Rebalancing

Note: I wrote this a long time ago and never published it for some reason. Since then, the Destiny team have done a better job designing new bosses and their arenas.

I'm not above arguing with people on the internet.

It's generally not about fighting with that person, or even trying to change their minds, because you're not going to reach people sometimes, no matter how hard you try. But I think there's value in leaving an artifact, punching holes into poor arguments, so that some loud person doesn't convince casual onlookers of some badly reasoned position without contest.

If someone states their credentials instead of just presenting the reasoning for their arguments, I almost always write them off as an idiot. It's one thing to cite experiences that are the result of your credentials, like, "I've been doing this for 20 years, and I've seen this kind of thing cause problems a lot", but whenever someone's like, "I have a doctor degree in smart, so I know what I'm talking about," it flips a switch in my head that makes me hyper critical.

Most recently, I got into an argument with someone on reddit who claimed to have worked on balance issues in Borderlands (BL), in a thread about some announced weapon balance changes coming in Destiny. He proceeded to not cite any experiences in working on BL as evidence for anything he was saying.

I have helped do weapon rebalancing for the game Borderlands. A game with a shit ton more loot than Destiny and a lot more weapon classes and archetypes. I know what they are trying to accomplish and I can make some pretty educated guesses as why. What this patch is doing is bringing the weapon archetypes up with each other and pushing our strongest weapons down to be competitive with other exotics.

"What this (weapon balance) patch is doing is <definition of weapon balancing>."

Okay. Great insight there.

He continued to talk about how a couple of sniper rifles that are getting nerfed, Ice Breaker (IB) and Black Hammer (BH), break the ammo economy.

For context, IB doesn't allow you to pick ammo packs up off the ground, and instead generates a round of ammo every 5 seconds, so you can snipe forever. The coming change increases the delay to 8 seconds. BH has a perk, White Nail, which will refill your 3 round magazine if you land 3 critical hits in some short time window, without depleting your ammo reserve. The coming change will increase the reserve ammo capacity a little, and make White Nail refill the ammo from your reserve, so basically you just get to skip the reload animation if you stay on target.

Both of these guns are used extensively in PvE content, generally for cheesing bosses. That is, hiding in some safe spot and sniping at the boss with your infinite ammo forever, until it dies. If you can land all crits, BH is the fastest boss killer in the game, despite it being a lower rarity class than IB.

Black Hammer is less generally useful than Ice Breaker (IB keeps generating ammo, hit or miss), but the guy fixated on it being better in the specific context of being able to chain crits forever, so of course it needs to be nerfed, because it's a legendary and IB is an exotic.

Neither nerf addresses the fact that there are safe spots from which you can snipe forever.

Add to this that there are consumable items you can buy cheaply that top off your ammo, and the fact that you can generally empty your primary ammo and then just sit and wait for a minute, and the game refills your ammo for free, and it's clear that the ammo economy isn't a real thing in Destiny, and the idea of balancing around it is absurd, so long as the safe spots exist.

Instead of cheesing bosses very quickly, people are still going to sit in their safe spot, but now it's just going to take longer while they wait for synth cooldowns or magic refills. This is strictly less fun.

The point of weapon balancing in games is to make things fair in PvP, and to provide a variety of viable options. In a loot based game, you want people to be excited to get new loot. A problem with the current state of the game is that people are using the same few weapons for everything, including IB and BH for fast boss killing.

Looking at it one way, you can say, "If everyone's using these weapons, then they must be overpowered!" But if you look at it more deeply, the prominence of those weapons is a symptom of the lack of variety in encounter design.

Just about every boss in Destiny is just a big, lumbering turret. They spam some projectile at you and they're huge, with a huge critical hit target, and they move really slowly, in a fairly confined area of the map. They generally have some sort of area of effect stomp attack that keeps you from standing near them, and that's about it. All they do is keep you from standing still out in the open.

In just about any other game, a boss has a variety of attacks that they'll use, and players have to observe them, anticipate attacks, avoid them so they don't die, and finding openings to do damage.

In Destiny, there's no reason to look at a boss unless you're currently shooting it, because they only have one attack, which is to dumbly shoot their gun at you. This was taken to a stupid extreme in the most recent expansion (House of Wolves), where the new end game bosses have different "attacks".

e.g. One boss, Urrox, will periodically make the floor in the arena do damage for a few seconds. This is explained as his rage burning the ground. There's no animation for him building up his rage, and there's no animation that indicates that the floor is burning. Instead, there are text prompts in the game's HUD that tell you it's coming, and then a HUD countdown timer while the floor is damaging, and then another text prompt that his rage has dissipated. There is literally no reason to look at him if you aren't shooting him. It blows my mind how lazy this is.

There's one boss (Skolas) that's almost just a turret, but he actually moves around the map, and there isn't really a safe place to avoid him, and one boss (Flayers) that's three mini bosses that work like regular enemies, who have replenishing shields, use cover and run around. There's another boss (Omnigul) that's also just a turret, but the safe spot in the fight doesn't give you line of sight on her, and she has a replenishing shield. None of these bosses are cheesable with Black Hammer or Ice Breaker, and the reason is incredibly simple: You can't snipe them indefinitely from a safe spot.

That's it. That's all you need to have BH and IB be irrelevant. You don't need to make the bosses actually interesting. You don't need to totally overhaul their AI. You can slap a shield on them, and make them move around a little more, and suddenly people have to stick and move and coordinate DPS windows with their teammates like you supposedly want them to.

And once you remove universal effortless boss killing from BH and IB, they won't be used for every encounter, and the nerfs don't make sense.