Armchair Designing

Below is a concept for a Destiny activity to shore up some of the game’s continuing weaknesses – replayable, dynamic combat encounters with additional pressure and competitive elements, inspired from the success of the Lost to Light secret mission.

Arms Race

Hybrid Vanguard/Crucible Activity

• Frenzied cooperative-competitive activity
• A fast-paced, high-energy skill test for:
  • PVE wave clear efficiency
  • boss efficiency
  • rapid cost-benefit decision-making
  • PVP skill

Something that was shown in The Taken King was the value of high end PVE content for smaller groups of players – the Black Spindle Lost to Light secret daily mission addendum was met extremely positively by the community and at least for the first couple of appearances, provided an answer to a question that had been present since Destiny’s launch – I like PVE, but my whole team isn’t on. Now what can I do to keep going? It was an extremely challenging set of encounters, but the most effective way to keep the tempo up was the timer. Even in a historic run that ended with 4 minutes left on the clock, it’s a breathless sprint through the fights where it feels like you never have time to pause for even a second. There is nothing else like it in the game – there are hard fights, but the timer means something. It brings value that just isn’t present otherwise.

But the Spindle mission wasn’t evergreen. It was a static challenge that offered no reward, no reason to return once you had cleared your three loot runs. Its shelf life was limited by the static encounters, by the standard formula for success that teams eventually arrived at and clung to. Gotta have a titan, gotta have Raze-Lighter. Clear these rooms in this way because it’s our time-tested best way to do it. And then it becomes rote, as static PVE does when you’ve exhausted it. Maybe that’s inescapable, but maybe it isn’t.

Arms Race applies the core principles that made the Lost to Light daily successful in a more structured and varied context. This is a multi-fireteam activity with three distinct phases. While Lost to Light, as an activity designed for the very hardcore, was able to use a timer and be more punitive, here we would use soft time gates and a consistently-effective speed motivator — competition. It’s a race. 

Phase One – The Test of Speed

This phase of the activity is analogous to the Ketch progression in Lost to Light, with each fireteam spawning into their own wing of the level. The teams are instructed to race to the waypoint and must fight their way through difficult encounters towards a central arena. Crucible-style scoring UI is in effect, and each AI kill grants a certain number of points – this is important to the overall structure and ranking system of the activity. Throughout this phase, a clock counts up from 0, measuring the team’s current phase completion time. At various points in each wing, the teams will be able to gauge the other team’s progress and see them clearing their wing through windows, viewscreens, or some other indicator (a stylized progress bar like you would see in a racing game). Side chambers could hold minibosses that grant your team a stat buff that lasts through the rest of the activity, forcing players to make a decision between spending that time on the boss for the buff or moving forward more quickly. Once the team reaches their arena entrance, which serves as the final measuring point, their timer stops. Based on tiers of par times, a multiplier is applied to their PVE kill score and that is set in the Ghost menu as the Phase One Score.

Phase Two – The Test of Might

At this point, the two teams are at an entrance to a large, cavernous room – potentially similar in size to the Prison of Elders arena. The structure of the arena entrance can differ between each map. In some instances, it may be valuable to separate the two teams and have them enter through separate doors across from each other, but in other cases one large, monolithic door with the teams intermingling would make more sense.

The door opens and the activity’s AI boss is introduced, again in a similar fashion to those in the Prison of Elders. The scoring UI has updated, and now in addition to scoring points from kills, your team can score from boss damage. The two fireteams work in cooperation to down the boss and clear the room from waves of enemy fodder, each trying to maximize efficiency for scoring purposes. At specific points on the map, players can trigger traps that spawn additional enemies for the other fireteam to deal with, in hopes that they are overwhelmed and die – there is a score penalty for player death, but you also run the risk of feeding points to the opponent. At this point, you cannot directly engage the other team.

The boss will drop to combined fire (with the last hit getting a small number of bonus points), and the phase ends. The scores are tallied, and we move to the next phase.

Phase Three – The Test of Cunning

This phase is a digital win-or-lose situation – it prevents any possibility for ties at the highest possible level of play. Phase Three directly pits the two fireteams against one another in a single round Elimination match. It’s not just elimination, though – the traps from the previous phase are still active (assuming they were not used), letting you distract your enemy by throwing AI at them to deal with. Standard Elimination revive rules apply. Since the same arena is being used for both Phases Two and Three, it must be able to properly work for both.

The hope is that since so much of the activity is focused on PVE efficiency, the core set of optimal PVP weapons will not become the standard for this round – ideally, there would be very little time to pause and prepare for the competitive portion without risking a wipe to an early rush. Instead, you would see a greater variety of tactics and equipment as people try to meet both needs as best as they could.

The team that successfully eliminates the other gains a large points boost, and the final scores are tallied. Rewards would exist in three tiers – Gold, Silver, and Bronze, or their equivalents. Each of these tiers would be assigned a score gate (ex: 15000 for Gold, 12000 for Silver, 9000 for Bronze) The teams are then awarded based on their performance – it would be possible for both teams to receive the highest tier of reward, but the winning team would also be guaranteed an additional Silver tier package. This way, an extremely close games don’t feel like a bust for either team, but the winners are getting more for their victory.

The below are structured attempts at trying to plug up some holes in Destiny’s current exotic weapon stable – in some cases attempting to make valid examples of archetypes that currently do not see much use, in some cases attempting to shift gameplay to a less-seen path, and in some cases just attempting to put forth some new ideas.

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Cascade

Weapon Class:  Auto Rifle

Base Stat Frame: Zarinaea-D

Exotic Node:

• Overwhelming Force: Each kill grants Crowd Control. Crowd Control stacks diminishingly three times.
  • 1x CC stack: 30% bonus damage, 5 second duration
  • 2x CC stack: 40% bonus damage, 4 second duration
  • 3x CC stack: 50% bonus damage, 3 second duration

Tier 1 Nodes:

• Accurized Ballistics
• Smart Drift Control
• Field Choke

Tier 2 Node:

• Performance Bonus: 25% chance to add ammo to magazine after each kill

Tier 3 Node:

• Persistence: This weapon grows more accurate the longer it is fired.

Tier 4 Nodes:

• Fitted Stock
• Extended Mag
• Rifled Barrel

Item Goals: Create a use case for a kinetic auto rifle exotic choice that can hold its own against major-target-heavy encounters by exploiting damage boosts from additional minor enemies. Introduce a streak-heavy active playstyle that fulfills the bullet hose power fantasy most auto rifles fail to achieve.

Aesthetic Notes: Ammo counter readout color changes as stacks increase (green -> yellow -> flashing red) and arcs of electricity flash along the barrel line at max stacks.

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Mistrial

Weapon Class: Scout Rifle

Base Stat Frame: Treads Upon Stars

Exotic Node:

• Of Your Peers: After three consecutive precision hits, your next shot will be a free lucky bullet (Triple Tap + reliable LITC).
• Tier 1 Nodes:

• Smooth Ballistics
• Soft Ballistics
• Linear Compensator

Tier 2 Node:

• Zen Moment: Landing shots with this weapon increases stability.

Tier 3 Nodes:

• Armor Piercing Rounds
• Hand-Loaded
• Injection Mold

Tier 4 Node:

• Reactive Reload: Reloading after a kill grants a damage bonus for a short time.

Item Goals: Incorporate Triple Tap in a way that feels more transparent than current lackluster player experience. Create a zen-state feeling for players landing constant consecutive hits and being meaningfully rewarded without weapon DPS rising to the point of breaking encounters. Improve current boss fight precision monotony at endgame strike difficulty by adding minigame.

Aesthetic Notes: Four lights on outer side of weapon scope (facing player) with matching indicators in scoped view. Three yellow indicators light up as each corresponding precision hit is scored. Fourth light (green) indicates lucky bullet is ready.

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The Omnicide Event

Weapon Class: Heavy Machine Gun

Base Stat Frame: Corrective Measure

Exotic Node:

• Pick Your Poison: This weapon changes its damage type to match the shield color of the last target hit.

Tier 1 Nodes:

• Accurized Ballistics
• CQB Ballistics
• Linear Compensator

Tier 2 Node:

• Counterbalance: This weapon has increased stability.

Tier 3 Nodes:

• Skip Rounds
• Reinforced Barrel
• Braced Frame

Tier 4 Node:

• Hip Fire: This weapon has bonus accuracy when fired from the hip.

Item Goals: A shielded-major solution. Not the highest damage output in class, but a good all-round solution when facing mixed-faction encounters or Ironclad strikes. In high level content, especially Match Game weeks, fulfills a fantasy of your heavy being able to chew through anything the game throws at it and not suffer damage reduction. Stability and hipfire bonuses with this HMG archetype creates Rambo moments as you throw a wall of fire at enemies. Trades damage output for versatility.

Aesthetic notes: Rounds must change color to match current weapon damage, along with indicator screen below scope.

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H-388 Omniscience Engine

Weapon Type: Sniper Rifle

Base Stat Frame: Praedyth’s Revenge

Exotic Node:

• The Eye: Viewing a target in scope with this weapon marks them with a Keen Scout tag visible to your entire fireteam for 5 seconds. This weapon deals reduced damage (75% of normal impact-tier) and has no scope glint.

Tier 1 Nodes:

• Aggressive Ballistics
• Smart Drift Control
• Field Choke

Tier 2 Node:

• Hidden Hand: This weapon has greater aim assist.

Tier 3 Nodes:

• Perfect Balance
• Injection Mold
• Casket Mag

Tier 4 Node:

• Unflinching

Item Goals: Move sniping in high-level Crucible activities away from people passively scoping down hallways waiting for runners and towards a more active scouting-support role. Enables a “mission control” experience as players direct their team towards their target while remaining less visible than normal to enemies. Lower impact makes it a less offensively viable weapon with greater utility, but is still capable of rapid retaliation in action due to fire rate of weapon archetype.

Note: Current radar soft-detection radius makes this less viable due to map design (short average engage range when flanking) – potentially should also mask user on outer ring of radar to make it a more appealing option.

Some spoilers for Crota’s End follow. If you haven’t completed this raid, I recommend tackling it blind and coming back later, if you’re actually interested in this.

After playing through Crota’s End a few times, it’s become apparent that there are some issues with the latter half that end up causing it to fall short of the standard set by Vault of Glass. It’s a less puzzly, more teamwork-oriented activity, which is all well and good, but it does not capitalize on that or the lessons learned by VoG in the way that it should have.

The long version:

The Deathsinger Fight

A big issue with the latter half of Crota’s End is that it doesn’t do a good job of informing the players what they’re doing. I look to something like the Deathsinger encounter as the biggest example of this. She is located in a large room overlooking the main combat space – the players rush into the room from below, while the ramps to reach the top level are on the lateral edges of the space. As such, you do not get a good sense of what you’re doing or what your objective is at a glance when you enter the room. You start the encounter and the only hint is that the Deathsinger text feed message appears. At that point, you’ve almost certainly not even SEEN the Deathsinger, so you have no context for what is happening. On top of that, the steps in the door mechanic are not well-defined and there is little to suggest to the player what the next step is.

So here’s my solution: The entire arena has been redesigned to facilitate this and the changes to the Crota fight. You drop down into the arena, facing the Deathsinger. She begins her song and you can see the flame effect on her character model immediately. It is apparent to the player that something bad is happening. The shriekers have been moved up in the hallway to be more obvious, and their internal illumination has been changed to the same transparent gray color that the door has. This creates a visual link between the shrieker and the objective. When the shrieker is destroyed, a text feed message appears saying “The Deathsinger’s Cantor emerges to defend the antechamber.” The Cantor is the Hallowed Wizard currently in the encounter, but renamed to establish more importance. Killing the Cantor causes the door to flicker, and a spotlight above the door, previously bathing the room in red light, turns green. Through the transparent door, the player can see that the other hallway is still red, leading them to rotate. This encounter would ideally have fewer major Knights, as they tend to clog up the combat space. Once both door objectives are complete, a text feed message appears: “The way is open.”

The Crota Fight

Another of the core issues with CE is that it doesn’t build upon its own mechanics like VoG, which taught the player more and more complex mechanics over time, all built from a solid base. The plate mechanic makes it halfway through and disappears, and the totem mechanic disappears directly after its first appearance. This leads to a lack of a sense of escalation in terms of mechanical complexity. You’re not using the lessons the activity taught you to win, you’re just progressing.

On top of that, the latter half of CE doesn’t capitalize on the strengths of its combatant race. The Hive are typified by mass waves of fodder punctuated by strong majors, but what you actually end up encountering are relatively (for the player count) small groups, so the intensity of the actual combat in the Crota fight doesn’t reach the same level as VoG teleports, which were a frantic rush to down the enemies and hit Oracle spawns.

Additionally, the way the arena is designed strongly discourages movement. VoG did not really allow (or force) players to remain passive – you were always responsible for something, and very rarely were you waiting around for the next “thing” to happen. CE, by comparison, is an extremely passive experience in the Crota fight proper, full of moments where you’re waiting for the next bit of scripting to kick in. Crota moving on top of the players should be a tense moment, but it ends up just causing people to wait it out and not actually do anything for the entirety of his stay near the pit. This is compounded by the inability of players to cause Swordbearer spawn – even if they COULD move around the arena, there is no reason to as they can’t actually do anything to progress the encounter at that time.

So what can change? Again, the entire arena has been redesigned to account for these changes. There is a plate where the players entered the space, and two totems to the left and right side of the space. The middle has a large glowing plate with the Chalice, and a fog surrounds the rest of the middle lower section. There are ramps leading up to the player and boss areas. When the encounter starts in the crystal room, as the structure around Crota is building, the plate the players landed on initially flashes brightly, and then the totems flash. This reminds the player of their connection. In order to damage Crota’s shields, players must stand on the plate. This activates the totems, so two players must suppress them as they did in the bridge section while suppressing the boomers in the two corner towers. Upon starting the encounter, Crota raises his sword and the game informs the player that the Swordbearer is coming.

When the plate is active, a text feed message appears informing them that Crota’s armor has weakened. The Swordbearer has spawned, and must be taken out on the lower level – he will not approach the ramps. This means that the intended sword carrier of your team must descend into the area, finding that the Weight of Darkness debuff has been placed on them. Going into the middle is now a commitment as you have no movement mode, and the reward is that the center plate acts as a stationary Chalice. If your Chalice carrier cannot reach you soon, you can risk running down to the Chalice plate to regenerate your shields.

The damage phase plays out largely as-is after the plate is active. Once the sword has despawned, Crota calls forth ogres from the side rooms. To establish connection to what they trigger, they can be named something like The Champion’s Vanguard. Pick a dumb thing, as long as it makes it obvious that their elimination is required. Their deaths trigger Crota to sweep across the room in a slow beam attack that can be dodged either via Ward of Dawn or via dropping into center. He then spawns the next Swordbearer, and the cycle continues. All the while, there are a large number of Thrall spawning in waves to assault the plate team, and in the middle section – these need to be cleared to make it safe for your sword carrier.

The goal here, more or less, is to provide a need for the players to move up in the room and not just turtle. By putting objective modes and a carrot (chalice plate) forward in the room, players actually need to be proactive in the fight. Additionally, we establish greater consistency in the mechanical progression both across all phases of the raid and within the final phase, especially re: swordbearer spawning. Crota would largely act as the same driving force that Atheon did – not really a huge threat by himself, but you’re focusing on finding out how to defeat him more than actually dodging his direct attacks.

A hypothetical new arena:

This might all be terrible. I’m 100% certain that there are a ton of issues that would pop up with this rotation that I’m not accounting for. My hope, though, is that they’re not the same problems that the encounters currently have. My worry is that it isn’t imaginative enough – I’m attempting to keep the feel of the current fight so I don’t want to stray too far from its “tone” and make it much more puzzly.

Making these things seems hard.

The short version:

Deathsinger Problems:

• Players do not get visual ID on Deathsinger or understand what she is doing to wipe them.
• The timer is an obscure mechanic because it isn’t visualized through text feed with enough consistency.
• The shrieker/wizard/door dynamic is not visually explained, and the importance of each element is not conveyed to the player.

Crota Problems:

• The arena promotes extremely passive play with a lot of downtime when Crota is on top level of starting pit.
• Swordbearer spawn delays lead to a lot of downtime where players do not understand what they’re supposed to be doing.
• Ogre phase starts too slowly, leading to a lot of downtime.
• Deathsinger hallway is too effective in providing safe haven.
• Starting pit promotes turtling during Crota fight.
• Enemies will often fail to assault defensible starting pit – very little danger to home team.
• The chalice mechanic discourages splitting and movement around arena.

Big changes to Deathsinger encounter:

• Changes to arena entrance establishes visual ID
• Flame effect begins upon encounter start
• Shrieker moved up and recolored
• Hallowed Wizard renamed to establish link to boss/arena
• Hallway lighting changes to establish success/fail state

Big changes to Crota encounter:

• Arena redesign removes pit.
• Chalice despawns after 3 minutes (hard mode); respawns on center plate.
• Center plate acts as stationary chalice (VoG well mechanic)
• Swordbearer spawns are faster and more consistent – player initiated steps.
• Crota does not move close to players, his threat comes from CQC on swordbearer mistiming and beam attack cycle.
• Players must move around arena to accomplish objectives.
• Totems/plate mechanic returns.
• Higher intensity thrall waves result in less waiting around.
• Lower area gives Weight of Darkness debuff – middle entry is conscious risk/reward gamble.

Deathsinger Completion Steps:

• Players enter arena by dropping into hole to starting platform, facing Deathsinger – establishing visual ID as she begins song (flame around character model).
• Players enter one hallway to kill DS, shrieker appears halfway through hallway with central energy same color as door.
• Shrieker destruction triggers text feed: “The Deathsinger’s Cantor emerges to defend the antechamber.”
• Hallowed Wizard renamed to Deathsinger’s Cantor, death causes door to flash and flicker.
• Spotlight above door bathing hallway in red light turns to green.
• Players approach door and see other hallway’s spotlight still red, leading them to rotate and finish the encounter.

Crota Completion Steps

• Crota spawns, players fight out of hallway as normal. Barrier appears halfway through hallway as players exit, preventing safe rotation.
• Players gather outside and grab Chalice 1, Crota raises sword. Text feed: “Crota calls forth his champion.”
• Swordbearer spawns, is taken out.
• Players must stand on plate to make Crota’s shield vulnerable to weapons fire.
• Shield plate triggers two totems to activate, players must dedicate two members to suppress + members to kill boomers in Crota towers.
• After plate is active, text feed: “Crota’s armor weakens” indicating that he can be shot. Current dynamic remains in the shield/damage phase.
• Swordbearer player approaches Crota and deals health damage.
• Repeat; sword despawns. Text feed: “Crota’s armor regains strength.”
• Chalice despawns soon after sword based on ideal round length and respawns in middle plate (stationary chalice plate; hard mode).
• After Sword despawn, Crota calls Ogres from side rooms, named Swordbearer’s Vanguard (possibly gatekeepers + swordbearer?)
• Ogre death triggers Crota to project beam across room, dealing damage to players – players must drop down to avoid fire.
• Crota calls his champion again.
• Repeat damage cycle.
• Oversoul behaves as-is.

On end-game and recurring content:

The end-game progression content currently revolves around repeating a lot of hand-designed content on a daily and weekly basis. It’s designed in order to keep players coming back and to bolster their progression via currency and upgrade materials, but the issue is that the content is simply not interesting enough to stand up on its own after the hundredth time you’ve run it. In particular, the daily and weekly heroics are a bit of a sore spot, while being completely understandable given the constraints on content that Bungie was working with.

What’s the result of this approach?

• A lot of repetition in hand-designed content that makes the game feel very small.
• A lot of effort going into exploiting the content to progress faster.
• A sense that some activities are not worth the effort.
• Once you do the weekly content, there’s very little reason to come back during the rest of the week once you’ve reached endgame.

My suggestion: A dungeon randomizer. Well-designed, hand-crafted arena pieces connected with tunnels, hallways, whatever, forming a linear progression through a “level.” Each piece is populated with a randomized set of enemies from the various factions working together with some basic rules like a hard cap on the number of snipers or charging enemies. Each room could activate modifiers like Angry or Lightswitch, and at base level always have Heroic active. There can also be a new modifier called “Strife” or something that re-enables enemy faction in-fighting. So you’ve got an infinite set of totally unique, intrinsically replayable dungeons. You have one room that looks like the Array control room from the Earth mission of the same name, filled with Fallen Vandals and Minotaurs. You run down the hallway after defeating them and are greeted by Phalanxes, a Major Knight, and a series of Goblins defending the World’s Grave. Eventually, you enter the final room where an Ultra named enemy waits and awards you your loot. This is a repeatable instance off of the director, and gives a high amount of Vanguard reputation and a small amount of marks (Vanguard Tiger has moved to give more marks and less rep). You can choose a tier for the dungeon, which determines its encounter difficulty (enemy makeup and tier, modifiers) and its length, but it is always scaled to your level.

So what do we use these for?

Instead of a Daily Heroic Story Mission, you now have a Daily Heroic Dungeon that is a 15-20 minute randomized level. Each player’s dungeon is unique. The rewards for the daily mission stay the same.

We also remove the Weekly Heroic Strike. It isn’t fun to be asked to grind through the same strike as the Nightfall to get a worse reward, when it’s often as or more difficult without damage modifiers. Instead, we have a Weekly Epic Dungeon. Epic is always on, and it’s a longer, more challenging dungeon. Again, unique to the player. Challenging, and proportionately rewarding (with the current Weekly Heroic loot table).

In addition, we now create a new tier of activity: Semi-Weekly Nightfall Story. Resets on Tuesday and Friday. Nightfall-level of difficulty applied to story missions. Appropriate rewards. Greater incentive for players to play through some potentially not-so-hot missions that they wouldn’t look twice at otherwise, without as much repetition (2x/week instead of 7x/week). The replayability (or lack thereof) of the content is now in line with how often the content repeats.

The Weekly Nightfall Strike remains as-is. Nightfall is designed to be a very challenging activity and demands a lot of the player. As such, it needs to be applied to hand-designed content so that players can’t run into an “unwinnable” situation where they get a crappy roll on their dungeon. This matters less in lower tiers because the player is better equipped to handle the challenge that the lower tier is asking of them.

A game that asks players to repeat content needs to leverage its best assets: in Destiny, that’s the sandbox and moment-to-moment combat, and it needs to have content that is conducive to being repeated. Diablo 3’s Adventure mode was huge for that game, and Destiny could use an analogous feature. I think this could provide end-game players a good reason to come back and would allow people to enjoy the best parts of Destiny without the in-universe wrapping that so often bogs it down.

This is not structured well. Sorry.

Exotics

One of the big selling points of Destiny was the idea of players’ arsenals telling a story. You’d look at someone and wonder where they got their gun. You’d ask and they could launch into a tale of how they picked up Thorn from Charlemagne’s Vault, or whatever. The specifics aren’t important, but the feel of these very specific, unique, mysterious weapons floating out there somewhere is. In short, they need to be special, they need to be numerous, and they need to be rare. In many cases, Destiny falls short in each category.

It’s been a month (ed: it had been a month at the time of writing this). I have half the exotics in the game, probably more. I only really care about getting one more, and that’s Hawkmoon. I’ve seen every exotic the game has….in a month. Is this an issue of there not being a huge variety of exotics? Yeah, maybe. The number is smaller than I would like, but at a certain point you can only really make so many weapons that feel unique and are still effective. The real issue is that exotics aren’t rare. They’re not even uncommon. I look around at people I’m matched with, and the thought that runs through my mind isn’t “oh wow, they have an exotic!” It’s “oh, that’s the exotic they’re using right now.” Because ultimately, they’re so easy to acquire that they’ve lost the thing that made them cool. Right now, Fatebringer is goddamn cool. I really, really want one. It’s cool because it drops from one specific place that is extremely difficult to get to. Not a lot of people have it because you have to bust your ass to get there. The same goes for the raid helmet. I want to look like a robot because so few people even have the capability to do so. Where did this go wrong?

Xur is a really significant part. I feel as though it was a massive mistake to have a vendor that sells extremely specific exotic gear for a price that isn’t staggeringly high. What we’ve ended up with is a SUROS/Ice Breaker-dominated landscape. Everybody, even if they don’t have alts, gets a guaranteed exotic every two weeks. More, if they’ve got the Motes. Now everybody’s geared out in what was ostensibly the most special gear in the game, and we’re a month in. Nobody is telling stories about their gear, they just say “oh yeah it was on sale last week.” That’s boring. It’s boring and it’s wildly disappointing.

So here’s how I would have handled Xur.

Items are very expensive. Each week, he has two items to sell:

• A weapon engram. This single item encompasses primary, secondary, and heavy. Every exotic weapon in the game is a possibility.
• An armor engram. This single item encompasses all armor slots. Every exotic armor piece is a possibility. The engram is heavily biased towards your class so you are likely to get something you can actually use.

What does this achieve? Well, for one, it means that people will have a much, much wider spectrum of the exotic arsenal on display. We won’t see the same garbage SUROS domination that we did as soon as it went on sale. A wider variety of exotics in people’s hands opens up the conversation more to “oh wow, I haven’t seen that one before” from the current “oh yeah, everybody has that one.”

Secondly, people would need to be very sure that they want what they were buying because you won’t be able to afford it again for a while, even with alts. Ultimately, it would decrease the overall number of exotic pieces that the player population would have at any given time. This drives up the usage of legendary items to the point where exotics can be more safely reworked to have slightly more radical quirks so that they’re farther up on the power spectrum. Right now exotics are often outclassed by vendor legendary gear. Sorry, The Last Word, but The Devil You Know has usurped you. You have some special stuff but you just can’t compete with the raw sustain damage. This is a problem because it’s not even close to a competition, the exotic is clearly inferior.

Exotics need to take a lesson from the raid gear drops. They should really only drop from high-tier activities, similar to how they already do from nightfall, but that should be one of very few outlets to get them. No PVP drops, some kid that idles or goes 4-15 should not be getting an exotic weapon for how sweet that neg bomb was. What I don’t know is how you gate that. Do specific pieces drop from specific activities? That leads to people picking the easiest one and farming it. Do you make engrams the reward instead of specific pieces? That removes some of the joy of seeing the names pop up in the combat feed and some of the instant gratification.

So, on to exotic armor. Super disappointing. How many pieces are “blah blah blah begins health regeneration”? How many do you look at and say “oh wow, that’s cool, I can totally make a build around this!” Not many. Saint-14, Acadlkjrytophage Symbiote, Praxic Fire, Armamentarium. Not many more are really all that useful. They’re often novel, but novelty doesn’t drive players to want to use them, not in a stat-driven game. They need to be impactful, effective, and dramtic. You’re already limiting them to one at a time, make it a worthwhile decision. There should never be an obvious choice. You should be constantly weighing the opportunity costs.

What I’d like to see:

• More pieces that give free talents. The Helm of Inmost Light is a really fascinating armor piece because it makes your character better without a lot of drawbacks, but not in a really radical way. Its primary benefit is that you have more freedom to build your character when you take two talents out of the equation and get them for free.

• More pieces that heavily, dramatically modify an ability. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they need to be strict upgrades, they could have drawbacks as well. Lucky Raspberry could cause arc bolt to deal DOT or movement slow to two additional targets that don’t receive the standard burst, but cause less damage to the primary targets. No Backup Plans could give the player a weakened version of Weapons of Light while Force Barrier is active, but Force Barrier would be less sustainable or have a shorter duration. Voidfang Vestments could dramatically increase the target acquisition radius of a less-powerful Axion Bolt, turning the player into a room-clearing assist machine. This would essentially force the player to build around these skills in such a way that you can mitigate the weaknesses, and ultimately make for a more varied experience.

• Let exotics modify movement modes. I’m really disappointed that none of them do this – let Titan legs grant blink, or have a quad-jump Hunter piece.

Some exotic gear ideas:

• Cuirass of Radiant Light (Chest; Warlock) – Doubles the radius of Song of Flame

• Nether Gauntlets (Gloves; Titan) – Adds void element DoT to Weapons of Light that scales with Illuminated

• The Rat Pack (Helm; Hunter) – Bonuses to grenade and knife doubled on Scavenger perk.

• Vestments of the Armored Metamorphosis (Chest; Hunter, Warlock) – Grants player choice between three Titan talents: Shoulder Charge/Iron Harvest/Juggernaut

• Chest of the Weathered Metamorphosis (Chest; Titan, Warlock) – Grants player choice between three Hunter talents: Scavenger/Quick Draw/Chain of Woe

• Cuirass of the Mystic Metamorphosis (Chest; Titan, Hunter) – Grants player choice between three Warlock talents: Bloom/Angel of Light/Touch of Flame

• Scorched Leggings (Boots; Warlock) – Radiant Skin causes attackers to take DoT on causing damage to player.

• The Singularity (Helm; Warlock) – Player receives a percentage of damage dealt to players trapped in Nova Bomb Vortex or Vortex Grenade as health.

• Brass Knuckles (Gloves; Titan) – While Force Barrier is up, Gift of Light activates on melee hit instead of on kill (1 orb per melee, balanced by melee tactics being complete garbage in actual content).

• Superconductors (Boots; Titan) – All aftershock abilities (Lightning Grenade, Pulse Grenade, Fist of Havoc Aftermath) trigger health regeneration when the player is standing inside.

• Jordans (Boots; Hunter) – Fleet Footed also significantly increases jump height (potentially only active while player is invisible as a balancing factor?)

• Misery Loves Company (Gloves; Hunter) – Chain of Woe now stacks up to 6 times.
• The Inferno (Helm; Hunter) – Golden Gun damage now stacks per shot on a single target if fired in rapid succession.
• Precision Insight (Helm; All Classes) – Rapid precision shots have a chance to generate an Orb of Light.

I think by modifying more existing abilities players have an easier time acclimating to the changes and understanding the impact that the exotic nodes have on their performance. With the Metamorphosis items, you can sort of patch up the holes that exist in the current classes and make yourself a little bit of a jack-of-all-trades at the expense of being very specialized like every other exotic perk allows you to be. With Precision Insight, auto and pulse rifles are now a viable PvE option as you increase your ability to support your team, where currently they are outclassed by Hand Cannons and Scout Rifles based purely on damage output. There’s currently an issue where players who aren’t strictly great at murdering are a severe anchor to their team. If you grant them a piece that allows them to be an orb-generating bullet hose with something like Epilogue, they’re all of a sudden still a valuable part of the group.

Class Items

They’re not exotic, but close enough to the topic to discuss: class items are in a really weird place right now. Beyond the faction rep funnel, which in itself is a bizarre thing (FWC gear kind of looks crappy, but they have the best stats, so I guess I’m stuck with this?), they’re strictly cosmetic. That…would be fine. But they occupy the same gear slots in the loot tables. How disappointing is it when you get a legendary engram…and its a class item? There’s no point!

What I’m suggesting is that class items should give stats (not defense, not light) and have effects. You’re already being forced to pick between visual appeal and functionality on every other piece of gear in the game, and class items are not so wildly different that it would break anything.

Class items could be your team-oriented item. Have each piece grant a buff. A Titan mark that grants 10% of your bubble bonus to team members within 10 meters. It’s tough to really use, but if you do it could have a noticeable effect. A Warlock bond that grants a tiny slice of Song of Flame to teammates in a similar proximity. A Hunter cloak that grants bonus AOE AGI. One of the issues with a lot of Destiny’s class interplay is…well, that there isn’t really a lot of it. AOE buffs are a simple but effective way to begin to rectify this.