So when sunsingers faded into irrelevance after they got nerfed I didn't play them for a while, in fact I barely played Destiny at all for quite a while, but I've recently given sunsinger another chance in the crucible.
Since bungie tried to encourage people to take other perks on the sunsinger I've been humouring them by taking solar wind on my melee.
It has it advantages, it's cooldown is very low and when running Memory of Felwinter and max strength I permanently have a melee charged which is nice.
However, I feel that the purpose of the perk, i.e. the wind, is extremely underwhelming.
The Problem:
The idea is that it offers the ability to push your enemies away from you so you can stop them from getting too close and killing you. However, it seems like half the time that I punch someone it just doesn't work at all, and when it does it barely moves the other person. Even when the opponent gets pushed back pretty much every time we end up trading because they will either a) kill my with a shotgun because they are still within one shot range, or b) they will lunge forward back towards me because of their melee snap on and then won't move backwards at all.
The problem is thus: in order for the melee to make use of it's unique perk to come into effect I must not kill my enemy with it in one shot.
If I don't want to kill them in one shot I have to put myself in melee range while they are still on full health (to avoid killing them). There are now two options: either a) they will have used a primary and weakened me such that as soon as I melee them they will melee me back as described above and I will die and they will not. Or b) they will wait until I'm close then shotgun me before I can melee them.
One of the other situations in which solar wind would be useful is to counter people running at you with supers such as bladedancers, but because of the superior lunge distance of the bladedancer compared to solar wind they will always swipe you before you can get a melee off.
There's pretty much no situation in which the solar wind perk is useful in the crucible.
The only time it really works as intended is when you either catch someone by surprise or they are jumping in mid-air and you can push them away, and even in these rare situations the distance and speed at which is pushes people away is pretty disappointing.
My suggestions:
Even if nothing else is done to solar wind (which I think it should be) at very least the speed and distance that the melee pushes people away at need to be increased to make it truly meaningful in crucible.
Another option is to more majorly rework the perk, perhaps the melee could do significantly reduced damage (so as to increase the number of situations in which the active perk will come into effect) and to significantly increase the range of the melee. Think thunderstrike (I know, it hurts to think about thunderstrike but bear with me) but instead of doing loads of damage, it only does say 60 damage (or possibly less, subject to testing) but launches your enemy much further away.
This would be useful for people playing sniper in order to counter rushing shotgunners, it would give you a change to kill your opponent with a primary before they get too close. It would also eliminate the issues I mentioned earlier (not wanting to 1 shot enemies, always trading etc).
This might not be the best way to fix solar wind (please reply with your thoughts to get some discussion going) but regardless, something needs to be done about solar wind because right now it's a pretty useless perk.
Side Note:
On the topic of sunsingers, can we please remove the feature where hitting an opponent directly with your firebolt grenade causes it to explose immediately causing reduced damage, not triggering the large blast radius and not burning the hit victim? That sucks and is really frustrating.
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A push and an 180 turn would be nice :-)