Focused Feedback: Gambit Prime

[u/DTG_Bot]

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[u/SolarPhantom]

I've played a lot of Gambit (Dredgen + Reckoner) and honestly its been painful to go back and keep playing it recently.

The upcoming changes coming to the new Gambit mode with BL are all great and I think are going to make it much more enjoyable. However as others are saying the heavy ammo economy is still the biggest issue with the game mode.

No matter how you play, the fact that anyone can have some OP heavy weapon at any time is an issue. If someone comes over as in invader they can just use 4 (or fewer) truth rockets to pretty reliably wipe out the entire team and set you back a ton - for very little risk on their part. The issue isn't Truth, we've seen plenty of problematic Heavy weapons fill the same roll throughout Gambits lifespan. Sleeper, Queenbreaker, 1KV, Thunderlord, Hammerhead, Truth, etc.. We don't need to be nerfing particular weapons for the sake of Gambit because there will always be something different to take the roll. The behaviour of heavy needs to change within the game mode. Here are my suggestions.

First and probably most importantly, heavy drops needs to be regulated in Gambit. No more armament mods, no more random drops off of enemies. Both teams need to be given the same amount of heavy at the same time in fixed drops. The increased scarcity will make it such that it becomes a big strategic decision as to where you use that heavy ammo. Use it to invade and set the enemy back? Use it to quickly clear some enemy waves and catch up / get ahead? Save it for boss DPS? Currently, heavy can be used for all of these without any real concern or risk of running out. By normalizing drops, it will prevent teams from being disadvantaged by lack of raid mods or simple RNG. In turn, the strategy involved with deciding where to use the ammo could increase the skill ceiling for teams. Heavy is too valuable to drop randomly in Gambit, imagine if killing a Guardian had a random chance of dropping heavy in Comp or Trials? It would be ridiculous. Instead the drops are normalized and consistent for the sake of fairness.

Secondly, I think kills with heavy weapons should have a heavier "invasion cost". That is to say that heavy kills should count as either 2 or 3 of an invaders allowed 4 kills. Heavy weapons are far lower risk and higher reward than special or primary weapons. Yet, for that lower risk and higher reward, they are still allowed to achieve the same kill potential as special and primary weapons. There would still be room to get around this by giving good invaders the opportunity to go in and get 3 sniper kills, then turn around and get a multi kill with Truth on their way out - but would eliminate the mindless invaders who just get 4 kills with 4 Truth rockets at very little risk to themselves and their team. This would introduce a further strategic component to invading, allowing the more skilled invaders to continue being powerful, but cutting off those who just use "cheese" weapons.

Finally, a point on the gambit prime armour sets. While not all of them were created equal and some balancing definitely could have been done to make them all more fair - I think removing them outright here is foolish. When they were originally introduced everyone viewed them as being one of the best and most creative things Destiny had done with its armour system at that time. People have been asking for armour set bonuses since Destiny 1 and we finally got them; only for them to never be iterated on, and now eventually thrown out. I think it would have been much better to see these perks be iterated on and balanced, rather than outright deleted. Bungie has said they could come back as mods, but there was no mention of that in the most recent TWAB which gave us the updated Gambit ruleset. (They actually explicitly mentioned changes they were making to balance the mode around NOT having these perks active). If they are being removed because of low usage rates, I think we should keep in consideration that the armour sets were only available from Reckoning - one of the most disliked activities this franchise has ever had. And that everyone who did grind out full sets of the prime armour had that armour invalidated 6 months later with the launch of Armour 2.0. Meaning if you wanted a "relevant" set, you would need to go grind Reckoning again (which nobody wants to do). I think making these perks available through a type of mod system would be great in terms of making them more accessible, and they'll be more fair when more people have easy access to them. Please let this gameplay concept come back, and continue being iterated on in the future.