Destiny 2
I’ve been thinking a lot about Destiny 2 and loot lately. As I’ve said before, things are kind of split into two halves right now, guns with almost too many options in a season, given how many are actually worth getting. And then legendary armor, which drops all the time and is effectively useless once you have 1-2 sets with the right Recovery, Resilience and Discipline distribution. The only evolutions there have been Artifice armor for micro stat boosts and things like raid mods or seasonal currency bonuses that never really caught on.
One thing I don’t really understand is why after a Resilience rework that turned that stat from trash to essential, why Bungie…stopped improving major stats in Destiny 2.
They nerfed Recovery and Resilience somewhat eventually, but both remain essential. They nerfed Intellect into uselessness when previously it was a major one you wanted to spike.
Now we’ve reached a situation where for the most part, only half the stats are viable, Recovery, Resilience and Discipline, and half are not, Mobility, Intellect and Strength.
Right now, this is what the last three do:
- Mobility – Increases your movement speed and maximum jump height
- Intellect – Decreases the cooldown of your super ability
- Strength – Decreases the cooldown of your melee ability
Destiny 2
Why are these problematic or useless? Mobility, of course, is useful in the context of being a Hunter, as it reduces the cooldown of your dodge. But that is essentially all it’s good for. On other classes it’s not uncommon to want Mobility as low as you can possibly make it with Recovery and Resilience infinitely more valuable. The concept of Arc’s Amplified buff is like getting 300 Mobility by comparison. Right now Mobility doesn’t even increase sprint speed, much less things like weapon reload/handling, which it feels like it should.
Intellect is a deeply boring stat that feels like it was nerfed for PvP’s sake alone to reduce super spam. I think a great addition to this would be a boost to PvE super damage, as so, so many super abilities feel underpowered in the sandbox, or you have to dramatically build into them with say, an entire exotic to boost your Titan Thundercrash to get actual good damage out of it.
Strength doesn’t work as well as Discipline does for grenades, because A) most charged melees aren’t nearly as strong as grenades, with a few build-specific exceptions. And B) oftentimes instant melee refills are easy. Hunter has an entire dodge dedicated to that. Titan can do things like pick up its thrown solar hammer. In general, it is still pretty easy to get melee and grenade cooldowns quite low, but grenades are better, so Discipline is more valuable. I’d love to see Strength do something significant like increase actual melee damage or even give you more melee charges at certain tiers.
Would all three of these be hard to balance? Yes! Especially since everything always has an annoying amount of PvP considerations. But I believe it’s a worthwhile project to ensure that half of your main stats in the game are not borderline useless and things that 95% of builds will desperately avoid. Buffing these stats dramatically increases the promise of legendary armor farming if you do finally need more sets than just going for double/triple 100s in the same three stats.
We’ll see if these three stats ever get touched, but in all the previews we’ve seen so far, we’ve heard absolutely nothing along those lines.
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