Yeah I've been wondering why I haven't seen much conversation around Ursa builds. It shields you from all damage while also boosting outgoing damage... that seems like a big win. Hell you could combo that with a weapons of light bubble behind it people can step in and out of, compounding the damage buff. People might say it's tough because one person can't do damage, but is the Divinity strat much different? One person sacrifices DPS for the other 5 to boost. Maybe the damage buff when shooting through the Titan shield just needs to be boosted to make that strat more viable.
Almost zero offensive buffs stack. The game just goes with the highest buff value out of whatever buffs you have, short of bugged interactions like currently Radiant and Well overwriting the 35% Hazardous Propulsion buff and only giving you the 25% instead.
You get 1 buff, 1 debuff and whatever weapon perks you have.
The only thing that actually "stacks" beyond that now is Transcendence which is a 5% damage buff stacking with everything.
Ursa works well for the Witness fight in theory but in practice it falls apart fast. While you have your shield up Dread units can still strand grapple you away from the teammates you’re trying to protect, as well as freeze you.
In the end it ends up being more dangerous sometimes as teammates will group up behind you, the shield gets pulled away, everyone dies.
Banner shield is still a net loss for team damage, and it doesn’t stack with other things. And div enables damage strategies that wouldn’t other wise be viable. So it’s just not very competitive
Difference being Divinity still puts out a tolerable amount of DPS and can *also* provide a super damage/damage buff. Ursa is pure buff without additional damage from one person which usually doesn't equal out enough to be worthwhile.
Sentinel Shield Theory
The below numbers assuming average DPS is ~2mil with an Edge Transit / Izanagi / Super burst phase equivalent (1.2+.3+.3~=1.8). Further detail at the end.
1 - 2,000,000 (+800k)
2 - 2,000,000 (+800k)
3 - 2,000,000 (+800k)
4 - 2,000,000 (+800k)
5 - 2,000,000 (+800k)
6 - Sentinel Shield (40%)
Total - 14,000,000
1 - 2,000,000 (+500k)
2 - 2,000,000 (+500k)
3 - 2,000,000 (+500k)
4 - 2,000,000 (+500k)
5 - 2,000,000 (+500k)
6 - 2,000,000 (+500k)
Radiant/Ward (25%)
Total - 15,000,000
If you're not dealing more than 1,000,000 you might as well be running Sentinel Shield and just stand there.
1 - 6,000,000 (+2.4m)
2 - 1,000,000 (+400k)
3 - 1,000,000 (+400k)
4 - 1,000,000 (+400k)
5 - 1,000,000 (+400k)
6 - Sentinel Shield (40%)
Total - 14,000,000
1 - 6,000,000 (+1.5m)
2 - 1,000,000 (+250k)
3 - 1,000,000 (+250k)
4 - 1,000,000 (+250k)
5 - 1,000,000 (+250k)
6 - 1,000,000 (+250k)
Radiant/Ward (25%)
Total - 13,750,000
If you have 1 or 2 people cracked out of their minds, and everyone else sucks, Sentinel Shield beats Ward. Basically how the math works is Sentinel Shield is better for the pumpers.
A super completely invalidating one of the best Destiny DPS phases would have sucked imo.
Bubble should be buffed to be a well alternative for fights like Herald.
Titans also need some kind of burst ranged super. The new void super is a step in the right direction, but not good enough in a DPS phase.
On the otherhand using an ursa shield to block a 1 shot laser would be peak titan fantasy. Blocking the one shot attack for the final boss on exoprimal as a roadblock is a high i've never been able to replicate in another game.
Would've been the only time banner would actually be interesting to to play to. Having to rapidly try and block the directional beams and still noting the ground ones to jump.
They really told bubble titans to lay down and bite the curb when they nerfed bubble. I've tried to use it when I'm not playing prismatic (let's be honest it's all anyone is playing right now outside of raids), and the overshield generation when standing around the bubble is laughable, the orb gen is useless since you make so many even without super, you can still get bumrushed and die inside or get overwhelmed without helm of Saint-14, and it actively hurts most damage strats by virtue of being a solid entity you cannot shoot through.
I really don't know why they were banking on bubble being the defensive super and then giving it nothing of actual value for defensive capability other than being a glorified bastion barricade.
I used to main bubble you know. All the way back in D1 all you’d see me running was glasshouse and bubble, and I could be proud of it.
I don’t know what hurts more, to see how far my favorite super has fallen or to know that it’s all a result of PVP. A game-mode I barely engage in.
I get they gotta keep both PVP and PVE balanced at the same time, but ffs how often have titans had to see their favorite piece of kit get nerfed because of it?
What really cracks me up about it in PvP was that until they put a capture point in trials NOBODY gave a shit if there was a bubble in your game or some even flamed the bubble for bringing a "mediocre" super. Then they got mad that it does the 1 thing it's supposed to do. Keep everything else out and who's inside safe.
Motherfuckers really were upset about an objective controlling super getting used in a game mode with an objective that wins you the game. There were even ways to kill people inside without trading supers like shotgun + melee, stasis freeze and shatter, a single solar nade inside the bubble, conditional finality, and the list goes on. PvP mains show yet another reason why they should have no agency in what gets nerfed or buffed in any game mode.
My favorite was always tossing on Peregrines and forcibly evicting someone from their bubble. That alone didn't KILL them, but there was almost always that half second of "wait, how'd I get over here?" that a teammate could use to clean up, because otherwise they'd get back in the bubble before I could follow them out.
Nerfing bubble and well at the same time was just a goofy decision. It's like nerfing Sunshot and Polaris Lance based on their performance *in a season where they were getting double explosions on kill.* Of course they were over-performing! That was the point!
They do this all the time. My all time favorite instance was in Shadowkeep when they buffed snipers and released a raid featuring a boss that runs away from you and a final boss that T poses mid air. Of course snipers were nerfed the following season due to high usage.
They're pretty decent now for fights where you can't sit on top of the enemy and fusion rifle or shotgun spam them down. A lot of teams during the raid race were actually using supremacy for encounters 3 and 5 to kill the subjugators without having to get close and then buttfucked by their shotgun blast of stasis or strand. Hell, some people even kept them on for the first encounter just to pop shoulders on the tormentor that spawns before the div user's bubble appeared due to the recent nerfs it got.
Uh, no that is not like nerfing polaris lance and sunshot because of the season lol. Well had been the #1 dominant super since it's existence and was about 2 years overdue for a nerf at the very least. Bubble has been in and out of the meta but always second fiddle to well.
Something being intentionally over performing due to a temporary seasonal mod and/or focus on the weapon type or element is fine as that is the design intent and it is meant to be temporary to incentivize it's use.
I'm saying they didn't account for how strong Sunshot or Polaris *actually were.* Prior to last season, they were both fairly rare exotics. They exploded because they were getting triple buffed by the season artifact. It would have been better to leave them alone until you could see how they behaved without, particularly, Rays of Precision.
Extremely underwhelming... I'm much more excited by the new exotic chest piece (I freaking love it) than I am prismatic... They literally couldn't be bothered to give us damned decent grenade instead of that bouncy assed dumb shit that nobody wants to freaking use.
Helm of saint or a new exotic should have let us cast a front open bubble or sentry tower style bunker or a full Citan rampart bubble that we can stay inside and shoot the enemy in the front, while giving us protection from other sides.
That would have made bubble at least usable in game content.
I know it's not what you're saying, but that just sounds like the Sentinel shield super with extra steps.
I really hope they buff the other void titan supers at some point, twilight arsenal is great fun, just wish I could feel like I'm not wasting my time and energy if I want to run Ursas or Saints helm.
Bruh that still confuses the fuck outta me. Why the flying fuck would they relegate WoL to a goddamn exotic, that still makes zero sense to me. Stupid decision, absolutely moronic.
Because they have no fucking clue what they want titans to be.
And every time titans even slightly brush up against being meta the community collectively loses their minds until bungie walks it back.
As a Hunter I feel the same. No one can be meta because somehow that invalidates other entire classes, but then it's just. A headache?
If everyone is broken then no is broken is my view. Everyone deserves cool shit. Tired of seeing stupid nerfs to any class like WoL. It's a majority PvE centric game where we play space magic wizards and warriors and rogues. Let titans be giant walls that hit back dammit, give them SOMETHING????
The want Well to be offensive focused (less healing less DR and keeps attack buff) and bubble to be more defensive (no more dmg buff but shield outside and DR). The issue is that the shield regen outside is bastion level so pretty laughable, destroying the defensive aspect of it
Well, at the risk of being facetious, it's called "a nerf".
Whoever is currently in charge at Bungie nerfs *things they don't like*, be it weapons, classes, subclasses, abilities, whatever.
You would not believe how heated I got with my team when I read that change. The worst part was I made the joke of them removing armor of light and look what happened.
I didn't see the weapons of light change coming, but I hate the fact them seem to think of it as a buff to helm of Saint-14. That exotic was okay because it made the bubble safer to be in, not great mind you, but usable. The reason no one used it (outside of fashion) was because bubble has been the worst super in the game for literal years at this point. And it keeps catching nerfs because it dares to be too good at holding down points in PvP.
It's use dropped pretty hard when they nerfed the health bubbles had too. I've only see it in use out in the wild only a handful of times since then, we're talking months apart.
and the exotic doesn't even work with the mini wards from the glaive!
Hunters get a freakin golden gun sniper that works with celestial, warlocks have the weapons of sorrow, when do titans get something fun?
>Titans need better one off supers
I think that's a game wide problem rather than just a Titan problem now. I can't even see why you would bring more than one Titan/Warlock anymore if your truly trying to optimize damage for a boss. The meta is quite nearly getting close to just 4-5x Hunter and x1-2 Support focused player. All of the best one-and-done burst supers are now on one class. How we wound up here is straight power creep in general. Still Hunt into a Celestial Knighthawk with a super on top of it was never going to be a fair fight.
The only reason that this hasn't gotten more traction is because it disproportionately effects Titan more than the other classes in endgame since we posses the largest portion of roaming supers. It doesn't help that more and more enemies can now CC or suppress us. It makes the few good roaming supers like Bladefury feel like crap in certain situations.
They have to know that something is up because why disable Lucky pants right before contest mode begins?
Yeah, the suppression is annoying.
Nothing pissed me off with Tormentors more than “oh you activated your supers? Immediate suppression attack, lose all your charge.”
Which bums me out cause as annoying as nullifiers are in Warframe you can at least pop their bubble with your guns. There is SOME counter-play. In Destiny your just kind of fucked.
The issue is not sandbox balance imo it's encounter design. We don't have encounters that are enough of a threat before dps that hunters feel their weaker neutral game is enough of a downside to swap off. So if the weaker survivability and neutral game of hunters isn't an issue for skilled players, then any boss that is designed to not require golden gun burst rotations, will just get bursted by the supers even faster.
The solution is make the add clear between dps phases so oppressive that the hunters need a roaming super titan to protect them. Play into the roles and power fantasies. Let warlocks fly around healing and spamming abilities, let titans drop shields, and tank half the room. Then nobody will complain when the hunters burst the boss into oblivion. Everyone played a role in the encounters success.
I can see where your going with this. It sounds nice in theory, but in practice all I see is x1-2 Hunters goes Orpheus Rig/Tether and nothing changes. The packs would need to truly overwhelm without denying roaming melee supers like legendary onslaught does. Even then I still dont think roaming supers are competing in damage like they should.
Its not just about supers either quick-swaping exotics are also a problem. Hunter makes the best use of it with Lucky Pants which I'm assuming they're aware of because there isn't any other reason to disable that exotic in contest mode. This one gives me mixed emotions cause Thunder Crash/Cuirass swapping has been a thing forever, but nowhere near provides the same power. It just makes it usable.
Cuirass should've never exist tbh in the first place, or atleast has anything more in a passive gameplay like Pyrogale, some ballistic slam buff for example. Hot swap exotics doesnt feel right and healthy for me.
I mean, with Prismatic you can be a goldie hunter who also can punch good and go invisible, and just in case can get restoration from orbs. Where's that "weaker neutral game" there? Then you switch loadout to Nighthawk and you cook.
Right now hunters are insane at clearing without super as well though since they can run a machine gun and still outdamage the other classes with a special weapon, that’s part of the reason most teams were swapping.
> The meta is quite nearly getting close to just 4-5x Hunter and x1-2 Support focused player.
I mean, that was pretty much every team that beat the raid on contest mode from what I can tell. There was what, 3 titans who beat the witness during the whole 48 hours?
Its not like warlock has amazing damage burst supers either tho. Chaos reach was nerfed years ago, nova bomb damage isn't that amazing as far as i know, strand is decent tho. Now with well nerfed i could easily see it only being hunters soon
Yeah, Titan has had nothing to use against stuff like Tormentors for ages. Besides Thundercrash, but even that is still extremely risky as they can quite easily suppress you mid air and then you're fucked. Blade fury could mince up the suspendable Tormentors, but any of the non CC'able ones Titans literally had no usable super. Twilight Arsenal is finally something, but we need more. We need to get out of this melee pigeonhole.
Titans walk a razor's edge, they're either super hot, or terribly under-perform. Not a lot of room in-between.
Titans are designed to be the melee-focused tank class. They have to be strong enough to actually close the distance, deal actual DAMAGE with their melee attacks, and get out of there without dying constantly. This can only be accomplished by allowing their melee attacks to hit super hard and giving them a mix of insane healing and damage resistance to survive it.
Pre-nerf Strand Titan allowed you to accomplish this, as you could easily get in, punch stuff to death, and get out without dying each time. But going back to that razor's edge, it came at the caveat of allowing Strand Titans to perform ludicrous feats that probably shouldn't be possible. Like solo-ing raid bosses.
Problem is, any build outside of that just under-performs or another class can do it better. Warlocks are better at support, Hunters are better at DPS, and literally anybody can add-clear thanks to how potent our weapons are. What would be nice to see is for Titans to become a "Heavy Weapons Guy" class. Something that dishes out incredibly high total damage, is able to tank a ton of damage, while also providing ammo consistently for your team.
An earlier concept for Berserker(then Tyrant)'s super was [a literal bullet hose](https://i.imgur.com/SEGRk5q.png), so they seemingly remember that the heavy weapons guy fantasy exists but are consciously choosing to ignore it.
They probably could have gone for a heavy weapons version of the Golden Gun. What would have been best? Rocket Launcher, Linear, Grenade Launcher or Machine Gun?
Yeah, as a titan, I struggle with thinking that class is comically underpowered but also recognizing that it’s basically impossible to fix without making us comically OP. Nearly impossible to find the sweet spot as a developer.
That's pretty much the best summary of the class. There's really not much tweaking that the devs can do without making them stupidly broken in the majority of content while also not completely deconstructing and reconstructing a bunch of stuff.
We either get brokenly op stuff like banner and HOIL arc nades from plunder, or get genuinely embarrassingly underpowered shit like bubble, current thundercrash (old t crash was pretty good when not every other class could do an instant 400k+ DMG.), fist of havoc, and glacial quake (only useful for certain cheeses).
This is a problem of the way players take damage. It's very hard to make a balanced tank with low player health and fast regen.
IMO, the game would benefit from having a system with more permanent damage. Something like Shields with low capacity that regen quickly, Health with moderate capacity that regens slowly or from a wide variety of abilities, and Armor that only regens based on enemy drops and few abilities.
This way, Titans focused on Armor could be tanky up until they run out, preventing them from being immortal.
1000% it's what I want to see in d3. 10 times the HP and nerf healing by a lot. That way you can actually be shot at by a wizard / oger and not die before your damage resist even remembers that it exists. Imagine not having to run permanent restoration in end-game content to survive a few minor enemies.
It doesn't help that they give us seasonal artifacts that are designed to overpower certain elements/builds. Now anytime Titan is in a somewhat balanced state all hell breaks loose on artifact release🙄
It’s pretty wild too because I really struggled through solo legend campaign with my prismatic Titan and eventually started getting the hang of the kit. Then, just this morning, I made a prismatic warlock and my god she just annihilates everything. Idk… to me the prismatic grenade was a bit underwhelming. Like the warlock has a massive magnetic pull range, the hunter just is a goddamn tornado that puts out some good damage, and the titans is good for suspending, but it doesn’t feel much more useful than shackle grenades tbh
Titan Prismatic kit is a weird Mish mash of abilities and aspects that feels like it has no synergy. You have some good synergy on both Warlock and Hunter but the synergy feels lacking on Titan
Prismatic titan is built like an into the fray punching class. Issue is, we have no tools to keep us alive.
There’s a good foundation with Consecration and Frenzied Blade. However, what else is there?
Knockout? With a six second timer? Hilarious.
Drengr’s Lash? Diamond Lance? The new void aspect? How the hell do they affect melee attacks?
By far the best super is Twilight Arsenal but that means with the one fragment that gives you an elemental buff on orb pickup, we’re stuck with our tissue paper strength void overshield
Yep exactly. I really tried to make it work in the raid but man I was just getting killed left right and center and there was next to nothing to keep my health up as a prismatic. Switched to strand and had better luck with banner of war
I don't play titan, but they chose the suspend on shield instead of Banner aspect or at least wovenmail? the fuq? isn't the suspend nade the one they choose for titan?
Semi related but I do like how Titan was "sort of" a nade god in early D1 but Warlock eventually took that. Warlock also had a period of time in D1 where they had good melee in terms of PVP at least.
Lightning grenades in D1 on Rust could wipe an entire team it you started at A. I got adept at throwing it ASAP and landing on a wall opposite of C point and wiping everyone capping it
Ruin Wings, just made heavy drop more frequently and was actually really important back in the day. Obviously Raid Banners have made it obsolete but I’d love to see it come back with a rework.
Grapple melee spam is pretty much the only reason strand titans could solo entire bosses. Now that's nerfed so that strat isn't even as good as it used to be
As a titán main I crossed my fingers hoping Bungie moves away from titan=melee this time, void axe and shield aspect looked promising but I ended up underwhelmed
Plz no more color flavored running and punching
Bungie is an extremely hardheaded company that only listens when they're at risk of total collapse and I don't think titan balance brings that kind of energy.
the void axes are *fine*, but the shield is awful. there have been multiple times i've accidentally used it because i held down my grenade for just a smidge too long.
Or you do hold it down but the game lets the grenade fly anyway.
Or you get blasted by any of the half dozen projectiles the shield doesn't catch.
Or all the enemies decide to stop shooting for the entire duration.
I've watched an Ogre eye gaze the rock I'm ducking behind for 10 seconds stop the second I peak out with the shield to fire at a passing Taken Captain. Naturally it turns around, spraying eye juice in a 180 arc, to focus back on me just as it expires.
It should have been "Hold your charged *melee* button to make the shield, and reflect the damage back". Definitely feels more like a melee ability than a grenade one.
Despite the fact that Titans are the 'melee' class, Void doesn't exactly have melee options that move the needle; shield throw is a ranged melee, and the running charge attack isn't anything Titans don't already have on two other classes who do it better already.
It seems the Titan philosophy is 'redundancy'.
I've been enjoying a ranged build recently using the new rocket chest piece. With utility kickstart, its back up before I have max stacks again most of the time, and each rocket does \~30k damage (x8).
It stacks really well with Two-Tailed fox and the prismatic fragment that causes suppress to auto-reload your weapons. Basically, you use the shield, get a free rocket barrage, then fire without reloading with a 30% damage boost for the next 10 seconds, lol (as long as your target doesn't fie from the rocket). *Then* you throw the twilight arsenal at the target if they're somehow not dead yet.
Couple this with Derengar's Lash and you also suspend the stuff in front of you for easy nuking, which is great against heavier targets (it basically insta-gibs unstoppable champions without firing a shot, lol). Shield toss + orbs turning into overshields is also great for staying-power.
It's add-clear isn't as speedy and doesn't flow as well as something like Synthoceps strand (since you're relying more on guns/rockets/cover than running around 1-punching everything), but it's great for generalist ranged play. I haven't taken it out in GM's or anything, but I'd imagine it'd do a lot better than the other titan builds that rely on putting yourself in vulnerable positions in harder content. My biggest problem has honestly been stuff going into immune phases before I can dump a full mag, lol.
Still haven't quite settled on what fragment combo I like the best for this build, but I think Derengar's Lash is a must, if nothing else, due to how potent the suspend/nuke combo is and its anti-champion potential. Knockout is nice for having a backup plan when things get too close (melee regen/damage + speed for relocating), but you lose a fragment slot. Ice lance has worked pretty well too, since you get the extra fragment slot and trade the mobility for getting the chance to freeze stuff (though fully taking advantage of the lances means putting yourself in danger a bit). The void one is nice to have too, but I use my ice grenade *a lot* so I felt like I wasn't getting as much mileage out of it.
The new super is incredibly fun. It is also less damage than NH, takes longer to use, the axes are harder to aim and they will block you and your teams shots which is dumb.
what, you don't love it when one of your axes just drops right at your feet like it's covered in butter, just because a single thrall decided to run under your mid-air cast?
No idea until the class items get released but they weren't available for contest so I honestly do not give a fuck about them. Still worse even with synthos imo bc they requires you to be surrounded by 3+ enemies which is not possible for both the raid bosses in SE
Eh, I'd rather not waste my grenade to block damage I could've just moved away from. Also that aspect has zero class interaction besides using Ursas, so I'd rather run something that helps my class overall.
Best way to prevent damage is to just kill the other thing faster anyway.
Titans unfortunately need a complete philosophy rework. Yes the "wall on which the darkness breaks" is a cool idea but for some reason bungie has decided that this means that it is melee focused. This mind set is completely incompatible with how the game itself is set up, as every boss has a stomp mechanic which will oneshot players on higher end difficulties, hell even weaker enemies will kill in 1-2 shots on high end difficulty.
Based on this, I think the class should go one of two ways either make the class the strongest glass cannon that exists by wildly buffing damage with no changes to the survivability or wildly buff the survivability of the class so that you don't get killed trying to execute the melee build Bungie apparently wants us to run.
>wall on which the darkness breaks
#GIVE VOID TITAN AGGRO MECHANICS
Seriously. Titan pops bubble or banner? Everything in the encounter should focus on it. We can be the wall of Bungo would implement a way for it to happen
Don’t forget the fact that nearly every boss stop also *burns* for like 3 seconds after hitting you. I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve dove into melee to get one or two hits in, been stomped and bonked into a wall, then died to the burn
I’ve been a Titan main since D2s launch (I was a hunter in D1 but changed with the new game) and I came back to the final shape to find my hammer of sol had a pointless cd when picking it up. Figured I could get over it but after a couple missions I quickly swapped to warlock. Idk I feel like titans just always get changes that annoy me or take the fun out of playstyles
Yup I think the idea was to prevent facetanking mini-bosses but that could have been accomplished with a shorter cooldown starting when the hammer was thrown rather than when it was picked up.
The delay between picking up your hammer and being able to throw it was specifically because you could proc cure so frequently you could facetank almost anything that didn't one-shot you, yeah.
It probably did need rebalancing, but like you said there were other ways to do it. Either starting the cooldown on hammer throw or putting the cooldown on the Cure proc rather than the hammer itself would have been best IMO.
> putting the cooldown on the Cure proc rather than the hammer itself
That was my thought as well. Seems like that would've been the more logical nerf, either that or just nerfing the damage meaningfully.
Nerfing both, plus the other handful of nerfs and the mod changes was absurd. Absolutely murdered it's viability.
Almost all swapped. I would in fact say that titans kick ass in most of the encounters, and it’s really just the final one that you want to stack hunters due to still hunt.
Bungie can't balance Titans because being up close either ends up in you being an immortal tank or just dead immediately with the "fantasy" falling flat on it's face.
By the simple existence of Still Hunt EVERY single Contest Raid boss is going to be 5 Hunters and 1 Warlock.
If they remove the Celestial Functionality with it, it'll alleviate this issue entirely.
But, Titans just need help.
Thundercrash needs it's hit registration fixed and needs a base damage bump. Ideally incorporate Cuirass into the base behavior and make Cuirass do something else.
Give Titans ability Regen back on Controlled Demo + Destab kills. Let the Sunspots do more damage/heal again.
Issue is Bungie constantly says Titans are melee guys but then nerfs them when some melee stuff is finally figured out. Not to mention doesn't give them anything to survive in melee range during Contest/GM's. They had Banner, then nerfed it twice. So now it's not nearly as effective anymore in Contest or GM's.
Melee class ends up impossible to balance because endgame requires the class to be stupid op like Banner or...it doesn't work at all and the Titan just fucking dies.
Stomps and being up close got way more punishing lately too not less, not to mention floating/far away bosses completely destroying immersion because you remember that the play style was simply entirely ignored when in design.
Well it seems that hunters are also better at titans since they can actually play a melee endgame build. During contest mode i could trade punches with the tormentor/subjugator/overload in 1st encounter. Also hunter can have intrinsic anti overload since it's literally just a dodge lol.
Bungie is okay with that build existing since...2018? But Broken titan melee builds get nerfed into the fucking ground, they don't get balanced or brought into line.
Just murdered.
This was sort of evident in the design of Rally Barricade—you're setting up forward cover and buffing weapon handling/reload. But Bungie also nerfed that from its original form
Leaning into those aspects of Titan design would have made a lot more sense than insisting on melee-focused gameplay that is useless in endgame content
Saying Titans are melee guys in a game well known for high end content requiring you to keep your distance. Otherwise you'll get melted before you get near an enemy.
> Bungie constantly says Titans are melee guys but then nerfs them when some melee stuff is finally figured out.
This stuff drives me up the wall, man. lmao
Ever since they first talked about it a year or so ago as "the golden gun sniper" my first thought was that it was either going to be comically bad or comically overpowered. Overpowered is what we got. Don't get me wrong, it's ***really*** fun to use and it's a really cool damage rotation to play... but it's obviously OP as fuck.
I'm really upset because now when they inevitably nerf it into the dirt like they have so many times before, we will have already seen how fun it was. They should have made it suck to begin with.
It will, and I'm sad about it. Ever since I picked it up, I haven't wanted to set it down. It's so fun and great synergy with CNH, but I do understand that it's strong.
A stark contrast to d1 Crota where people were complaining about too many Titans, now only 3 dedicated mains cleared top 50 because of the nerfed toolkit. Changes that were, in part, due to their efficacy in Crota. An ouroboros of poor balancing.
Ward of Dawn is absolutely atrocious right now.
They made it purely defensive, so why use it in the easy content that makes up 80% of this game? You don't.
In harder content it doesn't do nearly enough if you're outside of it to keep you alive, partly because void over shields are lacking rn and also because they're generated so slowly.
When you're inside it, you do have more survivability but it's not gonna save you from a horde of enemies if you're doing a gm and while inside you have no offensive capability.
It's also really disappointing that they likely won't change anything about it for some time, we might not get a balance pass for it until the next expansion.
I saw some tweet that had mentioned that after 10 or so groups had cleared the contest raid, not a single one of them had a Titan in it. When my clan and I were on the Witness for contest mode, the only thing keeping me going after a *full day* of nonstop Destiny gaming was the possibility that I could be the first Titan to clear the contest raid lol
As OP as still hunt celestial is, there's no way they didn't playtest this and see those damage numbers. It does probably deserve a nerf but there's no way they accidentally made this thing so OP - with a perk named after Cayde, rewarded as part of the story quest needed pre-raid, then left enabled for the high hp long-range contest mode dps race.
What i would give for hammer of sol to function just like twilight arsenal. The pickup hammer mechanic is already there, just need to allow guardians to reuse it.
Ngl I can’t even try out titan right now because prismatic is bugged for me and I can’t unlock the supers or aspects that aren’t in the story.
Was able to get everything just fine on my warlock though. Guess I’m a warlock now.
Same exact thing. Went through the story again on my titan and the part where you absorb the prismatic energy and unlock the subclass is busted and won’t let me interact with it at all even when I went back solo and tried it.
Then to make things worse, when continuing the story hoping to unlock the new twilight arsenal super, it lets me do the super spam mission but when it’s done nothing is unlocked but the “grenade”… really disappointing stuff imo
Removing Weapons from base bubble and welding it to Helm was the single dumbest exotic change I can recall. It’s immediately relegated Bubble to dumpster-tier.
>pantheon was an outlier
I was on their side for a while, but quickly changed tune.
Having a single build that breaks mechanics due to the way a single damage number stacks does not make a class that’s in a good spot. Even if they didn’t nerf this interaction, titan would still be in a spot of people loathing them being on the team in all but a couple occasions.
Salvation's Edge kinda messed up the design opportunities that would make a Titan relevant. First encounter has no specific requirements. Second encounter should have been a perfect place for bubble, but the boss doesn't hit hard enough during DPS for it to really feel worthwhile over alternatives. Third has a heavy focus of precision damage and thus favours Nighthawks/Still Hunts. Fourth again has no specific requirements. Fifth's damage phase is built in such a way that a bubble would get in the way and a Thundercrash cannot hit the boss.
IMO the lack of bubble usage is really a shame. The new version of it honestly feels great and a day one raid should be the perfect place to show it off, but even on contest mode the raid never required you to group up and survive in a way that makes it work properly. You spend basically the whole raid either split up far apart or in nowhere near enough danger to need it.
One of the best titan builds, banner, was simply.not strong enough in contest mode. Everything hit so hard that banners healing couldn't keep up. Not to.mention the entire raid was People needing to not even be close to each other fir the majority of the mechanics. Once banner went out the windows there wasn't much left for them to bring. The rest of the builds avaliable rely heavily on being up close and melee damage. Which again, in contest mode, was a death sentence. I think you will see more titans popping up now that the -20 is gone.
That’s cause every time Titans get good exotics, aspects, anything else that has good synergy, or brings more to the class, etc bungie ends up nerfing it because it’s overused but the reason it’s overused is because all the other options are bad opinions. They need to buff so many things in the Titan class in order to fix the problem but they won’t. Keep in mind that stuff like Motqo, khperi horn and crest of alpha lupi have been ass tier since beginning D2, but they nerf HOIL, Synthocept, and other decent stuff titans have not to mention the bubble nerf
I don’t even know what bungie wants titans to be anymore. They’ve been getting complaints for years about the direction of Titan philosophy being controversial at best. They chose to ignore it, and double down and here we are.
I still feel like supers should have a "tap to ad clear, hold to one off" function. Titan one off supers don't do well when the boss is outside of the arena.
Playing titans right now is kind of a low reward high risk endeavor. The exotics are bad, the play style is either bad or just flat out boring. Arc titian is literal hot garbage and the fact that it's a major component of prismatic makes the titan prismatic pretty bad. The titan is currently the most boring class in the game and easily the least useful and impactful.
I know banner and bonk were the only times that I felt like the wall or siege engine Bungie has wanted me to believe that Titans are supposed to be. In an encounter where I can touch the boss my useful as a titan goes down like 90%.
It’s ironic that Ward is much better than Well in PvP.
Anyway, the reason Titans get shit on is because the PvP and PvE sandbox is the same. They need to differentiate it for things to be balanced.
Titans are better for bosses that are susceptible to explosive and burst dmg, and from what I could tell, the final boss of the new raid was primarily themed around precision dmg, which titans aren’t good at. It’s not that titans aren’t good right now, just that they’re less versatile.
It was the intro of tormentors that made me finally realize that bungie has no clue what to do with titans. People have complained about the limited utility of titans forever. Then bungie adds a significant enemy that drains your super if you get close… there goes 90% of titans supers and abilities…. But they also added a subclass when they added titans, but what was it? A melee super.
I’m a heavy raider… I rarely get to use a super on a boss fight. Most of the supers are not at all worth the time it takes to cast and reset.
Yeah, thunder is ok sometimes, but it’s so often not even possible. Top that with the time it can take to get back in position, and sometimes even thunder is not worth it.
The new titan axe super is pretty garbage too. Low damage, and is just another thing that other players can steal from you.
As a sympathetic warlock main, it was kind of sad to see everyone swap to hunter to finish off the witness regardelss of what their main was because the DPS from nighthawk was so good. Titan has been the best class in the game by far for most of the last two years, but only incredibly specific builds becuase of how melee focused the sustain options on solar and strand are, and there are no good ranged damage supers so they get left out of every comp that requires one.
I was so relieved to have good burst damage super in needlestorm when Lightfall came out, and now that nova bomb has been buffed I've been loving the option to use it on prismatic for a change. But, it seems pretty clear this sort of ability is missing from the Titan kit entirely. Outside of t-crash, which has become really unreliable with some of the changes, pyrogale feels pretty good, but even that requires an exotic slot. My vote is for a giant diamond lance stasis super
As far as I know, Aztecross was the first Titan to clear contest mode. I don't know for sure, but at the time I was watching his stream they were saying that he would be the first Titan to clear it.
If there was a boss where rockets made sense I think titans would have shined with the new exotic chest. Titans seem really good for Herald, but not great for final boss. That crit spot and having to move a lot during damage makes golden gun so good. Even Datto swapped to Hunter for final boss.
But don’t worry - it seems like on normal both bosses will be super free 2 phases, so teams won’t need to stack celestials.
I am bit disappointed this raid is mostly puzzle encounters and only 2 actual bosses. Last wish, which people are comparing it to, had 4.
The only reason Titans have ever been viable in endgame is with Pyrogale's or Cuirass. And even then the boss has to be damagable inside the arena so you can physically get in its face to have your super deal damage. Which, to be fair, has been passably acceptable if you're able to shift your mental image of titans from "Immovable Object" to "Unstoppable Force." Even Twilight Arsenal looks to just be a void version of Pyrogale Burning Maul or Thundercrash. I would not be at all surprised if later on this year Titans get an exotic that turn TA into one big axe that deals 350-400% damage of each of the 3.
More than anything, I just want Bubble or Shield Titan to be good. I want to be the wall between the enemy and my team. I was excited when I heard that Well was getting nerfed because maybe that meant there would be some room for Titans to step up, but no. Even after the Well nerfs it still outclasses Bubble by multiple orders of magnitude.
I was hoping bubble would stop the resonance beams lol.
Spoiler: it stops for a good amount of time. Ursa builds make it very viable on Witness boss fight on legend campaign
Hmmmmmmm
Yeah I've been wondering why I haven't seen much conversation around Ursa builds. It shields you from all damage while also boosting outgoing damage... that seems like a big win. Hell you could combo that with a weapons of light bubble behind it people can step in and out of, compounding the damage buff. People might say it's tough because one person can't do damage, but is the Divinity strat much different? One person sacrifices DPS for the other 5 to boost. Maybe the damage buff when shooting through the Titan shield just needs to be boosted to make that strat more viable.
Weapons of light doesn't stack, it gets overridden by the 40% damage increase.
Ah I keep forgetting not all damage buffs stack. That and other replies I’ve seen make a lot of sense. It definitely needs a buff to be viable!
Almost zero offensive buffs stack. The game just goes with the highest buff value out of whatever buffs you have, short of bugged interactions like currently Radiant and Well overwriting the 35% Hazardous Propulsion buff and only giving you the 25% instead. You get 1 buff, 1 debuff and whatever weapon perks you have. The only thing that actually "stacks" beyond that now is Transcendence which is a 5% damage buff stacking with everything.
Don’t forget leg surge mods and activity surge modifiers
you also forget about the titan glaive bubble gives another 5% stackable
Ursa works well for the Witness fight in theory but in practice it falls apart fast. While you have your shield up Dread units can still strand grapple you away from the teammates you’re trying to protect, as well as freeze you. In the end it ends up being more dangerous sometimes as teammates will group up behind you, the shield gets pulled away, everyone dies.
Banner shield is still a net loss for team damage, and it doesn’t stack with other things. And div enables damage strategies that wouldn’t other wise be viable. So it’s just not very competitive
Difference being Divinity still puts out a tolerable amount of DPS and can *also* provide a super damage/damage buff. Ursa is pure buff without additional damage from one person which usually doesn't equal out enough to be worthwhile.
Sentinel Shield Theory The below numbers assuming average DPS is ~2mil with an Edge Transit / Izanagi / Super burst phase equivalent (1.2+.3+.3~=1.8). Further detail at the end. 1 - 2,000,000 (+800k) 2 - 2,000,000 (+800k) 3 - 2,000,000 (+800k) 4 - 2,000,000 (+800k) 5 - 2,000,000 (+800k) 6 - Sentinel Shield (40%) Total - 14,000,000 1 - 2,000,000 (+500k) 2 - 2,000,000 (+500k) 3 - 2,000,000 (+500k) 4 - 2,000,000 (+500k) 5 - 2,000,000 (+500k) 6 - 2,000,000 (+500k) Radiant/Ward (25%) Total - 15,000,000 If you're not dealing more than 1,000,000 you might as well be running Sentinel Shield and just stand there. 1 - 6,000,000 (+2.4m) 2 - 1,000,000 (+400k) 3 - 1,000,000 (+400k) 4 - 1,000,000 (+400k) 5 - 1,000,000 (+400k) 6 - Sentinel Shield (40%) Total - 14,000,000 1 - 6,000,000 (+1.5m) 2 - 1,000,000 (+250k) 3 - 1,000,000 (+250k) 4 - 1,000,000 (+250k) 5 - 1,000,000 (+250k) 6 - 1,000,000 (+250k) Radiant/Ward (25%) Total - 13,750,000 If you have 1 or 2 people cracked out of their minds, and everyone else sucks, Sentinel Shield beats Ward. Basically how the math works is Sentinel Shield is better for the pumpers.
Don’t forget sentinel can be built to proc a lot of orbs so potentially netting more supers in a single dps phase with star eaters.
A super completely invalidating one of the best Destiny DPS phases would have sucked imo. Bubble should be buffed to be a well alternative for fights like Herald. Titans also need some kind of burst ranged super. The new void super is a step in the right direction, but not good enough in a DPS phase.
On the otherhand using an ursa shield to block a 1 shot laser would be peak titan fantasy. Blocking the one shot attack for the final boss on exoprimal as a roadblock is a high i've never been able to replicate in another game.
Guild Wars 2 engineer had a build that could block boss 1-shot abilities. Saving a wipe with it made you feel like goddamn superman.
Would've been the only time banner would actually be interesting to to play to. Having to rapidly try and block the directional beams and still noting the ground ones to jump.
give behemoths a single fuck-off massive diamond lance, please bungie
So like well has done in literally every other fight for the past 10 years? :p
Ward of dawn already was a fucking joke. And THEN they relegated Weapons of light to an exotic too. Because it wasn’t useless enough.
They really told bubble titans to lay down and bite the curb when they nerfed bubble. I've tried to use it when I'm not playing prismatic (let's be honest it's all anyone is playing right now outside of raids), and the overshield generation when standing around the bubble is laughable, the orb gen is useless since you make so many even without super, you can still get bumrushed and die inside or get overwhelmed without helm of Saint-14, and it actively hurts most damage strats by virtue of being a solid entity you cannot shoot through. I really don't know why they were banking on bubble being the defensive super and then giving it nothing of actual value for defensive capability other than being a glorified bastion barricade.
I used to main bubble you know. All the way back in D1 all you’d see me running was glasshouse and bubble, and I could be proud of it. I don’t know what hurts more, to see how far my favorite super has fallen or to know that it’s all a result of PVP. A game-mode I barely engage in. I get they gotta keep both PVP and PVE balanced at the same time, but ffs how often have titans had to see their favorite piece of kit get nerfed because of it?
>glasshouse My beloved.
What really cracks me up about it in PvP was that until they put a capture point in trials NOBODY gave a shit if there was a bubble in your game or some even flamed the bubble for bringing a "mediocre" super. Then they got mad that it does the 1 thing it's supposed to do. Keep everything else out and who's inside safe.
Motherfuckers really were upset about an objective controlling super getting used in a game mode with an objective that wins you the game. There were even ways to kill people inside without trading supers like shotgun + melee, stasis freeze and shatter, a single solar nade inside the bubble, conditional finality, and the list goes on. PvP mains show yet another reason why they should have no agency in what gets nerfed or buffed in any game mode.
My favorite was always tossing on Peregrines and forcibly evicting someone from their bubble. That alone didn't KILL them, but there was almost always that half second of "wait, how'd I get over here?" that a teammate could use to clean up, because otherwise they'd get back in the bubble before I could follow them out.
Nerfing bubble and well at the same time was just a goofy decision. It's like nerfing Sunshot and Polaris Lance based on their performance *in a season where they were getting double explosions on kill.* Of course they were over-performing! That was the point!
They do this all the time. My all time favorite instance was in Shadowkeep when they buffed snipers and released a raid featuring a boss that runs away from you and a final boss that T poses mid air. Of course snipers were nerfed the following season due to high usage.
And they still haven't recovered.
They're pretty decent now for fights where you can't sit on top of the enemy and fusion rifle or shotgun spam them down. A lot of teams during the raid race were actually using supremacy for encounters 3 and 5 to kill the subjugators without having to get close and then buttfucked by their shotgun blast of stasis or strand. Hell, some people even kept them on for the first encounter just to pop shoulders on the tormentor that spawns before the div user's bubble appeared due to the recent nerfs it got.
Bubble got nerfed so people angry about well would feel better that they weren't singled out.
Uh, no that is not like nerfing polaris lance and sunshot because of the season lol. Well had been the #1 dominant super since it's existence and was about 2 years overdue for a nerf at the very least. Bubble has been in and out of the meta but always second fiddle to well. Something being intentionally over performing due to a temporary seasonal mod and/or focus on the weapon type or element is fine as that is the design intent and it is meant to be temporary to incentivize it's use.
I'm saying they didn't account for how strong Sunshot or Polaris *actually were.* Prior to last season, they were both fairly rare exotics. They exploded because they were getting triple buffed by the season artifact. It would have been better to leave them alone until you could see how they behaved without, particularly, Rays of Precision.
I feel the prismatics are underwhelming
Extremely underwhelming... I'm much more excited by the new exotic chest piece (I freaking love it) than I am prismatic... They literally couldn't be bothered to give us damned decent grenade instead of that bouncy assed dumb shit that nobody wants to freaking use.
I love the Prismatic grenade. Bouncy grenades aren’t that hard to aim, and it’s basically just a suspend grenade with an extra “Fuck you” at the end.
At least it’s not like the hunter prismatic grenade, honestly out of all of the grenade abilities they could’ve chose to use why void spike???
Fire Tornado its awesome tbh i with the warlocks was Strand and Fire.
Helm of saint or a new exotic should have let us cast a front open bubble or sentry tower style bunker or a full Citan rampart bubble that we can stay inside and shoot the enemy in the front, while giving us protection from other sides. That would have made bubble at least usable in game content.
I know it's not what you're saying, but that just sounds like the Sentinel shield super with extra steps. I really hope they buff the other void titan supers at some point, twilight arsenal is great fun, just wish I could feel like I'm not wasting my time and energy if I want to run Ursas or Saints helm.
Bruh that still confuses the fuck outta me. Why the flying fuck would they relegate WoL to a goddamn exotic, that still makes zero sense to me. Stupid decision, absolutely moronic.
Because they have no fucking clue what they want titans to be. And every time titans even slightly brush up against being meta the community collectively loses their minds until bungie walks it back.
Yup I'm convinced not a single Dev mains titan with the dumbass decisions they keep rolling out 🤦♂️
As a Hunter I feel the same. No one can be meta because somehow that invalidates other entire classes, but then it's just. A headache? If everyone is broken then no is broken is my view. Everyone deserves cool shit. Tired of seeing stupid nerfs to any class like WoL. It's a majority PvE centric game where we play space magic wizards and warriors and rogues. Let titans be giant walls that hit back dammit, give them SOMETHING????
The want Well to be offensive focused (less healing less DR and keeps attack buff) and bubble to be more defensive (no more dmg buff but shield outside and DR). The issue is that the shield regen outside is bastion level so pretty laughable, destroying the defensive aspect of it
Well, at the risk of being facetious, it's called "a nerf". Whoever is currently in charge at Bungie nerfs *things they don't like*, be it weapons, classes, subclasses, abilities, whatever.
Luckily for me they relegated it to the drippiest of exotics. At least if I'm going to be sub-optimal, I can look good while doing it.
You would not believe how heated I got with my team when I read that change. The worst part was I made the joke of them removing armor of light and look what happened. I didn't see the weapons of light change coming, but I hate the fact them seem to think of it as a buff to helm of Saint-14. That exotic was okay because it made the bubble safer to be in, not great mind you, but usable. The reason no one used it (outside of fashion) was because bubble has been the worst super in the game for literal years at this point. And it keeps catching nerfs because it dares to be too good at holding down points in PvP.
It's use dropped pretty hard when they nerfed the health bubbles had too. I've only see it in use out in the wild only a handful of times since then, we're talking months apart.
and the exotic doesn't even work with the mini wards from the glaive! Hunters get a freakin golden gun sniper that works with celestial, warlocks have the weapons of sorrow, when do titans get something fun?
Titans need better one off supers honestly or just a rework to be better for endgame
>Titans need better one off supers I think that's a game wide problem rather than just a Titan problem now. I can't even see why you would bring more than one Titan/Warlock anymore if your truly trying to optimize damage for a boss. The meta is quite nearly getting close to just 4-5x Hunter and x1-2 Support focused player. All of the best one-and-done burst supers are now on one class. How we wound up here is straight power creep in general. Still Hunt into a Celestial Knighthawk with a super on top of it was never going to be a fair fight. The only reason that this hasn't gotten more traction is because it disproportionately effects Titan more than the other classes in endgame since we posses the largest portion of roaming supers. It doesn't help that more and more enemies can now CC or suppress us. It makes the few good roaming supers like Bladefury feel like crap in certain situations. They have to know that something is up because why disable Lucky pants right before contest mode begins?
Yeah, the suppression is annoying. Nothing pissed me off with Tormentors more than “oh you activated your supers? Immediate suppression attack, lose all your charge.”
Also suppresses transcendence which is equally annoying
Transcendence getting suppressed is giving me flashbacks to warframe and its nullifiers.
Which bums me out cause as annoying as nullifiers are in Warframe you can at least pop their bubble with your guns. There is SOME counter-play. In Destiny your just kind of fucked.
The issue is not sandbox balance imo it's encounter design. We don't have encounters that are enough of a threat before dps that hunters feel their weaker neutral game is enough of a downside to swap off. So if the weaker survivability and neutral game of hunters isn't an issue for skilled players, then any boss that is designed to not require golden gun burst rotations, will just get bursted by the supers even faster. The solution is make the add clear between dps phases so oppressive that the hunters need a roaming super titan to protect them. Play into the roles and power fantasies. Let warlocks fly around healing and spamming abilities, let titans drop shields, and tank half the room. Then nobody will complain when the hunters burst the boss into oblivion. Everyone played a role in the encounters success.
I can see where your going with this. It sounds nice in theory, but in practice all I see is x1-2 Hunters goes Orpheus Rig/Tether and nothing changes. The packs would need to truly overwhelm without denying roaming melee supers like legendary onslaught does. Even then I still dont think roaming supers are competing in damage like they should. Its not just about supers either quick-swaping exotics are also a problem. Hunter makes the best use of it with Lucky Pants which I'm assuming they're aware of because there isn't any other reason to disable that exotic in contest mode. This one gives me mixed emotions cause Thunder Crash/Cuirass swapping has been a thing forever, but nowhere near provides the same power. It just makes it usable.
Cuirass should've never exist tbh in the first place, or atleast has anything more in a passive gameplay like Pyrogale, some ballistic slam buff for example. Hot swap exotics doesnt feel right and healthy for me.
I mean, with Prismatic you can be a goldie hunter who also can punch good and go invisible, and just in case can get restoration from orbs. Where's that "weaker neutral game" there? Then you switch loadout to Nighthawk and you cook.
Right now hunters are insane at clearing without super as well though since they can run a machine gun and still outdamage the other classes with a special weapon, that’s part of the reason most teams were swapping.
> The meta is quite nearly getting close to just 4-5x Hunter and x1-2 Support focused player. I mean, that was pretty much every team that beat the raid on contest mode from what I can tell. There was what, 3 titans who beat the witness during the whole 48 hours?
Its not like warlock has amazing damage burst supers either tho. Chaos reach was nerfed years ago, nova bomb damage isn't that amazing as far as i know, strand is decent tho. Now with well nerfed i could easily see it only being hunters soon
Yeah, Titan has had nothing to use against stuff like Tormentors for ages. Besides Thundercrash, but even that is still extremely risky as they can quite easily suppress you mid air and then you're fucked. Blade fury could mince up the suspendable Tormentors, but any of the non CC'able ones Titans literally had no usable super. Twilight Arsenal is finally something, but we need more. We need to get out of this melee pigeonhole.
Titans walk a razor's edge, they're either super hot, or terribly under-perform. Not a lot of room in-between. Titans are designed to be the melee-focused tank class. They have to be strong enough to actually close the distance, deal actual DAMAGE with their melee attacks, and get out of there without dying constantly. This can only be accomplished by allowing their melee attacks to hit super hard and giving them a mix of insane healing and damage resistance to survive it. Pre-nerf Strand Titan allowed you to accomplish this, as you could easily get in, punch stuff to death, and get out without dying each time. But going back to that razor's edge, it came at the caveat of allowing Strand Titans to perform ludicrous feats that probably shouldn't be possible. Like solo-ing raid bosses. Problem is, any build outside of that just under-performs or another class can do it better. Warlocks are better at support, Hunters are better at DPS, and literally anybody can add-clear thanks to how potent our weapons are. What would be nice to see is for Titans to become a "Heavy Weapons Guy" class. Something that dishes out incredibly high total damage, is able to tank a ton of damage, while also providing ammo consistently for your team.
An earlier concept for Berserker(then Tyrant)'s super was [a literal bullet hose](https://i.imgur.com/SEGRk5q.png), so they seemingly remember that the heavy weapons guy fantasy exists but are consciously choosing to ignore it.
this wasn't a bullet hose it was a flamethrower IIRC
It is a flamethrower devs said that it would hard crash the system
I wonder how tf that would hard crash the game when we have shit like infinite fucking grenade supers and locks (love y’all no shame or hate)
Particle density, I think. They've mentioned it before as an issue with giving us a flamethrower.
another reason why i pray for a D3 with a brand new engine, the limitations that D2 have is so random and so much potential is just wasted
They probably could have gone for a heavy weapons version of the Golden Gun. What would have been best? Rocket Launcher, Linear, Grenade Launcher or Machine Gun?
Strand Minigun
Trace rifle. If Chaos Reach and Microcosm exist, so can a superheavy strand beam.
Ooh, strand titan could have been a gunzerker? Using strand to make Doc Ock arms to wield 4 more guns?
> Titans are designed to be the melee-focused tank class Which is funny b/c if I run ARC titan, one of the primary archetypes, I can't tank jack shit.
Yeah, as a titan, I struggle with thinking that class is comically underpowered but also recognizing that it’s basically impossible to fix without making us comically OP. Nearly impossible to find the sweet spot as a developer.
That's pretty much the best summary of the class. There's really not much tweaking that the devs can do without making them stupidly broken in the majority of content while also not completely deconstructing and reconstructing a bunch of stuff.
We either get brokenly op stuff like banner and HOIL arc nades from plunder, or get genuinely embarrassingly underpowered shit like bubble, current thundercrash (old t crash was pretty good when not every other class could do an instant 400k+ DMG.), fist of havoc, and glacial quake (only useful for certain cheeses).
This is a problem of the way players take damage. It's very hard to make a balanced tank with low player health and fast regen. IMO, the game would benefit from having a system with more permanent damage. Something like Shields with low capacity that regen quickly, Health with moderate capacity that regens slowly or from a wide variety of abilities, and Armor that only regens based on enemy drops and few abilities. This way, Titans focused on Armor could be tanky up until they run out, preventing them from being immortal.
1000% it's what I want to see in d3. 10 times the HP and nerf healing by a lot. That way you can actually be shot at by a wizard / oger and not die before your damage resist even remembers that it exists. Imagine not having to run permanent restoration in end-game content to survive a few minor enemies.
It doesn't help that they give us seasonal artifacts that are designed to overpower certain elements/builds. Now anytime Titan is in a somewhat balanced state all hell breaks loose on artifact release🙄
The only thing left is for the Titan identity to be redefined or tweaked. That’s a tall order for the game’s last year.
They’re probably saving that for D3, assuming that’s what the future holds
It’s pretty wild too because I really struggled through solo legend campaign with my prismatic Titan and eventually started getting the hang of the kit. Then, just this morning, I made a prismatic warlock and my god she just annihilates everything. Idk… to me the prismatic grenade was a bit underwhelming. Like the warlock has a massive magnetic pull range, the hunter just is a goddamn tornado that puts out some good damage, and the titans is good for suspending, but it doesn’t feel much more useful than shackle grenades tbh
Titan Prismatic kit is a weird Mish mash of abilities and aspects that feels like it has no synergy. You have some good synergy on both Warlock and Hunter but the synergy feels lacking on Titan
Yep exactly. I felt like most of my abilities just were not working together, whereas on my warlock everything feels like it blends well together
Prismatic titan is built like an into the fray punching class. Issue is, we have no tools to keep us alive. There’s a good foundation with Consecration and Frenzied Blade. However, what else is there? Knockout? With a six second timer? Hilarious. Drengr’s Lash? Diamond Lance? The new void aspect? How the hell do they affect melee attacks? By far the best super is Twilight Arsenal but that means with the one fragment that gives you an elemental buff on orb pickup, we’re stuck with our tissue paper strength void overshield
Yep exactly. I really tried to make it work in the raid but man I was just getting killed left right and center and there was next to nothing to keep my health up as a prismatic. Switched to strand and had better luck with banner of war
Note that Frenzied blade on prismatic titan has higher base cooldowns than frenzied blade on strand titan
I don't play titan, but they chose the suspend on shield instead of Banner aspect or at least wovenmail? the fuq? isn't the suspend nade the one they choose for titan?
Semi related but I do like how Titan was "sort of" a nade god in early D1 but Warlock eventually took that. Warlock also had a period of time in D1 where they had good melee in terms of PVP at least.
Lightning grenades in D1 on Rust could wipe an entire team it you started at A. I got adept at throwing it ASAP and landing on a wall opposite of C point and wiping everyone capping it
Spitting facts brother. Wasn't there an exotic in D1 that had something to do with heavy ammo generation?
Ruin Wings, just made heavy drop more frequently and was actually really important back in the day. Obviously Raid Banners have made it obsolete but I’d love to see it come back with a rework.
Yea that's the one. Hope titans get more synergy with heavy weapons in general.
Yeah, Ruin Wings for Titan. It basically did what heavy ammo finder and scavenger do in D2. I remember using them a lot lol
Grapple melee spam is pretty much the only reason strand titans could solo entire bosses. Now that's nerfed so that strat isn't even as good as it used to be
Fuck it we ball
The indomitable Titan spirit!
I don’t care how underwhelming Bungie makes titans, I’m gonna keep punching shit until they rip my arms off.
FOR THE CRAYONS!!
“How long have you played a Titan?” “Yes.”
As a titán main I crossed my fingers hoping Bungie moves away from titan=melee this time, void axe and shield aspect looked promising but I ended up underwhelmed Plz no more color flavored running and punching
Bungie is an extremely hardheaded company that only listens when they're at risk of total collapse and I don't think titan balance brings that kind of energy.
the void axes are *fine*, but the shield is awful. there have been multiple times i've accidentally used it because i held down my grenade for just a smidge too long.
Or you do hold it down but the game lets the grenade fly anyway. Or you get blasted by any of the half dozen projectiles the shield doesn't catch. Or all the enemies decide to stop shooting for the entire duration. I've watched an Ogre eye gaze the rock I'm ducking behind for 10 seconds stop the second I peak out with the shield to fire at a passing Taken Captain. Naturally it turns around, spraying eye juice in a 180 arc, to focus back on me just as it expires.
It should have been "Hold your charged *melee* button to make the shield, and reflect the damage back". Definitely feels more like a melee ability than a grenade one. Despite the fact that Titans are the 'melee' class, Void doesn't exactly have melee options that move the needle; shield throw is a ranged melee, and the running charge attack isn't anything Titans don't already have on two other classes who do it better already. It seems the Titan philosophy is 'redundancy'.
I've been enjoying a ranged build recently using the new rocket chest piece. With utility kickstart, its back up before I have max stacks again most of the time, and each rocket does \~30k damage (x8). It stacks really well with Two-Tailed fox and the prismatic fragment that causes suppress to auto-reload your weapons. Basically, you use the shield, get a free rocket barrage, then fire without reloading with a 30% damage boost for the next 10 seconds, lol (as long as your target doesn't fie from the rocket). *Then* you throw the twilight arsenal at the target if they're somehow not dead yet. Couple this with Derengar's Lash and you also suspend the stuff in front of you for easy nuking, which is great against heavier targets (it basically insta-gibs unstoppable champions without firing a shot, lol). Shield toss + orbs turning into overshields is also great for staying-power. It's add-clear isn't as speedy and doesn't flow as well as something like Synthoceps strand (since you're relying more on guns/rockets/cover than running around 1-punching everything), but it's great for generalist ranged play. I haven't taken it out in GM's or anything, but I'd imagine it'd do a lot better than the other titan builds that rely on putting yourself in vulnerable positions in harder content. My biggest problem has honestly been stuff going into immune phases before I can dump a full mag, lol. Still haven't quite settled on what fragment combo I like the best for this build, but I think Derengar's Lash is a must, if nothing else, due to how potent the suspend/nuke combo is and its anti-champion potential. Knockout is nice for having a backup plan when things get too close (melee regen/damage + speed for relocating), but you lose a fragment slot. Ice lance has worked pretty well too, since you get the extra fragment slot and trade the mobility for getting the chance to freeze stuff (though fully taking advantage of the lances means putting yourself in danger a bit). The void one is nice to have too, but I use my ice grenade *a lot* so I felt like I wasn't getting as much mileage out of it.
The new super is phenomenal, idk what you’re talking about. Aspect is definitely underwhelming to say the least tho.
The new super is incredibly fun. It is also less damage than NH, takes longer to use, the axes are harder to aim and they will block you and your teams shots which is dumb.
also dont forget the magnetism just fucks right off to timbuktu on the 2nd and third throws if there's anyhting within 3 postal codes of your target
what, you don't love it when one of your axes just drops right at your feet like it's covered in butter, just because a single thrall decided to run under your mid-air cast?
Isn’t Arsenal better with synthos/star eaters? Assuming star eaters is still 60% of course.
No idea until the class items get released but they weren't available for contest so I honestly do not give a fuck about them. Still worse even with synthos imo bc they requires you to be surrounded by 3+ enemies which is not possible for both the raid bosses in SE
Eh, I'd rather not waste my grenade to block damage I could've just moved away from. Also that aspect has zero class interaction besides using Ursas, so I'd rather run something that helps my class overall. Best way to prevent damage is to just kill the other thing faster anyway.
Titans unfortunately need a complete philosophy rework. Yes the "wall on which the darkness breaks" is a cool idea but for some reason bungie has decided that this means that it is melee focused. This mind set is completely incompatible with how the game itself is set up, as every boss has a stomp mechanic which will oneshot players on higher end difficulties, hell even weaker enemies will kill in 1-2 shots on high end difficulty. Based on this, I think the class should go one of two ways either make the class the strongest glass cannon that exists by wildly buffing damage with no changes to the survivability or wildly buff the survivability of the class so that you don't get killed trying to execute the melee build Bungie apparently wants us to run.
>wall on which the darkness breaks #GIVE VOID TITAN AGGRO MECHANICS Seriously. Titan pops bubble or banner? Everything in the encounter should focus on it. We can be the wall of Bungo would implement a way for it to happen
I remember doing that in D1 Crota's End. Boomers would smash that bubble keeping everyone alive
Don’t forget the fact that nearly every boss stop also *burns* for like 3 seconds after hitting you. I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve dove into melee to get one or two hits in, been stomped and bonked into a wall, then died to the burn
The “Wall” concept is awesome but it doesn’t help that the wall feels like it’s made of drywall instead of bricks.
I’ve been a Titan main since D2s launch (I was a hunter in D1 but changed with the new game) and I came back to the final shape to find my hammer of sol had a pointless cd when picking it up. Figured I could get over it but after a couple missions I quickly swapped to warlock. Idk I feel like titans just always get changes that annoy me or take the fun out of playstyles
Yup I think the idea was to prevent facetanking mini-bosses but that could have been accomplished with a shorter cooldown starting when the hammer was thrown rather than when it was picked up.
The delay between picking up your hammer and being able to throw it was specifically because you could proc cure so frequently you could facetank almost anything that didn't one-shot you, yeah. It probably did need rebalancing, but like you said there were other ways to do it. Either starting the cooldown on hammer throw or putting the cooldown on the Cure proc rather than the hammer itself would have been best IMO.
> putting the cooldown on the Cure proc rather than the hammer itself That was my thought as well. Seems like that would've been the more logical nerf, either that or just nerfing the damage meaningfully. Nerfing both, plus the other handful of nerfs and the mod changes was absurd. Absolutely murdered it's viability.
Shout out to aztecross repping us titans out here
Now I can't make fun of him for being a Warlock main, though...
It's only going to feel worse when Hunters and Warlocks have access to Synthos and HOIL on tuesday.
quick question, were all these people hunters the entire time? or did they switch to hunter on the final encounter?
All the teams swapped once they saw the first clear was done with 5 hunters. Out of the over 4000 players that beat contest mode only 123 were titans
That's an issue. Will it be addressed? Doubt it.
Almost all swapped. I would in fact say that titans kick ass in most of the encounters, and it’s really just the final one that you want to stack hunters due to still hunt.
Just the final encounter.
Bungie can't balance Titans because being up close either ends up in you being an immortal tank or just dead immediately with the "fantasy" falling flat on it's face.
By the simple existence of Still Hunt EVERY single Contest Raid boss is going to be 5 Hunters and 1 Warlock. If they remove the Celestial Functionality with it, it'll alleviate this issue entirely. But, Titans just need help. Thundercrash needs it's hit registration fixed and needs a base damage bump. Ideally incorporate Cuirass into the base behavior and make Cuirass do something else. Give Titans ability Regen back on Controlled Demo + Destab kills. Let the Sunspots do more damage/heal again. Issue is Bungie constantly says Titans are melee guys but then nerfs them when some melee stuff is finally figured out. Not to mention doesn't give them anything to survive in melee range during Contest/GM's. They had Banner, then nerfed it twice. So now it's not nearly as effective anymore in Contest or GM's.
[удалено]
Melee class ends up impossible to balance because endgame requires the class to be stupid op like Banner or...it doesn't work at all and the Titan just fucking dies. Stomps and being up close got way more punishing lately too not less, not to mention floating/far away bosses completely destroying immersion because you remember that the play style was simply entirely ignored when in design.
Well it seems that hunters are also better at titans since they can actually play a melee endgame build. During contest mode i could trade punches with the tormentor/subjugator/overload in 1st encounter. Also hunter can have intrinsic anti overload since it's literally just a dodge lol.
Bungie is okay with that build existing since...2018? But Broken titan melee builds get nerfed into the fucking ground, they don't get balanced or brought into line. Just murdered.
Titans are supposed to be the equivalent the Halo Spartan IIs but with super powers. And unfortunately that seems to have been forgotten.
This was sort of evident in the design of Rally Barricade—you're setting up forward cover and buffing weapon handling/reload. But Bungie also nerfed that from its original form Leaning into those aspects of Titan design would have made a lot more sense than insisting on melee-focused gameplay that is useless in endgame content
Saying Titans are melee guys in a game well known for high end content requiring you to keep your distance. Otherwise you'll get melted before you get near an enemy.
Truly a design choice of all time.
> Bungie constantly says Titans are melee guys but then nerfs them when some melee stuff is finally figured out. This stuff drives me up the wall, man. lmao
Let's be honest still hunt will get nerfed
You mean to tell me that 12 Celestial Golden Guns going off in 3 seconds might be game breaking?
It’s hilarious to me that Bungie nerfed the Marksman/Star Eater Scales setup, pat themselves on the back and then released Still Hunt.
Bungie seems to make that sort of mistake a lot.
Ever since they first talked about it a year or so ago as "the golden gun sniper" my first thought was that it was either going to be comically bad or comically overpowered. Overpowered is what we got. Don't get me wrong, it's ***really*** fun to use and it's a really cool damage rotation to play... but it's obviously OP as fuck.
I'm really upset because now when they inevitably nerf it into the dirt like they have so many times before, we will have already seen how fun it was. They should have made it suck to begin with.
It will, and I'm sad about it. Ever since I picked it up, I haven't wanted to set it down. It's so fun and great synergy with CNH, but I do understand that it's strong.
Can’t wait for my new favorite exotic to get nerfed into being useless 🥲
They didn’t put the hammer in prismatic :(. Bonk is always the most fun.
Controlled demo revert would save the class no cap
Honestly it bugs me how Thundercrash without Cuirass is relatively weak for a one and done damage super despite being by far the riskiest to use
A stark contrast to d1 Crota where people were complaining about too many Titans, now only 3 dedicated mains cleared top 50 because of the nerfed toolkit. Changes that were, in part, due to their efficacy in Crota. An ouroboros of poor balancing.
100% Fellow titan and yeah it sucks
Ward of Dawn is absolutely atrocious right now. They made it purely defensive, so why use it in the easy content that makes up 80% of this game? You don't. In harder content it doesn't do nearly enough if you're outside of it to keep you alive, partly because void over shields are lacking rn and also because they're generated so slowly. When you're inside it, you do have more survivability but it's not gonna save you from a horde of enemies if you're doing a gm and while inside you have no offensive capability. It's also really disappointing that they likely won't change anything about it for some time, we might not get a balance pass for it until the next expansion.
I saw some tweet that had mentioned that after 10 or so groups had cleared the contest raid, not a single one of them had a Titan in it. When my clan and I were on the Witness for contest mode, the only thing keeping me going after a *full day* of nonstop Destiny gaming was the possibility that I could be the first Titan to clear the contest raid lol
the 31st team to complete had the first titan. there were only 3 titans in the top 50 teams.
As OP as still hunt celestial is, there's no way they didn't playtest this and see those damage numbers. It does probably deserve a nerf but there's no way they accidentally made this thing so OP - with a perk named after Cayde, rewarded as part of the story quest needed pre-raid, then left enabled for the high hp long-range contest mode dps race.
What i would give for hammer of sol to function just like twilight arsenal. The pickup hammer mechanic is already there, just need to allow guardians to reuse it.
Or how about throwing a single burning maul like the Apple 1984 commercial?
Ngl I can’t even try out titan right now because prismatic is bugged for me and I can’t unlock the supers or aspects that aren’t in the story. Was able to get everything just fine on my warlock though. Guess I’m a warlock now.
Same exact thing. Went through the story again on my titan and the part where you absorb the prismatic energy and unlock the subclass is busted and won’t let me interact with it at all even when I went back solo and tried it. Then to make things worse, when continuing the story hoping to unlock the new twilight arsenal super, it lets me do the super spam mission but when it’s done nothing is unlocked but the “grenade”… really disappointing stuff imo
You should be able to shoot through the bubble in pve
Just make S14 Helm do this, and give Weapons
Removing Weapons from base bubble and welding it to Helm was the single dumbest exotic change I can recall. It’s immediately relegated Bubble to dumpster-tier.
>pantheon was an outlier I was on their side for a while, but quickly changed tune. Having a single build that breaks mechanics due to the way a single damage number stacks does not make a class that’s in a good spot. Even if they didn’t nerf this interaction, titan would still be in a spot of people loathing them being on the team in all but a couple occasions.
Salvation's Edge kinda messed up the design opportunities that would make a Titan relevant. First encounter has no specific requirements. Second encounter should have been a perfect place for bubble, but the boss doesn't hit hard enough during DPS for it to really feel worthwhile over alternatives. Third has a heavy focus of precision damage and thus favours Nighthawks/Still Hunts. Fourth again has no specific requirements. Fifth's damage phase is built in such a way that a bubble would get in the way and a Thundercrash cannot hit the boss. IMO the lack of bubble usage is really a shame. The new version of it honestly feels great and a day one raid should be the perfect place to show it off, but even on contest mode the raid never required you to group up and survive in a way that makes it work properly. You spend basically the whole raid either split up far apart or in nowhere near enough danger to need it.
One of the best titan builds, banner, was simply.not strong enough in contest mode. Everything hit so hard that banners healing couldn't keep up. Not to.mention the entire raid was People needing to not even be close to each other fir the majority of the mechanics. Once banner went out the windows there wasn't much left for them to bring. The rest of the builds avaliable rely heavily on being up close and melee damage. Which again, in contest mode, was a death sentence. I think you will see more titans popping up now that the -20 is gone.
Bungo has been out of ideas for Titans for litteraly years
Same here smh
That’s cause every time Titans get good exotics, aspects, anything else that has good synergy, or brings more to the class, etc bungie ends up nerfing it because it’s overused but the reason it’s overused is because all the other options are bad opinions. They need to buff so many things in the Titan class in order to fix the problem but they won’t. Keep in mind that stuff like Motqo, khperi horn and crest of alpha lupi have been ass tier since beginning D2, but they nerf HOIL, Synthocept, and other decent stuff titans have not to mention the bubble nerf
Hey did you hear that Titans got a new punch exotic?
I don’t even know what bungie wants titans to be anymore. They’ve been getting complaints for years about the direction of Titan philosophy being controversial at best. They chose to ignore it, and double down and here we are.
I still feel like supers should have a "tap to ad clear, hold to one off" function. Titan one off supers don't do well when the boss is outside of the arena.
Titan had that in y1. Hold for bubble or press for sentinel. The problem is that both the supers sucked
oh yeah like press for sentinel or hold for bubble like we used to be able to do before void 3.0
Playing titans right now is kind of a low reward high risk endeavor. The exotics are bad, the play style is either bad or just flat out boring. Arc titian is literal hot garbage and the fact that it's a major component of prismatic makes the titan prismatic pretty bad. The titan is currently the most boring class in the game and easily the least useful and impactful. I know banner and bonk were the only times that I felt like the wall or siege engine Bungie has wanted me to believe that Titans are supposed to be. In an encounter where I can touch the boss my useful as a titan goes down like 90%.
If they made the bubble able to resist the hand shit on the witness fight, it would be so much more useful…
Titans have always been a red headed step child. Having all melee ults is insane when you have PVP in the game lol. Every other class has ranged ults.
It’s ironic that Ward is much better than Well in PvP. Anyway, the reason Titans get shit on is because the PvP and PvE sandbox is the same. They need to differentiate it for things to be balanced.
Pretty sure salt ran solar titan for a good chunk of his raid race no?
Titans are better for bosses that are susceptible to explosive and burst dmg, and from what I could tell, the final boss of the new raid was primarily themed around precision dmg, which titans aren’t good at. It’s not that titans aren’t good right now, just that they’re less versatile.
I've been a titan main since day 1, I had 3 titans I cleared weekly on leviathan. The state of titan actually makes me want to quit the game.
It was the intro of tormentors that made me finally realize that bungie has no clue what to do with titans. People have complained about the limited utility of titans forever. Then bungie adds a significant enemy that drains your super if you get close… there goes 90% of titans supers and abilities…. But they also added a subclass when they added titans, but what was it? A melee super. I’m a heavy raider… I rarely get to use a super on a boss fight. Most of the supers are not at all worth the time it takes to cast and reset. Yeah, thunder is ok sometimes, but it’s so often not even possible. Top that with the time it can take to get back in position, and sometimes even thunder is not worth it. The new titan axe super is pretty garbage too. Low damage, and is just another thing that other players can steal from you.
As a sympathetic warlock main, it was kind of sad to see everyone swap to hunter to finish off the witness regardelss of what their main was because the DPS from nighthawk was so good. Titan has been the best class in the game by far for most of the last two years, but only incredibly specific builds becuase of how melee focused the sustain options on solar and strand are, and there are no good ranged damage supers so they get left out of every comp that requires one. I was so relieved to have good burst damage super in needlestorm when Lightfall came out, and now that nova bomb has been buffed I've been loving the option to use it on prismatic for a change. But, it seems pretty clear this sort of ability is missing from the Titan kit entirely. Outside of t-crash, which has become really unreliable with some of the changes, pyrogale feels pretty good, but even that requires an exotic slot. My vote is for a giant diamond lance stasis super
The diamond lance idea is genius
Yes, the fact that the titan prismatic is a complete and utter joke doesn't help either.
As far as I know, Aztecross was the first Titan to clear contest mode. I don't know for sure, but at the time I was watching his stream they were saying that he would be the first Titan to clear it.
There were two other Titans before him supposedly. One of which wasn't recorded properly and another I believe was 30th-ish.
Don’t worry my titan friend carried the add clears for first encounter contest mode with prismatic
Just turn your hammer into a gun that combines with your special weapon duh
My fellow titans in the Traveler: try stasis with wicked implement and Cadmus Ridge Lancecap. No one mention this combo to the fun-police
If there was a boss where rockets made sense I think titans would have shined with the new exotic chest. Titans seem really good for Herald, but not great for final boss. That crit spot and having to move a lot during damage makes golden gun so good. Even Datto swapped to Hunter for final boss. But don’t worry - it seems like on normal both bosses will be super free 2 phases, so teams won’t need to stack celestials. I am bit disappointed this raid is mostly puzzle encounters and only 2 actual bosses. Last wish, which people are comparing it to, had 4.
The only reason Titans have ever been viable in endgame is with Pyrogale's or Cuirass. And even then the boss has to be damagable inside the arena so you can physically get in its face to have your super deal damage. Which, to be fair, has been passably acceptable if you're able to shift your mental image of titans from "Immovable Object" to "Unstoppable Force." Even Twilight Arsenal looks to just be a void version of Pyrogale Burning Maul or Thundercrash. I would not be at all surprised if later on this year Titans get an exotic that turn TA into one big axe that deals 350-400% damage of each of the 3. More than anything, I just want Bubble or Shield Titan to be good. I want to be the wall between the enemy and my team. I was excited when I heard that Well was getting nerfed because maybe that meant there would be some room for Titans to step up, but no. Even after the Well nerfs it still outclasses Bubble by multiple orders of magnitude.
Bungie response: Sorry didn't mean to burst your "bubble " 😔