Theres been a lot of people voicing their dislike over the removal of crafting from seasonal activities and the tonic system as a replacement. I wanted to give my own opinion because I felt that none of the discourse actually hit the points I feel. This is just my opinion, a player who loves Destiny and finds the hyperbolic 'criticism' being thrown around on this topic to be unhelpful and obtuse. I want to hopefully provide something thats at least a little more descriptive. This is just my opinion, one opinion of the many that make up this very large community. First of all, lets talk a little about crafting. For me personally (the only person I can attest for) I like crafting. I like its role as loot protection and I like its role as a pseudo vault that i can go back to for any future builds I might make. I think crafting is a net-positive for this game. However, I dislike the current iteration of crafting which has become the main pathway to gaining [b]the most powerful loot[/b]. This idea by itself isn't inherently bad but is made far worse due to the methods of aquiring red borders without even actively playing the activities they drop from. This has made gaining [b]powerful[/b] loot far too unrewarding. For example, I played Echoes' battleground once to get Abberant action to drop, I then used my huge excess of engrams to farm drops with deepsight harmonisers and grabbed red borders that sat on the season pass to finish all 5 red border requirements, I crafted one of the most powerful legendary weapons [i]at the time[/i] by sitting in a menu and clicking buttons. Thats not fun. I want to stress that I am specifically referring to gaining powerful loot without playing the game. In theory, when it comes down to your average, non meta-defining weapon this method of loot progression is perfectly fine, especially for PVP focused loot (being locked out of meta godroll hand cannon no.42069 is just annoying, though this is a different and more nuanced discussion) but this is specifically for powerful PVE weapons. Things like deepsight harmonisers and season pass red borders are a nice tool for topping off your 4/5 pattern progress but shouldn't replace progression entirely. I am aware that this is a very complex issue, what defines "meta-defining" isn't simple and how Bungie paves our way towards different tiers of "powerful weapons" isn't as easy as it is to say "muh crafting is unrewarding". There isn't a simple solution to this issue, but it is an issue nonetheless. For anyone who may think "but you dont have to use harmonsiers or the season pass, you could still choose to play the activity for the drops themselves" you're right I can do that, but that misses the point. Seeing the clearly easier path to obtaining these weapons makes choosing the grind instead to be [b]entirely[/b] frustrating and pointless. Because I know there is an infinitely smoother path to the [b]exact same reward[/b]. The whole point of this criticism is that I want it to be rewarding. With that being said, none of this is new criticism. This has been pointed out many times by the community for the years since crafting launched, but I feel its been drowned out by the recent [i]discussion[/i] of Bungie's decision to [b]remove crafting entirely[/b] from seasonal activities in Revenant. Initially this was something I was interested in, for the reasons I mentioned above, and because they talked about their new tonic system that would replace crafting, acting similar to attunement. But for reasons I'll get into, I slowly became disinterested in them. First of all, hot take, I like the tonic system... on paper. An avenue for players to gain access to certain weapon pools while doing other activites is nice and lets us have more agency over what we do in Destiny, this is something Bungie are going to do across more activities in Frontiers (see their portal article). I also like the path to unlocking more tonics, it felt like tangible progression that didn't have an egregious amount of grind to complete, though I am aware im in the minority on that. Despite these things, it is clear now as the dust has settled from Revenant that the tonic system released far too conservatively. Especially when compared to our previous source of weapon drops, crafting. these are the issues i had with tonics; 1. They didn't guarantee a weapon drop, which they have since fixed... though a [i]little[/i] late which is why i've listed it here. 2. They're far too easy to forget, resulting in me either not noticing a tonic has expired or finishing an activity before saying "-blam!-, I didn't pop a tonic". 3. Required too much grind to craft multiples of, meaning we had to grind the activity repeatedly for materials, defeating the purpose of the "agency over what we do in Destiny" I mentioned above. This adds a lot of steps to getting loot than what we had previously; grind activity for mats, unlock tonics, make enough tonics, use tonics and get weapon. (While yes, you would get weapons to drop from activites alonside materials, those drops are entirely random) This created a vicious cycle, slowing the progression of unlocking more tonics and, as you unlocked more, became increasingly specific to each weapon in the pool and costing more specifc materials. This made the reasonable (in my opinion) grind of unlocking tonics [b]feel[/b] a lot worse, which in turn, perpetuated the frustration of grinding materials. These issues mixed with the average quality of both the seasonal activites (a discussion for another post) and the weapons that dropped from them has resulted in a season of Destiny that feels unengaging in its reward structure. A quick side tangent on volatile tonics; I think the volatile tonic system is a really good idea, giving us an extra layer of agency to our artifact power and buildcraft. However, due to similar issues as the ones I mentioned above, coupled with their lackluster potency meant they just weren't worth paying attention to. Also being a Stasis focoused artifact, if you werent building into Stasis then these tonics were as useful as the artifact. From the looks of the artifact next season, they're keeping this system and despite the issues I have with it, I hope they continue to expand on it. Any way Bungie can give us more tools to build with is good. Overall, there is a really good system with these tonics under all this mess, offering additional pieces for both buildcraft and loot progression by allowing players to double dip into separate loot pools, but there is simply too much friction for it to be used as the only source of deterministic loot drops. And using it to entirely replace crafting would require a lot of changes, changes that Bungie are absolutely capable of making. However compared to crafting... Ultimately, I feel that removing crafting was the wrong choice as it veers too far in the other direction back to the mercy of loot drop RNG. A system that some players, understandably, just dont like. But I understand why Bungie wants to move away from it, just look at Into the Light, never have loot drops felt so good as that event, and I missed out on a shiny Edge Transit :(. But, we all know why it felt so fun, and it [i]wasn't[/i] because we couldn't craft the weapons. Lets be honest... If we could've crafted the Into the Light weapons from the beginning alongside randomly dropped shinies, the community's love for that event would be unchanged. What Bungie have done is take away players deterministic loot progression in an attempt to add back in rewarding random drops. Unfortunately, as the community have made abundantly clear, you do not take away what players know they will get in favour of random chance loot drops that are, for the most part, only rewarding because you know you might not get them. There is a middle ground here somewhere, you don't need to cater to either demographics alone. Let people have the saftey net away from RNG while rewarding those who [b]want[/b] to chase loot drops and [b]enjoy[/b] the bragging rights of getting something they know not everyone has, small bragging rights yes, but still... its fun. Ok, I am now going into armchair game dev territory so Bungie, if you are real, you can stop reading. First, let me enhance any randomly dropped weapon that can be crafted, If Abberant Action randomly dropped with heal clip, incandescent, let me enhance that random drop. I dont know if its a tech issue or just weird design debt but I can rawdog the roll of a weapon I want [b]randomly[/b], which would technically mean I dont need to craft it, right? nope, I will still dismatle it because it cannot be enhanced. It's super dumb. Then, let any craftable weapon have a better version, like adepts, that I can chase in harder tier activites with cosmetic differences like shinies. that way I dont [i]have[/i] to engage with the crafting system to get powerful loot but if I dont get the drops I'm after, I have a less powerful (albiet not by much) crafted version to fall back on. This also gives small bragging rights to those who stuck out the mercy of RNG. In Heresy it looks like bungie is doing exactly this just without actually bringing back crafting so we'll see how it works out. They're also adressing this in Frontiers with challenge customisation and reward tiers, but again, if it isn't coupled with less powerful, craftable versions its gonna result in a lot of unhappy players. This is just my opinion, would like to hear what people think.