The "Featured Gear" debacle is a result of Bungie's lack of confidence in their own creation. They want to see people who are using the "new stuff" that they made instead of the old stuff, but they don't know how to get people to want to use it without powercreeping it. Their solution is "temporary powercreep." Featured Gear, New Gear Bonuses, New Gear Mods... these are all things that expire/rotate so they can make the new stuff inherently better without continually increasing the relative power in the sandbox. I mean, just look at the brand new weapon type, the Heavy Crossbow: it's really bad at everything other than ammo economy; the Temporal Blast mod is carrying it for boss DPS. If that mod didn't exist, Bungie is convinced that no one would care about the weapon or want to use it. This is likely going to result in fewer buffs down the line, too. When you can hide an underperformer like the Heavy Crossbow behind a bunch of New Gear boosts and Volatile Mods, what incentive do you have to buff it? This comes double once that gear stops being "new," and the next group move in, get the boost and mods and take their place in your loadout. Even if they buffed the old stuff, they're still weaker thanks to NG bonuses so people won't use it anyway. tl;dr: Bungie uses this system because they're not confident in their design, they're unable to cope with people not using things that aren't powercrept, unable to make things interesting without powercreep, and don't want to spend dev time buffing underperformers. It needs to go.

I think the featured list is fine in terms of “here’s a small buff to specific weapons or damage resistance to some armor” … especially if some of that gear is in line with the artifact mods. But you should NEVER be forced to use featured items. And your score should NEVER be impacted by it.

Bungie: “Play like you want to”

It saves them money, they only need to balance a few items and it makes it easier to spot potential issues with exotics being too 'hot' Avant garde and the dlc bonus do a similar thing for the rest of the legacy gear, Bungie can ignore it, no balance pass required when its redundant. The whole dlc reeks of minimum effort, cut corners and all in recycled content.

It handcuffs the loot pool too. They can’t make old content relevant for more than 6 months so there will never be a period where all the old raids and dungeons have a purpose. They buried so much content with it. My other gripe is the champion mods that I’m constantly catering to in the champion loaded content. So many new great weapons just get overshadowed by the need to stun and won’t really have a chance to shine.

I agree 100%. Bungie has been slowly killing their own game with bad decisions for a while now. Nearly everyone dislikes the featured gear yet they double down on it. This is not the right direction for the game and they know it. Hopefully with new leadership we get some meaningful changes. The only thing they did right was the portal system. I dig it. However there’s no reason every exotic mission isn’t in portal and every strike in the base game. These slow trickles of fixes is hurting the player base as well. They have no issue rushing out armor ornaments that are broken every week but a change that would bring some of the base back or at least retain what they have left has to be weeks or months away. I get eververse but bungie needs to realize that if no one’s playing the game then no one is buying these ornaments.

Or at the very least, just a once per week challenge in ONE activity.

How is it "bad" if they are only required in Conquests and 1 PVP playlist?

It wouldn’t be bad if they just made every exotic featured

[quote]Title says it all. It’s KILLING build crafting and, more importantly, FUN!!![/quote] Power creep has been incentive enough to use new things for sometime now, at least for weapons. No need to have a featured list of exotics and new gear bonuses.

Agreed. Just baffles me that they would do something like that in the first place and think it was OK. Someone actually approved this BS and shoved it down the pipeline.