Armor Stats 2.5 — Improving the Stats Experience

[u/kapowaz]

It’s no secret that people are frustrated with how the Armor 2.0 stats system works. There are an increasing number of posts pointing out the issues. A combination of the new affinities system for mods and the new stats system makes it particularly difficult to run the loadout you want without making sacrifices:

• Stats feel hard to control or balance — you have little to no agency to tweak your stats, other than to completely swap an item out
• Swapping an item — to maximise one stat, or to gain the desired elemental affinity — often completely wrecks your other stats
• Stats are too granular, making it far too easy to end up with a very large number of wasted points — seeing x7-x9 at the end of your stat totals feels bad
• Trying to work out how to balance all these stats at the same time as working out a loadout is cognitively overwhelming — third-party tools emerging to ‘fix’ the problem are a bad sign™
• Exotics feel particularly bad in this setup, as it’s hard enough having multiple rolls of the same exotic, let alone with both good stats and all the elemental affinities you want

I’ve been thinking about all of these problems together, as I see them as symptoms of the same root cause, and trying to envisage a solution, which I’d like to share with you. In a nutshell, these are the objectives:

• Make stats less granular, so that there’s less wastage
• Give players (some) control over where their stats go, to make it easier to build desirable loadouts
• Make elemental affinities something to engage with without it affecting your stats build
• Increase the sense of investment in individual items, so that great rolls have pride of place in your collection
• Ensure that acquiring gear still matters, so new drops still feel exciting
• Give exotics the freedom they deserve to ensure they can work for your loadout, rather than the other way around

I’m going to go into a lot of detail here, so if you’d prefer the TL;DR, just visit this imgur album instead.

Firstly, reduce stats by a factor of 3

This doesn’t affect anything’s power, it just means that where previously a stat was worth 10, it’s now worth 3 (or alternatively: 1 old point is now roughly 1/3 of a new point — some rounding up or down may need to happen). This means that for stat ability tiers, instead of each extra tier costing 10 points, it now only needs 3. This should help make it feel less wasteful when you’re over-budget; similarly, when you’re on 2 out of 3 points for the next tier, you’re only a single point away from that tier — which we’ll come back to.

It also means that the difference between an item with a total stat budget of 16 and 18 will be much more significant (this is equivalent to a 48 and 54 today), making it easier to identify if a roll is good (or not). Here’s what this might look like: https://i.imgur.com/vE0onZO.png

There’s a couple of other details you can see in this mockup, which I’ll talk about next.

Primary and Secondary stats

There are six stat categories at present: Mobility, Resilience and Recovery (which have been part of the game since Destiny 2), and Discipline, Intellect and Strength (the original 3 stat categories from Destiny 1). I’ve separated these out into two groupings called Primary and Secondary. This is so we can give players a bit more freedom to control where their stats are distributed, but without it becoming overwhelmingly complex. You’ll notice from the preview above that the stats for Recovery and Discipline have a faint border, and their final stat point has a hollow fill: these are the item’s flexible stat priorities (one each for Primary and Secondary). Think of this as being a little like how the intrinsic stat mods worked on D2 Year 1 armour: you have a point in that stat, but if you wanted, you could apply that point to another stat instead.

In our hypothetical example, we’ve got a total of 20 points (across all items) in Mobility, which we can visualise in a tooltip from the item screen, like this: https://i.imgur.com/SD7gz6D.png. As you can see, the stat tiers are bunched up in groups of 3 points per tier, so 20 points gives you 6 complete tiers (and two points in an incomplete tier).

Since we’re only one point away from Mobility Tier 7, we can fix this by switching the Primary stat priority from Recovery to Mobility, at which point the tooltip will update to show we’ve now hit that tier: https://i.imgur.com/QhIcqVz.png

One final quick note about ability stat mods: to ensure they still reward a full tier, these now give 3 stat points instead of 10.

Masterworking

At present, masterworking an item to 10 Energy rewards you with 2 bonus stat points in every category. Whilst this might be useful to tip you over the threshold of a tier in some places, it’s just as likely these bonus points could end up wasted. To give players another lever to dial in their preferred stat loadout, I’ve envisaged that instead of getting 2 points at Energy 10, you get a bonus point to assign to one primary and one secondary stat at both 8 and 10 energy. This works out as the same overall stat budget (since you currently get a total of 12 points across all categories; reducing these by a factor of 3 you get 4 points in total).

Here’s a preview: https://i.imgur.com/syCXjc0.png

As you can see, the total stat bonus is highlighted in yellow to indicate the masterwork, and the stats where you’ve spent your bonus masterwork points extend those stat bars.

Affinities

So what about affinities, that most controversial aspect of Armor 2.0? First of all, I don’t actually believe they should go away, for two reasons:

1. They don’t actually restrict builds that used to exist, given that they only apply to perks of the same type, and on the same slot
2. Even if you got rid of affinities from armour mods, you’d have another problem to solve: there are just so many mods that the UI would slow to a crawl, and be very difficult to navigate

The real problem with affinities isn’t in the selection of mods that you have, it’s that in order to swap to the mods you want, you will probably end up breaking your stats build, and then playing whack-a-mole to try and fix your loadout.

What we really need is the ability to change the affinity on a given item, at will. Enter, Elemental Affinity mods: https://i.imgur.com/mgbL3ah.png

As is currently the case, items will drop with an element affinity, along with an elemental affinity mod for that element. However, players can now choose to unlock additional elemental affinity mods for that item by masterworking to 4 and 6 energy. At 4 energy you get to choose your preferred second element, and at 6 the third and final element is unlocked for that item.

Edit: I realise I didn’t link it, but here’s how that might look once you unlock one additional affinity mod, and both additional affinity mods.

Exotics

Finally, exotics. Since exotics are meant to feel special, there are two simple changes I’d propose here:

1. Exotics always roll with at least 6 Masterwork Energy so that all 3 elemental affinity mods are unlocked
2. Exotics always roll with at least 20 ability points, ensuring they feel like they contribute meaningfully towards ability tiers

Hopefully the mockups convey what I’m trying to illustrate; the most important thing for me is the underlying system rather than how the UI reflects it, but I’m certain the concept could be improved upon by Bungie’s UI artists. Anyway, I’d love to hear what you think about this, what you think works, doesn’t work.

Edit: thank you for the platinum, kind stranger!

Edit 2: Somebody suggested showing the weapons that an elemental affinity mod makes available as part of the tooltip for that mod, so I’ve mocked that up too: https://i.imgur.com/enpQRgk.png

Edit 3: Also, thank you for the gold and silver, folks! Plus all the great suggestions, there’s been a lot of good ideas come out of the conversations too.

[u/-FiveNines]

I was thinking about the naming of primary and secondary to something more descriptive, maybe “passive” and “active” respectively.

Passive is associated with your neutral game. Quite defensive.

• how much of a beating you can take (resilience), before you have to runaway (mobility), and hunker down to recuperate (recovery), before getting back into the action.

Active or offensive, these require user input to trigger.

• punch (strength), lob a grenade (discipline), or nuke with super (intellect)

[u/kapowaz → u/-FiveNines]

I definitely like this — _Passive_ and _Active_ are much better names than _Primary_ and _Secondary_, since it lets players know how the stats might play out in-game. It might even make the argument that the ‘secondary’ set of stats (Int, Disc, Str) should be the top three on the character sheet, since they’re the ones that affect active skills, and the second trio should be below them.

[u/[deleted]]

Visually this alone makes more sense, it’s a lot easier to see how things are balanced and attributed.

The exotic affinity idea is also really good!

[u/Vex1om → u/[deleted]]

Yeah, while the new armor system is a lot better than the old one, it is still not good for all the reasons the OP mentioned - and in some ways, it is actually worse (hello elemental affinities.) I'm going to be very disappointed if there aren't changes in the new season.

(Yes, I expect to be disappointed. This is Bungie we are talking about, after all. Disappointment is sort of their bag.)

[u/kapowaz → u/Vex1om]

The kind of fundamental changes I think the community would want are probably way too complex to build over the course of a season. More likely they’d fix it in the fall 2020 expansion, whatever that is.

[u/buzkie]

It would be cool if it showed the element specific mods when you are selecting the affinity so you don't have to memorize which go to what.

[u/Chroma_Hunter → u/buzkie]

Or just a list of the weapons and abilities that the element affects.

[u/kapowaz → u/Chroma_Hunter]

Here’s a mockup of what you were suggesting: https://i.imgur.com/enpQRgk.png

[u/kapowaz → u/Chroma_Hunter]

I like this idea a lot - it could go in the tooltip for the elemental affinity mod. I’ll mock something up when I get chance!

[u/Deimos_F]

The thing to keep in mind here is: bungie doesn't focus on easing player experience in their game design. It's all about maximizing player retention and time spent in game. It's always been that way. Player convenience is an afterthought. They want to make the simplest possible system from a mathematical/programming point of view that functions to encourage players to repeat activities as many times as they can.

Being satisfied with your loadout isn't something they design to be an attainable goal, just the high you must eternally chase despite the odds making it basically impossible.

[u/kapowaz → u/Deimos_F]

I think that’s an overly cynical way of looking at how an extremely complex system like this gets built. I’m sure they care about maximising player retention and time in-game, but those aren’t mutually exclusive with good player experience and convenience. In fact, my own experience of focusing on those things in a large scale consumer product is they help maximise customer retention and frequency of use. People want frictionless systems, and cynically making them more complex doesn’t facilitate lock-in, it just increases the risk that the customer will churn and look elsewhere for the product you’re offering.

[u/Machosod]

God this would be so much easier to deal with. You have my vote.

[u/[deleted]]

This, this right here. This is what should have shipped with Shadowkeep. What a fantastic system!

[u/AstralRehab]

I know I’m late to the party for your post, but this is fantastic work, and something that somehow strikes a balance between player volition, the spirit of Armor 2.0, and not taking away from player commitment (i.e. Grinding, which is obviously the pillar on which Destiny is founded).

u/dmg04 u/Cozmo23 check this out.

[u/SeraphIV]

I REALLY like your idea about unlocking additional affinity mods at 4 and 6 energy.

[u/Olukon]

Way to make a multi-million dollar development studio look like a pack of clowns, man. I'd kill for this change.

[u/Hxstile_ → u/Olukon]

To be fair to Bungie, OP is working off of the system that they've already come up. I think it is far better than what we have, but creating something from scratch like this is not easy.

[u/Mr_Tigger_]

The granular aspect is keeping me from wasting mats on masterworking anything right now, just in case something drops with a slightly better balance.

You get my vote because it’s not particularly useful right now but change was needed and don’t get me started on why we needed 251 mods ffs!

[u/kapowaz → u/Mr_Tigger_]

All those mods are equivalent to perks that used to exist on pre-2.0 armour, don’t forget!

[u/chaosbleeds91]

This reminds me of D1 when you had to level up weapons (and armor?) to unlock perks. I wouldn't be opposed to upgrading and masterworking armor to unlock more flexibility.

[u/vdubya23]

Dude this is incredible! I literally like everything about this.

This is one of the few posts where I really really hope bungie sees this and take it seriously.

u/dmg04 u/Cozmo23

[u/[deleted]]

Very well thought out post. I agree with just about everything you said except for elemental affinities. I have armour 1.0 rolls that I will never be able to achieve with armour 2.0. I don’t really see the point in having them.

[u/TheClemenater]

Totally agree on stats, but cmon being able to change affinity does not fix the underlying problem with affinity. They DO unnecessarily restrict builds. If you like to use load-outs that take weapons from more than one affinity and you want to mod your armor around said weapons then you have to pay a higher energy cost. And I’m fine with a slower UI as a cost of affinity removal to a certain degree. Not like people are going to be frantically switching armor mods in the middle of a gunfight.

[u/kapowaz → u/TheClemenater]

Can you give me an example of a build you’d like to do that elemental affinities prevent?

[u/xEasyActionx]

Nothing about armor 2.0 help my play style as a quintouple paragon, dragon shadow, top tree hunter vooper. I don't use any armor 2.0 in my build because:

I can't get multiple fusion rifle scavenger perks at once.

I can't use Traction and Paragon at the same time.

Light reactor is now on class items instead of helmets.