What is wrong with this comparison?
The first, a ‘junk’ Legendary available to anyone with access to picking up Legendary Engrams, the second, a (pretty) sought after reward from the Iron Banner, displaying their grind during the event. If I had a screenshot of the Annihilation Helmet (from a Flawless Trials of the Nine completion), I would put it up here too (and you’ll have to take my word for it on the stats).
Notice anything? That’s right, they’re all the same. I wanted to post this article after a quick discussion with Malystorm regarding his ever-beloved Armor of Rull from the Season 1 Raid – it’s craptastic. It’s Mobility armor, which is arguably the least sought-after stat in the game.
Now let me bring your attention back to our 3 helmets… they each share several qualities;
Now, I know I said in a previous article that cosmetics are the endgame in Destiny 2 (and a full set of Annihilation Armor does look awesome, despite not giving any additional bonuses), I’m talking about actual battlefield ‘results’ – I could equip a set of Kerak Type 2 and have equal stats to someone wearing full Iron Truage. Not good.
Going back in time to a much grindier and time-consuming world, also known as Destiny 1, equipment dropped with random perk options and a multitude of upgrades available by spending ‘shards’ and ‘tokens’ acquired from various activities, depending on the item you want to upgrade (see the below Darkblade Helm);
You can already see it has options… and Exotics got even more, not only that but the perks were laid out differently – you had Discipline, Strength, and Intellect, which reduced the cooldowns of your Grenades, Melee and Super respectively. The values (seen on the Darkblade Helmet next to the ‘298 Defense’) then “ranked up” to a maximum of 5 in one stat, and 12 across the board. So for example you could have 5 Discipline, 5 Strength and 2 Intellect, or 4/4/4, or whatever combination you wanted that totalled 12. Any excess statistic that took you over rank 5 in any particular perk was wasted.
However, the problem here is that things like this resulted in the grind-fest that is Destiny 1, and that is (apparently) what Bungie wanted to tone down with Destiny 2.
Personally, I can see why they did it – but the system definitely needs an overhaul. On a small ‘pet-peeve’, the armor itself does nothing for a character – bulky Resilience Titan armor has ‘generally’ the same defensive capabilities as Resilience Hunter armor. Is this right? Not as far as the class-fantasy goes. The problem here is that if they make Titans have slightly more health, Warlocks have slightly lower cooldowns, and Hunters have enhanced radars or movement (for example), I feel Titans stacking Restoration would become the new flavor of the game.
TL,DR: Armor perks have definitely been diluted in Destiny 2, leading to a pretty boring armor set progression. What can be done? What would you like to see? Answers on a postcard (or in the comments section below!)
– Wheldrake
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