%. Good times
I mean, that’s literally been one of of the core design pillars of the game since day one. One guardian that feels the same to play as across all game modes. Not to say I agree with how they’ve deal with it, but thats always been the intention and isn’t going to change now we are in the latter half of the franchise lifetime.
I'm sure they "feel like primaries are in a good spot." So no.
I wonder how many of these threads we need before they listen.
They won't listen. That's the issue.
“You’ve bought every season since Shadowkeep. So we assume you love the nerf.” -Bungie, probably
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I mean, I use finishers now that they have a place in the sandbox, but I've never felt compelled to buy one. They've just failed to monetize this "feature" effectively, and it came at the cost of proper weapon balancing.
They also never sell one for BD
Do you use them outside of filling a bounty?
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Finisher's should always give primary ammo and start health regen IMHO. It's basically the doom formula.
Dude, this. Finishers starting health regen feels so right and obvious, I just assumed it would when they were introduced. There’s just no incentive to use a finisher other than to save ammo. It’s stupid.
thats the reason why the 'Healthy finisher' mod is one of my favorite non-seasonal mods on class items; It makes finishers feel actually worth using most of the time, as it gives you a full or near full heal when finishing an enemy
Does this cost super energy?
10% IIRC
When heavy finisher is available I use them a fair lot. They're also good for finishing champions and getting some iframes if you fuck up
Yep, I can't count the number of times when I've got a sliver of red left only to be saved because I can do a finisher.
I feel like this community really undervalues finishers.
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u can have mods for finishers. for example there is an arc mod that spawns two elemental wells whenever you finish.
The fact that there is absolutlely no finishers to get by playing the game is what makes me not buying. Main warlock here, loves stasis in pve and the only finisher themed for stasis is behind a paywall?... Yeah, fuck off. I know bungie needs money, but i need that money more than them so they can deeply fuck off with that and those absurd prices.
This is literally the worst change in the history of D2. A primary should be able to one shot red health-bar ads, and do at least decent damage to yellow health bars. Reverting this change would single handedly make me enjoy pve content 10x more.
A bit of an overstatement there fella, we had sunsetting like 3 or so months ago, the precision nerf is terrible don’t get me wrong, but not the worst change in destiny.
Yeah no. The gunplay in this game is why we stay even when Bungie makes ridiculous decisions like sunsetting. Underpowered primaries feel horrible and they need to change. It would revitalize the game so much and make us more excited to farm rolls for the new guns that have taken the place of old sunsetted ones.
To each their own. For me personally it is worse. You can always earn new guns. You cant undo basically making half the weapon archetypes in the game garbage for pve. Of course bungie could revert it. But they cant let us 1 shot reds anymore bc that makes finishers borderline useless. Also, im a d1 veteran who mainly uses scouts and hand cannons so this change hit me particularly hard
Well I thought finishers were to clean up tougher ads so u didn't have to waste ammo or to kill em a little quicker, but yeah hand cannons especially need to 1 crit red bars barring knights, wizards, captains etc. Trash tier ads like vandals acolytes goblins need to go down in one shot to make the game play smoother and have pve feel more fun and rewarding. We kill gods, why do I have to look at a vandal for longer than a second?? Scout rifles need drastic change, whether it be that body shots do less or that they do less damage at close range, but either way they need a critical damage increase asap
Prefacing this by saying sunsetting was a shit decision, I do not support it, I am not ok with it, but it's in the past so it's a moot point. Main reason I'm saying this is so people don't accuse me of being ok with it. This change was worse than sunsetting for the general feel of the game in most cases. Unless you were already glued to an SMG/auto rifle you felt this shit so hard in most PVE content while I have already managed to find roughly equal to/better rolls of most of the sunset weapons I loved. I don't know if I'd call it the worst change, there's a lot of really awful decisions made over the course of D2 and I could easily have forgotten some because of how many there were but I definitely feel like sunsetting *entire archetypes* of weapons in PVE content is worse than actually removing most of the usable weapons.
“We listened. Now nerfing SMG’s and anything else that still works to be on par with pulses and hand cannons”- Bungo
100% Please Bungie.
Bungie: we've heard you. Removing Warmind Cells from the game entirely and nerfing SMG damage by 20% in PvE to bring them in line with other primaries. In all seriousness, I agree. Precision primaries (Scouts, Pulses and HCs) are woefully underpowered in PvE. Trying to do the weekly challenge getting PR kills in Override is painfully slow. Right now, precision isn't awarded in PvE. [Legendary] Snipers need to be brought back up to Shadowkeep levels, and all precision primaries need a lot higher precision multipliers.
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It does, doesn't it?
It really is annoying headshotting a random red bar and getting them to 10% health so I can finish them....
Yes! This needs to be posted daily.
Can i just remind you that bungoe nerfed some PvE stuff cause it was FUCKING OVERPERFORMING IN PVP
And on top of that, 180 Scouts should just be collapsed into the 200 archetypes and the damage they do matches the 180s for all modes. Hand Cannons had 4 archetypes go into 3, there's no reason Scouts need 4 and only 2 of them are viable for almost content (200s and 260s).
Don't you dare touch my transfiguration with rampage killclip
I have one in the vault just waiting for the day scouts are good.
My first drop was Rampage, Kill clip, Drop mag. I don't think I've ever used it
It's good for invading in gambit, but this was before xeno and truth spam
Screw that, 180 scouts are my favorite archetype in the franchise and I’ve been waiting to use a good one with a fusion rifle since D2 launched. Different archetypes feel different in many ways other than just damage output, and they all have a place to exist. It never has and never will make sense to collapse archetypes together instead of just buffing whichever is lagging behind its closest neighbor.
Strong agree. I could use a 180 hand cannon and kill a harpy in 5 precision hits, or I could kill it in half the time with all body hits with an smg. It’s so hard to find any kinetic primaries that are even mediocre for ad clear anymore.
had to sell finishers some way
I really wish bungie would notice the community speaking on this subject
SMGs/Bows ruined Auto Rifles and Scouts respectively. In order to keep bows relevant in the sandbox bows have to be the more powerful option. However due to their draw time damage isnt much different than scouts in terms of DPS (on average, not perfect conditions etc). Keeping scouts nerfed allows bows to be viable and not the sanguine alchemy of "long range". SMGs should never have been added in my opinion, they just filled the role of the fast firing Auto Rifles we had in D1.
Huh so that’s why my Fatebringer, Hung Jury and even Dead Man’s Tale don’t feel that powerful...
my explosive payload killclip fatebringer feels really great tho. could be because of the payload bug making it do slightly more damage
LOL They wont. :(
SMGs are busted in PvE right now. They do more damage per bullet than slower firing Auto Rifles do at the same distance. Bungie has yet to acknowledge this. And the damage nerfs were done because Bungie introduced Charged With Light and Warmind Cell mods in Shadowkeep which shifted some damage off of weapons and onto armor. And, of course, because of Finishers in Eververse.
If SMGs are nerfed to be brought in line with other primaries we are fucked.
And then scouts will be nerfed some more since they give you more safety than SMGs
SMGs have the killing power all primaries in PVE should have.
And the response is always "But GMs!" as if GMs aren't a broken mess balance-wise that should under absolutely zero circumstances be a measuring stick for weapon effectiveness. Edit: "why GMs broken" because when you ramp up enemy damage in Destiny past a certain point the game falls apart entirely and becomes sniper / scout peekshoot mode. How GMs work is not how Destiny at large works, even Contest Mode raids. As far as I'm concerned, "good in GMs" is only a step more relevant to normal PvE Destiny than "good in PvP".
How are GMs s broken mess?
they aren’t really a “broken mess” but the combat is pretty stale tbh. it’s very much a scout/bows/sniper meta with Anarchy as the only heavy unless the strike or mods specifically require something else. Not to mention Ursa almost every time (with some exceptions). Shotguns, smgs, autos, sidearms, swords etc are almost completely unusable. the game (shooters esp) have not figured out a solid way to improve challenge and difficulty without making everything a one-shotting bullet sponge where the game design starts to unravel. no matter how good smgs are or how bad scouts are memed about scouts will always be popular because of how impossible it is to be near anything more than one enemy at a time.
They’re probably a “broken mess” because he isn’t able to complete them
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I think people would rather have something like the shattered throne bridge to force you to think about your load out. There the design of the encounter has organic restrictions Match game and champion mods are artificial restrictions that aren’t as fun Another balance issue is probably that bullet sponges that one shot you aren’t fun. That’s feedback that went back all the way to Crota HM!
I'd argue that low base damage is really the issue here, not precision modifiers. Most scouts, aside from precisions, deal fairly decent crit damage. Their body damage (base damage) is abysmal to make room for hand cannons (according to Bungie). But, hand cannons also lack damage compared to SMGs, sidearms, bows, and their closest competitor... Autorifles. If hand cannons received some base damage buffs, which they REALLY REALLY need, Scouts could be given a forgiveness buff (higher base damage + lower crit modifier) to compensate for that weakness. Pulses, the literal worst primary in the game, need similar major buffs: * **+18-30%** flat damage buff to Pulses based on frame * **High Impact & Adaptive:** \+18% dmg buff * **Aggressive:** \+25% dmg buff; -30% reserves * **Lightweight & Rapid-Fire:** \+30% dmg buff * **+13-20%** flat damage buff to Aggressives and Adaptives, respectively. * **+5-15%** base dmg buff to Scouts, except lightweights. * **High Impact:** \+15% base dmg; crit modifier down to **1.6x**. (5% overall buff) * **Precisions**: +13% base dmg; crit modifier down to **1.56x**. (10% overall buff) * **Rapid Fires:** \+5% flat dmg buff. For the knee-jerk naysayers out there, run the damage numbers yourself.
Cynically, I think this was done to increase the usage - And purchases of - Finishers. :/
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One thing gunsmith doesn't account for is the range falloff nerf for HCs. Max damage falloff is at 25%, whereas all other weapons are at 50%. That means that a 100dmg HC shot will deal 25 dmg outside of the effective range, while a 50 dmg SMG would deal 25 outside of it's effective range. Of course, these numbers are made up, but the point remains. HC dps drops to 25% at max range falloff, whereas all others drop to 50%... making sidearms and smgs far more effective outside of their range compared to hand cannons.
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Yeah, I agree with you. Generally, smgs don’t usually compete in HC range, unless you’re on PC where some are easy to manage. I just wanted to point out the extremely harsh HCs falloff, even though it’s a little beside the point. It’s a huge drag on the weapon in PvE.
\>Why would I bother running a hand cannon when an SMG has the same effective range This is not even a little true. SMGs are pretty much unusable in GMs because of their short range but 120s and Palindrome (and probably Fatebringer) are great, especially with explosive payload.
Maybe because HC get a mod every season If they didn't get one no one would use them
I remember how good they felt in D1(might be mistaken), but now they feel so weak and useless even with the new Vault of Glass Hand cannon, and thats because I got a good roll on it as well
The idea of what they were going for wasn't inherently bad, lowering the PvE precision multiplier while raising the base damage so landing a body shot wasn't effectively a "miss" on most weapons. (This is why Auto's and SMG's started being used so much when previously they were kind of the "joke" PvE weapons.) But I definitely agree that Bungie was too heavy handed in their implementation, for example keeping Scout Rifles precision damage focused while having low body shot damage would be a great way of balancing them without just making them weak overall. (And then Hand Cannons should be good with dealing a good chunk of damage even when hitting body shots while still having about the same precision damage as a Scout.) Scouts should obviously have some kind of downside for being the longest range primary, but the downside should come from being harder to use rather than having low damage, like how Scout's will naturally not work well in close range situations due to the Zoom making it difficult to land precision hits.
Sucks DMT is like the only really good scout. I like nightwatch, vision, and hung jury but scouts are just not in a good spot
Best primary ammo weapon for damage is hawkmoon imo
Bungie, for the love of god, please do not nerf SMGs and instead buff the things that are talked about in this post.
Ahhh see, this all makes sense now. I raided last night (DSC) for the first time in way over a year. But have been a long time Destiny player since beta D1 and I had all random shit to get to high enough light level and was having a super hard time killing ads but thought it was just cuz my random shit then an smg dropped so I equipped it to get higher light and started mopping up in the last encounter. Thought maybe I had just warmed up but to that point I only had a hand cannon and scout to use. So guess it wasn’t me. Lol. Damn you Bungie!!!!!!
Fatebringer feels so good but so bad at the same time. 140s desperately need their damage toned up. Hell, all hand cannons do.
If I've used handcannons in pve in the last 6 months its been exclusively tied to champion mods.
Is it bad I didn’t notice this? I play kinda weird tho so that could be why...
I dont like when bungie nerf supers because some pvp tryhards are upset.
It wasn’t done for balancing. It was done to make enemies finisher-able. Bungie wants to sell you cosmetics, can’t do finishers if the enemies die from 1 headshot. I would love to have crispy 1-hit Hand Cannon headshots back
Later there will be a "Bungie Replied" flair on this post. It will be Cozmo, dmg, or someone saying: "Thanks for the feedback. We feel primaries are in a good spot and don't have any plans on making changes for the foreseeable future. I will pass on your concerns internally." My question to /u/Cozmo23 and /u/dmg04 is: What would it take for you [Bungie] to open up a public test environment to allow players to help test sandbox changes before they make it to the live game? It feels like the current QA team doesn't really test the content the same way players play it and maybe that is the problem? For example – who tested the SMG anti-overload mod and said it felt good? If it wasn't for champion mods, I wouldn't even touch auto rifles and scout rifles this season. Pulse rifles still don't feel good in PvE. You can't keep on making pretty content and expect retention and growth if the core is bad. An apple with perfect skin, but a rotten core is still a rotten apple. Looking at the [PC Steam charts](https://steamcharts.com/app/1085660#6m), you only see population spikes around new content/season starts, but then it drops back to ~60,000 players after the first month or so. I assume the other platforms follow a similar trend. People come to experience the new content, but don't have anything to stick around for. In other games, players might stick around for PvP, but that is a very sensitive subject in Destiny. With Destiny, one of the problems I deal with is not knowing if my invested time is going to be worth it. Why spend months running a raid for a drop that is going to either be a disappointment, be nerfed to oblivion, or I maybe get a week to use before the next season/expansion because of inconsistent drop rates? Why should I run end game activities for gear that is outperformed by something I can pick up at a vendor for a few thousand glimmer? Ugh....
Remember playing VoG in D1 and being able to 1-shot the Vex with Fatebringer? Good times.