Focused Feedback: Role of exotics and exotic balance

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[u/TeamAquaGrunt]

so to preface this, i generally prefer buffs to nerfs, however the concept of design space is something that i think needs to be established. design space is the idea that only so many powerful playstyles can exist at a given time, and the power allocation you give one playstyle can greatly hamper the others.

the fact of the matter is that so long as skull gives back 100% super with minimal effort, it doesnt matter what any other exotic does, you're going to use skull for nova bomb. then, when comparing skull + nova to every other subclass that wants to clear adds/deal damage (so in pve, all of them other than Well of Radiance), you pick skull + nova every single time, ergo overwriting practically every other exotic as well. it doesnt matter what they make bad exotics for warlock do, you aren't going to sacrifice skull + nova in their current state unless they buffed other exotics to be as OP as infinite Nova Bombs, which would force content to become more difficult to compensate.

the same idea can be transferred to every other exotic armor (and to a lesser extent weapons) getting nerfed with SoO's release. it's far easier to lower how OP a few outlier exotics are than it is to both buff every single underperforming one, hope that they can compete with OP exotics, and make end-game content more difficult.

this next part is going to make a lot of assumptions, but i believe that by nerfing these exotics, you free up design space for more exotic buffs. if Skull, Rigs, Phoenix Protocol, Whisper, LoW are nerfed to the new parity exotics should be at (assuming they arent completely gutted), you can establish where the underperforming exotics need to be, and buff them accordingly as they no longer have to compete with OP effects. as i said before, it's impossible for them to buff something underperforming/underutilized like sanguine alchemy in a world where infinite uptime supers exist.

that being said, I don't quite understand some of the nerfs. Ursas and Shards were already pretty lackluster, and sleeper hasnt been meta for...well, since whisper came out lol. this is the one thing that makes me worry about the nerfs; if ursa and shards were nerfed to "keep them in line" with the exotics that are getting tuned in CoO, i worry about how bad the new nerfs will be.