[quote][quote]Then imagine year 3; how are you going to introduce a successor to Ass Kicker[/quote] Destiny 2 is slated to release next year. There is no "Year 3," so that's an easy answer. This ecosystem is going to end at that point, presumably, so extrapolating that far is needless. And Look up "Imago Loop," they already brought Fatebringer back, anyway; as long as new gear is equal to old gear, people will use it. It doesn't need to be better. [quote]Again, the only way to make the new content relevant is to make the old content irrelevant[/quote] 100% false, sorry.[/quote] And yet you just proved my point with your opening comment; Destiny 2 will apparently have an entirely new ecosystem, leaving this one behind, compounding my point: for new content to be relevant, the old content has to become somewhat irrelevant, at least. I was wondering how Bungie would approach this; I was wondering how they would keep players interested with new loot, given the game is heavily loot driven, and given so many players already have most of the loot: would they make new loot better than the old, or make new loot of relative quality to the old, and leave the old behind? It seems they went with the latter, and it makes some sense, as it keeps a lot of weapons still relevant in PVP, but you can't just blaze through PVE like a God with maxed out Exotic's like you could in HoW. It's actually going to take time and effort for many players to reach max level, unlike HoW where everyone pretty much reached 34 in a week, if not in a day. [quote]Let me direct you to HoW. Players could chose whatever the hell they wanted to use, and guess what? People still used tons of new gear, because EVERYTHING was relevant. Player attachment to gear isn't binary, and your point is demonstrably untrue.[/quote] I don't think you're being honest with yourself. Everyone that I knew, and every video I saw of Skolas completion, was using Gjallarhorn to burn him in 30 seconds or less to avoid the difficulty of the mechanics in that match. It was such a thing that Bungie changed the match to include more formidable ads, as well as alternate his burn ever week. There was no shortage of "first Skolas kill" videos where everyone was using Gjallarhorn. Most PoE matches I was seeing Gjallarhorn and Fatebringers coming out at one point or another. Ghorn was easily still the best rocket launcher, and it was undoubtedly one of the first things anyone would of buffed up with an exotic shard. I could include a crap-load of YouTube links to prove the point but I don’t think that’s necessary. Hardly anyone was using new gear from HoW, apart from some new Exotic armour, most of which everyone managed to get in the first few weeks through Exotic engrams. [quote]If you read my post, you'd know that every one of these points has already been re-tooled in Year 1 gear, specifically to match their power levels with Year 2. Like you point out, everything is still viable in the Crucible, which is more balanced than it's ever been; 2.0 very clearly balanced both Y1 and Y2 to be equally effective at the competative level, so the fact that you still cling to the belief that Year 1 is "OP" is pretty strange, considering how glaringly untrue it is.[/quote] That actually wasn’t my point. I wasn’t arguing that Y1 was OP. My point was that Year 1 included a lot of stuff that was pretty great as it is, that would have to become irrelevant one way or another, whether by being nerfed and or prohibited from reaching max level, or whatever, because otherwise, you’d have to make new weapons that are even better than Year 1’s, and it would get ridiculous. [quote]Ghorn was nerfed. Have you even been paying attention? The 2.0 PATCH was what balanced it, not the level cap! In Year 1 environments, Ghorn is no longer the destroyer-of-faces that it once was. And, if it were Infusible, it would still preform at that weaker level in Year 2, as well. You're acting like bringing it to 310 would magically bring back it's godliness, which is totally not the case. The same goes for ALL Year 1 gear; it's been leveled out to Year 2 effectiveness, with no noticeable leg-up on Year 2 gear, as the new, more balanced Meta shows. Allowing Year 1 to be brought to Year 2 levels would in no way change that Meta, because it's the result of the patching, not the capping.[/quote] Then what difference does it really make? Either way, the point remains that in order for new stuff to be relevant, the old stuff has to be left behind. Furthermore, [i]obviously[/i], bungie didn't want people blazing through the new content with stuff equally as good as all the new top tier gear. Obviously. When HoW dropped, people were getting to max level in a day. With TTK, there's hardly anyone max level even after a month. They've made it harder this time. That's a good thing. I got bored of HoW very quickly. There was zero motivation for me to complete Skolas because I had everything already, and none of his loot table had anything better than I already had. It wasn’t worth completing every week. Whereas with TTK, I can already see myself looking forward to raiding again on reset every week. There’s still so much new loot to get. TTK has way more playability than HoW, not just because King's Fall is more interesting than PoE (at least in my opinion), but because they have rendered a lot of our old gear irrelevant, and so for the first time in a while, there's actually a motive to bother with it, there's actually a new goal and it's not easy to reach it. HoW was too easy.