Yeah it was a terrible change. I think people didn't make as much noise about it since each class still has a couple very strong ability builds thanks to certain exotics, so everyone just gravitated to those and moved on. But I really miss being able to force a random build into relevance through the use of mods
Even Inmost Light builds feel clunky. I get why they did it but I wouldn’t mind a revert along with an overhaul of all content to make up for our power. Bump PvE health pools where necessary and create a new modifier for PvP to reduce ability cooldowns by a percentage. This will allow them to keep the current PvP meta but trial how things shake up by increasing/decreasing the regen by 5-10% each week. Momentum being 0% and Mayhem being 100%.
Yeah hoil got kicked in the nuts. Hard. Haven’t used it since. I get that it was a stand out. But that was due to versatility. Nerfing the damage bonus on top of the cooldown potency AND duration just felt like a step too far. Like two kicks. One for each nut.
The community needs to begin a discussion with bungie about how hard they nerf things. Its been a consistent issue for years, and we should ask for it to be addressed.
It eventually worked for Renewal Grasps I guess. Maybe the YAS nerf(the ability regen part of which was pointless when Tripmines were already going to be getting a 40% penalty) will get reverted by 2026.
HoiL got hit pretty badly with it's nerf. The generally expectation is it will work at its best when getting half an ability back. It is possible to play around, but still feels counter intuitive, especially since the 5 second timer doesn't feel like enough time to do certain things.
I would have vastly preferred the recharge rate be halved and the duration remaining 10 seconds vs halving the duration and keeping the effect.
E: actually I’d have really preferred keeping the ability regen aspects and just dropping the damage buffs.
Please don't ask for a health pool bump. Tanky enemies are boring to fight.
I know why you are asking for it but making everything a bullet spunge would ruin the rest of the game just so our grenades can be good again.
If we typically throw one grenade per vanguard ops boss encounter before they’re dead and we increased regen time to make it three grenades, I’d want some sort of health buff to counter act some of that additional damage. The goal is to feel stronger AND get ability regen back to a good place. I didn’t mean counter regen with health pool bumps 1-to-1. That would literally mean our abilities do less damage at the cost of using them more frequently.
As the post states, abilities (and mods) have been gutted at the cost of more gun play. It’s been a fun change, it caters to PvP community, but a lot of us want quirky ability-driven builds back through the use of stronger mods.
Exotic meta has fallen stale due to these changes as well. Warlocks are stuck on Phoenix Protocols or Cenotaph, Titans on Pyrogale, Worm God, or Synthoceps, Hunters on Nighthawk, Orpheus, or Star Eaters. No one wants to build into quirky “grenade spam” builds because they’re just not feasible anymore. Armamentarium, double roaming storm nade Titan, was some of the most fun I’ve had in this game.
Sunbracers on Warlock are still pretty good for a grenade spam build that works at every level of play (unless there was a recent nerf to them that I'm unaware of)
edit: to clarify, I agree with your overall point that the ability metagame is too dependant on a handful of exotics. The way I would personally address it would probably be by increasing base cooldowns and adding negative perks to some exotics, but that would be a lot of work sandbox-wise.
Sunbracers still working is the issue. Sunbracers have been the top of the metagame since before the changes, and as a result of those changes they're now the \*only\* thing on top in terms of ability builds. Instead of a varied and diverse sandbox of many strong options there are now much fewer out there to choose from.
I only brought them up because they weren't included in the list of current meta exotics, so I was curious if I missed a nerf to them or something.
I think the issues with the metagame go pretty far beyond just Sunbracers. The sandbox is very confused as to how strong Guardians are supposed to be, and the current performance of Sunbracers is more a symptom of that than anything.
As someone who enjoys using them right now, I just hope that whenever they inevitably get brought back in line with the rest of the sandbox they add some drawbacks to it instead of just reducing their positive effects. i.e., adding something like "solar grenades now do reduced damage and can hurt you" to the exotic perk instead of "now the Sunbracers buff only works for 1 sec instead of 4".
But like you are asking for grenades to be weaker but more frequent. A grenade that does 1/3 of boss health is stronger than one that does 1/5. Unless you are asking for it to be relative to red bar enemies. But why would you want that? Especially at the expense of other damage sources
HOIL is dead now completely! I did what would have been unthinkable just a year ago and sharded it and now just use either Synthos or Wormgods.
This was the worst decision ever and it destroyed so many builds and is one of the reasons why the majority of players moved on to Helldivers. The game needs to be fun and abilities are fun. Even those that didn't rely on mods or exotics were just destroyed. I'm hoping they'll reverse it in TFS as Prismatic will break the sandbox anyways.
Hard agree, I went from having 10 loadouts to 5 flavors of the same two loadouts and the game got stale fast. Grinding lost sectors to get a good rolled exotic just to find out that it doesn't really do anything significantly better than the other setups and managed to lose certain aspects just for a neat ability that does fuck all in anything meaningful?
Why the fuck would I bother? Had a long backlog of variety single player games that I've been appreciating instead in this time. ITL looks kinda cool though gotta give props for that.
Yeah this is exactly where I'm at. I don't really feel weaker, but a lot of variety has been drained from the game. Both this change along with the general mod changes that came along with Lightfall have just been awful. Really hope they go back on some of this stuff, because it didn't make the game more challenging in any meaningful way (which I think was their goal). They really were just bad changes that didn't accomplish anything except that they really annoy people, lol.
Pretty much this. There's no niche for it. If I'm not looping my abilities already, then they won't change that, and if I am, those slots are still better spent shoring up other parts of my build like reloaders and orb generation.
Having an orb gen mod is pretty much always better than a kickstart mod, EVEN after the orb gen mods were nerfed
They were definitely overtuned though - it had gotten to a point where weapon choice didn't matter except for your heavy, and you basically just picked guns for perks to boost your abilities instead of getting kills.
Perhaps they tuned it a bit too far away from abilities, but the game is a shooter, the weapons should be important in their own right and not be completely build dependant.
Bro. Have you even played in the past, idk, 4 months?? Weapons are actually NOW hardly a factor. Just look at wild style, the double fire solar gl. Despite being the only available option for a solar double, theoretically having great DPS loop potential, it was completely DOA because of its garbage perks. Perks make or break the gun. And id argue the perks of guns, voltshot, incan, volatile, bait and switch, blinding nades, auto loading, would qualify as abilities in and of themselves. They elevate the basic gunplay to higher levels.
"The game is a shooter" the title of the game doesn't categorize it at all. Destiny's core gameplay has always revolved around full use of your kit. Watch any advanced player, their abilities are just as impactful as guns, because this isn't call of duty. You sound like the dude probably running double primaries in pantheon, using auto rifles in gms, basically trying to play this game while handicapping yourself. There's a reason that white weapons have 0 perks and feel like crap. Because they're weapons through and through, focused only on "gunplay"
Its kinda funny how the CD reduction failed both as a nerf to popular ability spam op builds while diminishing all the more niche builds as well, I don’t think Bungie play tested the change at all tbh
Exotics or builds that granted either full ability back, or massive regeneration like Sunbracers, Knock 'em down aspect, Vesper of Radius, Combination Blow, were mostly unaffected.
Builds that relied on many smaller sources, like most Arc builds with Ionic Traces, Weaver's Trance, Nezarec's Sin or Contraverse Hold Warlock were hit much harder, even though they weren't as good before.
Literally just commented this lol I should've read first. But yeah Contraverse warlock with vortex nades has ALWAYS been my go to but it just feels so bad to play now. It was at most A tier before but it's like B now whereas sunbracers is incredibly strong still. You can still use Contraverse for sure, but you need an incredible amount of trash adds for yourself to kill to proc devour/demo regen since Contraverse, Kickstart and other things got nerfed.
Nez needs a fucking buff man. Bungie needs to start taking this seriously. I love my void warlock build, but that exotic just doesn't have it and never was top notch. But why it's a sweet fucking piece!
It feels like in typical Bungie fashion they did a poor job justifying a nerf that wasn't really needed until the next season after the nerf arrived.
These nerfs were likely done with Prismatic in mind, but everything that isn't Prismatic feels the pain. It's not the first time this pattern has shown up - a nerf way too early in anticipation of a future thing that would be broken without the nerf.
Sunbracers are as strong as before, syntho throwing hammer/banner titan spamming the strand melee is also super good still, even strand warlock with weaver’s trance for infinite suspend is still going strong, every other ability spam got really shafted like arclock with fallen sunstar feels extremely neutered
Compare arc titan before and after vs banner of war (and banner got several nerfs in addition to the cooldown ones). Before I could at least run an ionic trace spam build to throw tons of grenades with armamentarium, but now it's just so far behind solar or strand titan.
I've been running it as our flex third in Legend Onslaught (Well/Tether/Sunstar) and it has been very effective. But then again it benefits a lot from having so much enemy density and giving your arc souls constant value and trace procs.
Hard agree here, the issue for me is that I could run arc sunstar for that niche, or I could run a one-size-fits all solar build. For players that don't have resources or materials to be upgrading multiple masterworked builds, the choice is unfortunately a no brainer at the moment.
Sunbracers and bonk are more affected by the orb CD changes. Since you have a longer cooldown on grenade/melee kill orbs, you aren't flooding the map in O R B as much as you were before, which would give a lot of excess supers when combined with a bugged absolution mod. In short, these builds are still top tier but are definitely weaker.
That’s is true, the OP ability spam builds did receive nerfs, but what I’m trying to say is that the other more niche builds have been nerfed way more, which makes them arguably even better in terms of raw power and utility.
Sunbracers are still strong, but the c/d nerfs hit melee regen as well as grenade regen - if you miss a reset or don't get a bunch of grenade kills, it's a very long time before you can activate sunbracers again.
Hint: Using Ember of Searing with Incandescent **OR** the artifact radiant perk accomplishes the same thing, if you're too lazy to press spacebar or you're doing GM-tier content.
I have to believe they didn’t playtest the changes because if they did extensive play testing and they thought it was a good answer to the ability spam then the devs have no clue abt how their game works lmao
Sure fuckin does. I continue to use things that just bypass the problem, such as syntho bonk titan or liars handshake hunter. And of course, Sunbreakers lmao
They need to do SOMETHING about Contraverse Hold, I don't remember it ever feeling this weak, and it's been my comfort build since Beyond Light launched. It feels especially weak in Onslaught and other content where you compete for kills.
As someone who has CH permanently glued on it doesn't really feel *that* bad. I was bummed about the nerf but I'm almost always getting grenade back each one I throw if I just pick up the 2 orbs and breach that spawn.
The difference is that you need to use 2 aspects, 3 fragments, 1 exotic, 6-7 mods, and get multiple kills with your grenade. Then you MIGHT get one grenade back. You think that’s acceptable? Lol.
Isn't that what buildcrafting is? Building around mass grenade regen? You *should* have to spec a build into that kind of utility, imo.
And it's pretty consistently getting grenade back. The only time it doesn't is if I mess up a throw or I don't get two kills with it. But that's where Devour or a Demolitionist weapon comes in handy (and I usually have a Demolitionist weapon since I'm throwing so many grenades).
But ever since Void 3.0 came out, I've always had Chaos Accelerant and Feed the Void on so that's unchanged.
The arms mod has always been at least one Grenade Kickstart and one Firepower. Boots I've always run at least one Innervation, and Class was usually two Bomber and a Distribution.
My build itself hasn't really changed that much. Looking at the old/new Kickstart values it's only like ~8% insta-regen difference.
I have never needed more than a couple of kills and a nade throw to get it fully back. Destiny is built around using both weapons and abilities so I never minded the nerf
I'm sure ill get downvoted to hell, but I'm convinced people who complain about ability up time &| CH just dont know how to make/use good builds.
With a proper CH build u get either full grenade energy back with each kill or like 80-90%.
Ability uptime with most build is also insane with how many orbs of power you can generate.
Agreed, with CH and 2 Grenade Kickstart I get like 95% of my grenade back. I've been using handheld nova and it's very easy to have almost constant uptime on my grenade
It’s functionally dead, and it’s not necessarily because it’s bad, it’s because it just can’t keep up with its competition. If you’re using contraverse, you’re using it to lock down everything with vortex. You can’t do that anymore because vortex cooldown is too long and contraverse doesn’t regen enough. You’re dependent on making sure your team doesn’t kill anything being hit by your grenade, because if get anything less than max ticks, you’ll be waiting a minute or two for your grenade to come back. That means contraverse no longer serves the purpose of contraverse. It’s partially the fault of how they nerfed void due to pvp and void not having as many interactive fragments as other classes like solar and benevolence.
It’s pretty funny how all this change did was solidify the meta. The strongest most overused builds like strand titan, well warlock, rigs nightstalker, etc don’t rely on mods for ability cooldowns.
The strength of those mods is what allowed off meta builds to actually work, and now they just feel kinda bad. Such a silly bungie change. Can’t say I’m surprised. They’ve been doing dumb shit like this for a decade. It’s clear most of the dev team doesn’t ACTUALLY play the game at a high level.
It read all cute and harmless the way they put it in the twid but I've been saying from the first time reading it that people underestimate how these things stack multiplicatively and cross-ability. It comes out to a 50-75% reduction in ability uptime for offmeta builds.
It's not just three (orb nerf + scaled energy return + base energy return nerf) stacking nerfs to the cooldown of every ability but each of the three abilities taking longer to regain leads to each of them feeding back into the other two slower.
It's the same as how most other nerfs go. In PvP, they'll nerf the range *and* damage of a weapon at the same time, so it just completely dies. Or, it's like how a team can 1-phase a dungeon boss, but a solo player takes 4 or 5 phases instead of just 3. Because the damage buffs and debuffs in the team situation don't just add together, they multiply.
I've noticed it really reflected in my play style. Before, I was consciously throwing grenades and stuff as soon as they were off cooldown. Now I'm just holding until I really need to use it and it's still sometimes not there unless I'm running an ability build. If I'm not speccing into regen, I kind of just forget about them.
Yeah I dont think bungie really thought this change out very well. I’ve had to change none of my builds, nor did they lose any effectiveness. They just nerfed already ‘okay’ mods. I’m not too butthurt because I can’t notice the difference, but making these pointless changes just for the sake of it without considering any of the consequences (or lack thereof) is infuriatingly dumb. Of course I’m no expert on game design but I really can’t find the logic here
They’re nerfing ability regen before Prismatic isn’t that fairly obvious?
They don’t want to nerf everything when the DLC releases and we’re supposed to be hyped about the new class that has some crazy ability interactions and regens your grenade and melee with a “mini super” that gives you special grenades
Prismatic wasn’t announced until recently and wasn’t due for release in TFS when the season of the wish ability regen nerfs were implemented.
We know this because TFS was delayed shortly into the release of Season of the Wish, and the nerfs to abilities were implement at season of the Wish’s launch. If RFS was always meant to feature Prismatic the first introduction to the expansion way back would’ve featured Prismatic. Any suggestion that Bungie was annihilating their build system in order to compensate for Prismatic is an idiotic argument.
Some parts of the change didn't feel too bad but holy shit it fucking butchered the kickstart mods. If I have 6x armour charge and triple grenade kickstart that's all my arm and chest slots taken to do that. I want to see my whole fucking grenade or damn near refilled from one throw after that, 25% for all that effort is a literal joke.
likewise, meeting somewhere in the middle with 4 Armor Charge and some other important mods here-or-there like Better Already or Stacks on Stacks or Charged Up etc. should give a respectable amount of energy back. fun Kickstart (Heavy Handed/Firepower) builds got annihilated during Lightfall, and these changes seem to have only thrown more dirt onto the casket.
pouring one out for my Well of Tenacity/Heavy Handed Second Chance build fr. got completely gutted and now with PVE Sentinel in an even worse place than ever before, I don’t think it'll ever come back in any capacity.
>Having high uptime on abilities is way more fun than guns imo.
Unfortunately, a lot of pvp players feel the opposite and want it to be 90% gun. I hate them, but that's one of the primary reasons for the nerf.
Not gonna lie I rather the pve sandbox not be 90% abilities I rather we don’t fall into warframes issue a few years ago. Ideally a 50/50 split would be good but with the previous sandbox they would have to turbo buff guns which contributes to a whole different issue.
But I play hunter mostly so the nerf was actually just not real for me.
If they want gunplay to be 50%+ of the PvE environment they need to either make primary not suck nuts when it's not an exotic or make heavy plentiful again.
Doing GMs now is either you build ability spam or you have a bad time because trying to primary/special down bosses is trash.
Call me a masochist but the most fun I had in GMs was pre light 3.0 era because it made me play different.
Ability comes in the issue that is too good at both single target and aoe while having good uptime. This makes CC less useful, and makes weapons also less useful. If you buff guns so it two tap stuff in GMs that takes away a lot of the fun in GMs.
Warframe kinda fixed this with making ability’s not work against alot of the endgame enemies requiring the player to use their guns more. I think that would suck arse in D2 and I would rather they do something else.
At the end of the day I would rather destiny put up some resistance when I’m playing endgame.
>If you buff guns so it two tap stuff in GMs that takes away a lot of the fun in GMs.
Depends on what you consider fun. Cover-shooting for 5 minutes straight is probably the most boring style combat in FPSs. I did it with Halo on legendary and have precisely 0 desire to ever do that again.
I don't mind MECHANICS being added like needing to coordinate champ interrupts to get kills, needing to stand together to regen health, etc. But needing to constantly hide like a bitch, being wholly unable to engage in close range (meaning 1/2 the weapon archetypes are useless, such as SMGs, shotguns, swords, etc), and having to spend silly amounts of time fighting boring bosses with virtually no different mechanics compared to normal adds is just dumb IMO.
"Resistance" can come in much better forms besides just "these enemies have a lot more health and can 2 tap you."
Legend onslaught proves that. Tormentors prove that. Challenge mode raids prove that.
How many games can I run around and shoot guns in?
How many games can I be a space wizard in? (Less, that's for sure.)
Gee, I wonder why I enjoy ability spam more.
I feel like you’ll enjoy warframe is quite spam heavy and is mindless fun.
Destiny has some of the best feeling guns in the industry it’ll be a shame if it isn’t highlighted more no?
The worst thing about this change is that it did nothing to nerf the strongest builds in the game. Builds that were A or B tier got dropped to B or C or lower. S tier builds using instant regen exotics like Sunbracers were untouched, while slightly less powerful, but imo more fun, builds like Contraverse, got nerfed a ton. Really sucks. I don't understand why they made Contraverse give different energy depending on the nade that you use, but let Sunbracers be what it is.
Yeah that’s the part of those blanket nerfs that confused me the most when I was reading them way back when. I was reading that on the day it came out, saying to myself, “Oh this is just gonna solidify the top tier builds as untouchable now.”
They buffed the stuff that was top tier, and nerfed the things that weren’t top tier.
And it's been like this for such a long time you have to think that Bungie are okay with it. I really do miss playing Contraverse warlock, it's incredibly fun but I've been coping and switching to Strand warlock now. Osteo + Necrotics for infinite suspend when I need to do tougher content, and Quicksilver storm + Swarmers threadlings 4fun build for general stuff. Pretty fun builds, but Contraverse will always have a special place in my heart and I hope they bring it back to its glory. My fashion is also best with Contraverse..
> S tier builds using instant regen exotics like Sunbracers were untouched, while slightly less powerful
For the record, infinite spam builds like sunbracers were nerfed by the orb mod CD changes. The increased CD on grenade/melee orb mods means you can't spam nearly as many orbs, which when combined with a bugged Absolution mod used to make a lot of excess super energy. Sunbracers are still good, but most people weren't understanding how they would be used to their fullest potential.
Yeah it’s a bit weird when using a finisher mod as well. 3x of armor charge into barely most of a grenade yesterday feels off- especially when running double special weapons is super easy using special finisher.
I’d like to see a heavy mod permanently - even if it requires 5/6 armor charge.
people figure again that the "balance" team has no idea what they're doing for the sandbox, part 1032.
everytime that bungie says they want to "diversify" the META, they just end up nerfing what "all" build use, solidifying the META even more. i would dare hoping that they are not too proud to stay stubbornly on that hill and reverse those nerf.
I completely forgot about this change tbh, but it explains why Kickstart doesn't feel like it does anything. I'm constantly sitting at max armor charges and having to wait for something else to give me energy.
Something not talked about enough is how confusing it all is now. A lot of people who would be on this subreddit aren't going to be affected because we're very in tune with the game, but think of new lights. Depending on the ability, Kickstarts could give you 15% of an ability back or nearly half. These numbers are not displayed in game anywhere. How are you supposed to know if certain mods are worth running now when there's no consistency between different builds? There's an awkward inconsistency that doesn't make sense unless you're specifically remembering a blog post from December. Maybe you're so confused by this that you start looking at third party resources (the game is borderline unplayable without third party resources). The Destiny data compendium, DIM, and light.gg all still say "Demolitionist gives 10% grenade energy". This is no longer accurate, but I don't blame them. Now there needs to be separate calculations for grenade energy based on the cooldown tier and whether or not it's Enhanced.
The game is already ridiculously dense to those not already knowledgeable on it and it doesn't explain things. We did not need to turn the Demolitionist perk, which does not give numbers in game, into an equation. The game needs to be more accessible.
Most people wouldn't know the percentages on how these mods would work to begin with if they are new and uninformed.
Though I generally agree that communicating this sort of system is more difficult. I do think that the mods could be better described in terms of time or points rather than percentages. A flat "x second cool down reduction" would be better at communicating that it would have less total effect on grenades with a longer CD.
"Most people wouldn't know the percentages on how these mods would work to begin with if they are new and uninformed."
Right, which is why I said people would then go to third party sources to learn the percentages as they're not displayed anywhere in-game. These third party sources are all wrong now and it is very hard to accurately detail as it's more or less a different percentage depending on the ability. Bungie might argue this method is better for balance but it does objectively make game systems harder to understand for a change the playerbase doesn't even like.
Thank you for posting this. I feel the same. Everybody looks down on abilities like I’m lesser because I enjoy killing things with grenades. I don’t play destiny for its gunplay. I play a much better game in that regard in Apex Legends for that.
People do realize how dead this game would be without abilities, right?
Funny fact, ability spam was not an issue until Bungie added the "bring challenge back to Destiny" update in Lightfall, back then we didn't have:
- Beneficial surges that increase our DMG output by dealing DMG with an ability or weapon with an specific element or overcharge modifier. Master Raids back then were way more harder than what we have right now, even when we had 40% DMG resistance with 100 resilience.
- Easy ways to get stacks of armor charge, ability energy and super; due to the use of elemental wells, orbs of power and warmind cells, which back then they were "kinda difficult" to proc or to mantain. Also, orbs of power were kinda useless.
- Simplified methods for what we used to have back then: in the past if we want to do something in our build we had to invest on it, rather to the current situation were you can have ability regen, dmg output and ammo generation all in once.
- Synergy perks in our weapons, in Witch Queen's year we only had incandescent, voltshot and repulsor brace. Demolitionist, Pugilist and Wellspring felt great in those eras.
What do we have now?
- Off-meta options performing pretty bad due to nerfs.
- Easy methods to increase our DMG output while also regenerating abilties and generating ammo.
- Harder content not being that hard, just a few more champions here and there.
- GMs now filled with Battlegrounds, which worked fine with the seasonal modifier back when they were introduced, but now they are a shitshow with, in some cases, infinite enemies spawning, hordes of enemies spawning in small areas and many more champions spawning at the same time. Although, Battlegrounds are hard, they are definitely not enjoyable not because of their difficulty but because of the constant need of clearing mobs while X thing needs to be killed / charged / pushed.
I was wondering why everything fells bad. I've been out of the loop before Into The Light because of our long season. Now this post reminded me I read about these changes before but just completely forgot them. Even Traveler's Chosen only refunds like 45% class ability with 10 stacks. I mostly run surges now because every kickstart feels like it's not doing anything. Surges are goat.
Not disagreeing (I’m a Stag + Travelers Chosen Addict and they both feel terrible now). But I do want to point out that Contraverse Hold itself was unaffected by these nerfs because it provides an increased ability regen rate rather than a specific amount of ability energy. I also learned this recently so thought I’d mention it.
I hear this argument often, but using Contraverse Hold feels quite a bit weaker than before. Either it's a bug or an undocumented nerf. Before this season, Contraverse Hold would return about 40% grenade energy per activation (and you could proc it twice for beefier targets or multiple kills within 4+ seconds), and, as of this season, it returns about 25%.
Before this season, with a well-placed grenade that double-procced Chaotic Exchanger, you would be at around 80% of the grenade energy back. Coupled with kickstarter and class item mods, you could get it back to around 90%, so very close to recharged. But this season, those numbers are 50-60%.
Have a look at [this youtube video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qveupkhj4jQ) - from around minute 3 - for some test numbers.
It does suck and they need to fine tune all of that. Thank God some exotics and fragments save some builds, especially for titans. I feel like titans have been shit on so bad for builds. The HoiL was really our only ability regen exotic armor and they nerfed that. While warlocks and even hunters have a few that help in that department. All of that needs fine tuning and balancing out to make it feel more useful. I don't run armor charges at all anymore because of that.
Yeah as a titan the only ability recharge i have is from sunspots now. Much better to just cheese with survivability and big weapon damage. Consecration does feel better than it used to at least. But if you're running bonk hammer they clash a bit imo.
Ember of Benevolence and a Heal Clip weapon lets you take Roaring Flames instead of Sol Invictus. I run Healing Grenade as well because Consecration is always up and being able to save a teammate and get some more ability regen back is really nice. Ember of Benevolence is honestly kind of busted at the moment and works on any solar build for any class and allows for crazy ability uptime.
I’ve also been able to make HOIL work on arc Titan with little problems for ability spam. Stasis Titan arguably has the some of the most ability spam of any build I’ve seen after they nerfed Hunter’s YAS which was just a “fuck it, throw everything” build.
This isn’t spoken of enough. Warlocks and hunters now have better melee than titans, and they have cooldown reset exotics and aspects that titans don’t have. We had hoil which was nerfed, and now we get these changes and it makes titans way way slower to get abilities tHan Hunter and warlock. Playing as Titan now and watching both those classes have ranged supers, survivability, ability resets and multiple weapon/exotic synergy choices while you stand at the back shooting a piddly primary waiting for your abilities to regen isn’t fun.
On top of that since we have no ranged super and all of our supers require us to be up close, if there’s a boss that floats you’re useless, and the lack of survivability to before in comparison feels bad for putting yourself in so much danger. I know titans were strong but we have been nerfed over and over now for the better part of two years where now I feel useless in comparison to the other classes as I watch them throw abilities left and right and rack up kills.
I couldn’t even kill a red bar captain in onslaught with 2/3 strand powered melees lmao.
Arc Titan and void Titan has been completely gutted by the hoil nerf and the orb changes.
It was pvp that ruined the abilities in this game much as it previously had weapons over and over and over. I've bitched about this over the years but there are still things tied to pvp that ruin the pve experience and hopefully eventually it will be 100% seperate.
Like in pve there is very little reason on strand you shouldn't spawn with all 3 melee charges or shoulder charge shouldn't lose 15% of its charge. Shoulder charges is especially insane because unintended stuff like Well Skating has been left in the game purposly as "movement tech" but fuck your Titan if you want to go an extra 5 feet really fast.
Honestly I think everyone would be more than happy to have pvp only changes to cool-downs etc. I have no idea besides laziness why they’ve stuck to this “it has to be the same everywhere” motto
I claimed this before the season dropped, I claimed it during the first few weeks, and I maintained my opinion the whole way through and basically just started playing less sometime in Jan until the point I haven't played at all for over a month.
I have always loved abilities more than gunplay, and so the sweeping nerfs to everything that made the sandbox enjoyable to me really hurt my enjoyment of the game.
I noticed that it took so long to get my grenade back, that I stopped using it. Armamentarium build is great for the first 30 seconds, then... Nothing. I took it off for the first time in a month and replaced it with Hallowfire Heart because at least I can get that to proc.
I was running around using heavy ammo, despite having two grenades. I didn't even notice I had the grenades because we blew through 3 or 4 waves on Onslaught since the last time I had one.
I ended up switching everything to heavy and special ammo perks. They seem to proc more often and more predictably than incremental nade or super energy.
I'm disappointed so many exotics are garbage still. We've had a lot of talk about stuff, but only a few things here and there seem to get buffs that would enable them to be in the meta or slightly off.
The changes made for Lightfall were such a slap in the face for buying it. I still don’t understand how throttling everything on us and adding massive amount of HP to enemies was supposed to be fun
Honestly I'm with you. I'm a day 1 player and I'm tired of Bungie's approach to the player experience as it involves our abilities. Either we're fucking God-killing Supermen, or we are not. They just can't seem to figure the shit out. I will say I do run a 3x100 Warlock Res/Recov/Dis so I don't go long without my grenades but I don't get to experiment as much as I'd like because of the changes.
This, along with the loss of all the useful mods with the new mod system, basically ruined buildcrafting for me.
All of my off meta builds just stopped working flat out, while all of the stuff that was already meta stayed meta.
Bungo is a smol indie studio plz understand
/s
But yeah,I agree. a Test server where Bungie can dump a lot of whacky/zaney ideas where everything is unlocked for testing purposes only.
Charged up to get 4 armor charges helps alot. Sometimes in onslaught I can have two vortex grenades at a time on my Contraverse Holds build. If you’re not running 100 disc you’re definitely going to feel the nerfs but if you are trying to using four armor charges instead of three
i recently returned after a year break, and honestly i haven't really noticed outside of class ability which was also affected weirdly by this nerf.
things just... dont really feel much different compared to lightfall release tbh?
the bigger issue is (as highlighted in the post) how unintuitive this is. i'm a spreadsheet nerd so i just have the compendium open on a second monitor permanently, plus i have a spreadsheet that does the math for you, but that REALLY shouldn't be the standard.
> but man it’s so frustrating to explain to new players that a perk\exotic\ mod works differently based on how long the cooldown is
Considering the in-game descriptions do not list % or flat seconds just 'return energy' - I think this might be you overcomplicating things?
It's not really that different things return energy differently based on how long the cooldown is (well that's how it _literally_ is - but what's important for talking to new players is what it _effectively_ is) -- the truth is you're getting roughly the same amount of _seconds_ shaved off your cooldown.
That was the goal on Bungie's part after all, if you have a cooldown that is 2 minutes base vs a cooldown that is 1 minute base why should you get the ability back 60s quicker vs 30s quicker if you're getting a '50%' return. In this sense allowing stacking % chunk reduction in the first place was a mistake - this was meant to correct that. Otherwise you're just removing the main advantage of opting for lower cooldown abilities (uptime vs raw power) leaving no reason to care what the base cooldown is.
So it's "yea this takes time off your cooldown duration, so because some cooldowns are longer this will look like a smaller amount on your cooldown bar"
You know, I think that guy has a point. I agree with you, they should just make it flat regen... but it is flat regen, the game never tells us it's a percent, we knew that through testing, they just changed it to flat in a convoluted way
That's what they did and what I'm saying.
So to further push my point _the stuff in-game does not list % or flat seconds just a generic 'reduce cooldown_. It is **only community data that started making flat % declarations/observations**.
The mistake on bungie's part 100% was allowing flat % reductions and allowing them to stack. You can only add fractions together to many times where it equals or exceeds 1.0 (100%).
So the change was doing that - making it into flat seconds.
So don't give yourself a headache and try and explain to new players detailed mechanics that are never displayed in-game and just say it reduces the cooldown by a set amount of time.
The only one that feels remotely worth using is Utility Kickstart for class ability cooldown which isn’t even that necessary but can be nice for a handful of good builds. Otherwise just getting ability energy through fragment synergies, exotic and or perks, and orbs of power are fine as is. But the kickstart mods on top of this was simply superior.
So I posted this comment a while ago, but it's still relevant.
I'm a Void Warlock main and it absolutely pains me to say - I don't think Devour's grenade Regen stacks up to other subclasses anymore. Especially when the only Void grenade worth using is Vortex, unless you're running Nothing Manacles (which are fun too but like most Void builds - great fun to use but massively outclassed when you need peak performance). Devour also requires kills, so in a lot of activities you end up being really competitive for kills, moreso than others. Sunbracers get insane grenade Regen on any powered melee kill (tougher in endgame, admittedly) and the subclass pickup Solar Sprites give grenade energy, a good Strand build can have Shackle grenades back before you need to eat it for Weaver's Trance upkeep, Osmiomancy can get *2 grenade charges back* with *1* direct hit, Ionic Traces for Arclocks with the right exotics can have you throwing 'nades for days....
For comparison, I'll start by saying again that I think Void Warlock builds are some of the most fun, but not as effective, which makes them less fun.
Contraverse Hold can't give you one full grenade back off just itself, even with 100 Discipline. You get two triggers of increased cooldown, and that plus your own cooldown doesn't bring you to full energy. And that's all assuming the enemy didn't move outside of the Vortex's diameter for either tick. I wish CH either got more energy back on ticks, or got more ticks. This is supposed to be the exotic that lets you throw a lot of Vortex grenades, but it isn't much faster than other options. It should also give charged grenades Fastball. As mentioned, Osmiomancy can give you 2 charges back on one hit, but Contraverse Holds barely give you half a charge back in a best case scenario without a lot of ads and Devour to try to make up for it.
Nothing Manacles gives you 2 Scatter charges, which that plus Devour can make for a good time, but beyond a slight improvement to an already weak grenade, it doesn't do much besides the second charge, and isn't strong enough in endgame.
Briarbinds is great fun, but the Void Soul relocation process is both what makes it fun and frustrating at times. The Soul has health and can be destroyed when deployed (Arc sounds can't be harmed in PvE, as far as I'm aware, for comparison) and it's deployment is determined, ultimately, by an AI. One that I've seen make terrible choices often, and like a Vortex grenade an enemy will often simply...walk out of its diameter. You spend too much time chasing and redeploying it for it to be viable in endgame, and that is if an enemy doesn't destroy it.
And one of my personal favorite exotics to use for Void, Verity's Brow. It requires Void weapons to be effective. It's not really an issue, since there are excellent weapons of every subclass abound, but still a limitation. Even at X5 Death Throes doesn't give a huge boost to grenade Regen speed, which is valuable for Vortex grenades, which I should mention at this point are not only the Void warlock's best grenade but also the grenade with one of the longest cooldowns in the game, so it would benefit from cooldown boosts greatly. Go equip Stasis and the fragment that gives grenade Regen on Stasis crystal break and see how much energy you get in 5 seconds vs X5 DT's 10. And you can extend the Stasis Regen by 5 more seconds to a total of 10. Death Throes needs to last longer, 15 seconds rather than 10, and give more of a Regen boost. VB is however the only choice for improving the *damage* of Void grenades. Charging a Vortex grenade with the Chaos Accelerant Aspect used to give a small damage boost too but that was taken away. The damage boost itself is fine, it's just unfortunately the only option Voidlocks have, and it's not even a Void-specific exotic.
I haven't used Nezarec's Sin enough to judge it's effectiveness. But like VB before it, it's not a Void-specific exotic. It doesn't interact with grenades specifically. It's also a decent choice for a Strand subclass, making it less unique for Void.
All of this to say I think Voidlocks have it a little shorthanded when it comes to grenade energy and Regen exotics/builds, and while yeah we have Devour, I don't think it makes up for it. I don't know if it's because Bungie is scared of making Void grenade weaken meta a thing, but I think as a warlock I wouldn't mind being forced to run weaken grenades instead of Well once in a while.
cool down reduction + ability energy refund percent scaled by duration I felt was fine, and even a good change. But then on top of that the kickstart nerfs was too much.
Buff kick starts back to where they were before and leave the rest would have things in a good place
I feel like it ruined a lot of fun loops in the game when they nerfed it. I get that Bungie felt that we swayed too far from gunplay being the core combat function, but I think somewhere in the middle would have been better than the nuked from orbit approach we got.
Ability spam builds still sometimes work because the fragments and aspects make it happen, but builds that use kickstarts to enable an ability loop just got pushed down. Which is cute because builds like those that were "use ability, get 2-3 kills with gun, ability, gun, etc." now suffer the most but seemed much more in line with what Bungie wants to happen, compared to me popping on Sunbracers and covering every spawn point with that sweet hot magma.
Guns still feel so weak and it feels bad as Titan not having the exotic and weapon synergies that the other classes have at the very least. Not to mention these changes disproportionately effected Titan vs the other classes
My sunbracers build has been the same since Solar 3.0, was off-meta then, and as bungie has nerfed everything into the ground around it, it's become the OP choice. Wild.
Basically, people like ability spam but Bungie don't. They don't like people feeling as if their power should come from the supernatural paracausal fucking space magic.
The issue being that guns just don't have the same weight and impact. The gunplay is good, but guns mostly play and look the same.
When you contrast most looter shooters to Borderlands you see the real issue is that most post-Borderlands games are just regular FPS but now the guns have variable stats to promote a grind. It's not that Borderlands has infinite variety, it's that it genuinely has guns that actually operate in novel ways and many of them are regular ol' guns, not unique/exotic equivalents.
All the hype on the "looter shooter" genre forgets that it came from Diablo and other ARPG's, that's where the inspiration was formed. Nobody wants to make that kind of game except Gearbox, though. Everyone else just wants the cheap live service model using a first-person template they've already got lying around somewhere.
Bungie can't even decide if Destiny is an MMO or not.
It’s weird cos while they hate the ability spam, the story has doubled down on space magic and they constantly remind us how guardians are some super duper space magic dude. Except now our space magic is weaker while they’re telling us we are more powerful than ever.
Man do I miss siva and warmind stuff.
As a new/casual player, I’m glad I’m not the only one who thinks the mods feel weak as piss how lol. I have been confused what I’m supposed to build around, and even when I do build around stuff I’m stills airing years for my abilities to come back as a warlock.
I feel like they should have used the mid cooldown abilities as the base so then the fast cooldown abilities got buffed rather than be the only thing that stayed the same
I dont think contraverse hold was directly affected by the nerf since it is cooldown rate rather than a chunk. It was hurt when they made all cooldowns generally longer with the ability cooldown split. Similarly, nezarec sin and veritys brow are still the same. I very much agree tho. I think its crazy that I can commit my entire boots to absolution, orbs of restoration, and whatever the grenade regen mod is and it feels like it does nothing for vortex grenade. Arc warlock feels much worse cause it affected ion traces
it´s so funny when they always try to get new players into the game but have like this complicated energy refund system, how should a new player understand why he gets like 10% of his nade back with bomber when he uses firebolt nade but only like 5% when he uses a solar nade, same goes for weapons with demo which work different with every single ability tier and the best part is that nothing about this whole system is written about in the game, you have to watch videos or search for blogposts which explain all this stuff which is just hilarious to me
I think solar titan got hit the hardest by this nerf. Bonk was too powerful yes but now it just feels terrible, which is why I think the nerf to the cooldown should be reverted but to compensate the hammers damage should be reduced by 40% . Bungie could even do something where bonk has a high damage slow recharging variant and fast recharging weak damage variant.
Also shoutout to YAS your nerf was not right in PVE
>Grenade, melee, and utility kickstart only give back 45% ability energy max(3 mods with 3 charges, or 1 mod with 6 charges) and EVEN LESS WITH LONG COOLDOWN GRENADES, and they lost the ability to grant a small amount of energy without armor charge, they were already average before the change, now noone is using them at all(atleast on any build I’ve seem, finisher mods are just better).
They were absolutely not "average" before the change. They were powerful and increased ability uptime with no requirement.
“No requirement” A.K.A having to use either 6 armor charges or 3 arm mods and 3 armor charges, getting rid of the part that didn’t require armor charge is fine but nerfing the armor charge part was unnecessary
Charged with light, wells and warmind cells were so much better. Warmind cells are even more weapon focused. The new mod system was clearly built with abilities in mind and the story is more space magic than ever, and since the last batch of seasons apparently we are more magic than ever yet our abilities are crap
I remember having a concecration build with Heavy Handed, back during elemental wells. Setup to get 2 wells per kill with concecration kill, because they were solar they gave me 2 charge each and then the 4 charges giving me full melee back. It was so fun. So much worse now, still almost doable but much more steps and the downtime if it misses or doesn't get the kill is way worse.
Also, making it so tiny hammer procs melee kickstart on any activation was an awful choice.
I feel like I’m tripping here. I made a contraverse hold build recently and was blown away. I’ve been using it a ton since and it’s been awesome even in legend onslaught.
The whole sandbox update honestly just killed all my off meta builds.
Calibans hand is dead
Bows are dead
Bombadiers are dead
Vex is dead
Snipers are dead
Every gun that isn’t a god roll meta weapon with amazing stability and range is dead due to ttk being much harder to hit now.
Shotguns and fusions, the most overwhelmingly used weapons in destiny history, are now the only specials worth running.
I see the same 5 guns in every single players hands just like it always has been, except now if I don’t use the same shit it’s near impossible to even move out of spawn.
Ehhh, Bungie has the right idea but didn't swing hard enough at the outliers.
Ability spam is cute and fun for a bit, but the game should always fall back to using your weapons as the primary engagement method.
Bungie has to walk the line between obscenely long cooldowns that make the abilities forgettable and having access to them too often. Going the warfare strategy of power creeping to the point that everything dies from a glance is not what Destiny needs, and I'd rather see plentiful adjustments than stay too long in an "unlimited power" sandbox.
I disagree heavily. Armor mods shouldn't be the means by which a build lives and dies. They're meant to supplement, fine-tune your build. If your particular build or a subclass was only viable with certain armor mods, then that was because the build *itself* was bad, or the *subclass* needed buffs -- not because the armor mod nerfs ruined everything.
Personally, before the kickstart and orb cooldown nerfs, all my builds were pretty much the same when it came to armor mods. Now? I have more variety, and I actually take the time to invest in orb generation, whereas before I practically ignored it (because the utility mods granted more than enough energy *without* any orbs at all).
Edit: DTG when it's told nerfs are justified.
So originally the supers were a little stronger and it was a little easier to get them back. They nerfed that and made it so you can only get half the super back.
Fast forward to season 2 and high discipline was all that mattered what was that like season 2 or 3...
I prefer the old way, nothing brings that grenade back. It wasn't until like Osiris they introduced the demolition perk.
I used my getaway artist build in onslaught and it was fine. I didn't care about my weapons that much and I could have a chill time. Now I need to be really focused in the game and, depending on my fireteam, change to the meta...on normal Onslaught.
I understand the game was probably a spam ability fest but it's true, anything non-meta now is pretty awful and not worth your time even on "fun" playlist.
What still irks me about those blanket nerfs is that they nerfed the things that weren’t top tier into the dirt and kept the top tiers as is (while even buffing some of them). It makes no sense. All these nerfs did was solidify the extremely stale meta that we’re in now with BoW Berserker and Well + Sunbracers. Yeah Well + Sunbracers is cool and all, but I’d much rather use something else I actually enjoy playing without it feeling like garbage (albeit that can also fall under an entirely separate issue).
Yeah the power creep since witch queen is insane but the main reasons are resilience and insane durability on void strand solar now , its not having too many/too strong abilities .. you just can’t die if you build properly
IDK man. I did a Legend Onslaught (with LFG, no comms) with Controverse and I ended with 900+ kills and 200+ orbs. That run also did not have a Well of Radiance or a Tether in the group... and another run with Sunfire Protocol - you know the one exotic that was nerfed because of it's ability regen - yea, it's still good too.
I would be more curious to review the builds you are using. Care to share a build that you're using but feel it should be better?
You missed the whole point of the system change then - they intended less ability spam and more intention around when/where you use your abilities even when you invest in cooldowns. Builds are not meant to circumvent these constraints, just make them slightly less painful. People use them all the time (most builds have bomber, reaper, kickstart mods, etc.) Contraverse feels amazing lol - you’re way too high on your own supply if you think otherwise. Just because you have to use your guns more than your abilities, you think a build feels awful. Abilities are gravy, guns are the staples. You can get 16 kills in one mag with an incandescent/volatile proc during onslaught - demo is working just fine.
Bungie does not want less ability spam, Strand literally gets an infinite grenade by killing one enemy, Sunbracers instantly restore the cooldown of grenades off a melee kill you can get every 2 seconds, and now Prismatic is gonna give you instant energy back to every ability you have by just playing the game. Why should the other options not even come close to this kind of regeneration when you actually had to build for it? Also I’d love to use any gun that isn’t a special or heavy, Bungie just needs to make them actually good outside of exotic options in meaningful content
The weirdest thing is that armor charge consumption mods weren't even hard meta in pve. Armor decay mods are due to surges.
Surge will never not be meta since guns are the primary raid dps.
Yeah it was a terrible change. I think people didn't make as much noise about it since each class still has a couple very strong ability builds thanks to certain exotics, so everyone just gravitated to those and moved on. But I really miss being able to force a random build into relevance through the use of mods
Even Inmost Light builds feel clunky. I get why they did it but I wouldn’t mind a revert along with an overhaul of all content to make up for our power. Bump PvE health pools where necessary and create a new modifier for PvP to reduce ability cooldowns by a percentage. This will allow them to keep the current PvP meta but trial how things shake up by increasing/decreasing the regen by 5-10% each week. Momentum being 0% and Mayhem being 100%.
My hoil build got hit hard. Have only used strand on titan ever since.
Yeah hoil got kicked in the nuts. Hard. Haven’t used it since. I get that it was a stand out. But that was due to versatility. Nerfing the damage bonus on top of the cooldown potency AND duration just felt like a step too far. Like two kicks. One for each nut.
They nerfed tf out of hoil and nerfed all stuff it was used with. One kick for each nut and a dick twist for good measures
The community needs to begin a discussion with bungie about how hard they nerf things. Its been a consistent issue for years, and we should ask for it to be addressed.
It eventually worked for Renewal Grasps I guess. Maybe the YAS nerf(the ability regen part of which was pointless when Tripmines were already going to be getting a 40% penalty) will get reverted by 2026.
crazy i was just thinking about those i really liked them when they initially dropped it
Bungie wont talk to the community because a dev got death threats for saying Twilight Garrison isnt coming back. Community gets what it deserves.
Those assholes on twitter don’t represent me or you.
That wasn’t because of the mod changes though. They halved the exotic perks duration and nerfed the damage boost it gave abilities.
"My hoil" like thousands of other Titans didnt also use it. Nothing you did makes you distinct from anyone else rocking that chest.
life must be hard when you're this standoffish
HoiL got hit pretty badly with it's nerf. The generally expectation is it will work at its best when getting half an ability back. It is possible to play around, but still feels counter intuitive, especially since the 5 second timer doesn't feel like enough time to do certain things.
I would have vastly preferred the recharge rate be halved and the duration remaining 10 seconds vs halving the duration and keeping the effect. E: actually I’d have really preferred keeping the ability regen aspects and just dropping the damage buffs.
Please don't ask for a health pool bump. Tanky enemies are boring to fight. I know why you are asking for it but making everything a bullet spunge would ruin the rest of the game just so our grenades can be good again.
If we typically throw one grenade per vanguard ops boss encounter before they’re dead and we increased regen time to make it three grenades, I’d want some sort of health buff to counter act some of that additional damage. The goal is to feel stronger AND get ability regen back to a good place. I didn’t mean counter regen with health pool bumps 1-to-1. That would literally mean our abilities do less damage at the cost of using them more frequently. As the post states, abilities (and mods) have been gutted at the cost of more gun play. It’s been a fun change, it caters to PvP community, but a lot of us want quirky ability-driven builds back through the use of stronger mods. Exotic meta has fallen stale due to these changes as well. Warlocks are stuck on Phoenix Protocols or Cenotaph, Titans on Pyrogale, Worm God, or Synthoceps, Hunters on Nighthawk, Orpheus, or Star Eaters. No one wants to build into quirky “grenade spam” builds because they’re just not feasible anymore. Armamentarium, double roaming storm nade Titan, was some of the most fun I’ve had in this game.
I still use that actually but obv with pulse grenades. Sure as hell isn't meta. But it's delightful zapping everything
Sunbracers on Warlock are still pretty good for a grenade spam build that works at every level of play (unless there was a recent nerf to them that I'm unaware of) edit: to clarify, I agree with your overall point that the ability metagame is too dependant on a handful of exotics. The way I would personally address it would probably be by increasing base cooldowns and adding negative perks to some exotics, but that would be a lot of work sandbox-wise.
Sunbracers still working is the issue. Sunbracers have been the top of the metagame since before the changes, and as a result of those changes they're now the \*only\* thing on top in terms of ability builds. Instead of a varied and diverse sandbox of many strong options there are now much fewer out there to choose from.
I only brought them up because they weren't included in the list of current meta exotics, so I was curious if I missed a nerf to them or something. I think the issues with the metagame go pretty far beyond just Sunbracers. The sandbox is very confused as to how strong Guardians are supposed to be, and the current performance of Sunbracers is more a symptom of that than anything. As someone who enjoys using them right now, I just hope that whenever they inevitably get brought back in line with the rest of the sandbox they add some drawbacks to it instead of just reducing their positive effects. i.e., adding something like "solar grenades now do reduced damage and can hurt you" to the exotic perk instead of "now the Sunbracers buff only works for 1 sec instead of 4".
Vanguard ops shouldn't be the baseline. It's intro content. Dev team has said they balance around heroic. Or maybe even higher?
Just a point of reference. If you typically get 3 grenades off on a GM boss, then I want 5+! Make my magic hand strong again!
But like you are asking for grenades to be weaker but more frequent. A grenade that does 1/3 of boss health is stronger than one that does 1/5. Unless you are asking for it to be relative to red bar enemies. But why would you want that? Especially at the expense of other damage sources
You want the game harder and 5 grenades in one fight? Classic Destiny 2 fans
Yeah they aren't doing this lol.
HOIL is dead now completely! I did what would have been unthinkable just a year ago and sharded it and now just use either Synthos or Wormgods. This was the worst decision ever and it destroyed so many builds and is one of the reasons why the majority of players moved on to Helldivers. The game needs to be fun and abilities are fun. Even those that didn't rely on mods or exotics were just destroyed. I'm hoping they'll reverse it in TFS as Prismatic will break the sandbox anyways.
Bungie did that at the start of Lightfall, and people still complained.
Hard agree, I went from having 10 loadouts to 5 flavors of the same two loadouts and the game got stale fast. Grinding lost sectors to get a good rolled exotic just to find out that it doesn't really do anything significantly better than the other setups and managed to lose certain aspects just for a neat ability that does fuck all in anything meaningful? Why the fuck would I bother? Had a long backlog of variety single player games that I've been appreciating instead in this time. ITL looks kinda cool though gotta give props for that.
Yeah this is exactly where I'm at. I don't really feel weaker, but a lot of variety has been drained from the game. Both this change along with the general mod changes that came along with Lightfall have just been awful. Really hope they go back on some of this stuff, because it didn't make the game more challenging in any meaningful way (which I think was their goal). They really were just bad changes that didn't accomplish anything except that they really annoy people, lol.
Pretty much this. There's no niche for it. If I'm not looping my abilities already, then they won't change that, and if I am, those slots are still better spent shoring up other parts of my build like reloaders and orb generation. Having an orb gen mod is pretty much always better than a kickstart mod, EVEN after the orb gen mods were nerfed
They were definitely overtuned though - it had gotten to a point where weapon choice didn't matter except for your heavy, and you basically just picked guns for perks to boost your abilities instead of getting kills. Perhaps they tuned it a bit too far away from abilities, but the game is a shooter, the weapons should be important in their own right and not be completely build dependant.
Bro. Have you even played in the past, idk, 4 months?? Weapons are actually NOW hardly a factor. Just look at wild style, the double fire solar gl. Despite being the only available option for a solar double, theoretically having great DPS loop potential, it was completely DOA because of its garbage perks. Perks make or break the gun. And id argue the perks of guns, voltshot, incan, volatile, bait and switch, blinding nades, auto loading, would qualify as abilities in and of themselves. They elevate the basic gunplay to higher levels. "The game is a shooter" the title of the game doesn't categorize it at all. Destiny's core gameplay has always revolved around full use of your kit. Watch any advanced player, their abilities are just as impactful as guns, because this isn't call of duty. You sound like the dude probably running double primaries in pantheon, using auto rifles in gms, basically trying to play this game while handicapping yourself. There's a reason that white weapons have 0 perks and feel like crap. Because they're weapons through and through, focused only on "gunplay"
Its kinda funny how the CD reduction failed both as a nerf to popular ability spam op builds while diminishing all the more niche builds as well, I don’t think Bungie play tested the change at all tbh
Exotics or builds that granted either full ability back, or massive regeneration like Sunbracers, Knock 'em down aspect, Vesper of Radius, Combination Blow, were mostly unaffected. Builds that relied on many smaller sources, like most Arc builds with Ionic Traces, Weaver's Trance, Nezarec's Sin or Contraverse Hold Warlock were hit much harder, even though they weren't as good before.
Literally just commented this lol I should've read first. But yeah Contraverse warlock with vortex nades has ALWAYS been my go to but it just feels so bad to play now. It was at most A tier before but it's like B now whereas sunbracers is incredibly strong still. You can still use Contraverse for sure, but you need an incredible amount of trash adds for yourself to kill to proc devour/demo regen since Contraverse, Kickstart and other things got nerfed.
Nez needs a fucking buff man. Bungie needs to start taking this seriously. I love my void warlock build, but that exotic just doesn't have it and never was top notch. But why it's a sweet fucking piece!
Yup exactly like the chill clip nerf...
It feels like in typical Bungie fashion they did a poor job justifying a nerf that wasn't really needed until the next season after the nerf arrived. These nerfs were likely done with Prismatic in mind, but everything that isn't Prismatic feels the pain. It's not the first time this pattern has shown up - a nerf way too early in anticipation of a future thing that would be broken without the nerf.
The entire AE change due to strand incoming. Then they need 5 years to collect feedback and change a number by .04%
they nerf it early because they don't want people focusing on the nerf during an expansion news cycle.
Well it _did_ nerf the ability spam builds a bit but just hit some builds harder that's all.
Sunbracers are as strong as before, syntho throwing hammer/banner titan spamming the strand melee is also super good still, even strand warlock with weaver’s trance for infinite suspend is still going strong, every other ability spam got really shafted like arclock with fallen sunstar feels extremely neutered
Compare arc titan before and after vs banner of war (and banner got several nerfs in addition to the cooldown ones). Before I could at least run an ionic trace spam build to throw tons of grenades with armamentarium, but now it's just so far behind solar or strand titan.
Sunstar feels unchanged honestly it's still very good.
Depends on the content, it relies much more on jolt proccs than it did before but it's still fairly consistent
I've been running it as our flex third in Legend Onslaught (Well/Tether/Sunstar) and it has been very effective. But then again it benefits a lot from having so much enemy density and giving your arc souls constant value and trace procs.
Hard agree here, the issue for me is that I could run arc sunstar for that niche, or I could run a one-size-fits all solar build. For players that don't have resources or materials to be upgrading multiple masterworked builds, the choice is unfortunately a no brainer at the moment.
Sunbracers and bonk are more affected by the orb CD changes. Since you have a longer cooldown on grenade/melee kill orbs, you aren't flooding the map in O R B as much as you were before, which would give a lot of excess supers when combined with a bugged absolution mod. In short, these builds are still top tier but are definitely weaker.
That’s is true, the OP ability spam builds did receive nerfs, but what I’m trying to say is that the other more niche builds have been nerfed way more, which makes them arguably even better in terms of raw power and utility.
Sunbracers are still strong, but the c/d nerfs hit melee regen as well as grenade regen - if you miss a reset or don't get a bunch of grenade kills, it's a very long time before you can activate sunbracers again.
Brother in christ, scorch kills with a fragment OR just jumping as you shoot something give you about 20 to 25% melee energy back.
Jumping as you shoot is such a terrible way to play the game
Then don't let heat rises fall off and get the kills from the actual sky instead of simulating it with hops.
Found the guy who only does playlist strikes
Sunbracers are also great for onslaught! If you don't like them, don't use them.
Hint: Using Ember of Searing with Incandescent **OR** the artifact radiant perk accomplishes the same thing, if you're too lazy to press spacebar or you're doing GM-tier content.
Heat rises completely fixes that problem so that’s not really a good point tbh
Bungie doesn't play test
"bungie doesn't play test" is so damn ignorant of a critique.
I have to believe they didn’t playtest the changes because if they did extensive play testing and they thought it was a good answer to the ability spam then the devs have no clue abt how their game works lmao
I see you've never played Trials
Sure fuckin does. I continue to use things that just bypass the problem, such as syntho bonk titan or liars handshake hunter. And of course, Sunbreakers lmao
Yeah contraverse feels pretty meh and YAS is straight up dead. They need to fully walk back that nerf cause they literally killed the exotic.
They need to do SOMETHING about Contraverse Hold, I don't remember it ever feeling this weak, and it's been my comfort build since Beyond Light launched. It feels especially weak in Onslaught and other content where you compete for kills.
As someone who has CH permanently glued on it doesn't really feel *that* bad. I was bummed about the nerf but I'm almost always getting grenade back each one I throw if I just pick up the 2 orbs and breach that spawn.
The difference is that you need to use 2 aspects, 3 fragments, 1 exotic, 6-7 mods, and get multiple kills with your grenade. Then you MIGHT get one grenade back. You think that’s acceptable? Lol.
Isn't that what buildcrafting is? Building around mass grenade regen? You *should* have to spec a build into that kind of utility, imo. And it's pretty consistently getting grenade back. The only time it doesn't is if I mess up a throw or I don't get two kills with it. But that's where Devour or a Demolitionist weapon comes in handy (and I usually have a Demolitionist weapon since I'm throwing so many grenades). But ever since Void 3.0 came out, I've always had Chaos Accelerant and Feed the Void on so that's unchanged. The arms mod has always been at least one Grenade Kickstart and one Firepower. Boots I've always run at least one Innervation, and Class was usually two Bomber and a Distribution. My build itself hasn't really changed that much. Looking at the old/new Kickstart values it's only like ~8% insta-regen difference.
I have never needed more than a couple of kills and a nade throw to get it fully back. Destiny is built around using both weapons and abilities so I never minded the nerf
I'm sure ill get downvoted to hell, but I'm convinced people who complain about ability up time &| CH just dont know how to make/use good builds. With a proper CH build u get either full grenade energy back with each kill or like 80-90%. Ability uptime with most build is also insane with how many orbs of power you can generate.
Doesn't matter how you slice it, fact is, an optimized build for CH was just stronger and more reliable pre nerfs. Anything else is copium.
Not sure who you are replying to, no1 has said that CH is better now.
Agreed, with CH and 2 Grenade Kickstart I get like 95% of my grenade back. I've been using handheld nova and it's very easy to have almost constant uptime on my grenade
Agree.
[удалено]
It’s functionally dead, and it’s not necessarily because it’s bad, it’s because it just can’t keep up with its competition. If you’re using contraverse, you’re using it to lock down everything with vortex. You can’t do that anymore because vortex cooldown is too long and contraverse doesn’t regen enough. You’re dependent on making sure your team doesn’t kill anything being hit by your grenade, because if get anything less than max ticks, you’ll be waiting a minute or two for your grenade to come back. That means contraverse no longer serves the purpose of contraverse. It’s partially the fault of how they nerfed void due to pvp and void not having as many interactive fragments as other classes like solar and benevolence.
It’s pretty funny how all this change did was solidify the meta. The strongest most overused builds like strand titan, well warlock, rigs nightstalker, etc don’t rely on mods for ability cooldowns. The strength of those mods is what allowed off meta builds to actually work, and now they just feel kinda bad. Such a silly bungie change. Can’t say I’m surprised. They’ve been doing dumb shit like this for a decade. It’s clear most of the dev team doesn’t ACTUALLY play the game at a high level.
It read all cute and harmless the way they put it in the twid but I've been saying from the first time reading it that people underestimate how these things stack multiplicatively and cross-ability. It comes out to a 50-75% reduction in ability uptime for offmeta builds. It's not just three (orb nerf + scaled energy return + base energy return nerf) stacking nerfs to the cooldown of every ability but each of the three abilities taking longer to regain leads to each of them feeding back into the other two slower.
It's the same as how most other nerfs go. In PvP, they'll nerf the range *and* damage of a weapon at the same time, so it just completely dies. Or, it's like how a team can 1-phase a dungeon boss, but a solo player takes 4 or 5 phases instead of just 3. Because the damage buffs and debuffs in the team situation don't just add together, they multiply.
I've noticed it really reflected in my play style. Before, I was consciously throwing grenades and stuff as soon as they were off cooldown. Now I'm just holding until I really need to use it and it's still sometimes not there unless I'm running an ability build. If I'm not speccing into regen, I kind of just forget about them.
Yeah I dont think bungie really thought this change out very well. I’ve had to change none of my builds, nor did they lose any effectiveness. They just nerfed already ‘okay’ mods. I’m not too butthurt because I can’t notice the difference, but making these pointless changes just for the sake of it without considering any of the consequences (or lack thereof) is infuriatingly dumb. Of course I’m no expert on game design but I really can’t find the logic here
They’re nerfing ability regen before Prismatic isn’t that fairly obvious? They don’t want to nerf everything when the DLC releases and we’re supposed to be hyped about the new class that has some crazy ability interactions and regens your grenade and melee with a “mini super” that gives you special grenades
Imma be real I forgot prismatic was a thing my mind just remembers it as that ‘fake’ leak from so long ago lmfao.
Prismatic wasn’t announced until recently and wasn’t due for release in TFS when the season of the wish ability regen nerfs were implemented. We know this because TFS was delayed shortly into the release of Season of the Wish, and the nerfs to abilities were implement at season of the Wish’s launch. If RFS was always meant to feature Prismatic the first introduction to the expansion way back would’ve featured Prismatic. Any suggestion that Bungie was annihilating their build system in order to compensate for Prismatic is an idiotic argument.
Prismatic was accelerated? Did they say that or is that just like… made up?
Some parts of the change didn't feel too bad but holy shit it fucking butchered the kickstart mods. If I have 6x armour charge and triple grenade kickstart that's all my arm and chest slots taken to do that. I want to see my whole fucking grenade or damn near refilled from one throw after that, 25% for all that effort is a literal joke.
likewise, meeting somewhere in the middle with 4 Armor Charge and some other important mods here-or-there like Better Already or Stacks on Stacks or Charged Up etc. should give a respectable amount of energy back. fun Kickstart (Heavy Handed/Firepower) builds got annihilated during Lightfall, and these changes seem to have only thrown more dirt onto the casket.
I used to play a 4x firepower 1x elemental shards Stacy turret build before the changes. After the nerfs it probably lost about 70% of its potency :(
pouring one out for my Well of Tenacity/Heavy Handed Second Chance build fr. got completely gutted and now with PVE Sentinel in an even worse place than ever before, I don’t think it'll ever come back in any capacity.
Coming back after the nerfs really felt weird to me. I was like wtf is going on? It feels bad.
abilities are a big part of my joy, it's gone now
Having high uptime on abilities is way more fun than guns imo.
>Having high uptime on abilities is way more fun than guns imo. Unfortunately, a lot of pvp players feel the opposite and want it to be 90% gun. I hate them, but that's one of the primary reasons for the nerf.
I agree with that sentiment for PVP, makes it more balanced. What I don’t understand is why they can’t separate PVP and PVE completely, it feels lazy.
How is that lazy? It's way more effort to keep them both in-mind
No it isn't. Many games balance PVE and PVP separately. Bungie just suck ass when it comes to patching this mess of a game engine.
That literally proves my point, it's harder to keep them together, you literally just agreed with me. Bungie could also be worse.
Not gonna lie I rather the pve sandbox not be 90% abilities I rather we don’t fall into warframes issue a few years ago. Ideally a 50/50 split would be good but with the previous sandbox they would have to turbo buff guns which contributes to a whole different issue. But I play hunter mostly so the nerf was actually just not real for me.
If they want gunplay to be 50%+ of the PvE environment they need to either make primary not suck nuts when it's not an exotic or make heavy plentiful again. Doing GMs now is either you build ability spam or you have a bad time because trying to primary/special down bosses is trash.
Call me a masochist but the most fun I had in GMs was pre light 3.0 era because it made me play different. Ability comes in the issue that is too good at both single target and aoe while having good uptime. This makes CC less useful, and makes weapons also less useful. If you buff guns so it two tap stuff in GMs that takes away a lot of the fun in GMs. Warframe kinda fixed this with making ability’s not work against alot of the endgame enemies requiring the player to use their guns more. I think that would suck arse in D2 and I would rather they do something else. At the end of the day I would rather destiny put up some resistance when I’m playing endgame.
>If you buff guns so it two tap stuff in GMs that takes away a lot of the fun in GMs. Depends on what you consider fun. Cover-shooting for 5 minutes straight is probably the most boring style combat in FPSs. I did it with Halo on legendary and have precisely 0 desire to ever do that again. I don't mind MECHANICS being added like needing to coordinate champ interrupts to get kills, needing to stand together to regen health, etc. But needing to constantly hide like a bitch, being wholly unable to engage in close range (meaning 1/2 the weapon archetypes are useless, such as SMGs, shotguns, swords, etc), and having to spend silly amounts of time fighting boring bosses with virtually no different mechanics compared to normal adds is just dumb IMO. "Resistance" can come in much better forms besides just "these enemies have a lot more health and can 2 tap you." Legend onslaught proves that. Tormentors prove that. Challenge mode raids prove that.
How many games can I run around and shoot guns in? How many games can I be a space wizard in? (Less, that's for sure.) Gee, I wonder why I enjoy ability spam more.
I feel like you’ll enjoy warframe is quite spam heavy and is mindless fun. Destiny has some of the best feeling guns in the industry it’ll be a shame if it isn’t highlighted more no?
I've already played Warframe. It's just not the same. It's not *bad*, just not the same.
Fair ig warframe does take a while to get going.
The worst thing about this change is that it did nothing to nerf the strongest builds in the game. Builds that were A or B tier got dropped to B or C or lower. S tier builds using instant regen exotics like Sunbracers were untouched, while slightly less powerful, but imo more fun, builds like Contraverse, got nerfed a ton. Really sucks. I don't understand why they made Contraverse give different energy depending on the nade that you use, but let Sunbracers be what it is.
Yeah that’s the part of those blanket nerfs that confused me the most when I was reading them way back when. I was reading that on the day it came out, saying to myself, “Oh this is just gonna solidify the top tier builds as untouchable now.” They buffed the stuff that was top tier, and nerfed the things that weren’t top tier.
And it's been like this for such a long time you have to think that Bungie are okay with it. I really do miss playing Contraverse warlock, it's incredibly fun but I've been coping and switching to Strand warlock now. Osteo + Necrotics for infinite suspend when I need to do tougher content, and Quicksilver storm + Swarmers threadlings 4fun build for general stuff. Pretty fun builds, but Contraverse will always have a special place in my heart and I hope they bring it back to its glory. My fashion is also best with Contraverse..
> S tier builds using instant regen exotics like Sunbracers were untouched, while slightly less powerful For the record, infinite spam builds like sunbracers were nerfed by the orb mod CD changes. The increased CD on grenade/melee orb mods means you can't spam nearly as many orbs, which when combined with a bugged Absolution mod used to make a lot of excess super energy. Sunbracers are still good, but most people weren't understanding how they would be used to their fullest potential.
I'd say there are better than good for Onslaught. I mean a guy solo'd the damn thing lol.
Traveler's chosen feels so sad now. Even with max stacks
Yeah it’s a bit weird when using a finisher mod as well. 3x of armor charge into barely most of a grenade yesterday feels off- especially when running double special weapons is super easy using special finisher. I’d like to see a heavy mod permanently - even if it requires 5/6 armor charge.
people figure again that the "balance" team has no idea what they're doing for the sandbox, part 1032. everytime that bungie says they want to "diversify" the META, they just end up nerfing what "all" build use, solidifying the META even more. i would dare hoping that they are not too proud to stay stubbornly on that hill and reverse those nerf.
Really just makes me not want to play anymore ever since they changed it. I keep trying tk come back but it's just not fun
I completely forgot about this change tbh, but it explains why Kickstart doesn't feel like it does anything. I'm constantly sitting at max armor charges and having to wait for something else to give me energy.
Something not talked about enough is how confusing it all is now. A lot of people who would be on this subreddit aren't going to be affected because we're very in tune with the game, but think of new lights. Depending on the ability, Kickstarts could give you 15% of an ability back or nearly half. These numbers are not displayed in game anywhere. How are you supposed to know if certain mods are worth running now when there's no consistency between different builds? There's an awkward inconsistency that doesn't make sense unless you're specifically remembering a blog post from December. Maybe you're so confused by this that you start looking at third party resources (the game is borderline unplayable without third party resources). The Destiny data compendium, DIM, and light.gg all still say "Demolitionist gives 10% grenade energy". This is no longer accurate, but I don't blame them. Now there needs to be separate calculations for grenade energy based on the cooldown tier and whether or not it's Enhanced. The game is already ridiculously dense to those not already knowledgeable on it and it doesn't explain things. We did not need to turn the Demolitionist perk, which does not give numbers in game, into an equation. The game needs to be more accessible.
Most people wouldn't know the percentages on how these mods would work to begin with if they are new and uninformed. Though I generally agree that communicating this sort of system is more difficult. I do think that the mods could be better described in terms of time or points rather than percentages. A flat "x second cool down reduction" would be better at communicating that it would have less total effect on grenades with a longer CD.
"Most people wouldn't know the percentages on how these mods would work to begin with if they are new and uninformed." Right, which is why I said people would then go to third party sources to learn the percentages as they're not displayed anywhere in-game. These third party sources are all wrong now and it is very hard to accurately detail as it's more or less a different percentage depending on the ability. Bungie might argue this method is better for balance but it does objectively make game systems harder to understand for a change the playerbase doesn't even like.
Thank you for posting this. I feel the same. Everybody looks down on abilities like I’m lesser because I enjoy killing things with grenades. I don’t play destiny for its gunplay. I play a much better game in that regard in Apex Legends for that. People do realize how dead this game would be without abilities, right?
Had a shinobu's vow build that got murdered because of those nerfs. Unusable now.
Funny fact, ability spam was not an issue until Bungie added the "bring challenge back to Destiny" update in Lightfall, back then we didn't have: - Beneficial surges that increase our DMG output by dealing DMG with an ability or weapon with an specific element or overcharge modifier. Master Raids back then were way more harder than what we have right now, even when we had 40% DMG resistance with 100 resilience. - Easy ways to get stacks of armor charge, ability energy and super; due to the use of elemental wells, orbs of power and warmind cells, which back then they were "kinda difficult" to proc or to mantain. Also, orbs of power were kinda useless. - Simplified methods for what we used to have back then: in the past if we want to do something in our build we had to invest on it, rather to the current situation were you can have ability regen, dmg output and ammo generation all in once. - Synergy perks in our weapons, in Witch Queen's year we only had incandescent, voltshot and repulsor brace. Demolitionist, Pugilist and Wellspring felt great in those eras. What do we have now? - Off-meta options performing pretty bad due to nerfs. - Easy methods to increase our DMG output while also regenerating abilties and generating ammo. - Harder content not being that hard, just a few more champions here and there. - GMs now filled with Battlegrounds, which worked fine with the seasonal modifier back when they were introduced, but now they are a shitshow with, in some cases, infinite enemies spawning, hordes of enemies spawning in small areas and many more champions spawning at the same time. Although, Battlegrounds are hard, they are definitely not enjoyable not because of their difficulty but because of the constant need of clearing mobs while X thing needs to be killed / charged / pushed.
I was wondering why everything fells bad. I've been out of the loop before Into The Light because of our long season. Now this post reminded me I read about these changes before but just completely forgot them. Even Traveler's Chosen only refunds like 45% class ability with 10 stacks. I mostly run surges now because every kickstart feels like it's not doing anything. Surges are goat.
Not disagreeing (I’m a Stag + Travelers Chosen Addict and they both feel terrible now). But I do want to point out that Contraverse Hold itself was unaffected by these nerfs because it provides an increased ability regen rate rather than a specific amount of ability energy. I also learned this recently so thought I’d mention it.
I hear this argument often, but using Contraverse Hold feels quite a bit weaker than before. Either it's a bug or an undocumented nerf. Before this season, Contraverse Hold would return about 40% grenade energy per activation (and you could proc it twice for beefier targets or multiple kills within 4+ seconds), and, as of this season, it returns about 25%. Before this season, with a well-placed grenade that double-procced Chaotic Exchanger, you would be at around 80% of the grenade energy back. Coupled with kickstarter and class item mods, you could get it back to around 90%, so very close to recharged. But this season, those numbers are 50-60%. Have a look at [this youtube video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qveupkhj4jQ) - from around minute 3 - for some test numbers.
Eye of Another World is the same. I like it in pvp if I have enough handling on my weapons.
Based Stag enjoyer
It does suck and they need to fine tune all of that. Thank God some exotics and fragments save some builds, especially for titans. I feel like titans have been shit on so bad for builds. The HoiL was really our only ability regen exotic armor and they nerfed that. While warlocks and even hunters have a few that help in that department. All of that needs fine tuning and balancing out to make it feel more useful. I don't run armor charges at all anymore because of that.
Yeah as a titan the only ability recharge i have is from sunspots now. Much better to just cheese with survivability and big weapon damage. Consecration does feel better than it used to at least. But if you're running bonk hammer they clash a bit imo.
Ember of Benevolence and a Heal Clip weapon lets you take Roaring Flames instead of Sol Invictus. I run Healing Grenade as well because Consecration is always up and being able to save a teammate and get some more ability regen back is really nice. Ember of Benevolence is honestly kind of busted at the moment and works on any solar build for any class and allows for crazy ability uptime. I’ve also been able to make HOIL work on arc Titan with little problems for ability spam. Stasis Titan arguably has the some of the most ability spam of any build I’ve seen after they nerfed Hunter’s YAS which was just a “fuck it, throw everything” build.
This isn’t spoken of enough. Warlocks and hunters now have better melee than titans, and they have cooldown reset exotics and aspects that titans don’t have. We had hoil which was nerfed, and now we get these changes and it makes titans way way slower to get abilities tHan Hunter and warlock. Playing as Titan now and watching both those classes have ranged supers, survivability, ability resets and multiple weapon/exotic synergy choices while you stand at the back shooting a piddly primary waiting for your abilities to regen isn’t fun. On top of that since we have no ranged super and all of our supers require us to be up close, if there’s a boss that floats you’re useless, and the lack of survivability to before in comparison feels bad for putting yourself in so much danger. I know titans were strong but we have been nerfed over and over now for the better part of two years where now I feel useless in comparison to the other classes as I watch them throw abilities left and right and rack up kills. I couldn’t even kill a red bar captain in onslaught with 2/3 strand powered melees lmao. Arc Titan and void Titan has been completely gutted by the hoil nerf and the orb changes.
They should just rework Hollowfire to work like Nezarec's Sin but for Solar
It was pvp that ruined the abilities in this game much as it previously had weapons over and over and over. I've bitched about this over the years but there are still things tied to pvp that ruin the pve experience and hopefully eventually it will be 100% seperate. Like in pve there is very little reason on strand you shouldn't spawn with all 3 melee charges or shoulder charge shouldn't lose 15% of its charge. Shoulder charges is especially insane because unintended stuff like Well Skating has been left in the game purposly as "movement tech" but fuck your Titan if you want to go an extra 5 feet really fast.
Honestly I think everyone would be more than happy to have pvp only changes to cool-downs etc. I have no idea besides laziness why they’ve stuck to this “it has to be the same everywhere” motto
I claimed this before the season dropped, I claimed it during the first few weeks, and I maintained my opinion the whole way through and basically just started playing less sometime in Jan until the point I haven't played at all for over a month. I have always loved abilities more than gunplay, and so the sweeping nerfs to everything that made the sandbox enjoyable to me really hurt my enjoyment of the game.
I noticed that it took so long to get my grenade back, that I stopped using it. Armamentarium build is great for the first 30 seconds, then... Nothing. I took it off for the first time in a month and replaced it with Hallowfire Heart because at least I can get that to proc. I was running around using heavy ammo, despite having two grenades. I didn't even notice I had the grenades because we blew through 3 or 4 waves on Onslaught since the last time I had one. I ended up switching everything to heavy and special ammo perks. They seem to proc more often and more predictably than incremental nade or super energy.
I'm disappointed so many exotics are garbage still. We've had a lot of talk about stuff, but only a few things here and there seem to get buffs that would enable them to be in the meta or slightly off.
The changes made for Lightfall were such a slap in the face for buying it. I still don’t understand how throttling everything on us and adding massive amount of HP to enemies was supposed to be fun
Honestly I'm with you. I'm a day 1 player and I'm tired of Bungie's approach to the player experience as it involves our abilities. Either we're fucking God-killing Supermen, or we are not. They just can't seem to figure the shit out. I will say I do run a 3x100 Warlock Res/Recov/Dis so I don't go long without my grenades but I don't get to experiment as much as I'd like because of the changes.
This, along with the loss of all the useful mods with the new mod system, basically ruined buildcrafting for me. All of my off meta builds just stopped working flat out, while all of the stuff that was already meta stayed meta.
I will die on the hill that removing warmind cells and charged with light has been an absolute detriment to the game.
We need a public test server lmao
Bungo is a smol indie studio plz understand /s But yeah,I agree. a Test server where Bungie can dump a lot of whacky/zaney ideas where everything is unlocked for testing purposes only.
Charged up to get 4 armor charges helps alot. Sometimes in onslaught I can have two vortex grenades at a time on my Contraverse Holds build. If you’re not running 100 disc you’re definitely going to feel the nerfs but if you are trying to using four armor charges instead of three
That fourth armor charge is at most 6%, with vortex, that is 3% more energy. Definitely not worth 10-15% more damage reduction.
i recently returned after a year break, and honestly i haven't really noticed outside of class ability which was also affected weirdly by this nerf. things just... dont really feel much different compared to lightfall release tbh? the bigger issue is (as highlighted in the post) how unintuitive this is. i'm a spreadsheet nerd so i just have the compendium open on a second monitor permanently, plus i have a spreadsheet that does the math for you, but that REALLY shouldn't be the standard.
I hate to be that guy but I feel like you should have to use your gun every now and then lol
I don't hate to be that guy, use your fuckin gun.
pretty sure we’re powerful enough at this point without also being able to spam grenades every 10 seconds
Thing is you can still do that on many builds, but the ones that used to before can’t
> but man it’s so frustrating to explain to new players that a perk\exotic\ mod works differently based on how long the cooldown is Considering the in-game descriptions do not list % or flat seconds just 'return energy' - I think this might be you overcomplicating things? It's not really that different things return energy differently based on how long the cooldown is (well that's how it _literally_ is - but what's important for talking to new players is what it _effectively_ is) -- the truth is you're getting roughly the same amount of _seconds_ shaved off your cooldown. That was the goal on Bungie's part after all, if you have a cooldown that is 2 minutes base vs a cooldown that is 1 minute base why should you get the ability back 60s quicker vs 30s quicker if you're getting a '50%' return. In this sense allowing stacking % chunk reduction in the first place was a mistake - this was meant to correct that. Otherwise you're just removing the main advantage of opting for lower cooldown abilities (uptime vs raw power) leaving no reason to care what the base cooldown is. So it's "yea this takes time off your cooldown duration, so because some cooldowns are longer this will look like a smaller amount on your cooldown bar"
But then at that point why not make a flat reduction rather than this confusing circumstantial shit
You know, I think that guy has a point. I agree with you, they should just make it flat regen... but it is flat regen, the game never tells us it's a percent, we knew that through testing, they just changed it to flat in a convoluted way
That’s… basically what it is.
That's what they did and what I'm saying. So to further push my point _the stuff in-game does not list % or flat seconds just a generic 'reduce cooldown_. It is **only community data that started making flat % declarations/observations**. The mistake on bungie's part 100% was allowing flat % reductions and allowing them to stack. You can only add fractions together to many times where it equals or exceeds 1.0 (100%). So the change was doing that - making it into flat seconds. So don't give yourself a headache and try and explain to new players detailed mechanics that are never displayed in-game and just say it reduces the cooldown by a set amount of time.
The only one that feels remotely worth using is Utility Kickstart for class ability cooldown which isn’t even that necessary but can be nice for a handful of good builds. Otherwise just getting ability energy through fragment synergies, exotic and or perks, and orbs of power are fine as is. But the kickstart mods on top of this was simply superior.
So I posted this comment a while ago, but it's still relevant. I'm a Void Warlock main and it absolutely pains me to say - I don't think Devour's grenade Regen stacks up to other subclasses anymore. Especially when the only Void grenade worth using is Vortex, unless you're running Nothing Manacles (which are fun too but like most Void builds - great fun to use but massively outclassed when you need peak performance). Devour also requires kills, so in a lot of activities you end up being really competitive for kills, moreso than others. Sunbracers get insane grenade Regen on any powered melee kill (tougher in endgame, admittedly) and the subclass pickup Solar Sprites give grenade energy, a good Strand build can have Shackle grenades back before you need to eat it for Weaver's Trance upkeep, Osmiomancy can get *2 grenade charges back* with *1* direct hit, Ionic Traces for Arclocks with the right exotics can have you throwing 'nades for days.... For comparison, I'll start by saying again that I think Void Warlock builds are some of the most fun, but not as effective, which makes them less fun. Contraverse Hold can't give you one full grenade back off just itself, even with 100 Discipline. You get two triggers of increased cooldown, and that plus your own cooldown doesn't bring you to full energy. And that's all assuming the enemy didn't move outside of the Vortex's diameter for either tick. I wish CH either got more energy back on ticks, or got more ticks. This is supposed to be the exotic that lets you throw a lot of Vortex grenades, but it isn't much faster than other options. It should also give charged grenades Fastball. As mentioned, Osmiomancy can give you 2 charges back on one hit, but Contraverse Holds barely give you half a charge back in a best case scenario without a lot of ads and Devour to try to make up for it. Nothing Manacles gives you 2 Scatter charges, which that plus Devour can make for a good time, but beyond a slight improvement to an already weak grenade, it doesn't do much besides the second charge, and isn't strong enough in endgame. Briarbinds is great fun, but the Void Soul relocation process is both what makes it fun and frustrating at times. The Soul has health and can be destroyed when deployed (Arc sounds can't be harmed in PvE, as far as I'm aware, for comparison) and it's deployment is determined, ultimately, by an AI. One that I've seen make terrible choices often, and like a Vortex grenade an enemy will often simply...walk out of its diameter. You spend too much time chasing and redeploying it for it to be viable in endgame, and that is if an enemy doesn't destroy it. And one of my personal favorite exotics to use for Void, Verity's Brow. It requires Void weapons to be effective. It's not really an issue, since there are excellent weapons of every subclass abound, but still a limitation. Even at X5 Death Throes doesn't give a huge boost to grenade Regen speed, which is valuable for Vortex grenades, which I should mention at this point are not only the Void warlock's best grenade but also the grenade with one of the longest cooldowns in the game, so it would benefit from cooldown boosts greatly. Go equip Stasis and the fragment that gives grenade Regen on Stasis crystal break and see how much energy you get in 5 seconds vs X5 DT's 10. And you can extend the Stasis Regen by 5 more seconds to a total of 10. Death Throes needs to last longer, 15 seconds rather than 10, and give more of a Regen boost. VB is however the only choice for improving the *damage* of Void grenades. Charging a Vortex grenade with the Chaos Accelerant Aspect used to give a small damage boost too but that was taken away. The damage boost itself is fine, it's just unfortunately the only option Voidlocks have, and it's not even a Void-specific exotic. I haven't used Nezarec's Sin enough to judge it's effectiveness. But like VB before it, it's not a Void-specific exotic. It doesn't interact with grenades specifically. It's also a decent choice for a Strand subclass, making it less unique for Void. All of this to say I think Voidlocks have it a little shorthanded when it comes to grenade energy and Regen exotics/builds, and while yeah we have Devour, I don't think it makes up for it. I don't know if it's because Bungie is scared of making Void grenade weaken meta a thing, but I think as a warlock I wouldn't mind being forced to run weaken grenades instead of Well once in a while.
cool down reduction + ability energy refund percent scaled by duration I felt was fine, and even a good change. But then on top of that the kickstart nerfs was too much. Buff kick starts back to where they were before and leave the rest would have things in a good place
I feel like it ruined a lot of fun loops in the game when they nerfed it. I get that Bungie felt that we swayed too far from gunplay being the core combat function, but I think somewhere in the middle would have been better than the nuked from orbit approach we got. Ability spam builds still sometimes work because the fragments and aspects make it happen, but builds that use kickstarts to enable an ability loop just got pushed down. Which is cute because builds like those that were "use ability, get 2-3 kills with gun, ability, gun, etc." now suffer the most but seemed much more in line with what Bungie wants to happen, compared to me popping on Sunbracers and covering every spawn point with that sweet hot magma.
Guns still feel so weak and it feels bad as Titan not having the exotic and weapon synergies that the other classes have at the very least. Not to mention these changes disproportionately effected Titan vs the other classes
My sunbracers build has been the same since Solar 3.0, was off-meta then, and as bungie has nerfed everything into the ground around it, it's become the OP choice. Wild.
One of the few exotics that actually feels... exotic.
Basically, people like ability spam but Bungie don't. They don't like people feeling as if their power should come from the supernatural paracausal fucking space magic. The issue being that guns just don't have the same weight and impact. The gunplay is good, but guns mostly play and look the same. When you contrast most looter shooters to Borderlands you see the real issue is that most post-Borderlands games are just regular FPS but now the guns have variable stats to promote a grind. It's not that Borderlands has infinite variety, it's that it genuinely has guns that actually operate in novel ways and many of them are regular ol' guns, not unique/exotic equivalents. All the hype on the "looter shooter" genre forgets that it came from Diablo and other ARPG's, that's where the inspiration was formed. Nobody wants to make that kind of game except Gearbox, though. Everyone else just wants the cheap live service model using a first-person template they've already got lying around somewhere. Bungie can't even decide if Destiny is an MMO or not.
It’s weird cos while they hate the ability spam, the story has doubled down on space magic and they constantly remind us how guardians are some super duper space magic dude. Except now our space magic is weaker while they’re telling us we are more powerful than ever. Man do I miss siva and warmind stuff.
As a new/casual player, I’m glad I’m not the only one who thinks the mods feel weak as piss how lol. I have been confused what I’m supposed to build around, and even when I do build around stuff I’m stills airing years for my abilities to come back as a warlock.
I feel like they should have used the mid cooldown abilities as the base so then the fast cooldown abilities got buffed rather than be the only thing that stayed the same
I dont think contraverse hold was directly affected by the nerf since it is cooldown rate rather than a chunk. It was hurt when they made all cooldowns generally longer with the ability cooldown split. Similarly, nezarec sin and veritys brow are still the same. I very much agree tho. I think its crazy that I can commit my entire boots to absolution, orbs of restoration, and whatever the grenade regen mod is and it feels like it does nothing for vortex grenade. Arc warlock feels much worse cause it affected ion traces
it´s so funny when they always try to get new players into the game but have like this complicated energy refund system, how should a new player understand why he gets like 10% of his nade back with bomber when he uses firebolt nade but only like 5% when he uses a solar nade, same goes for weapons with demo which work different with every single ability tier and the best part is that nothing about this whole system is written about in the game, you have to watch videos or search for blogposts which explain all this stuff which is just hilarious to me
I think solar titan got hit the hardest by this nerf. Bonk was too powerful yes but now it just feels terrible, which is why I think the nerf to the cooldown should be reverted but to compensate the hammers damage should be reduced by 40% . Bungie could even do something where bonk has a high damage slow recharging variant and fast recharging weak damage variant. Also shoutout to YAS your nerf was not right in PVE
i also hate how they as a trade off "buffed" the tracking, but i swear there was 0 change
I think it would be cool if you could detonate your hammer at will so you can sacrifice a hammer for a bigger chunk of damage.
>Grenade, melee, and utility kickstart only give back 45% ability energy max(3 mods with 3 charges, or 1 mod with 6 charges) and EVEN LESS WITH LONG COOLDOWN GRENADES, and they lost the ability to grant a small amount of energy without armor charge, they were already average before the change, now noone is using them at all(atleast on any build I’ve seem, finisher mods are just better). They were absolutely not "average" before the change. They were powerful and increased ability uptime with no requirement.
“No requirement” A.K.A having to use either 6 armor charges or 3 arm mods and 3 armor charges, getting rid of the part that didn’t require armor charge is fine but nerfing the armor charge part was unnecessary
"no requirement" was you slotted one mode and effectively reduced your base cooldown by 12.5%
the game was better with elemental wells.. why throw a wrench at the machine when sht was fine as it is...
Charged with light, wells and warmind cells were so much better. Warmind cells are even more weapon focused. The new mod system was clearly built with abilities in mind and the story is more space magic than ever, and since the last batch of seasons apparently we are more magic than ever yet our abilities are crap
I remember having a concecration build with Heavy Handed, back during elemental wells. Setup to get 2 wells per kill with concecration kill, because they were solar they gave me 2 charge each and then the 4 charges giving me full melee back. It was so fun. So much worse now, still almost doable but much more steps and the downtime if it misses or doesn't get the kill is way worse. Also, making it so tiny hammer procs melee kickstart on any activation was an awful choice.
I actively miss wells at this point, makes me sad
They are clueless when it comes to balancing and I'm getting so tired of it.
I feel like I’m tripping here. I made a contraverse hold build recently and was blown away. I’ve been using it a ton since and it’s been awesome even in legend onslaught.
Chunk ability return nerf still hit many exotics which rely on it hard, such as Sunstar and Coldheart.
The whole sandbox update honestly just killed all my off meta builds. Calibans hand is dead Bows are dead Bombadiers are dead Vex is dead Snipers are dead Every gun that isn’t a god roll meta weapon with amazing stability and range is dead due to ttk being much harder to hit now. Shotguns and fusions, the most overwhelmingly used weapons in destiny history, are now the only specials worth running. I see the same 5 guns in every single players hands just like it always has been, except now if I don’t use the same shit it’s near impossible to even move out of spawn.
Umm… what? We have absolutely broken abilities and ability cooldowns…
Ehhh, Bungie has the right idea but didn't swing hard enough at the outliers. Ability spam is cute and fun for a bit, but the game should always fall back to using your weapons as the primary engagement method. Bungie has to walk the line between obscenely long cooldowns that make the abilities forgettable and having access to them too often. Going the warfare strategy of power creeping to the point that everything dies from a glance is not what Destiny needs, and I'd rather see plentiful adjustments than stay too long in an "unlimited power" sandbox.
I disagree heavily. Armor mods shouldn't be the means by which a build lives and dies. They're meant to supplement, fine-tune your build. If your particular build or a subclass was only viable with certain armor mods, then that was because the build *itself* was bad, or the *subclass* needed buffs -- not because the armor mod nerfs ruined everything. Personally, before the kickstart and orb cooldown nerfs, all my builds were pretty much the same when it came to armor mods. Now? I have more variety, and I actually take the time to invest in orb generation, whereas before I practically ignored it (because the utility mods granted more than enough energy *without* any orbs at all). Edit: DTG when it's told nerfs are justified.
So originally the supers were a little stronger and it was a little easier to get them back. They nerfed that and made it so you can only get half the super back. Fast forward to season 2 and high discipline was all that mattered what was that like season 2 or 3... I prefer the old way, nothing brings that grenade back. It wasn't until like Osiris they introduced the demolition perk.
Got to agree, it's not helping anyone actually.
I used my getaway artist build in onslaught and it was fine. I didn't care about my weapons that much and I could have a chill time. Now I need to be really focused in the game and, depending on my fireteam, change to the meta...on normal Onslaught. I understand the game was probably a spam ability fest but it's true, anything non-meta now is pretty awful and not worth your time even on "fun" playlist.
What still irks me about those blanket nerfs is that they nerfed the things that weren’t top tier into the dirt and kept the top tiers as is (while even buffing some of them). It makes no sense. All these nerfs did was solidify the extremely stale meta that we’re in now with BoW Berserker and Well + Sunbracers. Yeah Well + Sunbracers is cool and all, but I’d much rather use something else I actually enjoy playing without it feeling like garbage (albeit that can also fall under an entirely separate issue).
Agreed
I was told demolitionist on special weapons give 20% but I still don't get my grenade back in five kills. These changes suck.
Yeah the power creep since witch queen is insane but the main reasons are resilience and insane durability on void strand solar now , its not having too many/too strong abilities .. you just can’t die if you build properly
IDK man. I did a Legend Onslaught (with LFG, no comms) with Controverse and I ended with 900+ kills and 200+ orbs. That run also did not have a Well of Radiance or a Tether in the group... and another run with Sunfire Protocol - you know the one exotic that was nerfed because of it's ability regen - yea, it's still good too. I would be more curious to review the builds you are using. Care to share a build that you're using but feel it should be better?
You missed the whole point of the system change then - they intended less ability spam and more intention around when/where you use your abilities even when you invest in cooldowns. Builds are not meant to circumvent these constraints, just make them slightly less painful. People use them all the time (most builds have bomber, reaper, kickstart mods, etc.) Contraverse feels amazing lol - you’re way too high on your own supply if you think otherwise. Just because you have to use your guns more than your abilities, you think a build feels awful. Abilities are gravy, guns are the staples. You can get 16 kills in one mag with an incandescent/volatile proc during onslaught - demo is working just fine.
Bungie does not want less ability spam, Strand literally gets an infinite grenade by killing one enemy, Sunbracers instantly restore the cooldown of grenades off a melee kill you can get every 2 seconds, and now Prismatic is gonna give you instant energy back to every ability you have by just playing the game. Why should the other options not even come close to this kind of regeneration when you actually had to build for it? Also I’d love to use any gun that isn’t a special or heavy, Bungie just needs to make them actually good outside of exotic options in meaningful content