We didn't land on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock landed on us.

Just like the champion system, your logic is counterintuitive as well If not having weapon choices limited by champions is what you want then by that there's no reason to have champions, whose entire purpose is to limit your weapon choice

Why would that ever be a design goal in a looter shooter: Limiting our weapons choices?

so people can't abuse meta loadouts to have a huge advantage over other players who don't own certain things, or just so people arent finishing NFs incredibly fast. The system was implemented with the Pinnacle Weapon era in mind. Not all players were skilled enough, or had the time to invest into earning some of the most powerful Pinnacles, giving players that had them a big advantage, and making most content incredibly easy to burn through. I think the real reason Bungo wants loadouts to be restricted to a degree in NFs is because they want to encourage use of other weapons that arent normally picked, rather than cater to a meta. It does work, to a fault, and that is that a lot of weapons types and archetypes (at least those readily available) are not very good. Also, Bungo sees something as powerful as Arbalest, and gives it anti-barrier, stepping all over anything that ever uses the mod or has it intrinsically

But that's exactly how the system works now.....Bungie is creating "meta loadouts" every season whether they intend to or not. Don't have Le Monarque? Oh well too bad, because it rocks with Overload Bow. Don't have Divinity? Too bad, because it's the best thing ever for Overload Champs. Don't like using Arbalest? Too bad sucker! It's the best thing for shields of all types and Barrier Champs in the game bar-none. Hell that single gun is basically required for GM Nightfalls going on 2 or 3 seasons now. So instead of letting the community pick the "meta" (which is just guns we like to use in a looter shooter) you are preferring the situation now where perfectly good weapons get almost zero usage because Bungie has artificially placed them outside said "meta". How is that any better???

Because I get to play the way I want. What’s wrong with that? A “looter shooter” doesn’t mean anything to me because I play for fun. Le Monarque is great! But guess what, when overload is on and the burn is arc I ain’t using it. It’s the lack of options that gets me - I can only run one great weapon when overload is active but I [b][i][u]HAVE[/u][/i][/b] to run an HMG. I don’t like HMG’s nearly as much as I like every other heavy weapon so f it. I just won’t play as much.

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Missed fusions and linears