[MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] This has been one of the most difficult weeks in our beloved game's lifespan, and the three of us have decided to modify this episode's topic in light of the recent news, we will be discussing the layoffs at Bungie, but we have a different topic as well. They will be focusing on in the latter half of this week's episode. We're going to carry on, as we always do. We think that is the most appropriate path to take in light of the changes coming with the future of the game. But for now, let's talk about what we did in and out of Destiny 2 last week. Court, I'm going to pass it over to you. Yeah, hello lads, certainly has been a difficult week, but we shall push on, I think, positive. During that week, Saint and I were doing our last couple of challenges for the Master Salvation's Edge. Very interesting challenges. I'll let Saint talk about the challenges themselves if he wants to. I've got some sweet loot, including some solid sniper and pulse rifle rolls. I've posted that over on the Pictures Lounge as well. If you want to have a little peek, it was a few days ago as of this recording, anyway. My damage stacking for graphic is partially published. It's over on my coffee, and it'll be out to the public in the near future. I just didn't want to publish that during that week. Not really fair to grab the attention away from the important matters of the Bungie layoffs. Outside of Destiny, I've been playing through GT5 as well. It's a very lovely game, I will point out. Last time I'd probably played it was probably on... Yeah, it would have been PS3, which is many, many years ago. It's kind of surprising how long these games are if you think about when they initially launched. But Grand Theft Auto 5 was some time ago, and it went through three console generations now. It's pretty impressive. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so busy week for many goods, but also negative reasons. But yeah, the Salvation's Edge will quickly see a very challenging run. The first couple of challenges, not too bad. It's just your usual kind of, you do a couple of runs and then you get to feel how it's supposed to work. And you just do it. But Verity and Zenith, or the Witness fight, we were in there for a couple hours. That's what we've seen. Yeah, we got through all the first three of them in a single setting. It wasn't even really a big issue. There was some frustrating bugs in the third encounter challenge where if you're trying to deposit at the same time, it would take one of your residents away instead of all three. And the challenges you have to deposit with a full sack of three. So it's pretty annoying, but yeah, we get through all three of the first encounter challenges and then Verity and the Witness were just kind of a slog. Because it's actually challenged to stay alive, which is saying a lot. And I don't think that that is like they're actually challenging raid challenges, which really sounds ironic. But they aren't all that way, you know, even evidence by this rate of going through the first three and a single sitting like no problem. Coming back to these reminded me of much more intensive ones. I remember a long time ago, like master, you know, gatekeeper challenge involved was always a pain, right, of getting the timing down on killing everything and having everybody stay alive in the portals and stuff like that. That a Verity felt a lot more like that. And I don't even know how to describe the Witness challenge. There's just so many things in the master version of that encounter. It definitely gets you back more of like a contest mode feeling just because of the amount of things that can kill you. And I mean, like, yes, the enemies can kill you, but, you know, you can die too. If you're not taking out the ads quick enough, you can get, you know, rubber banded into a scrape and die. You can get rubber banded into the bees landing on one of the residence attacks or the resident attack ending and die. You know, a captain, you could get hit by a hand as it's coming out of the ground trying to pick up a different buff. You can die because you didn't refresh your stack in time. You could die because you picked up too many stacks. I mean, like, yeah, just so many things that can kill you in that challenge that you have to keep everybody alive for to get those. Everybody basically having Glyph Breaker up at the same time before you go to DPS phase, but it also made it really satisfying when we finally cleared those challenges. So, shout it to everybody that was in on that. Honestly, those are the hard parts of the raid title. Now, I just have a few static tribes to go back and finish up for the iconic class title. And kind of like Quartz said, I just totally dumpster my spoils, raid spoils reserves on some of the DEP weapon rolls. And you know that because don't plan to do a lot of master witness challenge clears. Honestly, at this point, I would not say. So, thankful for that. And, yeah, despite the just how rough of a week this was, I did have a great time last time. A great time last night was the final session of the first campaign that I've run as a DM. And it was a great, you know, it's like four and a half hour finale. And it was just a ton of fun. So I'm very grateful for that and that whole crew. It's a lot of rain about master raids impetus. How are you doing, man? What have you been up to this week? Well, my D&D session is hopefully tonight. So I can't say that I've gotten to play D&D since our last episode, but looking forward to that for sure. I've been running seasonal activities nonstop again. I just wanted to get all those weapons unlocked, especially the time-worn wayfarer because we've got that buff to aggressive frame scout rifles right around the corner. I did unlock curation and faithkeeper, I'm obviously more excited about curation than faithkeeper for crafting purposes. But the sidearm eludes me. Man, those red borders are just not dropping for me. I have deep site harmonizers, but I'm at that point where I want to save those for the raid weapons more than my episode/seasonal loot, if you feel me. So I'm just forcing myself to play more seasonal activities. It's funny, getting those, when you knock down those, I don't even know what they're called, but the totems that you need to spend a hammer charge on to get all the little radio light samples to appear. When you go and dunk those at the very end, I've been getting exotic armor drops like crazy, which kind of feels crazy to say that I have more exotic armor drops than red borders of the episode weapons, but that has basically been it because every time I run one of those battlegrounds, I've been getting the radio light samples enough that I can go and get that extra one to deposit. So that's been nice, but for most of the armor that is dropping, I already have pretty spicy rolls and would take a very, very, very specific roll with a very, very specific stat distribution for me to swap that out for my current exotic armor. But yeah, keep giving me Lunafaction Boots game. I will keep sharding them, keep getting more glimmer out of it, but that's really been my week. So yeah, I've been working on that and having a good time. Again, I like the battlegrounds. I think really the standout, and I'll say this when we do our review of the episode, but for me, the standout of Echoes has just been the changes to Nessus. I think the environment is probably the best it's ever been, especially once we get underground in that third battleground. Yeah, third battleground and then the exotic mission that you did. Sorry, not the exotic mission. The mission that we do at the end of Act 2, that is just a very beautiful space that we get to go to. So I am looking forward to the exotic mission I haven't gotten to play yet, but I'm really hoping the play space looks incredible there. But that's enough about me. Let's turn over to our podcast reviews and our community feedback. Yeah, going to start off by giving a shout out to some new Patrons, supporters of the show, which we greatly appreciate. Ghosty, Lurch, and then John S in David. Thank you all very much for joining the ranks of the Patrons. We're grateful to have you aboard. And each and every episode, give a shout out to our PVE Grandmasters, Dark Wizard 85, David Deacon, I'm K Rose, Jelly Puppy, The Shazzle, The Puxter, The Mirror, and this moment. As a reminder, you can send us all kinds of feedback about the show directly to any of our socials or at pod versus enemies on the platform still known as Twitter. And of course, on Patreon, if you are a patron of the show, we're happy to answer any questions and updates and anything like that, where you can reach out to us directly on the platform. Positive, critical, and constructive feedback always helps with the trajectory of the podcast and how we present all kinds of activities, builds, and more in the PVE sandbox. We want to, of course, thanks to everybody that supports PVE downloading, listening, watching episodes, each week discussing the show with us and the Discord and supporting via Patreon. Speaking of which, if you would like to support the show, you can click on the link to Patreon found in the show notes of this episode where you get access to members to only channel it in a Discord server behind the scene content, text write up, weapon breakdown reviews, input on the future show, and much more. Court, what are we talking about this week? Yeah, so we originally had lined up for this week. We were going to talk about the Hunter Titan Warlock Prismatic builds. We had the exhausted class item recommendations, and we also had some recommended Ergo Sum rules. We decided to move that to a future episode. There's a lot of content, there's a lot of bulk to those topics. We wanted to get condensed down to a more decompressed episode this week. Talk about the recent Bungie layoffs. We have a kind of additional topic that we'll talk about after that with the state of PVE sandbox. There's going to be some fairly critical, fairly commentary like a kind of discussion about the layoffs, but then we did want to make this a little bit more of a kind of a PVE episode on top of that will be a little bit less critical, be more kind of our standard sales when we talk about the state of the PVE sandbox. The aforementioned topics will get to them in the future, but this week we're going to talk about the Bungie layoffs and the PVE sandbox. In terms of housekeeping, updates to the Patreon podcast, we do have a few posts that we put up recently. We've got the commemoration, Deepstone Crypt machine gun breakdown that went up, blast furnace from the Brave Arsenal has also went up. We'll be going through some of the DSC and the Brave weapons over the next few weeks, so keep an eye on that. I also put up the critical anomaly breakdown. So all those breakdown text posts are up on the Patreon for patrons to view. So yeah, like we said, this is going to be our little section regarding the Bungie layoffs. We're going to touch on the sort of highlights of the layoffs themselves just to kind of keep us, us and you the listeners kind of in the know of what's been going on the last couple of days. We'll also talk about kind of further highlights. What does this mean with Bungie destiny in regards to some kind of not official commentary from Bungie, but kind of various other sources that I've kind of talked about. What does this mean for far future when it comes to Destiny and Bungie? If you'd like to skip this, fair enough. We'll obviously have some timestamps in this, in the show notes, at least for the next, I don't know, 30 or ish minutes. We're just going to talk about the Bungie layoffs. So I'll kick this off here, just in very kind of high-level highlights. Highlights is probably not the best way to describe them. They're certainly not the highlights in terms of a positive manner, but just to touch upon on the kind of the top level. So, Bungie did announce that they have shrunk from 1,300 employees to roughly 850. Now, this is on top of the layoffs that we talked about last year back in November of 2023. So that means 220 people have been laid off as of 31st of July 2024. That includes several top executives and senior leader roles, excuse me. Teams hit hardest, include the audio department narrative and player support. Additionally, they have moved 155 staff to Sony Interactive Entertainment. It's kind of more kind of a centralized role within Sony themselves. And they also said that a separate group will spin out a new game company within Sony, working on an incubation project called named Gummy Bears, which is kind of a mobile Smash brother style game, kind of fighting game from that kind of top level perspective. In essence, Bungie's rapid expansion from the last five years stretched their talent too thin and too quickly, in addition to broad economic slowdown, sharp downturn, excuse me, in the games industry, the quality miss with light fall and the need to give both the final shape and marathon quote the quality our players expect and deserve. Another quote here, "We were orally ambitious or financial safety margins where subsequently exceeded and we began running in the red." So that's very, very big topic, obviously the last couple of days. What are kind of big values when it comes to this? Sadness, I would say, frustration, you know, generally is the vibe here. It's just really tough to watch. It's tough to watch people that you know are talented and passionate and good at what they do lose their job and despite knowing what they've done, what they're capable of, how invested they are, to see that still result in people losing their jobs, their livelihoods and, you know, dreams of working for, you know, a company like this and franchise like this is really hard to see. And especially when it comes after something like the final shape, you know, you release something like the final shape that is, you know, just by all means a hit, right? It is critically reviewed well. It is popular amongst your player base. It is firing on all cylinders and yet right after that you get hit with something like this. And it's just that feeling of, you know, what's the point? If even these testers, these engineers, these writers, these directors can get laid off after putting out this quality of work, you know, who is safe, you know? It's just like a really dark thought to have but a common one kind of over the past couple of years looking into like game dev in general. And there's some lights in that tunnel, but yeah, it's really just tough to watch men. Emptice. Yeah, it's just been really hard scrolling through Twitter and seeing post after post from the dozens, at least on Twitter, but as we soon came to find out hundreds of people that were finding out they had been laid off, especially the folks that were finding out from the official article that was posted by Bungie. This was actually the first time that we had heard first from Bungie that they were planning to lay off people and it seems like employees were finding out about that from the article first and then trying to log in and finding out that their Bungie ID no longer worked and the implications from that. So that was very demoralizing. Again, we found out about this last Wednesday. And you know, seeing the posts, the pictures kind of reading about the cracks coming to light about how things had not quite been what we assumed they were in the lead up to the final shape, the development of the final shape during the kind of extended period of the last season. Very, very difficult to watch. Then of course all the information about Pete Parsons spending habits coming to light in the innumerable articles and reacts to all of that. It has not been, it has not been fun. I did have to eventually just put the phone down, not go on Twitter, not go on Reddit because I had hit my emotional limit. You know, we've been very blessed to get to know some developers personally. So I think this was especially hard because we know the faces and the names behind this studio, this massive studio. And obviously the figure of waiting to hear if any of them had been affected was not a great feeling. But I think that is important for everyone to remember is that these are people. These are real people that work on this game that you love and/or hate depending on how you feel about Destiny 2. And this was their job. And for most of them, almost all of them, I would say they were very passionate about the work that they did, the work they contributed to this franchise, this incredibly long franchise, this unique franchise. And it has been very tough to watch both people who were recent employees but also long-time employees find out that they're not going to be able to see this all the way through or they're not going to keep contributing to a dream project or a company that they had a lot of love and passion for or just a group of colleagues that they had a lot of love and passion for. Especially on the narrative side, I know that was really hard for many of those people losing the ability to work with the storytellers and also the voice actors for whom they wrote a lot of those lines. It's very, very tough to read and get to understand all the stuff that they contributed to, to bring up one example of one of the departments that was hit hardest. So, yeah, it is, it is tough. It is, it is hard to have hope right now. We have gotten some idea, some, an unofficial idea from journalists who have been talking to people that have been speaking on the condition of anonymity, of course, because no one's, no one's allowed to talk on an official line from Bungie. But we have some idea, the announced plans, obviously the three episodes coming out with the eventual release of Destiny 2 frontiers as we saw from that trailer, the dungeon pack, and then what we believe is still the case, an eventual release of Marathon in 2025. That is all still in place. We have not gotten any, again, the ex-employees who are aware of this stuff do not know of any changes to those plans. So, that is our understanding of what the situation is for the future of both Destiny and Bungie as, as a whole. Beyond that though, there is some speculation. Again, nothing officially confirmed, but there are just people talking to sources such as Jason Schreier have pointed out some of the following things. I will talk on the future of Destiny 2 and then pass it over to court for the Destiny IP as a whole, but for the future of Destiny 2, what has been told to journalists is that we will not have any more traditional annual expansions, but rather content packs. These content packs will be about the size of the Shadowkeep expansion followed about six months later by and into the light sized pack. There will be very familiar Destiny elements like destinations, raids, campaigns, but condensed it down to a smaller scale. The goal here is to achieve and develop a more replayable, unique style of activity like the coil from last season, season of the wish, and less focus in turn on one-off campaigns and more of the replayable activity. We will not see widespread updates that hit every facet of the game at once, like most expansions have come with, right? Those massive, massive patch notes that takes a while to scroll through and they will be far less frequent than what players are used to. Court, what is the news on Destiny 3 and the Destiny IP as a whole? Well, it was a little bit of a surprise to a majority of people, at least from the pulse reading I got, looking on various socials, that Destiny 3 was and is not in production and bungee themselves, at least the higher ups they consider it to be too big of a risk. The idea that they had, which is now no longer happening, they wanted to go down the path of splitting up Destiny as an IP into more manageable components. So, Destiny 2 would still remain and that would be primarily focused with PvE, again these are all just very top level points, so we would be missing some nuance on top of this being it's all speculation. A quote payback, which is their, again, part of the Destiny franchise would be our third person adventure game set in universe and using Destiny characters similar to Warframe and Genshin Impact. They were working on a mobile Destiny game and they were thinking about spinning off a separate 3v3 crucible game, so that would be like channeling trials. So, various points that are no longer happening, that is, again, presuming this speculation is truthful, none of these things are happening, so Destiny 2 is going to remain, obviously. But we did hear from Luke Smith and Mark Noseworthy, they were, there's been kind of a back and forth, we're not sure if they stood down, I think it's more, we've heard more news that they decided to step down before being laid off. They were the leads on payback and/or other cancelled Destiny projects, so they're no longer part of Bungie, they're no longer part of anything related to Bungie, they have, again, I think it's on the side of that they stood down, originally I think that was reported that they were included with the layoffs, but we did get some further news to say that they decided to step down. So yeah, speaking, just regarding Destiny 3, I don't think I've ever been convinced that Destiny 3 was in production, I know a lot of folks, they've thought that Destiny 3 would be kind of chipped away in the background. I've never really been convinced with that, just with how massive and dense Destiny 2 is, it just never really made much sense with, even with Lightful kind of faulting, it was still a large expansion, regardless of the critical reception, it was still large enough to have various changes to the game, that's where we got a lot of our quality life updates, a lot of bugs were kind of squashed, just a lot of things did happen with Lightful, both the final shape, and prior to that with Witch Queen, we have had these massive expansions, when I played those and when I still play the final shape just now, I just never really thought that Destiny 3 could be secretly being worked in the background, just never felt like that was such a thing. I'm not being critical to those that thought Destiny 3 was in production, that's fair enough to have that kind of desire, that wish to clean the slate for Destiny, I think at this point I would love to see a sequel to Destiny, but that's just not, we're not going to see that, at least in the next 5 to 10 years. Seeing, what was your advice with a potential Destiny 3? Yeah, I'm looking at this thinking, why, you know, game development is unfortunately like a monetary endeavor, and you gotta have some kind of like cost benefit analysis here, so my mind goes to, what is the cost of making it a D3, and what is the benefit of it, what am I like actually getting out of it? I'm actually getting out of making a brand new game versus trying to continue to develop on the platform I have now. Generally, this amounts to people who want to start a new game because they want to develop a new engine, they want to move on a new platform, a new way of developing things, you know, all kinds of stuff like that, these are usually big motivators, they want to build features that the current engine or system just wouldn't let them allow or don't make sense to try to develop and integrate in the current game. So, at a quartz point, I don't think that a lot of those things are true about Destiny. Destiny 2 operates on an engine that is developed by Bungie and keeps just being iterated on by Bungie, it's old at this point, but like many engines, it just keeps getting updated and iterated upon every release you six months a year, who knows. So, the idea of Bungie just swapping over to the latest Unreal release, it just never really seemed like it was a thing that was going to happen or anything that they had ever talked about. There's nothing to give us any kind of hint that they would be like majorly changing game engines and have a big motivator to go remake everything in a new engine for Destiny 3 and have all these new ways of working when they can just kind of just integrate that continuously with what's going on in Destiny 2. And the same thing goes for like player investment, and you know, kind of other half of that coin is like onboarding experience, which is something we can talk about a little bit later. But, yeah, so I think a lot of people were like really sad or frustrated that there was no D3, but my expectation, well, obviously now I know this is naive and untrue, but my anticipation was that after the final shape, there would be kind of a lull for them to have a momentum. To have a moment to think about what are major changes that we want to bring to Destiny's franchise, maybe we went in an entire year while Marathon gets the spotlight, and there is no major Destiny expansion, just some seasons, and then maybe another into the light update, which, okay, that party is kind of true. But, yeah, I was expecting no major expansion, maybe for like a two year gap, and then coming back into, okay, what's deliver some absolutely massive changes to like systems in the game, and then keep going with Destiny from there. I was really surprised to hear that they were like trying to diverge into action games and some other stuff like that, like within Destiny, because that's not, I mean, yeah, I have no idea that they could like do that well. You know, hundreds of really talented people that work there, sure, you couldn't make a action 3D game look good and feel good and be probably be very fun to play. But people love Destiny, and you just keep playing this game because it succeeds in a lot of different areas that some other games just can't compete with it, like, you know, movement, and shooting and gunplay feel, and some of the build crafting systems that people get hooked in on. That's what keeps them coming back so, yeah, it does seem really odd to me that they would not try to be capitalizing more on that on their major projects, or considering some kind of delay and larger overhaul to Destiny 2. I'm going to pass it up to impetus for his thoughts here in just a second, but the last thing I'll say is, you know, Luke Smith and Mark knows where there's people that are really have been at the core of people's like perception of people that are working on these games for a really long time. You know, it's just two guys out of hundreds of people that contribute to these games, but we've just heard a lot over the years about the impact they have had on the game. I know that, you know, I saw a tweet from Tokon that was just talking about Kevin Janis talking about the way that they would advocate for the player and their intense investment in the franchise and all these things. I'm pretty sure it was Luke Smith, who, you know, from his like wow background was a big proponent of the idea of raids in Destiny 2 and how much that has shaped this game over time. So it is really just sad and like kind of in an era, I feel like moment to see them both depart the studio. Seemingly, allegedly, I should say the projects that they were working on are projects that they were working on was canceled like a couple months ago, and, you know, I see they're resigning or leaving as their project was canceled a couple months ago. They saw the writing on the walls. They've probably just been spending the last two months kind of trying to manage, you know, and leave things as good as they can before just departing from the studio, but it is, it is odd and surprising and into an era kind of feeling to see those two leave the studio after how invested they had been in the franchise over the past decade. And just, I don't know where you're at, future expansions, Destiny 3, spin-offs, feelings, thoughts, opinions. You know, Destiny has been the moneymaker for the studio for pretty much its entire length. I mean, it's their moneymaker and yes, Marathon is in the future, but I think every detail that has come out about the project, the very brief Vidoc that introduced Chris Barrett as the game director only then to find out that Chris Barrett is no longer the game director, you know, that project feels so shaky to me, even even the concept of it has apparently been changing. I don't think there's a big appeal for an extraction shooter nowadays. I think we have, you know, no offense because I know that we do have some Call of Duty fans here, but I feel like once Call of Duty gets to the genre, it is probably starting to phase out. And you don't want to be following up Call of Duty on an extraction shooter at this point. I think we know how extraction shooters are going, new extraction shooters, I should say, are going to handle. And I don't think that Bungie can make a better one than the Call of Duty universe. So, I don't know. You know, I had kind of thought maybe it wouldn't be Destiny 3, but there would be some sort of revamp. Maybe it would go back to, I think there was a common idea floating around the community where it would just be called Destiny, right? We'd get rid of the number and just say it's the Destiny universe, but they would be trying to bring in stuff and storylines and places from Destiny 1 into this up-to-date, more modern Destiny 2 era and then rebranding it all as just the Destiny universe IP or the Destiny IP. So, I don't know. Again, I don't want Marathon to fail so that Destiny can succeed, but at the same time, I am not confident in the success of Marathon. It would have to really blow not only myself away, but also I think a lot of people away. And that could still happen for Bungie to have another money-making IP, but for that time being, it is Destiny and Sony knows this and Sony owns you. So, either Bungie comes to an end and we're going to kind of be talking about the actual studio itself here in a bit, but either Sony gets broken up and the wonderful people that work there right now are funneled into other projects within the Sony umbrella. Or, Bungie sticks together and they got to really keep coming up with something that can keep making the studio in Sony by extension money and that's right now and possibly for the future, just Destiny. I don't know what they're going to do. Obviously, I don't know how much money Destiny is making right now compared to how much it used to be making. We've certainly looked at the population numbers for when the expansion drops. They were quite high for lightfall. They were quite high for the final shape, but that clearly wasn't enough given the layoffs. So, yeah, I don't know. I don't think it's crazy to say. I thought we'd have something coming in the future, whatever you want to call it, the third iteration or just an upgraded updated version, not necessarily a new engine, but big changes that would kind of bring Destiny forward a bit. I don't think you're crazy for believing in that. I am still expecting it to some degree, not as much as I used to following this news. But yeah, I don't know. Nobody knows. It feels like nobody really knows. What is the future of Bungie internally that we've learned about court? So, we learned a little bit about the final shape and its delay. It actually allowed them to add to Destiny. So, they managed to add the dread commands. We got dual Destiny. We got an extra encounter with Salvation's Edge with Verity and Counter, which does kind of make sense with how contrast is with the rest of that raid. We got Exotic Class items. We got Ergo Sum, the Swords, the Special Ammo Swords. And we also got GM Excision. They spoke about the new player onboarding experience, remains fairly subpar, like below expectations, because the team responsible for that onboarding experience a few years ago, we're given one shot at it. And then, since then, no one has been allowed to tweak with it. We've seen like small tweaks here and there. You go to Ikora, new players can just jump straight into getting their super. You don't need to go through like a kind of hoops to get straight into the game. We saw that with into the light. That was the change there. And they did say in some of these articles that the onboarding experience may change in the future to put more emphasis on onboarding. One of the other articles, which one of the quotes or comments was that Destiny's got quite an aging player base, which was something I found quite interesting. I never really thought about the player base as in terms of not the numbers, not the quantity of players. It's the age of the players, which I found fairly fascinating. It's one of the articles they talked about. I can't find the specific quote here, but basically we're all old farts and we're still playing this game. And it's true because this franchise has existed for becoming up for 10 years in a couple of months of 10 per time. Yeah, so next month actually, 10 year anniversary since Destiny 1 came out. And when I read that quote, I was a bit taken aback because it's like, yes, I have played this game pretty much for 10 years. And I don't think I've done that with any other franchise, maybe college-y, but it's maybe something that's not so much point A to B. I have played college-y on and off from time to time, but Destiny as a franchise is something I've been stuck with. And I am now in my 30s and I've been playing since my early 20s and it's just like, woof. So that point about the Asian player base and how they want to put more focus on trying to get, you know, the youngens, the younger player base, that's fair enough. But that player onboarding experience, I went through it once. I think it was for like a test account, for like when I was doing split-screen testing with the... And it was just horrible. It was just such a bad experience. And I'm not surprised that people would love to get into Destiny, but they can't stay on Destiny because it's just such a confusing, it's just a mess of an experience to get in. And like we talk about the Destiny experience being one of the best out there. When we play raids, we play dungeons, we do GMs, we talk about builds, we talk about weapon breakdowns. And once you're in it, it's a fantastic thing to be in, but just to kickstart it, it's horrible. Yeah, I mean, I would agree with you and the idea of like, I'm not really thinking about player demographic split, but yeah, well, you know, maybe I get where they're concerned about because, you know, all their teenager players that used to just crank those engagement numbers, you know, just had their second kid and they ain't putting in the hours and the raids and dungeons anymore. You know, the metrics are backsliding, but I mean, on a, you know, on a serious note, the new player onboarding experience has... It is getting marginally better over the years. I think going through some of the new stuff now in the game where you can pull you in and take you through like the early, very early Guardian rank stuff is maybe one of the better onboarding experiences we've had so far. But still leaves a lot to be desired, and especially in the ways that, you know, the game just has a steep barrier to understanding and to like buy in potentially depending on when you're trying to come into the game with all the legacy content that the game has. And, you know, the reality is that you could download a Destiny for free, and then if you like it, you should buy the final shape and you pretty much be good from there on out, but still even trying to convince somebody of that once they get in to go buy a major expansion, then you're like kind of hooked in and you realize there's actually like a lot of old expansions that you really still need to pay for, and that's kind of a lot of money. And I think that that also is contributed to the idea of like people for better or, you know, accurately or inaccurately whatever, probably, you know, more the former perceiving that there's a massive inch barrier, right, to getting into Destiny really into understanding it all. It is absolutely wild to hear the amount of things that they were able to add in the delay and. I mean, yeah, when you think about that amount of time in the amount that they were able to accomplish and how much the things that they added, the more dread combatants, the exotic class items or some. The updates to the raid, all this stuff is kind of crazy, you know, it's a massive amount of content is hugely influenced. I feel like people's perception of this expansion. And into the light, right? Like, that was just coming with the final shape expansion. Then we also had the stuff that came before the final shape expansion that was also added in. Yeah, who, who, who I've built on slot. I know seeing that stream, we saw like Tom Farnsworth, right, and then Noah Lee, right, and all these guys and I'm sure there's many other people who contributed at Chris and, you know, and the weapons team, you know, gear team armor, cranking out. These like armor sets and this huge set of reprise weapons and designing all these levels for this activity is a great point of this, like, how did, how did you. The two exotic missions got redone. I'm assuming they had to do the lighting tweaks for Whisper and. That's the outbreak perfect at one call. I can never. Zero hour. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Incredible. Impressive on a time crunch. Ridiculous amount of work to get done and seemingly like a month or so. Two months. Yeah, then that was on top of making all of these new. I think we're expecting dread commands at some point. I'm certainly not like I don't pretend to think that the dread commands were spun up within this. What was it six months delay? I think dread has a combatant race was a thing that they were testing for some time in the future, but they were like, okay, now we can, or we should really like push this out for the final shape. And to be honest, I don't see any like, like it feels flawless to be fighting against the dread. It doesn't feel like it's being tagged on. It doesn't like they are, they are with like the high, they are with the scorn and the taken, but you are up against some like healthy amount of the dread combatants. It doesn't feel like, oh, this was added like pretty late and in stage. So yeah, I think, yeah, I can't find the article that goes into detail or maybe it was something on Twitter where. These devs were making all this content for into the light for the final shape for future content as well. Working hard to the bone and then, you know, some of them, most of them got the chop and that's what ultimately I'm just such, I'm in such a solemn mood about. Like, I, to emphasize his point earlier on, there was certainly a point for me that I just had to stop like scrolling, doom scrolling, as they call it on social media because it was getting to me and like just that, just the thought that even with all this new content that was spun up in close proximity to the release on top of into the light, on top of a brand new encounter for salvation's edge, all these exotic class item roles, dual destiny. I mean, that's such a massive activity itself. To then, you know, those staff members just getting the chop and, I don't know, it's just something about that just feels just catastrophically wrong. And I think they said the final shape was supposed to be the make or break. And we thought, we talked about how the final shape was definitely it. We've made it. And so did the staff members, but obviously not. It was not make or break. It was certainly, it doesn't matter how hard you've worked on this type of content. You're just going to get the chop anyway. Just really frustrating. There was a tweet arrow I put out. It was actually in reply to Fallout. And there was obviously get these folks saying, quote, bungee deserves this to happen. And that's just such evil nonsense to be coming out of people's keyboards. These people are just, they really don't understand the devs. And I suppose we're, we're in a very fortunate position. We're in a very lucky position to have some of these devs on our podcast. And we've spoke to some of them and they always exude passion, whether it's on or off the mic. We talked to various devs off the podcast from time to time. And, you know, we have nothing but respect for them just because they exude that passion. And that's what makes it more devastating when they've worked to the bone to be then thrown out like trash. Just a tremendous amount of talent being squandered by simply mismanagement. That's all it is. It's just really sad. Yeah, if you are hiring, it's probably the best thing you could possibly do is, you know, if you happen to work in games, in media, in software, whatever it is, and you're looking to hire some people, you know, reach out to some people. The thought of, oh, I could probably help versus helping is like a very small, you know, very thin line. But the best thing you can do at this point and other than that, you know, if you can't just be willing to listen to people and hear them out on their experience working there and how difficult it is to let go and have to be forced to move on from something like that is tough. You know, it's like also really hard to just watch something that you believe in suffer over time, you know. And this is like not even that personal for me, but even seeing people, there's like all these people that I remember going through rooted nightmares like ray tests with test engineers, designers, whatever, you know, and I saw a bunch of them get laid off. And these people, you know, like Word has said, we've had the chance to get to meet one or the other and you see their work and you know exactly the influence they are having on the game. That does have a very specific way of like making you feel a little like pessimistic, you know, about the future. And I'm going to follow that up with saying this idea that is destiny dead, you know, is this it? Is this the beginning of the heat death of the franchise? I don't know, you know, I mean, it is really sad, right? It's an incredibly dark day to see the state that this studio is currently in despite what the final shape was and to see what has happened to all these people. I don't know if destiny's dead, it is a certain specific kind of unique and addicting and it has a ridiculously loyal, pretty large player base, including, but not limited to the three of us here and a lot of friends of ours. And I think that this could also be a moment of, you know, we know, we know. These are the plans that we've heard from people that are working at the studio, we're working at the studio that we've gotten from people like Paul Tassie and Jason Schrier, you know, and gotten these insights from. The plans could change. They could shift around resources and focus more on, you know, what does a major destiny expansion look like two years from now? Like we were talking about, they could have strategy shifts and we don't know ultimately where the future holds. It is clear that at least to some extent destiny to will keep being supported in content is going to keep being delivered into destiny to not exactly clear what that looks like or what the size of the expansions will be, but it's going to be maintained. Marathon is still a thing that is going to happen. Who knows how that turns out. I know that I'm definitely in the target market. And I played a bunch of, you know, DMZ war zone back in the day, and that was cool. And it was supported for like six months. And then they kind of abandoned that, right. And maybe a year it got support for. And that was kind of fun, but I would love to see, but G's making an attempt at something like that. But yeah, I also think that marathon is really definitely also going to need some kind of like 3v, 3v, 4v, 4 arena play in combination with just like extraction shooter to make sure that it can stay viable. Long-term Apex Legends players will remember the time when that was a feature in that game. And I never understood whether they didn't invest in that more, especially considering the amount of resources that it takes to keep a game like that running, diversifying your game types and game modes available. It just seems like a really solid bet, which may be making safer bets, distributing risk and things like that is probably very high on the list of a lot of people that are leading up to development at Bungie after this time. You know, we've also heard several people express their confidence in Tison Green as a game director, you know, despite all the people that you have seen leave, you know, people have expressed their confidence in him as a leader and as a designer. So what happens with Bungie and their leadership, their franchises, their involvement with Sony, you know, what content we see to Destiny, you know, who knows, but I don't think this is quite the end, as it may seem, despite how sad it is. And I'm going to keep playing and keep supporting the people that are working on it, and it's still hundreds of them, right, which is a tough thing to kind of work through mentally, but I don't think like boycotting the people that are still there doing what they love is the best response to something like this. Well said, well said, same. All right, let's turn our attention to the actual game that we cover on the show. Let's get in game, so to speak, and talk about the state of the sandbox. This was a suggestion. It was actually made to us by Johnny Hammersticks over in our Discord. So thank you very much for this recommendation. But yeah, we're going to do a state of the sandbox here where we talk about what's met up, what's kind of at the top here. This is also going to be because we haven't ever done one of these before. We're also going to cover our kind of general or standby meta options in addition to the weapons, the armor and the abilities that are being buffed by our artifact for the episode echoes. So we'll be talking about some classics, but then also stuff that's kind of having a moment right now with the, you know, not knowing whether or not some of that stuff that's hot right now will continue to be hot, but we are going to give you some coverage of things that are true blue, kind of solid, consistent expansion over episode, over episode here. So again, we've broken this up into weapons. We'll be talking about this from an exotic and legendary point of view. Then we're going to cover armor again across our three classes here, hunter titan warlock in that order. And then the abilities side of things hunter titan and warlock. And at the very end, we're going to kind of talk about buffs, nerfs and updates more so what we would like to see kind of things that are right there on the edge that maybe need just one small push before they come into the new hotness stuff that maybe is really hot actually has been the new hotness maybe needs to cool off a little bit and stuff kind of that we're keeping an eye on here because again with each of these with each of these acts we are getting a new row in our artifact so there are there is potential still even throughout the echoes episode for things to come into the the meta so to speak and things for to get to get tuned in the patch that comes along with that new act so without further ado, let's get into the weapons here. I'm going to pass you over to court to talk about some of the exotics that we're looking at that we've been looking at what's new and hot what's what's still kind of providing a pretty solid path, a quality path, even with the final shape coming around. Yeah so right off the bat is one of our new exotics exotics snipers I should say it's still hunt that has been well it's already been balanced it was I would certainly say it was over performing by quite a large amount. We also have seen a little with the artifact mods coming in in act two we did see a little bit of a uptick with cloud strike whisper the warm off is obviously solar so that has a little bit more synergy with the the sniper artifact mods. Someone's put Darcy in the in our script for this week I I want to love Darcy lads, I really do but it's a no from me. Unfortunately Darcy it's just one like envious assassin catalyst away from being really strong and it's just right on the edge there. I agree yeah it is very close to being like up there in terms of maybe not so much for for like burst damage but certainly something that if you've got a lot of ammo in the magazine or just total damage. It could perform quite well it's got utility purposes as well with this sort of on demand dual. Over on our kind of other exotics we've got macrocosm which also came out with the final shape that is our kind of witness killer if you want to not really think if you don't want to aim down site you've got a perfect kind of vision of the wave attack that the witness does macrocosm will be your your best friend for that and also just for general tormentor and subjugator slaying. For kinetic priorities the kind of best for building with transcendence on prismatic you've got Kvostov you've also got outbreak perfected definitely a big one. outbreak perfected is also craftable if you go through zero hour get some of those some of the perks rewind rounds is on outbreak perfected just such a great amount of damage great for building transcendence. And we've also got necrocosm and thorn they've got their kind of AOE effects that work quite well with transcendence on prismatic. Ergo sum another exotic that came out this expansion will go into a little bit more detail with Ergo sum in a future episode so I won't go into too much here. Outside of those we've got kind of the standby metas we're calling it just the kind of they always work you're kind of we call them the kind of workhorse weapons. Kinetic side we've got wishender malfeasance outbreak energy we've got buried bloodline we've got grabbed and lance sun shot in there as well heavy we've got tracked can and tracked can has just got such a great utility. And it's love it's been really fun watching track canons have this kind of smooth uptick over the last couple years it's really fun to see. Back in spreath from last season gala horn of course legend that creates for a lot of those kind of shorter damage phases like in goes to the deep with the first boss encounter and levee's breath. Always solid again another great witness DPS what weapon you don't need to aim down sync with it you've got some great kind of aim peripheral aim for for watching the waves come in from the witness with the whether that's a raid or excision. Saint we've got some legendaries we want to kind of highlight here as well. Yeah so those are you know new standby and kind of bubbling up exotics I like what you said about tractor cannon. Divinity was like seeing a bit of a decline as people sort of value that buff from tractor cannon more and realize the difference that extra 15% can make. Yeah and then especially you add on like expanding abyss and some other things this season a lot of void focused stuff I feel like it's just given it that bigger you know even a bigger push up and divinity still really popular and overload heavy you know activities but it's it's not what it was right it is definitely not the dominating force tractor cannon I would say is probably getting more play time than divinity would you guys agree with that aggregate you think. I'm trying to think of encounters where you can't tractor for an optimal DPS I think warpriest you still just due to the mechanics you don't want to be up there on the platform right it makes it hard to be down there. So not that his head is super hard to shoot but like divinity just makes that job easier and it's it can be a pretty challenging encounter so I think divinity is still the top plate there. Nezorack again you you can tractor it's not like it's a distance thing there but it's very chaotic. Oh sorry divinity still makes it pretty easy to hit consistent shots. I'm just yeah I'm trying to go through the bosses here like we used to divinity roll and then now you can use tractor I think we've just gotten so much more aggressive it feels like with a lot of things you know where you'll have somebody run up tractor and if you're still playing a distance you just use rockets but you get the tractor in that way you don't need to have a player wasting that damage phase on their divinity and you know their DPS really tanks that you just you have the tractor and then you swap to another high power and special weapon get your shots in with your you know if it's a shotgun or something like that swap back to divinity once your timer is up to reapply and then go back to your special and keep keep blasting away. So yeah I don't know Corey can you think of another boss? So the final boss for goes to deep was the one that kind of clicked to my head now we don't tend to recommend divinity and three player activities because that's one person now not doing damage but that's pretty much always going to be like a two at least a three phase comfortable three phase you can definitely two phase especially with something like divinity just with the final boss the wizard being really like thin it's a thin hitbox and ideally you know you're using live lives as breath there or linear fusion rifles with just how kind of a long damage period you have divinity there try to think where else you can tractor everyone in VOG yep you can do you can track to the witness if you catch one of their hands you can tractor yeah you can tractor pretty much everything it's not that you like yeah you mentioned saying about or sorry impetus the war priest it's not that you can't track or it's just not viable it's it's better just to use a divinity there instead of a tractor cannon but and by by no means like divinity is not terrible it's still a solid weapon if you want to use divinity in some examples I know St. We played one I think it's just a normal salvation's edge and someone mentioned that's used divinity as the debuff but at least in this season I was kind of arguing we've got expanding abyss it makes more sense to have a weaken or a tractor cannon for that example divinity maybe in the future when you don't have those type of artifact parrots that may be viable but even at that I'm not convinced using divinity on on the witness in in most circumstances because it's it's fairly easy to rat to sorry to land those those damages so it's more of the mechanics that people kind of fumble about with rather than landing shots what do you use for a weekend for the boss and garden the final one oh yeah that's one do we use divinity oh yeah no return to chaos he's uh he's obviously on uh on that oh okay saying it's been years since I did the ring you can't can't lie to me like that I'll believe you and then make a fool of myself somewhere else I think where the bubble is positioned on the salvation garden of salvation boss is it makes it a lot easier to land again linear fusion rifles or Leviathan's breath I can't I can't visualize it at the moment but it's it's it makes it very easy compared to if you didn't have it and I think it's the boss is far away and no you can still get up to the boss there's no like invisible wall I mean you said real area pool yeah but again it's that's maybe not viable anyway you can definitely do try to cannon but yeah I think divinity would be a good shot there yeah yeah it's it's a pretty again it's not like you couldn't use tractor beforehand I think it's just with the buffs to tractor and it's similarly the nerfs to linear and kind of the real prominence of one two punch shotguns also just rockets continue to be a touchdown gls you might as well just send some some lucky Titan in there with their tractor cannon pop them and then they sit there with their sword or their shotgun and blast away while everyone else stands at a more reasonable distance with gls and rockets bop you gotta jump in there bop dude and then when you hear that tractor cannon noise effect you just think bop right that is a bop right there just I would say the only other phrase I would probably accept this boop you know boop and bop yeah hit him up it's a matter of how many o's you're feeling I get you I get you right so you're using your you're using a tractor cannon you know what are you pairing with it you're using a still hunt or a cloud strike you know what are you pairing with it and what are some you know great legendary options what's kind of get over that side of the sandbox you're starting off with a few examples I just mentioned there. Yeah let's say you are a tractor cannon player what are you probably interested in using and some of your other slots maybe you're doing some boss damage shotguns like in this mission are very viable we've got some rapid fire shotguns you know perfect paradox Basilos sonata the Aikilo shotgun until it's returned these rapid fires are all you know they're popular for dumping damage they're popular for their high ammo economy for one to punch builds you also have some you know your lightweight maybe some aggressive options that have threat detector and Vorpal or Reconstruction Vorpal all kinds of stuff like that that is going to be good for shotgun swapping so you know those are those are all pretty popular for pairing with a tractor cannon or something like that you know fusion rifles there's stuff like ribtite and deliverance that are very popular for you know your chill trip chill clip utility play deliverance seeing an uptake since ribtite is still taking three shots to freeze you know you still have other stuff you know you have weapons like scatter signal for your your your strand option there and Aramite with like an envious reservoir burst or Cartesian coordinate these are all like pretty popular options here for supporting maybe a tractor cannon type of build and I'll definitely meta options let's say you're using still hunt cloud strike you're probably going rockets these days you know you've got aggressive crux termination cold comfort apex predator in hot head you're probably looking to match some surges there those are you know those are going to kind of be your meta picks looking at like supporting some DPS stuff we also you know we have a lot of other snipers that have come up in popularity this season even in the legendary side court you know what other snipers you know have we seen since act two of episode one here is kind of kicked in and brought all these sniper mods along with it yeah so for the mods we've also got anti buyer sniper we've got century rifle rounds and we've got snipers meditation and just to give some quick numbers for meditation so on sniper rifle direct hit grant stack snipers meditation for seven seconds heavy sniper rifles grants to stacks and snipers meditation above persistent restore you get increased damage stability and reload speed we're just going to focus on damage here so it goes three to six to nine twelve and then up to fifteen percent increase that impact damage so that applies sorry that stacks with all damage buffs and debuffs surges activity surges and pretty much any other perks that you can think of it's one of those core outlier buffs it will be kind of featured on my damage stacking infographic just to kind of make it clear that this is its own thing that you can stack with it when I mentioned impact damage only applies to the impact portion of a hit so it doesn't include still hunts golden gun shot that was fixed with the I think most recent sandbox update those effects is an Aggies honed edge so you're getting 15% on top of that like what is it 350% damage buff and Darcy's target acquired they will both benefit from it I think target acquired is also 35% it doesn't include kinetic tremors or cloud strike storm bringer those kind of AOE effects they don't get buffed by snipers meditation in terms of snipers that we're looking at solar snipers have got the I class sniper rifle we've got twilight oath and we've got Luna regular three and then in general snipers are not solar so you're not going to get your incendiary rifle rounds here which is applies 30 stacks with snowboard sorry solar sniper rifle precision hits applies that 30 or 45 when you've got ashes you've got critical anomaly which I've talked about quite a lot recently in terms of on the podcast and also on the patron with the breakdown succession is still doing really well as is the supremacy those snipers you know we've I think it's fair to say that we've not been as friendly with sniper rifles up to fairly recently would I be correct and say in that lands I would agree so recently with with some changes to sniper rifles they did tweak with the the what's called the flinchers this is what you're talking about yes that's it thank you they've tweaked with the ammo reserves as well in the background we have seen a nice slow uptick I think we can understand that they do they don't want to make them as powerful as destiny one snipers that's fair enough but we do have some really solid snipers now and again I want to really highlight that critical anomaly has been my go to for kind of the Swiss army knife for champion countering this succession with the recombination pair for kind of burst damage and then supremacy which has got quite an eclectic range of perks you've got for the weapon you've got bait and switch and you've also got connected tremors really solid like all round perks for all these weapons side arms impetus whoops are you've got our big three here that's right and we do have an artifact mod to support them in this episode that's unstoppable side arms so there's very much a reason to be running these in pretty much every piece of in game content but especially ones with unstoppable champions there's an arc Australian and a solar one indebted kindness the call and aberrant action again these special weapons have almost no downside they fire at extreme distances they deal explosive damage they have fantastic ammo reserves they're very easy to handle and control and they reload quite quickly at base without any help from any artifact excuse me without any column three perks or column two perks so really there has not been a big reason to not run a sidearm in fact I know a lot of people I've been getting into the double special build because they've been utilizing a rocket sidearm as one of those specials and then they have maybe a more specialized special weapon and then they're running something like a rocket launcher or one of our exotic heavy snipers to really take advantage of our new artifact perks so yes they are certainly the new hotness carrying over from our last season where indebted kindness debuted and yeah they will probably continue to be hot but I do expect them to probably get tuned a little bit as they are eating trace rifles a lunch handily on the other hand I would also say machine guns are doing quite well if you don't want to lean into the double special using a rocket sidearm as a primary so perhaps an adaptive or an aggressive frame we've got on the adaptive side commemoration hammerhead I think either one of those depending on which one you might have a good roll of will serve you just fine we do have of course our new aggressive frame machine gun promo moria from the pale heart craftable extremely strong the best frame for machine guns right now really looking forward to getting more aggressive frame machine guns that has a phenomenal role gls doing quite well as well we're just talking special gls for the moment here mountaintop undisputed very very strong weapon great perk pool double fire gls also not as many we've only got the two wilder flight and wild style wild style did see a pretty big glow up here this this episode with that perk pool refresh here and they're both incredibly strong both for damage but then also if you get a blinding roll you have two grenades firing out at the same time for an even wider blinding sorry disorienting grenade radius there so a lot of great special options here again with snipers getting the buff I think there's a lot of competition but if we're just looking for kind of an overall meta pick it's currently rocket sidearms for sure they just they do so much they ask so little of you have a ton of ammo so you rarely need to worry about your reserves right you'll get special bricks to drop with ease before you run out of all those rockets on the sidearms but yeah they're strong we do have some primaries that wanted to talk about here before we swap over to armor I think right now hand cannons pulse rifles currently doing quite well here on the hand cannon side it's really adaptive precision frames and then the heavy bursts are really the three archetypes that are they're performing well right now but also have been performing quite well we've got on the adaptive frame side at midnight coo and soullies bane very very top the line options here on the precision side of things we've got two arch ones here posterity of course we've talked about in sight line survey are newer one here both craftable a third craftable option dropping from another raid is word of crow that's the void option very very strong precision frame hand cannon and then our newest archetype being the heavy bursts we've just got the the two here mahis and wardens law very very strong options they're dominating mahis being the only energy one wardens being I think the better of the two in the kinetics slot just with its fourth times a charm and for a weapon I know lucky pants builders use that a lot for top tier damage pulse rifles incredibly buffed incredibly strong also a new archetype that just dropped the heavy bursts we've got the three of those that we've just covered in breakdowns in previous episodes I just care nullifying curation rapid fires are kind of the the next one in line we have a lot of good ones out there as well I'll just touch on three darkest before over soul edict autumn wind being quite strong and then a fan favorite blast furnace with the access to those double damage traits very very sexy strong pulse rifle there really really rounding that out auto rifle side again I think onslaught the perk has been very popular on some of these newer additions we got rasa rogo and summoner both with that perk very very powerful but then also a new frame that support frame that we got from the pale heart in no hesitation is an incredible healing machine very very solid if you don't want to spec all the way into healing with your abilities you can have a strong primary weapon also healing yourself and your teammates with ease when you shoot them so quite a lot of utility there on the auto front side any other options here on the legendary weapon or even the exotic weapons guys that we haven't covered that are performing quite well we forgot to add before we swap over to armor we touch on heavy gls I mean it's transit you know just good point we did not do that yeah we're the ones you're using yeah it's transit yeah and it's and it's I mean it's such a strong weapon with the ability to crank up its magazine size right in and with bait and switch being that 30% buff on it and it was also so easy to access and is about to be again and this is another thing I'll say about some of these weapons that we're mentioning the focusing for the brave arsenal weapons is coming back right so if you're hearing us talk about a bunch of these weapons I've been like who edge transit mountaintop and blast furnace whatever that you don't have a good role on it's going to be pretty easy in maybe this coming reset or relatively soon right free of weapon focusing is coming back yeah so it's a massive amount of meta options in there that are still meta well into this you know our full release here I'm still incredibly strong options and it'll be pretty easy to go back and focus those for their 60% drop chance once that updates hits soon so man yeah I mean a lot of really good stuff yours and it's interesting to see how you know we've got them the new stuff the newcomers right on the final shape and there's some new stuff in there but honestly not massively upended I wouldn't say from what I expected I've been using I've been using a baron action with mountaintop but I want to do a lot of damage you can get something like you know recomb or yeah recombination going on a mountaintop for like a lot of burst damage on top of using a rocket sidearm and a rocket launcher like dragons or something like that that's going to be causing a lot of ignition damage there's also you know just so many good options coming from the new raid like we were talking about dumping a bunch of spoils on weapons that are coming from the new raid critical anomalies ability to counteract all three champ types right now in this very specific given moment it just allows you to have pretty much whatever you want in your energy slot which is nice a little niche but you know still really just incredibly strong options there can't go wrong with any of the heavy burst I mean again maybe sometimes it takes playing seasonal stuff to go get your creation maybe you want the nullify rates a little bit hard there but I think that you know I feel like we've got a wide enough meta right now that it's not like it is that hard to get into some of these loadouts we've been talking about which is pretty nice and a lot of these weapons don't have massive you know time sneaks or entries or anything like that and again going back to the whole pretty versatile some of this is going to get easier to access than ever or yeah actually ever because it's 60% up and 50 pretty soon which is great to see yup yeah it's better what we got yeah I think we've got very varied weapons sandbox I think it's very fair to say this is probably the best we've had for a while you mentioned trace rifles earlier on and yeah I want to see trace rifles have a little bit of a to do something that you know in any of the non-exotics anyway but it just look at the list here it's just a lot of variation of like I can bring in a machine gun for for maybe some damage scenarios bring in rockets rockets are still doing well they weren't buffed with the whole kind of consolidation with the spec mods but they also weren't there so they kind of just stuck it kind of what they were doing before GLS got a recent buff up the snipers as we've already talked about it's just just a very nice list here not everything's viable again trace rifles being like the kind of go to weapon to kind of back that up but you know even shotguns are quite viable recently especially if you are a Titan yeah solid solid list of weapons here yeah man it was in a I'm sorry I was just gonna say rocket sidearms versus trace rifles you'll look at the difference between those two weapons and I'll tell you a lot alright so head over to armor I'll kick us off with the hunter of course it's going to be slasher night hawk much like what I mentioned with the the top of this section talking about still hunt I'm going to talk about slasher night hawk that is the go to it's been quite a wild ride over the last you know eight to 12 months since you know so see hawk was pretty much like F tier then it went straight to S tier when it went to when it got its buff with the the start of season 19 just having that small kind of you get your super back a little bit faster and then they also added the damage buff they increased that up so obviously slasher night hawk buffs still hunt as well you crunch down one bullet into one super sized one super energized shot to do even more damage they did nerf the interaction with still hunt sorry selection night hawk with still hunt it's no longer doing some out of proportion multiplier I think it's the last I need to look at the specific numbers but it's like somewhere in the region of six percent before it was going up to it was close to basically it was close to a normal celestial night hawk shot which is just bonkers to come out of a still hunt slasher night hawk shot it was just something really wild and you can charge up still hunt really fast to get that slasher night hawk all the time so that's the reason why it's been knocked down it's still viable it's still very good but yeah it's it's not as go to anymore outside of damage scenarios gifted conviction which we all had zero expectations including myself when this was revealed back before the final shape came out but the turns out this has been a very solid exotic I have been having a blast with gifted conviction just for your kind of ad dense activities when you use your sorry if you use your ascension or tempest strike you are launched up into the air releases three tracking art projectiles they deal quite a reasonable damage themselves but they also apply jolt and when you use ascension or tempest strike you also get amplified for yourself and your nearby allies and you also apply jolt with I think it's 15 meters you also also get damage resistance for 10 seconds up to maximum of four stacks and that applies to any jolt application is not when you refresh the jolt it's just when you apply the jolt and you have to be within 50 meters to refresh that and I think it goes up to around about 50% damage resistance still need to double check on that but this has just been a solid all-rounder for just a mono type build for ARC also on prismatic because you get ascension over on prismatic renewal grass I've used a fair amount if I've been I just want to change things up I've been having a lot of joy with celestial Nighthawk and gifted conviction but renewal grass keeps getting stronger it did get the mini rework where you get frost armor so while you're inside that slowing field and enemies deal 50% reduced damage to you and users and allies are immediately granted one frost armor and then you gain an additional frost armor stack every 0.9 seconds just a really solid kind of utility exotic just a massive dust field when you pair it with a touch of winter you get a big crystal as well so it's also got a little bit more synergy when using on just stasis subclass but you of course you can use on on prismatic because hunters do get dust field grenades as their grenade for stasis terms of other exotics I'll maybe talk I'll touch on a few later on where we're kind of thinking about buffs but in general I think other exotics are doing fairly well there's still some outliers that are just like why does this exist but you know assassin's chaos still really great for for those plays I'm not using it as much but I would always recommend it for kind of solo type content if you're doing like a dungeon then you've just got things like certarachnes facade which is the grand grants woven male on grappling they did add that particular perk with the exotic class armor full tracer I've been using a fair amount just with you know getting that free times for surge a little bit of a minigame when it comes to for tracer so I wouldn't be surprised if people are a bit kind of put off with how much how many looks you have to kind of jump through just to get the whole thing running but it can be useful in a few builds I have a particular stasis build with the shatter dive which I kind of go into a little bit more detail I spoke about that in the past I think it is also on the podcast versus enemies discord build section for the host builds and yeah I think yeah hunter exotics are doing pretty well doing pretty well at least in terms of current sandbox now I'm a bit jealous about one particular titan exotic and I'll hand that over to to see yeah actually there's two here you've listed two that I'm quite jealous but similar to gifty conviction hanzordous propulsion has definitely taken the the titan meta by storm I would say in this release it is it's good for dealing just burst damage on a single target it is pretty easy to activate about every 30 seconds it buffs your your rocket launchers rocket sidearms there's all kinds of stuff that covers court I know you put out some some infographic little piece on this covering all that stuff but yeah it's it's it's great you know it's great outside of DPS phases it's great in DPS phases it's easy to activate it doesn't require a lot of time of investment and it does a lot of damage hanzordous propulsion is just the most you know not only effective but just like really fun thing to use I would say right now on Titan no doubt about that it's just I don't know it just scratches that right you know mech kind of fantasy itch and it just is really really nice yeah we're looking right now at a at a list of all the you know stuff that is impacted we're talking you know all your rocket sidearms including very bloodline your dragons breath if you've got ignitions going off wolf backgrounds from your sword wolf backgrounds from you know whatever rocket that just happens to be benefiting from wolf backgrounds nanotech tracer rockets the the missile strike from grand overture there's just so much uh that can benefit from this it's kind of nuts um I don't know what to say it's it's just it's hardly ever not on my character uh these days and if it's not equipped it's definitely in uh in my chest piece uh you know inventory waiting to be so you know there's some other things they're still hanging on though obviously um stoicism exotic class items you know we won't get into a ton here and that's kind of absorbed some of this uh synthesis still see play um on and off the class item you know there's absolute classic you know there's a reason that that synthesis still popular um hoyle also you know on and off class item still sees play for just supporting any kind of ability loop you know going like slightly off meta I would consider still very strong um there are a few other options out there uh second chance outlets for you know just just the amount of void mods and things like we have this season you can really get a lot of benefit ever chance especially in in some uh barrier champion content and stuff like that uh pyregills really fun to use uh consecration tornadoes you know find the actual super itself is is still really strong it's like 650% of the hammer slam um can't just reach the lance cap I would even say you know can be used in uh some decent builds so yeah there's a few others there that I wouldn't consider uh hard meta but definitely very strong if you're if you're building into them I would say for sure um second st pyregill by the way well go ahead sorry st pyregill was the one the second one that I was referring to that so okay uh yeah is either whenever I'm on titan it's either hazardous or pyregill probably the latter most of the time because it's just so fun yeah consecrating and then those big cyclones pop up and then you've got the massive hammer yeah they both just really speak to I mean in my eyes like titan fantasy titan identity right uh whether that is like tanky meck or yeah smash uh king ddd massive hammer you know kind of burn everything yeah um you know as uh one character um long ago said sometimes you need to get your mallet you know it's just it's it's what needs to happen um we're like I know what the thumbnail for this episode is going to be oh yeah you already you already know it's coming um yeah we're like some you know we're you out what are you what are you running what do you what do you think is meta what's kind of on the fringes I'll I'll talk about our two new exotics first here speaker site I don't think anyone is surprised that this is strong healing is good actually um very controversial statement here I'm known for those here on the podcast but yeah he looks pretty pretty good pretty meta pretty helpful pretty handy and healing turret is probably the most helpful you could be so no surprise speaker site is getting a lot of play here obviously it will probably be an evergreen meta pick here unless healing grenade receives a pretty hefty nerf I doubt that very much but it could happen I wouldn't rule out Mattadoxia I've not played with this a ton but there are a lot of people that swear by it and it is it is useful it does give prismatic warlock access to the suspend verb through our arcane needle melee in particular which is already I think the melee that many folks run when they run prismatic warlock it's probably the best for the range and then also the multi charges Mattadoxia giving suspend to prismatic warlock like we needed another verb access on that subclass but again it can be very powerful the class already specializes in crowd control and suspend is one of the top tier crowd control verbs so you can really lean into that fantasy on prismatic warlock with Mattadoxia or you could just run it on a typical strand lock and then you have another option there for both getting anti barrier built into your abilities but also melee synergy and easy suspend even easier suspend access so I think both of our new exotics are currently meta I think speaker site and Mattadoxia are probably both going to remain pretty meta here I would be very surprised to see either one of those tuned in such a way that they would fall out of the usual rotation of exotics of course the one that has come out of nowhere to absolutely dominate has been getaway artist on prismatic warlock with the unique interaction of the arksal and also our ice turret so I again will cover this in more detail when we get to prismatic and I talk about that prismatic warlock build but very very surprised I don't know if this will get nerfed or not I would imagine bungee once warlocks to go and play with the new warlock exotic class items but there's not really a need for any of them outside of some very niche damage rolls and with the current difficulty of acquiring exotic class items even with the buffs coming to them here with the solstice update it's still going to be a bit of a slog so I think for more casual players they'll just stick to getaway artists and absolutely chew through enemies in pretty much all levels of content I don't know if getaway artists will be relevant for the time moving forward even in episode two and three but it is definitely stealing the show here in episode one very very strong and as far as some of our more you know evergreen content there's a ton of them I'm not really I really just want to focus on these three because I think these are the ones bringing everyone's attention to we already know about the various solar warlock exotics yeah I'm not you know I'm not even gonna go into them well that's probably a topic for another time there's a lot of them I would definitely recommend playing with these three as they are new and they will certainly get you through all levels of content and they're a lot of fun to play with so I will transition over to abilities I'll pass you back to court here to talk about what are we playing with on the hunter ability side of things yeah so really as you have already touched on a few of these so ascension on our core prismatic for that on-demand jolt and amplification Golden Gun of course on solar or prismatic again CC Hawk or still hunt Stasis Hunter isn't the in thing at the moment but with recent buffs it's been very strong it's still something that I love to go back to it's just a great kind of build stasis itself I think again we'll talk about this maybe in a future episode but stasis still needs some kind of hype to some just some additional kind of help just kind of supplant it into the sandbox things I've not talked about though grapple on prismatic also that is our strand quotes grenade it triggers a bunch of melee stuff especially when you do combine it with the exotic class item perks I'm getting ahead of myself though because we'll talk about that in a few trips of when we talk about exotic class item perks and then lastly as ever tether it still remains strong as ever as we get more and more add dense activities Deadfall tether is also on prismatic so you can pair that with Orpheus reg if you want but tethers just always going to be the go-to if you just want to clear out a bunch of adds and lit to Saints hazardous propulsion rockets clear them out and then the getaway artists three turret combo to clear out them as well yeah hunter abilities are still really strong very just solid game staples on all all the subclasses I'm just kind of skipping through some of them we also got a few buffs related to was yeah arc bolt did get a buff just with that being the arc grenade for prismatic and I have went back to lucky raspberry and I'm kind of going backwards with the exotic armor but arc bolts feel really strong and when you do combine it with lucky raspberry just feels kind of child's play when it comes to a bunch of ads and getting your your grenade back amplifying it with amplifying it with the ionic traces and yeah it's a lot of fun going on so again I'll have a little bit kind of further commentary when it comes to kind of buffs or nerfs or updates we want to see in a moment here but Titans how are we feeling yeah it's um it's okay you know I there's a lot of like just doom saying I feel like at you know a few weeks into our current episode that prismatic Titan wasn't strong enough or Titans are in a horrible spot there's all this talk after the raid placement and I think that that just is like a really niche thing that has to do with ranged DPS loadouts and I'm really I'm not that is not dictate to me that the class itself is is greatly suffering now there's some great things in the class and there's some things that could be improved which we'll talk about in a minute you know right now what I see is like being really popular obviously you have your like you know the the bill that you see you're everywhere's triple consecration knockout right on on prismatic Titan it's all the place you use grapple grenades you have your prismatic fragment that is going to allow you to deal additional damage to targets that are affected by darkness abilities all you know all that kind of stuff includes range building clears rooms all that stuff Twilight arsenal on prismatic and on void proper and it's really strong super as long as you don't hit your teammates in the back of the head excellent super you know you got to watch out for your aim and that thing just a little bit is something to do there is something to be said for like solar and void Titan you know I don't I've been really been touching arching stasis very much but solar Titan right now you know I went in like full in on a consecration sunspots build and really leaning all the way in on using you know several fragments for ignitions pumping the ignitions up you capitalize on something like solar formation with your consecration and dragons breath and a barren action and all this stuff and you can have a really high damage outputting build with something like pyregal and have a lot of healing from your sunspots of ability regeneration just uptime there it says something easily really strong ignition focused solar build void has got some stuff with again kind of taking a moderately strong kit already I would say from the base and building into it with your shield crush expanding abyss all that kind of stuff from the current artifact can can make something like a second chance Titan build feel pretty strong and and be able to deal a lot of you know have a lot of utility as far as just like controlling champions and gyms and things like that and then also just like having generally good survivability but yeah so you know control demo incredibly strong on the void kit you know along with twilight arsenal your your prismatic consecration knockout also very strong and then solar just leaning in on solar formation and ignitions it's synth those or pyregal something like that you know there's there's some really strong stuff coming together on those fronts um you know warlocks coming off of armor that we just talked about how you feeling on general builds on how those are coming together and you know just supers and stuff even better um yeah song flame don't think I really need to explain why this is meta it is incredible clears ads keeps you alive through ridiculous amounts of damage resistance uh yeah it you like explosions turn turn your flames into little little baby fireflies and cinnamon enemies with your grenade or your melee and just set them set them all on fire it really is a burn the world in a kind of a very intense way solar warlock in general is the strongest I think it's ever been really when it comes to just the quantity and quality of the kit and the exotic armor pieces that all tie into it again I don't want to get in all of them right now but again healing grenade with speaker sight is fantastic there's a lot of different options with you could do pretty much all the aspects I'm looking through these right now um yeah every single aspect here I was going to mention a little bit later on but I'll touch on Helion being a great source of passive damage especially with our solar foam nation artifact mod this this episode going to be great for just passively creating really strong ignitions through that just scorched that routine scorched here very very powerful I still think Helion will be strong even after this episode and we lose solar foam nation again it just it's shooting out damage in the background while you're playing after you pop it which is fantastic you don't even have to think about it but you're setting enemies on fire and if you're really specced into scorched as a verb on your solar subclass it can be fantastic but if you're running Helion on prismatic no worries again it's just passive damage you're setting enemies on fire if it's one big beefy target they'll keep targeting it and then that will also end up leading to an ignition which is another fantastic source of damage I've mentioned the healing grenade and speaker sight again that is just going to be an all-time classic here if we pivot off of solar we've got feed the void granting us devour I'm thinking more through the lens of prismatic but still even on void warlock feed the void is that that linchpin that centerpiece that really keeps it going devour is a fantastic verb and the ease of use which with which warlocks get to access devour is fantastic and then of course arxel particularly through getaway artist has been phenomenal on prismatic provides near a hundred percent uptime on the amplified verb which if you are using the galvanic armor artifact mod is also providing you extra dr when you're amplified so really we are running around on prismatic warlock with insane dr and then insane passive damage and insane grenade uptime for unbelievable crowd control and then locking down some higher health targets some beefier targets so I really can't criticize anything on warlock they're all strong there's all plenty of solid exotic armor options I think maybe the one subclass that I would like to see fleshed out a little bit more is arc but I think that's more just the fact that I have issues with the arc verbs rather than the actual aspects I don't find amplified to be as helpful outside of some very specific interactions jolting is phenomenal I would like to see arc blind built a little bit more into the warlock hit but that is a personal preference and that's really the last thing I can touch on and I'm kind of getting into our buff slash nerf slash updates here but yes warlock is in a phenomenal spot I don't think there's really any path that won't lead you to success in any serious in game PVE on warlock and I think there's also some just fun stuff which is really the most important thing there's fun stuff on warlock across all of our different subclasses or different elements so to speak now if we do talk about buffs and nerfs updates kind of our or what we want to see this is the state of the sandbox what would we hope in the sandbox morphs into evolves into or pivots away from maybe on the ability side of things saying I know you had mentioned Titan there are some people out there that are nay saying some doom posting titans what do you where do you fall on that and then what are you hoping to see with the state of the sandbox just for Titan players I'm I feel that the Titan pure element classes are fine you know maybe yeah maybe say skis a little bit maybe arcadise a little bit but I really you know it comes to like prismatic Titan I feel like prismatic Titan is one strong aspect away from gaining access to some great builds and feeling you know more diverse which I've maybe is is one of the things that people have been so honed in on of oh it's just consecration plus knockouts is the only viable thing on prismatic Titan okay I don't I don't think that's entirely true but if we if we saw you know so Invictus control demo bastion from void into the fray from strand added into our prismatic Titan kit as far as just available aspects go I think that that is all that we would take to to get your prismatic Titan if people thinking and you know feeling like it's a much more varied build or there's a lot more variation that you can find here as far as making different things in combination but yeah you know something like control demo bastion and into the fray and so Invictus honestly they all offer like defensive like really strong defensive capability and while we're in other your healing getting you know your ability region and restoration from sunspots you're getting 80 HP added to you and all your teammates with a massive radius on control demo bastions over shields into the fray is within mail all these things I you know I don't ever think we would get like a banner of war or something like that on prismatic Titan but I don't know some of my expectation and I think that any anybody that's really in tune with the games like sandbox and balancing probably would agree that that would not be a healthy thing but yeah I would love to see one of these things added in to prismatic Titan and I think that would really just up the overall efficacy of that in the you know the ability to just change things up a lot in that kit so that's my kind of big hope and I don't think it's crazy to assume that they will you know tweak fragments and buff and nerf fragments over time and maybe even add in other aspects for the classes into prismatic I don't think it's a crazy thing to think of court where you at on hunters. So as I've already mentioned I think the overall hundred kit is doing well especially prismatic because I've found a use for all the grenades from the other sub classes and the mailies they all have their UCs um mentioned previously we'd love to see additional help to stasis we spoke about that a few weeks ago with like decaying frost armor the stasis shard cooldown is a bit too extreme but again that applies to all of stasis not just specifically stasis hunter um over on the armor side for me uh talk about class out armor in the future I think there's a solid set of perks there but when it comes to the individual exotics I think that's the weakest part of the hunter kit if you think of hunters the entire kit is a pizza or a pie or something like that the weakest slice of all of that has to be the exotic armor I'm certainly not saying it's the weakest out of all the classes maybe it is but at least when it comes to the kit as a whole exotic armor can just be really like they're really good like you've got things like uh starry or scales or even like niche builds like trying vise I've been having some fun with that they have buffed it recently they've they've they've made it the glaive exotic but then you've got things like blight ranger which hasn't seen any sort of movement since it was launched uh gem and ijester it can be a bit of a meme thing in pvp but it's pretty much not it anywhere else squeeze and vest again it's another it's not seen any help it's not useful and prismatic whatsoever cause you can't get prismatic uh so you can't get uh uh spectral blades it's the same with blight ranger you can't get arc strider on or I should say arc staff on prismatic um raiju's harness again it's another like arc staff thing doesn't work on prismatic so you're very like focused on one particular subclass of one particular uh uh super which just doesn't do much for me um uh and then we've we've mentioned this many many times but to the young aham caris spine got that pretty severe uh nerf and I feel like at this stage now that we see how prismatic is performing it's like well I don't think uh yes need that uh nerf in the first place when you've got some insane like gameplay loops with the prismatic build um we don't get uh trip mines with prismatic hunter that is the um uh not skip grenades but uh swarm swarm thank you uh we get swarm and prismatic we don't get uh uh trip mines so this would only really be applying to solar hunter anyway but yeah the amount of gameplay loops where I've just seen like well this was basically young aham caris spine way way back when it was in its like uh best state so it's a bit of a shame that we haven't seen like a kind of on nerf or at least like a little bit of an alleviance to the nerf because it's been pretty severe I have kind of uh I do agree with that sentiment now I think at the time I was like well maybe yes needed a little bit of a it's wings clipped but yeah I think it was just a bit too much and then like so six coyote um it got a free reaper mod um as part of the final shape sandbox change it didn't move the needle for me maybe it's not for me anyway it's obviously more of a kind of pvp uh exotic it's got more uses with if you want to double up on uh various classability spawning or triggering effects like you could use ascension twice with this I'm not quite sure why you'd use it because it's fairly easy to get up pretty fast anyway but yeah that the reaper the free reaper mod just didn't really do much for me um I kind of wish they went down the path of it gets a unique reaper saw some suggestions on reddit and kind of elsewhere where it was kind of uh either a new sorry a no or a tiny cooldown versus a mod version so it's a bit of more of an amplified effect for the reaper mod because the more reaper mods that you apply the shorter the cooldown of uh of spawning or as a power so I think if they wanted to go down that route I feel like you putting on an exotic something like six coyote coyote I would be fine with having no cooldown at all compared to the mod version um but yeah that that's my uh kind of thoughts I don't think anything really needs to be buffed sorry sorry not buffed nerfed uh for for any of the sandbox there's a lot of commentary with pvp we're not going to get into that specific rabbit hole but uh in terms of prismatic hunter it's doing perfectly good it's perfectly well um is it maybe again not I'm not talking about pvp I'm talking specifically about pve uh is is there maybe parts of the build that are pretty out of band perhaps uh but I'll talk about prismatic hunter in in the future and my kind of thoughts with that um saint you got any other uh did you talk about kind of armor exotics here before we pass it to impetus I'm feeling pretty good about titan armor I would say I mean there's you know obviously there's some stuff that will continue to get me on like mask of the quiet one I there's some things yeah there's some things I would like to see like differentiated a little bit more between their their class item version and their pure version so to say when it comes to exotic armors you know a little bit of stuff on that like armor and terrarium got um was it heavy handed or um you can make orbs on grenade kills for free whenever you are using um arm and terrium the original version and then alpha loopy has like reaper built in I believe and I think that those are interesting uh but we we're kind of in an odd spot here when it comes to those pieces of exotic armor and exotic armor you know in the class items we'll talk more about that when we get to that here that that whole episode and topic but it's just my kind of brief two cents on that as first Titan stuff goes um yeah it's all that I'll get for that yeah I don't have a ton I'm trying I was looking through the armors here for warlock a little bit earlier even a generally good spot I don't think we have any outliers of wow this is not helpful at all I mean again there's still some stuff like astrocyte verse I think has a very specific pvp playstyle what I like to see some more pve integration it did get some but I would like to see more yes but I'm not I'm not losing sleep over it I don't think it's you know there's still other fantastic options Nazarax sin I think it's quite nice and still solid in in game pve so that's one of those things where I think there's still enough of a fantasy for the void related for the void locks out there that if astrocyte verses I'm quite living up to that fantasy or die or die or hakara to use another example if those two aren't living up to the example we're okay because there's still some pretty top tier options in addition to those so I yeah I'm I'm very much kind of with saint here but for the warlock exotic armor it's all generally in a good place sure there's some stuff that could get tweaked but nothing horrible nothing crazy out of band and plenty of very solid options great options really for a variety of different elements so that's my thought on exotic armor are we good to move on to weapons here yeah Jasper maybe has some anxiety karma thoughts I'm trying to him but yeah if he's good I think we're good to move on to I just I think he disagrees with this but he didn't realize he was a skull of dire hakara main I will update my spreadsheet here on that note he is a briar veins user okay all right um yes weapons here I think we're all in agreement we obviously thought aggressive scouts were getting buffed a few weeks back but it's gonna be imminent really excited to see some of those buffs really want to like play around with scout rifles and see how they perform I think we've been fairly critical on aggressive scouts so it's glad glad to see they're getting some nice buffs I'll skip the middle one at top of linear if LFRs yeah I think at this stage now I think they could do with just a little tiny buff maybe another kind of crit multiplier increase because I think the weapons team have always prefaced with like LFRs are the go-to for precision damage but if you do a damage shot then sorry a body shot then you're not you're not doing any damage it's very apart with sleeper similar that's that's the kind of thing that I always remember when you know you're using sleeper simulation you're going for that precision shot and if you don't then you're not doing much damage but yeah I am in agreement with this point linear LFRs could do with a small buff they're not completely whack they're not in dire straits whatsoever but again when you've got things like rocket launchers even the aggressive machine gun still doing some serious damage LFRs can just be fairly either I'm not using them or I will use them when it's a specific set like bait and switch with cataclysmic same I think I was at yourself that put this note about SMG's getting a small buff yeah and I was kind of looking at kind of trying to just look at the the weapons and all the context of each other and what's really popular and what's not that's what I'm going to do is I'm going to say that SMGs are like way on performing SMGs right now which is wild and the same goes for LFRs when I say that you know yeah they've had their time but there are still some SMGs out there that are getting play you know no doubt about that but yeah you know 5% the little SMG you know 5% general buff SMGs kind of just get them maybe not quite to where side arms are sometimes you maybe need a little closer range SMGs you get that extra 510 meters on the effected band same thing for LFRs you know yeah court create multiplier is great because it's like you're you're it's still kind of leads into the yeah you have to hit create what if that multiplier is just an extra 5% higher or something like that they've got fine total damage you know at this point the DPS is not really great but that's like not what they're there for small stuff but I think that would just like even things out a little bit right yeah it's it's so strange to me yeah I just never thought I'd be in a world where SMGs were not optimal I always thought they'd be that fallback option but here we are so and that's I don't know are you guys using regular sidearms I feel like you know we were we were kind of we would mean on sidearms and then rocket sidearms came out and everyone's like oh yeah I'm using I'm using a sidearm but they're using rocket sidearms and not regular sidearms have you guys been using breach light to use to name a recent example like hmm yeah I am I have used breach a little bit because of the threaded blast is really strong the on artifact for exploiting tangles there are like little mini warm mind nukes which is really nice and it's pretty fun you know damage outputs pretty solid I will still mess around with the little pregens law every now and then I was using volshot SMGs and I said it just give that a try I feel pretty good you know can't really complain too much there but yeah I would say that's about it as far as like you know sidearms in general go see a ton of play and I don't kill four of under either okay that's different that's something good weapon no doubt but might as well be in the rocket more though like the rocket sidearm category which I think I speak for all this when I say that they're in a perfect spot and nobody should look at that all right and and and there's nothing to see there honestly in fact just every other part of the sandbox is up for grabs and compared to what is the gold standard yeah yeah if anything happens to rocket sidearms I'll quit playing destiny too so you know it's really over for the game and it's not the studio playing out hundreds of people it's you know it's not projects getting canceled it's the rocket sidearms honestly come for you in the end facts you know when you mention sidearm I immediately just think of the rocket sidearms exactly that's my point like but like see it's a I just like I had my fun back when we're you were meaning us for using brigands law with the with vote shot I had my fun back then it was fun to use I'm not really thinking about just normal non rocket sidearms at the woman I'm not really thinking about SMGs either do I agree that they should get a little like a little bump up yeah but again SMGs had their time in the sun and the sandbox goes through these kind of waves and I'm fine with that I'm fine with SMGs just taking a little bit of a time out for for the next I don't know till midway sees it through episode two like I'm fine with that I do you know I am using subjunctive quite a lot which is the that are quite late frame yeah with the what do I have on it I think it's stats for all or threat detector plus vote shot one of the two and that has been performing quite well I was using a little bit during our master run content when I was on our counter so like SMGs aren't terrible they're not in a bad state but like this was my suits a little bit different when you've got vote shots vote shot just kind of spreads out everywhere and you just completely eliminate a bunch of ads but in terms of non-exotics like I'm not using Kalisman at all much if at all these days I'm thinking about any other SMGs officer we've got some guardian games with the title I'm not using that I got a few recluse rules from into the light but I'm not using them I'm just looking at the list here even the ICLOS SMG that's the other aggressive version for a vote shot I've not been using it a lot but I think that's fine I'm okay with that in terms of sandbox health because I do want to use well my eyes immediately went I've got demo from here my eyes immediately went to boring or in date that's the same but I have been using other things like sweet sorrow which is way back season 16 that's the or a land tank arc or rifle I've been using rosarago I've been using prosecutor I have been using like all rifles have took their place in some in some formats but yeah my point is that I'm okay with SMGs being taken a little bit of a break from the sandbox but yes I do agree that they should get a little buff at some point yeah I brought that up to say more so that it feels weird that we don't have a very obvious close range primary option I do think you're right court that auto rifles are currently filling that slot but it feels like even with the SMGs getting tuned down sidearms didn't still didn't naturally slot into that role for a lot of people like we just went up in the range category to auto rifles instead now we're just using auto rifles up close which is fine you're not wrong for doing that of course but you would think for the two primary types that are pretty much purpose built for close quarters combat with the more dominant one of the SMGs being tuned down I have not seen sidearms also then rise up to kind of fill that void it's like we just we just pretend that there aren't close quarter primaries anymore and we use an auto rifle for our close to mid-range engagement distances or you get a little you know cheeky and use your rocket sidearm up close and maybe take a little bit of self damage right yeah yeah again I don't want to go too much into the rabbit hole here but do you guys know because I've not really had any knowledge about PVP recently but how are sidearms and SMGs performing in that sandbox and the PVP sandbox oh just fine yeah I played some trials against all my better judgment a few weeks ago as you guys know to to get the pulse rifle and a comp to get the auto rifle as well and I mean I'm not like some cracked PVP player and I was having plenty of success still running you know a high mobility peacekeepers build or a rapid fire sidearm as a backup you know still plenty effective options I even use several different archetypes of sidearms and found success for the most part and if I didn't it was my fault because I just absolutely got played or pushed when I shouldn't have the kind of a thing but yeah plenty viable in in PVP and you know to that exact point of I'm not I've been using the repost with destabilizing rounds more than I'm using the recluse and that's odd it's kind of you know or at least like traditional mindset of like when I wanted to use a close range automatic weapon I went void and I used my destabilizing rounds for post to trigger control demo and not might as you know not a void SMG just because I'm you know my hand I'm thinking oh well the damage is just about as good if not slightly better on a rapid fire you know or in this case 720 RPM let's just say auto rifle versus my you know my SMG equivalent and I'm I came around the top of my head but I'm pretty sure when I went and checked like mossy's DPS output against you know like minor tear enemies the 720 auto was better and it has been arranged and that doesn't make any sense right yeah just feels a little off of the balancing like auto rebels if they're going to have that range band going up to like 35 meters shouldn't be beating out SMGs that are going up to 20 something meters right you know 20 ish 25 meters I think max maybe versus some auto rebels can get you know especially your high impacts are pushing about past 35 meters seems odd for sure okay yeah I was just curious how they were performing in PvP and again that's kind of where I'm like if they're fine in one sandbox but maybe not so much in our sandbox the PvE then I'm like okay again I'm fine with them taking a little break not not for like the next four years like we've seen with some of these weapons like I said earlier on with I think we're in a very good spot in terms of overall sandbox health when it comes to weapons like I think everything barring as we've been mentioning SMGs and trace rifles they're kind of the exceptions to this particular rule when it comes to everything's got some sort of viability again in the PvE sandbox so I'm happy with the health the current health but yeah I do agree that like LFRs and SMGs and trace rifles do kind of merit a small optic when it comes to their damage so that is our first state of the sandbox I think we covered a lot a lot more than I think we were planning to at the start here but there you go folks that's the meta just you know clip that whole part of the podcast and you're good to go you'll immediately get all your raid titles your dungeon titles solo flawless solo flawless grandmasters really everything you need we just talked about so you're welcome and yeah I think that wraps it up for episode 112 my name is impetus I want to thank our audio engineer auto didactos for his work behind the scenes keeping the sound and professional and sharp over so many different episodes here again you can find me in discord and in destiny by that name impetus and also lurking on the pod versus enemies username on Twitter court what are we going to talk about next week are we planning on covering prismatic set still the plan here I feel like that is plan also we'll keep a keep an eye on what news comes from bungee we haven't heard anything recently they are I think the MG did tweet out that they canceled the most recent twids which I think would have went into a little bit more detail with upcoming content in regards to the mid season update I think that's still going ahead by the time this podcast comes out that should be live as well so still but again we'll keep an eye and year on current events and those but yeah I think next time we'll talk about our exotic class items Ergo soon and prismatic sandbox fantastic well then where can our listeners find you good sir yeah so you can find me over on socials at as court projects find me on the discord as that as well you can find my spreadsheets and infographics over on the the two spreadsheets link tree along with other spreadsheets and applications to enhance your destiny experience same where can we find you yep you can find me at Saint underscore beer on Twitter hanging out in discord in game running out some of those salvation's edge static triumphs to complete that title and you know lamenting a bit of a loss this week you know tough tough week just to watch everything that happened you know if you know people that were impacted by this you know directly personally don't be afraid to reach out if you can amplify the voices of people that are looking for work or refer them to jobs at your company you know stuff like that like really makes an impact and it is pretty much all we can do in moments like this where we are trying to look out for people that deserve better than they are being dealt in life thanks for listening to another episode of PvE we'll be back next week with more stuff on a game that continues to live despite what some may say until next time thanks for listening to PvE
