The tier system works for armor, but not weapons. The problem is, getting Tier 5s are too easy, to the point where it's not exciting and gets old instantly. What we need to make loot and the grind exciting again, is to go all in on the rarity aspect of guns, and making drop rates reflect that, all while shrinking the bloated rarity of Legendary. So imagine being a new player back in vanilla D2. You had white Common gear for a solid 20 levels before you saw green Uncommons. Then you had to go to like level 50 before blue Rares dropped. I think with today's system, new players jump to having Legendaries way to fast, and there is no gradual progression, that's a problem. Now here is where things could change. Look at every Legendary in the game, pick a selection of the worst performing, from overall stats to perk options and reviewed performance. Downgrade those weapons specifically and exclusively to a new pink rarity named Epic, and deliberately hard limit the available perks and even type of perks these rarity guns could have, including removal of origin traits, but these guns are clearly still better than Rare guns. Let that carry a newer player for a while, maybe till level 200. Then, from this point forward, loot drops are Legendary minimum, with higher rarities having much lower drop chances based on current level, rank, and activity difficulty, BUT are never fully guaranteed. I'll explain later. So what is a Legendary in this different vision? Basically tier 1s with restrictions. Again, only a handful of weapons from the current pool of every Legendary in the current game, would become exclusive drops to this rarity only. They are the standard guns we're familiar with, 2 perks per column, full range of possible perks and mods, introduces Origin traits. Getting to max power is not tied to rarity, and Legendaries are the basic reward you can expect. Now, this is where things start getting more exciting. Any Legendary that has an Adept variant, remove the normal Legendary version, and make Adept it's own rarity (maybe red?). Adept rarity is your tier 3 equivalent but with a new twist. So Adept weapons would introduce enhanced perks, adept mods, stat tracking, leveling, holofoil variants and Mementos, HOWEVER, to make this rarity more exciting to earn, is by making leveling the gun up matter more, where you can enhance more perks at certain thresholds, and the cherry on top, unlock an empty perk socket, where you need to extract the perk you want from a different copy of that gun, allowing you to build the God Roll if you were just shy. This would be expensive to do, through Banshee, but essentially you would be building the gun up from a tier 3 into a tier 4. And getting this rarity is exclusive to master/grandmaster difficulty or the Lighthouse. But wait, one more rarity above that. And I'm talking about taking the absolute best Legendaries and making them exclusive to this rarity (Mythic, Iridescent, whatever you want to call it). These are true tier 5s, everything enhanced (not at first, need weapon leveled up), special FX skins and kills unlocked at high weapon levels, 3 perk columns guaranteed. Make the drop rate lower than holofoils, lower than raid exotics even. Why? Because this is the chase and excitement we need to grind for. It can't be handed to us. Doing Ultimate difficulty increases the chances as well as being at max Guardian rank, but expect to be raid farming for a low chance. My final note is on Exotics. We need to go back to D1 where getting an exotic would make people scream with joy. D2 is very bloated with exotics, but what's sad is the game showers you with them. It is stupid easy to just go and buy most of them, and that needs to change. It may not matter for many veterans that have it all unlocked, but for the future and especially for new player excitement, these drops need to be lower. I'd make them easier to drop than this fictional Mythic rarity, I'd say treat them all like Cloudstrike, activity specific and low chances to drive incentives. I would limit how many exotics Xûr sells and which ones he can sell as well. So what does this model really improve? For one the overall joy of getting a higher rarity to drop is properly reflected. There's a better sense of progression of power. Exotics wouldn't be noticeably different at first but getting them at all as a new player would feel incredible compared to just buying most of them. And for me, I think the biggest improvement with this idea, is we would see as a community a wider mix of weapon rarities being consistently used. It wouldn't be everyone running Legendary Tier 5s, we'd see a blend of Legendary, Adept, and Mythic, and one could argue that makes no real difference by just taking the guns that exist and subdividing them into more rarities, but it's about taking the concept and power of Tiers, and making rarity actually reflect how rare it is, and giving better incentives to farm and grind activities. There's a difference between better rewards reflected by difficulty, vs rewards flat out guaranteed, and that's the main problem with loot right now. Too easy to get Tier 5s and exotics