The nerfs announced in yesterday's TWID revolve around the idea that certain builds are too powerful, but it also extended nerfs to every single build in the game with the orb generation nerfs.
That's right. [i][u]Every existing build is getting nerfed.[/u][/i] That is a blanket guardian nerf.
Well, I'm going to remind you that power is relative. We are powerful relative to our enemies.
And what are our "challenging" enemies? What are the enemies in most content that are supposed to serve as a power check? Champions.
And guess what? They're just not. They are boring, repetitive, and mechanically simple and provide no meaningful check to our power. Stun with a few bullets and then melt with abilities is a joke.
You know what enemies do provide that check? Tormentors.
That is what we need. We need more unique, powerful enemies that meaningfully check our power like Tormentors are capable of.
Get rid of champions altogether and give us more unique, truly difficult, boss enemies, and THEN evaluate the power scales.
Example: What if there was a boss enemy that had AoE suppressing fields? Maybe buffed the enemies with damage, DR, or suppressing abilities? What if there was an enemy that spawned damaging AoEs that we had to navigate while dealing with intense add density?
What if enemies had armor types (like Tormentors) that were weak to blast, precision, grenade, melee, or sustained damage? What if multiple of these bosses could spawn and have synergies with each other?
Each and every one of those would be many, many times more engaging, complex, and difficult, than champions.
Edit: To be clear, I'm not debating the merit of the nerfs to hammer and banner. This post is limited to the general discussion of the power scales between the Guardians and their enemies.
[b][i]Bungie themselves have made it clear that they measure our power by comparison to that of our enemies. [/i][/b]
Therefore, if the power checks present in the enemy ranks are too weak or infrequent, the scale will always say to nerf us. I'm simply arguing that Champions set far too low of a bar for engaging or difficult bosses and therefore the measure of our power is skewed.
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If only Tormentors, boss or not, weren't entirely circumvented by a particular exotic which also, ironically enough, was historically used to trivialise champions. Divinity does wonders. Rhulk was absolutely a step in the right direction for boss design, but I'd also like to see the return of Insurrection Prime type mechanics.