Yeah...with so many of these people it’s like, “Guys, you’re completely glossing over the fact that D1 legendaries had twice as many strong perks as D2 legendaries. That’s your perceived power difference; has nothing to do with whether rolls are random or not.” It should not have been rocket science for Bungie to just roll out a more complex mod system to let players slot an extra powerful roll or other scopes or so forth and just use the mods as part of the late game farming drive; letting players use messing around with customization to build investment and playtime rather than depending on RNG. At the very least it’s a middle ground between two camps of players that both obviously exist, otherwise we wouldn’t have had the design choices we did for Vanilla D2. But instead they just walked back to D1 designs and left a mess of depreciated year 1 gear that they refuse to update in their wake. It’s frankly generous to call their seesaw approach to design lazy. I would go so far as to call Bungie’s attitude with Forsaken and particularly its post launch handling unprofessional. So many of the issues, from economies to balance to simple design aspects addressing the needs of various different types of players, are obvious sticking points on inspection. Many of the issues remain unacknowledged or obviously mishandled by Bungie. Also, have we even gotten to the part where there’s only a handful of new exotic weapons, and two are bows, two are hand cannons? I can understand two bows, since that’s a new weapon type outright, but like....this just seems sad.

I remember when Warmind came out I put about 20 hours into grinding Crucible to get my Jade Rabbit catalyst to drop (I’m a Scout Rifle guy). That also happened to be the time it took for my first valor reset, give or take a match; the two happened about the same time. It’s something of a joke at this point that I’m still waiting on a Vigilance Wing catalyst and, as of the most recent Iron Banner, have finished 5 Valor rank resets total. The sleeper nodes being purely random were the other major clue aside from catalyst drops in Warmind that this was Bungie’s mindset, and a lot about Forsaken speaks to that same mentality. Sparse drops, but also random gear rolls? Checks an artificial inflation box. Literally all the game economies right now? Artificial inflation and draining of existing, long time player stockpiles so Bungie can better control the state of economy going forward. Continued RNG dependence of having engrams decrypt for the right gear slots to gain power, compounded by fewer drops per powerful engram and many engrams being of lower power? Same story. There’s sparks of cleverness in some of the content design and certainly aspects of the art, but overall everything is very much lacking and lots of rough edges. It only takes noticing that all sniper archetypes have the same total carried ammo in PvE to realize that Bungie put no serious work into actually balancing the game sandbox in a lot of ways, especially given the unjustifiable scout rifle PvE nerf that happened. Sorry to rant. I’ve put a lot of time and energy into D2, and it feels like Bungie has basically just been casually drawing over everything with a crayon instead of actually putting quality time into the game.