Today: the promise of fantasy and how to properly express that fantasy during moment-to-moment combat. I'll be focusing on Striker Titan and Berseker to analyze how and where they either do or do not properly express their proposed fantasies. To start, let's begin with Strand Titan and it's power. Suspend is powerful. Arguably far too powerful. It counters (essentially) every single champion, can wipe entire rooms, and by the time the effect is over you're all-but-guaranteed another ability to perform the same action again. This seems strange to me, because the Lightfall patch/nerfs on certain abilities seem to be targeted on the 'looping' of abilities. Hence the Heart of Inmost Light nerf. I was never worried about Heart's power, as it's either forever going to be the go-to for a lot of situations unless it gets hardcore nerfed; that's the nature of its design. Either it's too good for everything or useless. That's the nature of ability spam. Strangely though, [b]Strand has the 'looping' aspect of ability spam Bungie seemingly wanted to remove or reduce intrinsically built in![/b] This HOIL change, paired with Strand's (absolutely busted) fragments, leads to the same gameplay loop we've been seeing for the past few months. Grenade spam and the absolute destruction of all low & mid tier ads. Strangely, though, the subclass of [i]Berserker[/i] expresses it's power in gameplay as being... suspend spam? It's extremly strong, the super is powerful, but still the original criticisms unfortunately stay valid: moment-to-moment gameplay of berserker is still startingly close to stasis titan or striker titan while in super. Just because crab-strike titan's numbers are higher than striker titan, that does not mean the gameplay is fundamentally altered. Moreover, the subclass [i]Striker[/i] is almost solely based around grenade spam. The melee sublclass on Titan is arguably the worst melee subclass in the game. Solar does it better, void does it better, Hunter can do it better in a few situations. That being said, Hunter's are suffering in a few ways, as they are also being shoe-horned into a relatively limited amount of play-styles for each subclass. We live in a world where Hunters have an arguably more powerful melee-meta (with the exception of 1-2 punch synergies with shield bash or synthoceps + grapple melee + 1-2 punch). Trying to use Titan's melee synergies in GM or Master content is just asking for a headache. And somehow Titans are better at 'spellcasting' than Warlocks when it comes to some situations (striker grenade spam and so forth). Arguably Titans are the better 'healers' as well with benevolence + pheonix cradle + sol invictus spam. [b]Titan is probably the most powerful class in the game now, barring Well of Radiance, but primarily in ways that do not reinforce fantasy. [/b] Important note: the 'delta' between class power is now significantly lower than in previous years. (Forsaken and after warlock was so much more powerful than the other two classes it actually was insane). We are a melee class that cannot melee in anything other than piss-easy combat. HOIL exacerbates this problem even further because HOIL is one of the strongest exotics in the game, but without it, many of Titan's playstyles just absolutely fall apart. Without HOIL what does Striker provide? Thundercrash burst every 15 years that can't even 1-shot most champions? Juggernaut isn't even a perk in PvE content, I dont' think I've ever used it since its inception. Striker's melee damage is barely sufficient for most end-game things, even with 1-2 punch and a shoulder charge with either synthoceps or Peregrine greaves. Even if the damage is good and useful, the downtime portions of those loops (building up melee damage for a big burst then having nothing) feel particularly bad because of the specific [b]lack[/b] of a loop afforded by the Subclass in general. Or, [b]Arc's 'sparks' or fragments are so underwhelming compared to Strand it's particulary mindboggling.[/b] Furthermore, on Strand and its busted fragments, why not just build in fragments that make-or-break the element built into the subclass? Why is grapple such an insanely high cooldown when we have ways to reduce it to nothing (while in combat) to essentially zero? Even without mods, the uptime on Strand is like nothing I've ever played. [b]Strand is not satisfying to build because it builds itself, in my opinion.[/b] Equip two fragments for essentially infinite grenade and class energy to wipe entire rooms and survive -90 light level lost sectors because of woven mail. Why not just start the Subclass as playable and build on a good foundation, rather than needing to expend build-crafting capabilities just to get it to that place? A few proposed changes in regards to ability design philosphy: [b]Ability Loops should be designed to have a 'high-powered state' and 'low powered state'. [/b] One should give way to the other. Or just a 'rotation' like in most mmo's. HOIL almost gets this right, but HOIL should allow us to empower two abilities with cooldown, but the last ability with significant damage and duration without boosting its recharge rate. Use weak abilities in the meantime during the 'strong' ability's recharge time. This way the 'low power state' and 'high power state' are squarely defined and can be interacted with in interesting ways. Bersker's melee should have [i]three swipes per charge.[/i] The damage should be piss-poor on every individual swipe, but have the damage ramp up significantly as a result of consecutive swipes. That way the 'high power state' is having all three charges, gives way to the 'low power state' of being without melee charges and working to get those back via other abilities and buildcrafting. This would also enable the choice of using a melee charge to sever multiple targets rather than for damage. Low damage on multiple targets for utility, high damage on a single enemy for burst potential. Essentially, Striker should be: 'build up damage against piss-easy targets to unleash a larger attack on a bigger enemy,' where Berserker should be: 'rage and focus on a single target for extended time to allow for some crazy damage.' Thank you for reading. Something extra: Armor mods are also problematic, as getting back any abiliities full charge is as simple finishing two targets. Armor mods in their current state are 100% busted and disable Bungie's ability to properly design encounters. In simple terms, having infinite heavy ammo (scout + finder spam), and infinite ability spam (empowerd x 2 + stacks on stacks with a finisher mod) will lead Bungie to design encounters with more 1-shots, less interactive enemies, and will overall be less fun, in my opinion. The power creep has just shot into the stratosphere, it feels like. We're going to be getting a post sometime in the next year saying 'Strand and Build crafting 2.0 forced us to break tenants of design for us, spawning enemies behind the player, relying on physics and so on to kill the player' just like we saw in season of the drifter because of auto-loading mechanics and super spam.