It is hard to read any update about Destiny 2 these days without scratching your head in befuddlement, and that’s certainly true with a giant sandbox nerf, buff and upcoming changes post that went up yesterday.
There are about 5,000 words to go through in this new blog, but there is one thing I need to pull out that is just…I don’t understand what we’re doing here. Bungie is refusing to fix an extremely obvious problem in that it has limited “relevant” exotic selection to a handful of options, classifying them has New Gear, which will give you an often necessary bonus to get a higher grade in Portal activities, and fulfill modifiers like requiring a build that uses all New Gear.
Bungie is not doing the obvious thing and simply removing that restriction and letting players make whatever exotic build they want without a penalty, they’re simply adding a couple more exotics. Here’s what they said about weapons, and the armor bit is similar:
“In Ash & Iron, we’ll be expanding the Featured Exotic Weapon list with the following options. They’ll benefit from the Artifact Buff and contribute to your score with an intent to add more diversity into loadouts. We’ve also revisited a few of these options to make them a bit more appealing.”
They’re just adding 3-4 new weapons to each weapon slot, and 2-3 exotic pieces of armor to the list. I am tearing my hair out here.
We can debate the New Gear idea with the newly added weapons and armor, I suppose, albeit I still come down on the side of mostly hating it, but this exotic issue is the easiest solve in the world and they still won’t do it.
This has created situations like this season putting a bunch of solar buffs in the artifact, but not allowing all solar exotics to be used without penalty. I have a good Ashen Wake solar build this season, but the exotic is not featured, so this has likely cost me more than a few ranks in various runs, and I can simply never run the build at all for the New Gear modifier or things like challenge missions that require only New Gear to be used. Then you have the most obvious thing in the world, the fact that exotic class items are not in the featured lists, which are a part of 90% of Prismatic builds, which are now non-functional if you want to stick with the New Gear criteria. (And don’t even get me started on how exotics are not in the Tier system yet, and allegedly will not be until year 2).
I cannot count how many times Bungie has said they want you to “play your way” in Destiny, but they are herding players into a handful of new weapons and armor to be used without a penalty, but even exotics are somehow wrapped up in all this in a way that makes absolutely no sense. They will figure this out eventually, but I truly have no idea what’s taking this long.
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