After a year of consistent community feedback, Destiny 2: Forsaken ushered in a revamped weapon system, freeing up the slots and drastically improving your damage output potential. I outlined this a couple months ago, but essentially, all Sniper Rifles, Fusions, Shotguns, and Breech Grenade Launchers, moved from the Power slot into the Kinetic and Energy slots. By nature, a vast majority of those weapons entered the (secondary) Energy slot, granting the Energy slot the largest pool of weapons. Unfortunately, the variety of weapons introduced at the launch of Destiny were not designed to accommodate this, and it has had some negative impact to our loadout choices.
Great swing, poor followthrough
The first place this is evident is in your options for Legendary gear. 8 of the power weapons made it to Kinetic versus the close to 50 that landed in the energy slot. This included the majority of shotguns, one of the most popular weapons types in Destiny. No only did this overcrowd the energy pool, it also severely reduced the pool of legendary power weapons. Sadly, Forsaken didn’t supply enough compelling options for kinetic or power alternatives to some of our favorites.
There are still more energy weapons offered than anything else. This is because they need to adequately provide new weapons in the primary and special categories. It feels like the weapon design team may not have been told about the new weapon slots until late in the game. The graphic above illustrates how closely balanced the three slots were in regards to choices, and how lopsided options are now.
I think this is the reason the Edge Transit has become the meme that it has. It isn’t because of a bug. It is the only non-destination-specific, or “world” power weapon in the game. 1 out of 11 weapons. Other weapons in this pool include the Go Figure, Duke Mk.44, Badlander, and Subtle Calamity. So if the game needs to give you a “world” power weapon, it only has 1 choice.
[UPDATE: Bungie announced last night that they will be adding 3 more Power weapons to the world Power weapon pool. Edge Transit will have some friends.]
The fix the the bug that Bungie is claiming is for them to reduce the number of power weapons awarded. This issue also shines a light on the limited weapon pools available from the vendors, namely The Vanguard, The Crucible, and Iron Banner. These vendors only have 3-4 new weapons, supplemented with 2-3 brought forward from year 1.
The fix for this would be more kinetic and power weapons. I would inject many more kinetic legendaries than energy to try to balance the scales a bit. Since fusion and trace rifles can only be energy, I would have made another weapon type only available in kinetic. Breech Grenade Launchers could have been perfect for this. Next, I would focus on a much larger number of power legendaries. Give us more foundries for linear fusion rifles. I would love to see what Omolon linears could looks like. Buff swords to make them more compelling in PvE. Put 2 rounds back into our rocket launchers. The good news is that the return of Heavy Machine Guns should be a big help in this space.
The Fall of Power
With special weapons out of the mix, we are resorted to linear fusion rifles, rocket launchers, swords, and grenade launchers. Sadly there is very little that is compelling about the legendary weapons in these categories. There is essentially only 1 linear fusion rifle (The Tarantula), swords aren’t as effective as they should be, grenade launchers are largely disliked, and rocket launchers seem only ever used if they drop with one of 2 necessary perks (cluster bombs or tracking). In the exotics department, a majority of the power exotics remained in the power slot because of how powerful they were originally designed to be.
There is now an over abundance of very compelling power exotic weapons, and the fact that you can only equip 1 exotic, make the choice pretty difficult. Many of the exotic power weapon options are obscure and unique weapons that vastly outperform legendary counterparts. Some of these weapons include the Tractor Cannon, Wardcliff Coil, Sleeper Simulant, and Whisper of the Worm. I most likely just named at least 1 weapon that you always have with you, if not currently have in your power slot. They are just way better than the current legendary power offerings. So much so that its hard not to feel like you’re at a disadvantage without one of these guns. Because of this and the lack of good legendaries, it is very difficult not to choose an exotic for your power slot. More compelling power options would make us feel more at ease about not picking a power exotic. In fact, I would take it one step further and create a kinetic rocket launcher, or a energy-slotted sword. Mix things up the other way as well.
Either way the first major content expansion is arriving in December with Black Armory. This will also bring us the aforementioned return of Heavy Machine Guns. Hopefully Bungie sees the issues here and has a fix in mind.
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