As predicted, freelance trials solves 99% of the experience. Got to do the rep and wins rewards without constant 3-stack vs 3-rando awfulness. Was fun.
any hunter complains about any other classes abilities ever again I'm just going to point them at this fucking bullshit being in the game for a over a year.
Shatterdive is fun and I like it, I still think the solution to give every class an ability like it would have evened things out. I just like being able to punish a bad shotgun rush on command. Behemoth is a complete joke of a class now, the super is really sad. Might as well have changed it to something else completely. I hope whatever they do with the subclass, it's atleast still playable unlike what the did to titans
basically yeah, I hope that shit is completely unusable after December.
They actively remove minimal skill, low-risk OHKO's from the other two classes, and the one that hunters have is basically as good as a D1 fist of havoc they can cast every 30 seconds or so, plus its also a movement tool that strictly better than the warlock version of the same move because of the DR.
Remove the DR, increase the cool down to 10 seconds minimum, make it so that you have to be frozen instead of just in the same zip code for it to kill you and change how the grenade energy recharge works for it.
Idk I've seen people do work with it, much better than say shoulder charge
Oh I'm not saying that titan's have ever had it better, but at least A) shoulder charge doesn't hurt them if they use it "wrong" and it doesn't feel terrible to use due to a very short hold time like HHSN does with its tiny 2.5s of armed time.
Neither were ever as good as shatterdive, especially when you add stompees in the mix. Contraverse came close with the 40% DR, which should have been a huge warning sign to bungie to never do something like that again, much less as an innate property of the move itself sans any exotic.
which is nuts! SD is basically original HHSN+Contraverse+mini landfall and you still get another aspect slot and exotic to play with.
on a different note, I've been stuck at Game 1 for the last hour and half in the solo queue because the matchmaker keeps giving the other team at least 1-2 golden flawless titled people, and in those games my team has had none.
I'm constantly the top on my team, but I can't carry like that.
while I was writing this, it gave me a 3v2, my side had the advantage.
We still lose, my two teammates would regularly both die to one of them without trading. One of their guys got 17 total kills. Our combined kill total was 9.
Edit: 17 kill guy has the trials rank of "Legend" on destiny tracker, which I didn't even know was a thing, so cool I guess, I got my ass handed to me by the top 0.4%.
My two teammates are Silver 1 and Silver 2, with me as Platium 1.
My guess is there's not a ton of MMR based matchmaking in here at the moment.
Shoulder Charge absolutely hurts you if you do it wrong
It's called getting shotgunned, or Shatterdived, or HHSN
You know what I mean. If I jump in the air and look down while throwing HHSN at literally nothing, I'll either die or take critical damage. That's about as stupid as when they removed the forward travel on untargetted shoulder charges
I'm done with trials for tonight, 7 straight game 1 losses to trials gods with absolute fucking potatoes for teammates.
Whoever said earlier that there is SBMM going on is dead wrong and I have the match results to prove it, it's the same chaos that trials normally is.
Regarding matchmaking, this was one of my Freelance matches yesterday. The other team didn't get a single kill.
I dunno it's fine. It's fine.
That was my 2nd loss on game 5 that kicked off the downward spiral for the night. At least I took one round off of them.
I ended up losing over 200 elo tonight.
Edit:
I'm also kind of over the idea of power enabled pvp. I completely understand the power fantasy aspect of "you played more than this other guy and it should be rewarded", but not only was that one guy on my team crap, they were 12 power lower than the other guys and that just makes it all worse. I'm not going to stop playing those pvp modes, but the whole feature should go away, it's more damaging to the mode than its value-add.
Freelance Trials is entirely antithetical to the core idea of "gather your fireteam and try your best" that Trials has been since its inception.
All the positive feedback and criticism towards Freelance from players championing the mode seems to me that, ultimately, these players don't want to play "Trials" at all, and never did. They just want to play the existing SBMM-based Elimination node in Crucible with much, much better rewards, draped in the prestige of an "event". And that's entirely valid.
So I don't know what Bungie should take from this, about what "Trials" should be.
But it does seem abundantly obvious that it Bungie creates a bunch of awesome loot, designs a reliable way to earn that loot, and makes it accessible to players of all skill levels, then players will happily participate. Maybe Bungie should consider that.
Handheld Supernova is still good but it's also more nerfed then it needed to be. They capped that thing in the head like 6 times in one patch because it dared to try and be great. Honestly the super is still what holds the spec back more then anything.
The two big nerfs that could be undone imo, either one or both, are the charge-time being made longer or the self-damage being added. The controverse hold nerf is kinda bullshit too imo but isn't a huge priority.
Hand held supernova is not amazing. Any ability that requires you to basically stand still for two seconds for it to be ready is situationally useful at best and anyone who says otherwise hasn't spent any amount of time trying to use it. You might get mad about the two times you die to it in a match but you don't see the seventeen other times the warlock died because of it.
I'll never get over what they did to middle tree nova, they only bring out the true nerf bat for warlock stuff and it suuuucks.
I watched a lfg teammate get multiple multiple HHSN kills the other night. Just because an ability is more difficult to setup doesn't make it bad. Just like the OHKO throwing knives, it takes finesse to use properly without getting instagibbed or killing yourself. But again, just because it's not the absolute absurdity that was the original version doesn't make it bad
I got a subsistence Comedian from the grandmaster! I'm pretty happy about that because it seems like a fun perk for a shotgun. Second perk is unrelenting, which seems like a good pairing too.
Hand held supernova is not amazing. Any ability that requires you to basically stand still for two seconds for it to be ready is situationally useful at best and anyone who says otherwise hasn't spent any amount of time trying to use it. You might get mad about the two times you die to it in a match but you don't see the seventeen other times the warlock died because of it.
I'll never get over what they did to middle tree nova, they only bring out the true nerf bat for warlock stuff and it suuuucks.
I use it all the time. You don't have to stand still, you just can't sprint. It's basically a super-wide decently-long-range shotgun blast with a charge time. You gotta treat it a bit like a fusion but it's actually more forgiving in a lot of ways. Get into close quarters while staying in cover, pre-charge and then come around the corner or jump over the cover or whatever and let it rip.
In my experience the number of times I die from the self-damage is less then the number of times I die because it takes too long to charge or it runs out just as I'm about to let it go or I'm out of range because the radar isn't precise enough with range pings. Or the biggest one is you just trade because they shoot you as you release it.
I never said it was bad, I just said it wasn't amazing. It's fine and situationally good but comparing it to something like shatterdive is ridiculous. If they added a two second delay after throwing a grenade to the shatterdive aspect then we're talking apples to apples, it joins the ranks of abilities that take some setup and have counterplay opportunities.
No I'm not comparing it to shatterdive, more like where HHSN is right now is where I'd like Shatter to be; useful, not made useless. I want it to require skill to use not just be an I Win button.
HHSN could maybe see a small buff but it's in a decent spot right now where the right players can menace people with it.
I think it's just the shatterdive part that tilts people. Whether they are frozen first is almost irrelevant. If a hunter comes at you, freezes your whole team with glacier grenade and instantly wipes you with shatterdive, nobody is less mad.
The problem is shatterdive is just inherently the best shatter in the game and it's not even close. It's free, it's got barely any cooldown, it's got essentially no setup and what setup it has is sometimes actually beneficial since playing from the air is always an advantage in this game.
Compare it to Cryoclasm on the Titan and it's just instantly obvious what the problem is. Cause you can do the same freeze/shatter combo on Titan with cryoclasm. It's just like 1/10th as powerful and so nobody really does. Hell, when cryoclasm was super powerful it was cause of the slide, not the shatter.
Shattering for anyone else requires setup (like cryoclasm) or going for the melee (if you can reach them) or burning special ammo. Run around as a warlock and you really feel how awkward it becomes once you can't lean on shatterdive.
The amount of times you actually freeze people with the grenade is way less frequent. I'm actually pretty shocked when I freeze anyone with it to be honest. The whole point is to punish bad positioning, but as is you can just toss it and slam it and kill everything around you with the Whisper of Fissures. I don't know a single person who runs Shatter without it because you don't get nearly as many kills without it.
Shoulder charge is fine, but I would be happy if Bungie reverted the past nerfs they made to it, even partially. It suffers from bad melee hit detection enough as-is.
Handheld supernova seems like it's in a good place. Hard to say since I don't see too many middle tree voidwalkers. It might even warrant a buff but I'd hesitate on buffing it until after we see how the void rework shakes out.
Shatterdive is still too easy. It definitely needs some nerf, such as only being able to kill completely frozen targets, not being able to shatterdive enemy glacier grenades nearly unscathed, and maybe even give it a sprint startup requirement like titans get stuck with for their abilities. I'm hesitant on nerfing Fissures or Glacier grenades to solve the problem as it just screws over stasis titans even more.
1-hit kill throwing knife never should've been a thing IMO. It's ranged, it can bounce around corners, it's absurd.
Bad positioning is always interesting to me, cause it also deletes supers. Which in the case of most other times, it isn't bad positioning.
"I am wreathed in the fire of the sun" nope
"I am lightning made flesh, and must melee you so have to get close" nope
"I am spinning a staff that reflects all super" nope
"I am in an impenetrable bubble" slide in then nope
But I am like a B-tier player at best. But like "insta-delete from the most mobile class" punishing bad positioning essentially reads to me often as just "only engage Revs at mid to long range" which also doesn't work if your team also wants to not play lane control.
Perhaps it really just is the removal of other ability-based OHKOs that were less forgiving, usually single targets, not super-ending and not paired with movement abilities, and yet it got untouched.
The warlock freeze melee is another thing that sounds better than it is, the projectile is slow and moves in a straight line so it's great for punishing people running straight at you and that's about it. The freeze rift is low key way more useful and satisfying, I just don't think people are focused on it.
Shatterdive is still too easy. It definitely needs some nerf, such as only being able to kill completely frozen targets, not being able to shatterdive enemy glacier grenades nearly unscathed, and maybe even give it a sprint startup requirement like titans get stuck with for their abilities. I'm hesitant on nerfing Fissures or Glacier grenades to solve the problem as it just screws over stasis titans even more.
I think this is pretty obviously the reason they've taken so long to nerf it. The way Stasis is designed makes it really hard to balance shit like this because you can't really touch the other things that support Shatterdive without killing other stasis classes. (this is the problem with the stasis class design and one of the reasons why D2 had gone with the separate fixed nodes to begin with)
Shatterdive's very existence has always been the issue. It's just too easy and too effective and meshes too well with mobility. The fact that Shatterdive is a goddamn monster in crucible and has been since people figured out how it works and cryoclasm is a "Wait, what was that one again?" speaks to where the issue lies imo.
The warlock freeze melee is another thing that sounds better than it is, the projectile is slow and moves in a straight line so it's great for punishing people running straight at you and that's about it. The freeze rift is low key way more useful and satisfying, I just don't think people are focused on it.
I was messing in 6s with double freezes and chaperone, it was pretty effective. Freeze, kill, get Roadborn, tear ass, anyone gives me trouble freeze again, etc
The nerfs to shoulder charge basically killed bottom tree Sentinal for me, which is a shame because it was a neat class. But it always had detection issues, and now it is worse. So many times you just fly literally through someone and then whoops my back is to you, my keen enemy.
Shoulder charging a super to suppress and then cleanup felt rewarding, now just a quick way to lose a round.
The warlock freeze melee is another thing that sounds better than it is, the projectile is slow and moves in a straight line so it's great for punishing people running straight at you and that's about it. The freeze rift is low key way more useful and satisfying, I just don't think people are focused on it.
Rift freeze's problem is that the rift animation is painfully long and trying to bait it around corners is usually just asking to get shotgunned. Or shoulder charged. Or shatterdived. Hilariously the thing it's best at in some ways is killing some roaming supers.
Warlock melee freeze has eaten so many nerfs at this point is why it's not that great now. They even said it wasn't a big problem but it felt bad so they nerfed it just for the hell of it at one point. I think the last nerf especially really pushed it over the edge.
Coldsnap is the other casualty of the stasis reaction nerfs. That grenade basically has no purpose anymore in either PvP or PvE. It's so bad it's fucking comical.
Stasis at this point is just a fucking mess and already needs an entire Stasis 2.0 rework. They released it badly tuned and then hastily smashed it mostly to pieces in order to stop the complaining. There's no way to fix it now without a lot of work imo.
I didn't get back to trials, mostly because one of the weekly goals is to get the gambit ornament for Ascendancy, which means resetting gambit rank TWICE. I'm no fan of Gambit; I usually play my three matches and get out. After grinding most of the weekend on that one mode, I'm seeing about a rank per day advancement. So that means I should have that ornament with another two weeks of dedicated playtime. I may run out of incentive before then.
In other news, I finished step 6 (out of 8) of the Splicer storyline. I can see why people were so jazzed about that season! It's a really cool story (at least so far) and the event is not terrible. I'm actually enjoying it more than the Wrathborne Hunts and the Battleground events. Some of the legacy triumph goals are stupid though... like 'Wear Splicer armor whilst doing the event'. I mean, I guess I'll do it, but I'm not going to like it, and I will likely be counting down to get that one done!
Posts
All kinds out there.
Actually feeling like a good player, compared to when queueing against actual good players.
That said, jesus can my team please stop having people who leave before the match is over, that's why we lose friendo.
And hey, look, the world didn't end!
any hunter complains about any other classes abilities ever again I'm just going to point them at this fucking bullshit being in the game for a over a year.
basically yeah, I hope that shit is completely unusable after December.
They actively remove minimal skill, low-risk OHKO's from the other two classes, and the one that hunters have is basically as good as a D1 fist of havoc they can cast every 30 seconds or so, plus its also a movement tool that strictly better than the warlock version of the same move because of the DR.
Remove the DR, increase the cool down to 10 seconds minimum, make it so that you have to be frozen instead of just in the same zip code for it to kill you and change how the grenade energy recharge works for it.
It's a suicide pack against anyone with decent movement, because lol warlock self damage.
Oh I'm not saying that titan's have ever had it better, but at least A) shoulder charge doesn't hurt them if they use it "wrong" and
Neither were ever as good as shatterdive, especially when you add stompees in the mix. Contraverse came close with the 40% DR, which should have been a huge warning sign to bungie to never do something like that again, much less as an innate property of the move itself sans any exotic.
which is nuts! SD is basically original HHSN+Contraverse+mini landfall and you still get another aspect slot and exotic to play with.
It's called getting shotgunned, or Shatterdived, or HHSN
I'm constantly the top on my team, but I can't carry like that.
while I was writing this, it gave me a 3v2, my side had the advantage.
We still lose, my two teammates would regularly both die to one of them without trading. One of their guys got 17 total kills. Our combined kill total was 9.
Edit: 17 kill guy has the trials rank of "Legend" on destiny tracker, which I didn't even know was a thing, so cool I guess, I got my ass handed to me by the top 0.4%.
My two teammates are Silver 1 and Silver 2, with me as Platium 1.
My guess is there's not a ton of MMR based matchmaking in here at the moment.
All my sword rolls have been terrible
You know what I mean. If I jump in the air and look down while throwing HHSN at literally nothing, I'll either die or take critical damage. That's about as stupid as when they removed the forward travel on untargetted shoulder charges
I don't see the problem
Or the ground, a doorframe, or an ally
I'm done with trials for tonight, 7 straight game 1 losses to trials gods with absolute fucking potatoes for teammates.
Whoever said earlier that there is SBMM going on is dead wrong and I have the match results to prove it, it's the same chaos that trials normally is.
Regarding matchmaking, this was one of my Freelance matches yesterday. The other team didn't get a single kill.
I dunno it's fine. It's fine.
That was my 2nd loss on game 5 that kicked off the downward spiral for the night. At least I took one round off of them.
I ended up losing over 200 elo tonight.
Edit:
I'm also kind of over the idea of power enabled pvp. I completely understand the power fantasy aspect of "you played more than this other guy and it should be rewarded", but not only was that one guy on my team crap, they were 12 power lower than the other guys and that just makes it all worse. I'm not going to stop playing those pvp modes, but the whole feature should go away, it's more damaging to the mode than its value-add.
All the positive feedback and criticism towards Freelance from players championing the mode seems to me that, ultimately, these players don't want to play "Trials" at all, and never did. They just want to play the existing SBMM-based Elimination node in Crucible with much, much better rewards, draped in the prestige of an "event". And that's entirely valid.
So I don't know what Bungie should take from this, about what "Trials" should be.
But it does seem abundantly obvious that it Bungie creates a bunch of awesome loot, designs a reliable way to earn that loot, and makes it accessible to players of all skill levels, then players will happily participate. Maybe Bungie should consider that.
The two big nerfs that could be undone imo, either one or both, are the charge-time being made longer or the self-damage being added. The controverse hold nerf is kinda bullshit too imo but isn't a huge priority.
I'll never get over what they did to middle tree nova, they only bring out the true nerf bat for warlock stuff and it suuuucks.
I use it all the time. You don't have to stand still, you just can't sprint. It's basically a super-wide decently-long-range shotgun blast with a charge time. You gotta treat it a bit like a fusion but it's actually more forgiving in a lot of ways. Get into close quarters while staying in cover, pre-charge and then come around the corner or jump over the cover or whatever and let it rip.
In my experience the number of times I die from the self-damage is less then the number of times I die because it takes too long to charge or it runs out just as I'm about to let it go or I'm out of range because the radar isn't precise enough with range pings. Or the biggest one is you just trade because they shoot you as you release it.
HHSN could maybe see a small buff but it's in a decent spot right now where the right players can menace people with it.
They need to make Fragments that just don't work in PvP, like certain mods that would break PvP
The problem is shatterdive is just inherently the best shatter in the game and it's not even close. It's free, it's got barely any cooldown, it's got essentially no setup and what setup it has is sometimes actually beneficial since playing from the air is always an advantage in this game.
Compare it to Cryoclasm on the Titan and it's just instantly obvious what the problem is. Cause you can do the same freeze/shatter combo on Titan with cryoclasm. It's just like 1/10th as powerful and so nobody really does. Hell, when cryoclasm was super powerful it was cause of the slide, not the shatter.
Shattering for anyone else requires setup (like cryoclasm) or going for the melee (if you can reach them) or burning special ammo. Run around as a warlock and you really feel how awkward it becomes once you can't lean on shatterdive.
Handheld supernova seems like it's in a good place. Hard to say since I don't see too many middle tree voidwalkers. It might even warrant a buff but I'd hesitate on buffing it until after we see how the void rework shakes out.
Shatterdive is still too easy. It definitely needs some nerf, such as only being able to kill completely frozen targets, not being able to shatterdive enemy glacier grenades nearly unscathed, and maybe even give it a sprint startup requirement like titans get stuck with for their abilities. I'm hesitant on nerfing Fissures or Glacier grenades to solve the problem as it just screws over stasis titans even more.
1-hit kill throwing knife never should've been a thing IMO. It's ranged, it can bounce around corners, it's absurd.
"I am wreathed in the fire of the sun" nope
"I am lightning made flesh, and must melee you so have to get close" nope
"I am spinning a staff that reflects all super" nope
"I am in an impenetrable bubble" slide in then nope
But I am like a B-tier player at best. But like "insta-delete from the most mobile class" punishing bad positioning essentially reads to me often as just "only engage Revs at mid to long range" which also doesn't work if your team also wants to not play lane control.
Perhaps it really just is the removal of other ability-based OHKOs that were less forgiving, usually single targets, not super-ending and not paired with movement abilities, and yet it got untouched.
But I am in a salty mood, I suppose.
It could probably use to be a bit stickier too. It's been kinda unreliable with the hit detection since they nerfed the hit detection.
I think this is pretty obviously the reason they've taken so long to nerf it. The way Stasis is designed makes it really hard to balance shit like this because you can't really touch the other things that support Shatterdive without killing other stasis classes. (this is the problem with the stasis class design and one of the reasons why D2 had gone with the separate fixed nodes to begin with)
Shatterdive's very existence has always been the issue. It's just too easy and too effective and meshes too well with mobility. The fact that Shatterdive is a goddamn monster in crucible and has been since people figured out how it works and cryoclasm is a "Wait, what was that one again?" speaks to where the issue lies imo.
I was messing in 6s with double freezes and chaperone, it was pretty effective. Freeze, kill, get Roadborn, tear ass, anyone gives me trouble freeze again, etc
Shoulder charging a super to suppress and then cleanup felt rewarding, now just a quick way to lose a round.
Rift freeze's problem is that the rift animation is painfully long and trying to bait it around corners is usually just asking to get shotgunned. Or shoulder charged. Or shatterdived. Hilariously the thing it's best at in some ways is killing some roaming supers.
Warlock melee freeze has eaten so many nerfs at this point is why it's not that great now. They even said it wasn't a big problem but it felt bad so they nerfed it just for the hell of it at one point. I think the last nerf especially really pushed it over the edge.
Coldsnap is the other casualty of the stasis reaction nerfs. That grenade basically has no purpose anymore in either PvP or PvE. It's so bad it's fucking comical.
Stasis at this point is just a fucking mess and already needs an entire Stasis 2.0 rework. They released it badly tuned and then hastily smashed it mostly to pieces in order to stop the complaining. There's no way to fix it now without a lot of work imo.
In other news, I finished step 6 (out of 8) of the Splicer storyline. I can see why people were so jazzed about that season! It's a really cool story (at least so far) and the event is not terrible. I'm actually enjoying it more than the Wrathborne Hunts and the Battleground events. Some of the legacy triumph goals are stupid though... like 'Wear Splicer armor whilst doing the event'. I mean, I guess I'll do it, but I'm not going to like it, and I will likely be counting down to get that one done!