When all strikes are different in difficulty but provide the same exact rewards, players will always choose the easiest to do. Locking a specific strike and specific gun drop each week only encourages players to wait. If the gun you want is on the same week as a really hard strike, most of the population is not going to bother trying and is going to bide their time for the next time the gun rolls around on an easier strike, double drops or not. Instead of driving up selected strike balance, the player population is going to go down.
A guaranteed Ascendant Shard and a gun that has +3 to all stats, the removal of Bottomless Dollar as a bad drop creator, and the ability to slot in stat mods a player won’t use because damage Specs and Icarus Grip exists isn’t worth 15+ extra minutes and at least twice the likelihood of failure except on the easiest of strikes. Proving Grounds, Glassway, Scarlet Keep, and the now-retired Garden World all come to mind as Grandmasters not worth doing over their Master counterparts in terms of efficiency.
These are my proposals, which can work alone or in concert with one another. They’re free to use, I don’t care for credit:
-If you are going to lock strikes, unlock which gun you can pursue; remove the need to wait for the stars to align to get the strike and gun you wish to pursue. This would also server to counter accretion for waiting for the right gun to show up, and would increase weekly player population. It is ALWAYS time to get that god roll Palindrome (Adept) after all.
-If you are trying to encourage players doing the harder strikes, scale the loot table equal to the difficulty so players have more incentive in terms of efficiency.
-If you are trying to increase the balance of strike selections to be evenly spread, then you need to make them more equal. Difficulty comes to mind; does Glassway really need respawning Champions on a timer, for instance? Does Lake of Shadows need to be so short? Also see above proposal with loot.
This comes from a place of concern, Bungie. Removing choice with no recompense is only a detriment to your playerbase. You are stripping away an important feature that is the only reason many players managed to get some of their favorite weapons- myself included- and you are not giving anything in return to make up for it.
Destiny is a game where you play for your guns so your guns can work for you. Please don’t make it a game where you work for your guns so your guns can play with you.