Creating orbs for yourself wasn't possible in D1 if I remember correctly.

I mean, its a bad change (at least in the vacuum it was presented in, apparently it ties into something yet to be announced which will make it make sense) but weapons didnt generate orbs in D1. Apart from Telesto but that was as part of its perk...

They also specifically say the reason they're making this change is because weapon masterworks were pointless aside from orb generation, and exotics without catalysts cannot generate orbs. What it looks like to me is they're removing the only reason to masterwork a weapon because they're changing what masterworking weapons does to make it actually worth doing. Since you can't just masterwork exotics this also then allows every weapon in the game, regardless of masterwork or catalyst, to be able to generate orbs. So, we don't know how powerful these orb generating mods will be or what else we'll be able to do with orbs (seeing as it's now part of buildcrafting I would expect mods that utilize orb pick ups to be buffed to compensate for the lesser orb generation), we also don't know what change if any they're making to weapon masterworking, or what they're doing with weapon crafting and whether masterworking will be tied to that in some way. But sure let's all jump to Bungie is ruining the game, because that's what's cool to say now I guess. It's funny how little weapon multikills orbs actually did for the game; aside from occasionally getting an unnoticeable amount of super energy or at the very least providing an inconsistent way of getting charged with light this mechanic that everyone says was so integral to the game was useless. For all we know this could be a really good change making builds specific to orb generation really powerful but everyone wants to throw a fit because of what they THINK this will do to the game. I hate how popular it is to hate on Bungie for every single change they make over a month before we even get to try the changes for ourselves and come up with our own conclusions as to whether or not it was a good change. Sure it could be terrible but nobody knows, no one. This whole comment forum is just an echo chamber of people saying it's bad just because it was removed but really how many people were absolutely dependent on their weapon giving them a single orb for a multikill 5 times in a strike. Orbs on multikills was a weak way of incentivizing spending the resources to masterwork. Personally the only reason I did it was to get the gold borders on weapons, because I'm a simple creature. I'm hoping they change masterworking to be something actually worth doing, a reason to invest in your favorite weapons. Until we know what changes those are, and until we can get hands on with them and come up with our own conclusions... I reserve judgment.

If Bungie throw us an inventive curveball, I'll hold my hands up. But right now it sounds dreadful, and I'm not sure why they'd tell us something that doesnt sound good, y'know?