Destiny Developer Seeks Feedback About Primary Weapons
By Weston Albert 05 November 2016
In the midst of a PvP meta that has firmly shifted toward shotgun use, Bungie asks for fans feedback regarding the idea of buffing primary weapons in Destiny.
Ask any Destiny player and they will tell you shotguns are firmly in the meta of PvP right now, especially with the addition of the new gametype Supremacy in Rise of Iron. This gametype encourages aggressive close-quarters combat, so players have defaulted to having a shotgun in their Special slot at nearly all times. The last two weekends of “spooky” Trials haven’t helped, either.
This increase in shotgun use has created an idea within the Destiny community – if Primary weapons were buffed across the board, rushing shotgunners would be deterred from pushing in on players as often. It appears Bungie has heard the cries of its fanbase, as community manager Cozmo has posted on the Bungie.net forums asking for feedback on the issue.
In a response to a poster on the Bungie.net forums proposing that all Primary weapon classes get their damage buffed to allow for faster kill times, Cozmo had this to say:
I can take this feedback to the devs, but first I wanted to get some others to weigh in as I know there are two schools of thought on this. Let me know below if you agree that you would like to see primaries made much more powerful like OP suggested.
Many of the Primary weapon classes have had a time to shine in Destiny‘s two years. At launch in vanilla Destiny, auto rifles were highly deadly, especially the SUROS Regime exotic. Around the second half of Year One, hand cannons were very powerful, even at range. That led to pulse rifles becoming the go-to weapon class at the beginning of Year Two with the launch of The Taken King. The idea is to take every weapon class back to those levels of damage to allow players to be able to counter Special weapons better, especially shotguns.
But as Cozmo says in his post, there is an effect to such a buff:
This would significantly decrease the “Time to Kill” across the board, which would drastically change how Destiny plays.
One of the reasons shotguns have been able to grow in dominance is due to a sniper nerf that neutered their effectiveness up close and make quick scoping harder to pull off. Even many of the Destiny community’s most competitive players and skilled snipers have switched their loadouts to shotguns because of the nerf to snipers.
Without another Special weapon class to counter shotguns, fans are starting to ask whether a faster time to kill with Primaries will allow them to kill rushing shotgunner before they get close enough to fire off a shot.
This is sure to be an ongoing debate, and it’s likely that Bungie will have to do something soon to address shotgun use in the Crucible. We’ll all have to wait and see just what that response is.
Destiny: Rise of Iron is available now on Xbox One and PS4.
Source: Bungie.net (via Destiny Reddit)
