And boring. Bungie needs to learn the difference between artificial difficulty and actual challenging game design.
Throwing a hundred red bars with more shields and nine million health into an activity doesn't then make it more difficult; it's now just boring because it takes me three times as long to kill the same type of enemy I can fight on a patrol.
Champions are not difficult. They're dumb gimmicks that hinder any kind of interesting play styles and approach to an encounter. Every GM basically just boils down to sitting in the back of the map with a full team of wishenders until every enemy is dead.
If one weapon can effectively render your whole design philosophy for encounters obsolete, that's bad game design.
I feel like Tormenters are a good first step towards a boss type enemy that isn't just your run of the mill champion throw on a mod and win gimmick, unfortunately I feel like they have been critically misused by Bungie since their introduction. Anyway just my 2c.
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when have GMs not been about plinking from a safe place until it's safe to progress to the next area? GMs are and have always been almost exclusively about finding a safe place, using mechanics to lock down a damage source, and/or manipulating spawns, in order to safely and methodically deal with mobs in a mode where a dreg is a huge problem. GMs aren't really "artificial difficulty". Things aren't spongy, they are deadly. Champions can be an annoying ammo sink sometimes, I guess... but to me champions are a really good litmus test for someone's skill. They are deletable. Even more than that, with the subclass reworks, there is more flexibility in GMs to go absolutely bonkers aggro from time to time, which I think is cool.