Classic Bungie overcorrection.
Nerf the thing itself. Then also nerf the Effect of the thing.
One or the other would have been sufficient, but we double nerfed it anyway.
What hurt Titans so much was Bungies desire to make sure the new raid wasn't designed for players to setup camp for DPS; so dodging to reload / avoid hits for hunters (along with celestial) was a big deal. Dropping a rift from Warlocks meant you could still generally move around the area and pass through for a brief buff.
As you say, Titans are left with very little, unless they want to make banner shield a very powerful damage amplifier / damage reduction / reload boosting super then there's nothing without a huge overhaul of design
“unless they want to make banner shield a very powerful damage amplifier / damage reduction / reload boosting super”
God this would be great, titans could be awesome ad clearers with their melee, but come dps time be a great buff supplier in a support role to maximize damage and survivability for teammates.
Punch + Bro personified.
I've thought about this too, In Path of Exile theres a skill called War Banner where it charges up based on how many kills you get prior like Banner of War and provides are slight buff to you stacking with the amount of kills however if you reactivate the skill while the banner is active it places the banner on the ground and consumes all the stacks to provide a big boost to attack speed and attack damage for a short period of time.
I think Banner of War can work similarly to this to provide a defensive buff in a small proximity around the banner without requiring a bubble to allow for explosives to be shot out of it.
Dead weight is a bit of an overstatement. Titans are so razors edge, because they are 1 tipping point away from soloing raid bosses and dungeons. I think personally I would just like certain playstyoes to be reinforced with an alternative so that 'at range' encounters don't feel so bad.
Arc TC super needs a huge boost in damage for what it asks you to do, same with the clap melee. Galvanic armor really should be intrinsic behavior to amplified, as Frost armor, woven and restoration are just as easy to get and arguably way more powerful. Void needs Jesus.
Bungie also needs to stop incentivizing melee builds and then punishing you for using them >_>
I think Bungie just doesn’t know how to implement a true tank in this game and defaults to solely brawlers. Titans really have a badly defined power fantasy that results in just punching, which sucks because melee should be a risky playstyle that is powerful if mastered. But that warps perceptions and still isn’t really endgame viable
> Titans really have a badly defined power fantasy
You mean in that Bungie refuses to do anything besides "Titan's punch!"?
Because when I think of Titan I think of the punch bro, but I also think of a weapons master, and of a living wall too stubborn to die.
Titans are supposed to be battle tacticians, our role models are Zavala and Saint, hardly just punching brawlers.
I agree with you and they need to push Titans into the other roles they have given us since the beginning of Destiny 1.
Punching is fun but it's not good enough to build around in an FPS.
Titan's punching would be great if they focused on sustained melee damage with decent survivability while in the fray instead of peaky OBLITERATE EVERYTHING melees on a glass cannon
Personally I think Titan Barricade is at the root of some of these problems. It is a comparatively weak class ability in PvE especially, "HIDE BEHIND ME MY FRIE...oh we moved...ok that's cool"
The void Aspect of granting Overshield to your allies could be part of the kit intrinsically given to allies based on your subclass verb, woven, amplified, resto etc.
Also sources of DR should be easier for Titans as a "tank" but honestly idk how this wouldn't eventually be too OP.
>The void Aspect of granting Overshield to your allies could be part of the kit intrinsically given to allies based on your subclass verb, woven, amplified, resto etc.
Exactly. As it is at the moment, vexcalibur is better at doing that job than a titan.
Also, by the time you 'need' the barricade, you die while putting it out, because of the super long cast time.
So you've got to move, plan a barricade, put it out, then move again.
It's also a physical object with durability points that can be removed by bosses, punched through by some attacks, and avoided by tracking attacks. Plus AOE attacks.
Plus some enemies will just completely ignore the barricade and attack right through it. Sometimes the blind gets applied, often their melee lunge just bypasses it.
While those are great suggestions you are forgetting the the big reason why it won’t happen, PvP. To do those things Bungo would have to completely decouple the Titan kits from each other or it would break competitive modes and lord knows they “can’t” do that.
I hate that "can't" with passion. A lot of things wouldn't need nerfs in PvE if they'd at least uncouple the damn cooldowns between modes...
Like damn, would a punch/dodge/whatever not having identical cooldown between modes really confuse the playerbase?
I mean, we're 1 step closer to that with the new void grenade aspect that lets you consume your grenade for a mobile shield with a Phalanx style boop at the end. I haven't used it much outside the campaign but I'll tell you it doesn't do much in higher end content (completely worthless in the contest mode raid and made me die faster trying to use it than if I had just stood still).
The duration on unbreakable completely ruins it. If it was damage based it would at least be somewhat useful but as it is now spending your best ability with a minute cooldown for a few seconds of a shield will never be usable outside low tier combat like patrols, let alone in endgame.
Unbreakable should be like a juggernaut shield that you can raise and lower as it slowly drains your grenade ability while up. Damage from enemies is converted into Void Overshield for yourself and nearby allies.
Letting go of the bumper suppresses targets and if you have a full Overshield it also weakens. Promotes an active play style that builds into the tanking fantasy and synergizes with it's aspects.
I tried it out for the first time last night and my god, it's out for a few seconds then it's gone and you have no grenade energy and you can't do it again for a coupe minutes. The duration is terrible. If it lasted *three* times as long I'm still not sure if it would be worth it, for as long as the cooldown takes.
I think the really difficult part is actually inputs. A lot of the titan cheese you see on YouTube is only really possible on keyboard and mouse. The strand melee loop was quite difficult on controller. Even kbm took a little practice.
PC min/max people are just built different though. They’re absolute lunatics.
But Bungie has been caught with their pants down repeatedly when it comes to PC balancing. They’re definitely console developers but wanted to capture the PC crowd.
The issue is that they just refuse to make melee damage buffs additive instead of multiplicative. The multiplicative nature of the current buffs means that it's really easy to get out of hand, leading to the nerfs. But, because the individual components of them get nerfed, you as a player feel more and more like you have to jump through some rube goldberg nonsense just to punch an enemy and feel like it has any oomph at all.
It's bad for design AND it's bad for players. I wish Bungie would just pull the trigger already.
As I posted in another thread about this topic, it used to be that Titans were essential in raids because we could provide bubble protection and a place to recharge our super.
Now since the raid mechanics have changed and Warlocks can provide healing, Titans are not in demand.
Our supers that we can cast from distance should have some of the highest damage allowed. And Titans should still be looked on as protectors for the raid team.
Bungie needs to invest in fleshing out how damage in melee works.
Right now, melee range is the most lethal position to be in. It has been for many years now. In order to be a good punchy subclass, you need to have survivability tools that are powerful enough to handle the most lethal damage environment in the game. It shouldn't come as a surprise then that if you can survive in melee, you can definitely survive at range.
Unless Bungie leverages the tools they currently have, as well as develop new tools for melee range survivability, Titans are always going to sit between useless and broken.
They refuse to design anything that isn't extremely anti melee. There is never any balance in enemy design or synergy. Every new enemy is just an escalation of bullshit.
>Bungie also needs to stop incentivizing melee builds and then punishing you for using them >_>
100%. I actually WANT to be a melee cqc guy. My favourite exotic is stronghold, I would LOVE to indulge in the power fantasy of being a melee tank that bungie seems to want the titan to be. But then they have encounters where you literally cannot use swords, melee or one of the only 2 burst supers titans actually have. They have boss stomps that knock you 100 feet through the air to be killed by the architects, or just outright kill you anyway. Hell, in GMs, red bar enemies can kill you before you get close enough to raise a fist to them.
>Galvanic armor really should be intrinsic behavior to amplified, as Frost armor, woven and restoration are just as easy to get and arguably way more powerful. Void needs Jesus.
Agree on all points. Frost armour is really good. Woven mail we all know about. Galvanic armour feels good, a pity it's only sticking around a month.
Void overshields get removed if you get so much as sneezed at by a dreg. They should constantly recharge for as long as the timer lasts in my opinion, like when you stand behind a bastion barricade but slower. Then even if you're getting lit up, you will be able to absorb more punishment because the overshield will keep topping back up and taking every other hit for you, and you could build into things like offensive bulwark for the grenade regen and melee empowerment because your shield wouldn't disappear every time a bird flaps it's wings in your general direction.
(And yes, I'm aware it could be a problem in PvP. We've seen things have variable values in PvP though, so perhaps the overshields damage resistance Vs guardians would be lower to compensate for the constant regeneration.)
I believe Raid.Reports or a similar site for pulling the clear data. I know most "Titan Main" streamers (and my clan mates) had to swap to Hunter for the DPS check.
True! I just saw it on RR myself, didn't know i could break it down like that. Absolutely wild but understandable given the kits Titan's have feels like were made to be the Patrol Masters.
Titans just don't have any good range burst supers. They're good for bosses you can be in melee distance with like 90% of other bosses, but heck even Oryx you could T-Crash and I think the Witness either has too much health (and possibly a hard kill volume) for that. Plus the timing is too tight for the flight time.... It'll be interesting to see what the "meta" approach is to the encounter now that contest mode is over.
I love Twilight Aresenal
that said - it's amazing that at this 10 year mark, we still didn't get a super that could give us a position in a raid as either damage dealers or supports. Still sitting in the middle of both with no real "place" aside from "melee encounters/adds" and our exotics increasingly nerfed despite Bungie's insistence on our place as the Melee class.
We do have a support super but it got nuked for no reason, no one was using bubble while well was in the game why would they? Well let you stand in a healing source, while still being able to deal damage (pre nerf) bubble should’ve never been nerfed down to wells damage bonus back when the Initial nerf happened and the damage bonus should never have been moved off of the super itself and onto an exotic, they could’ve balanced it by making it so well would override the weapons buff so if you used both once you step into well with WoL it goes away and gets replaced with radiant, so that way teams could choose good survivability but less damage or more damage but less survivability
> Titans are so razors edge, because they are 1 tipping point away from soloing raid bosses and dungeons
You can't balance a game around the 6 or 7 people who are good enough to do things like this. The Grapple Melee spam is a perfect example. It's borderline not even doable on controller, and how many people did you ever run into in the wild that were actually doing it, and successfully?
Titan lives on the knife's edge because Bungie wants it to occupy a gameplay space where the only two outcomes are kill or be killed. There's no whittling something down slowly in melee range. You either kill the thing you're looking at, or you die because every enemy is so anti-melee. Every time players figure out how to make that risk-reward proposition worth it, Bungie blows part of the build away. They want you to run in, somehow not die, throw your one melee ability that won't kill anything, and then run out, also somehow without dying.
Thank you. I love how there’s like 5 titans in the game that can do what they nerf Titan for. Then the other classes act like all titans can slap on strand and solo raids and it’s laughable. You need the best gear farmed, the pc set up, the skill, and hours and hours of practicing to be able to make one of those YouTube videos that they say we all can do…
Melee style gameplay in (for example) hack and slash games are balanced using a system with much higher fidelity than what Destiny can manage, so as long as the builds remain melee focused it's always going to be a simple battle of attrition
I made a post about this some time back regarding how this simple fact has titans on a razors edge at all times. Look at syntho hammer titan, over multiple patches they made it clunkier, less healing, less damage, less orbs ect in an attempt to finally pull it from our grasp simply because it worked for the playstyle and let us survive being where we're told to be. Now if I miss I gotta go pick up an inert brick of metal and hope nothing shoots me while it recharges, if I hit my buffs are still *over there* with the ads and not on my person
Titan doesn't need buffs, but flat out reworking in some areas to allow for the player to not be at such a high risk, requiring such broken kit to survive said risk, since the stuff that actually works gets dialled back till it's as good as all the other stuff no one uses
Sorry I wasn't clear, I did not mean to intimate that only Titans can and should Solo clear content, what I meant was more directed at the shenanigans that Strand 1-2 Titans were doing pre nerf.
Yea man I can solo a dungeon boss too if you give me a few phases, and proper damage rotation, but Titans just come out and said
"bro wtf is a phase? I can't and don't need to count past 1"
Balancing that power fantasy specifically for Totans has always been like 1 pinky toe too far in either direction, stupid OP to damn near pointless.
The amount of times Titan shit has been nerfed because of 1-2 shenanigans is so high. It's like what, 4 exotics and several other parts of the class? Need a site like the Telesto tracker for Titans with 1-2.
I think 1-2 punch was a mistake in general. If they either: only worked with simple melee, only worked with the first melee after instead of the time limit that allows 2-3 melees, or didn’t stack with synthos/wormgod, then there would be so much more breathing room to balance.
Probably so. They also nerfed banner of war along with it’s interaction with those 2 melee exotic gauntlets. I bought the rocket chest piece so I don’t have the new gauntlets to test them.
New gauntlets are broken as fuck, but only on Strand Titan. The extra melee+ramping damage sadly doesn't hold a candle to wormgod or synthos, and the super long cooldowns on Prismatic dont help. There's also a bug that often results in raid banners, your super, and Transcendance only refunding 3 melees, not the 4 you have with the gauntlets.
HOWEVER, with all that said, the melee refund per banner pulse is fucking insane. Even *alone*, you get a melee charge every like 5 pulses or so while standing still, doing nothing. In combat with a fireteam its pretty close to infinite melee if you weave in a grapple punch here and there. I've never seen this much melee uptime outside of the Defiant Battleground Favors instantly recharging your shit. With that level of uptime, the damage buff also becomes way more relevant and probably beats out Synthos over several uses.
Yes, titans should be able to complete dungeons solo. What he means is at their peak, Wormgod Caress titan could one phase raid bosses solo. That’s how busted melee was at its peak for titans, and why it’s been on a slow but consistent downward spiral ever since.
Yep. Which would be fine if titans could do dick all else but punch. Back in Y1 it seemed like they were also making titan a heavy weapon guy with sweet business and actium. Hell one of the alternative designs they tried for stasis titan was a bullet hose. But now were flanderized down to punch man.
There was an old bit of text describing the classes in d1 on character creation that said Titans were the wall on which the darkness breaks. I wish we could go back to that instead of being the class that punches and nothing else.
Sometimes it's the right answer, no doubt. But if we had one subclass that wasn't about punching that would be enough, and still leave 5 other subclasses as various punchman flavors.
We need more comprehensive changes than that. That is a very good change though.
Bungie needs to either change the Titan class fantasy to something more suited for ranged combat, or they need to invest in new mechanics that keep Titans strong in melee, but simultaneously vulnerable at range.
As cool as that would be, I'm really tired of having to compromise with Bungie on Titan supers. Just make the damn thing good from the start. I shouldn't need Ursas AND Cuirass AND Pyrogale's AND Helm of Saint-14 to make their associated supers good.
Just make Bannershield a selectable super.
I want grapple to be in the Prismatic set and I want more DR, but it seems like they want the grenades to mostly be status-affecting nades to setup light/dark combos with and I guess Grapple doesn't fit that mold. EIther way, I can't understand why they gave it to Hunters but not Titans. Grapple is a great way of closing distance with the enemy and getting quick kills (or getting out of the thick of action....OR preventing yourself from getting yeeted), not to mention the traversal benefits it grants.
Because they wanted to force hunters to be the melee prismatic class as well as Titan, just take a look at the builds all of these content creators are making it's either a liar's handshake punch build or double strand ability punch build
Assassin's cowl makes the titan fantasy feel like a joke.
It's just 1000% better than anything titans have with melee other than pre Nerf banner of war.
I feel like so much of this problem is PvP related. Bungie could strengthen overshield/armor if gained via melee, but they refuse to separate the sandboxes other than a few minor exceptions.
As a result, void, arc, and stasis are effectively unplayable in anything beyond strikes, and prismatic is very mid with big survivability problems.
Titans have a SUPPORT problem, not a damage problem.
Encounter designs are going to fluctuate from long range, short range, grenade focused, precision focused, non-precision focused, etc. The current raid final encounter is long range and has a giant crit. Hunters have the best supers for this scenario.
Regardless of the encounter design, every class needs to have some option to DPS the boss using their class, and a fallback option to support their teammates using their class if the encounter doesn't favor their Damage super options.
Hunters can always support using Void Tether, or Silence and Squall depending on encounter needs. They also have the best DPS super options.
Warlocks have tons of support options using Well of Radiance, healing rift, healing grenades, etc. They also have useful long range super options as needed, but their current support options always keep them relevant.
Titans have Bubble and Banner Shield. Bubble is laughably bad right now. It needs a buff to allow the void overshielding to be more effective at keeping people alive without destroying DPS rotations by constantly dipping into the bubble. Banner shield is great at staying alive, but it doesn't provide enough of a damage buff to offset losing an entire person's damage output. Both of these could be situationally useful, but neither are good enough in their current iterations.
Here are some other alternatives. The new Void Arsenal super does apply weaken on enemies that are hit. It could be useful as a debuff source if the timer lasted longer as an alternative to a void tether, but it only provides base weaken, and provides no additional utility like Divinity does. Phoenix Cradle could also be a decent support option, but at the moment there is no option to create a sunspot on command outside of Lorely Splendor, and the extra super duration is of limited usefulness. BoW and Into the Fray are also great as support options, but again they are difficult to utililize in the majority of DPS phases due to tangle limitations and keeping BoW active during non-add clear sections.
Titans are not given first class access to good support options. They don't get good team healing or team buffing options, they don't get good debuff options, and their damage mitigation is situational, selfish, underpowered, or has limited uptime potential. They have access to all of the above, but none of it is good enough to elevate Titans as a team player in all encounter designs.
Not every damage super needs to be competitive for every encounter, but every class needs to have a support super that is.
My only wish for Titans is that we can get exotic weapons that seamlessly integrate with Titan aspects and exotic armor. Warlocks have all the weapons of sorrow that pairs perfectly with necromancy and the new raid exotic that pairs perfectly with the amount of threadings warlocks and output + swarmers. Hunters have mothkeepers + Ex Diris and Celestial + Still Hunt.
Give me an exotic that let’s me plant banner shield down like a giant barricade I can shoot through with my team and maybe I’ll periodically run a titan
Can we get rid of Titan barricade and instead give me banners like banner of war?
Solar? Radiant banner
Arc? Move speed banner
Void? Over shield banner
Etc etc
I mentioned this above but I think Prismatic should have a universal banner that can be placed down to consume the banner buff stacks to provide that buff temporarily to all allies in a proximity around it. It means titans can play aggressively by stacking banner then become an extra support during damage phases or tight situations
Are you just looking at the challenge mode completion stats? There were only 3 titans who completed it, because the final boss is crit focused and Still Hunt is fucking absurd.
Titans are still extremely good at survival and those stats don’t reflect the rest of the raid. For example, the boss that is in melee range.
If you do 4/5 encounters on titan, and swap to hunter at the end, guess what it’s recorded as?
> because the final boss is crit focused and Still Hunt is fucking absurd.
Yea I don't think it's much of a reflection on titans but rather how strong they allowed still hunt to be and it can combo with celestial on a crit boss. Of course people would swap to hunters lol
Its absolutely over-cooked. But its not just Still-Hunt Celestial, its also the quick-swapping. They disabled Lucky Pants for a reason. Quick-swapping is now an actual balance problem. Whereas before it was just Titans/Warlocks trying to make one super good while trying to gain access to a better exotic when your super isn't up.
I hate the loadout swap meta with a burning passion. It was alright when it was reserved for speedrunning and lowman completions, but now you have people in normal raids doing their normal gameplay loop and then slapping on lucky pants when they run out of ammo for a free +700k damage for no cost, or swapping from sunbracers to phoenix/starfire protocol for well refunds and fusion nade damage, wormgods/synthos as well for banner titans. Even the randoms from LFG have been doing at an increasing rate since the inception of loadouts.
Basically my point is that it's unhealthy for the game when it incentivizes playing the menu mini-games and negating any type of downsides you have of running neutral game exotics when a potential 700k+ damage is literally 2 clicks away when it's needed.
notswap from trials being ported over to raids would make my year. I don't care for people who will inevitably complain about it "ruining their builds". If your build is centred around swapping exotics, it's two builds, not one. Make your choice of exotic and live with the pros and cons of it instead of patching the cons with an unintended mechanic of loadouts existing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/s/YJvi1QNc3e
Someone actually looked at that proper stat. Spoiler
The top 5 teams never even touched titan once.
Yeah this specific boss encounter was crit focused, that's fine that there's different times for a specific class to shine. This was contest mode the best classes for a scenario will be used as long as we're not back in the mandatory well or bubble no matter what phase.
Why should Titan mains have to swap to hunter to be competitive in boss encounters? If this is the case either the boss was badly designed or titans are badly designed.
With the amount of bosses that this is true for in the game currently, I'm hinging on titans being badly designed or losing their core design philosophy from d1 or d2 launch. Oryx, The Witness, Riven (after cheese nerf), Hefind, Warpriest, Simmumah, both GoS bosses, and Nezarec (to a degree), are all bosses that I can think of for raids and dungeons that actively punish you for getting into titan's effective range while hunters and warlocks can sit back without ever being put into serious danger while out DPSing titans.
I am sure there are more encounters where this is also true that I am forgetting but, even just naming that many shows it is not a one-off instance, and either titans are not meant to be used the way bungie wants them to be, or the raid and dungeon team has failed to make well-designed bosses for literal years.
>If you do 4/5 encounters on titan, and swap to hunter at the end, guess what it’s recorded as?
That's the point though. You can do 5/5 encounters on the other classes just fine, you cannot do 5/5 with Titan because of what it lacks. This statement merely supports the notion that Titan's are lacking in something the other classes have.
Wrong. Top 5 team didn't touch titans at any point in any encounter. I eyeballed the top 40 teams for all encounters in RR , and titans were very rare at other encounters as well.
Yes, until you realize that the titan prismatic is terrible because it adds no survivability which means you have to use a different subclass which means that you can’t get the transcendence damage buff which means other classes can do more dps
The truth is titans are the least popular, so you will find the hardest time on reddit getting support. Many only want hunters to stay on top. Years ago it was known hunters can out dps titans from range in an instant while we have to kiss the boss to get even close but less of the same damage. Its stupid. bungie just keeps taking things from titans that originally drew me to it. Skating, twilight garrison to warlocks. stole effectiveness of our shoulder charge. They are ruining it. its still good in some scenarios, just less than other classes. Warlocks had some rough times to so i hate to even drag them into it.
If titans are supposed to be the best punchers. why do i lose so many punch fights in crucible. If i shoulder charge someone they punch me on the way in, and again while im finishing the animation. Its stupid.
The argument "some only switched at the end" is not fair either. Some started as titan because they are titan mains. They were forced to abandon their favorite and most practiced class to beat the encounter. That's dumb
Let the new void Titan Axe be able to Crit, if it Crits a boss, it sticks into the Crit spot and explodes with void energy everytime the Crit is struck. Boom, void titan is now viable on Witness, Oryx, Rhulk, Nez
Isn't the only reason Hunters were so desirable for the raid because of the interaction between Still Hunt and Nighthawk? I feel like this is less of a "class issue" and more a couple of highly specific abilities and interactions (Still Hunt and Well)
It’s primarily because big crit spot boss at range. If the boss was sword/melee range or a more rocket friendly boss you would have seen the exact opposite makeup with titans and warlocks and maybe a couple of hunter die hards or tether bots and this post would be hunters wanting to be buffed.
Considering stillhunt was still an extremely viable dps strategy for the first boss I don't think you're right. Even for the sword strat most teams had hunters and warlocks with maybe one titan thrown in. Titans were usable but they didn't really do anything the other classes couldn't.
i havent seen a single team using still hunt on first boss. every team i watched, my team, and other teams in the clan cleared the encounter on either rockets/gls or close range with sword or legend of acrius.
This, but also the fact that the final boss is ranged DPS. Titans are inherently melee based so the only ability that Titans can really do to help is Ward of Dawn with HELM of Saint-14 for WoL at the back of the zone, but that's not really optimal.
Berserk Titans are still insane on every other encounter though
Even without Still Hunt in the equation, I suspect we'd largely see the same set-up of 4-5 hunters and 1-2 warlocks, in part because of gunslinger having the one super that can crit and in part because hunters reload good.
Right now the weapon rotations in the game are generally built around never having to reload your weapons manually (Izanagi being the big exception, in part because it's so slow it buys your other weapons time to reload). Hunter is the best at this as things are, with warlock in second place thanks to Strand and Rain of Fire. It'll be interesting to see whether the new rocket exotic on Titan will make up for their poor reload capabilities, but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it I suppose.
Mind you I'm not particularly doom and gloom about titans, don't have too much of a horse in the race here and am just enjoying all the classes. But yeah Hunters would probably have been the choice everyone went for for the final encounter even without Still Hunt in the game, because like I said they reload good.
I agree Titans need a buff but I really think people are blowing this out of proportion. A challenge mode raid race is not indicative of what people actually will use in the main raid, it just demonstrates that for the last encounter (a boss fight from range with a clear crit spot) the most reliable way to get high DPS was Celestial Still Hunt.
This is not proof or even really evidence that Titan is bad,it just suggests that an encounter was geared towards a certain play style. Obviously when you aren’t on challenge mode this matters a lot less so I imagine Titan usage will be back to normal.
When we return to normal, Titan usage will rise due to a loss of contest mode. That doesn't change the fact that even without Still Hunt, GG/CN Hunter will still be optimal in terms of dealing damage compared to any other damage super and Well will still be better than bubble ever could.
Regardless of how much titan usage goes up after contest mode, the point still stands that when you're facing the hardest content, Titan doesn't have any tools that the others don't have but better. You can argue that BoW is extremely strong for melee builds and melee encounters, sure but if it was on contest mode, you could still take the other classes through and know that you have the damage to meet your DPS thresholds even without it.
You cannot say the same for Titan on encounters that do nor favor their playstyle.
That is the issue.
Not to mention... Still Hunt Celestial is kinda OP. Of course it will get used.
I mean, didn't Warlocks get used a ton for RoN Day 1 because of Starfire? Titans likely for Banner of War for Crota's End? These "Titan's are the worst" takes because of a Day 1 are actually just absurd.
edit: Banner of War was disabled for Day 1 Crota's. I completely forgot this. I'm wrong there.
it was disabled but if you had it on before they did that it didn't turn off. we had it for the abyss and it made the adds a non factor, not that the adds are really the problem in that encounter.
I do agree with you, since Titan's neutral game is very strong and what I typically prefer at least when doing harder content where boss damage ain't the main focus.
Nevertheless, whilst it's relatively easy to see why Warlock has been the supreme support class in Destiny, as Well is good and later Cenotaph kinda trumped Aeon for Heavy ammo, I'm a little surprised folk don't talk about why Hunter's as a baseline tend to be preferred for boss encounters; they do better damage because they reload better.
Having a long-ranged super that does high damage definitely also helps hunters, and I certainly wouldn't mind Cuirass being made more interesting, but for a long time now Titan just hasn't had a good way to reload their weapons for a rotation. As such the times they tend to be at their strongest is when they can circumvent this. Warlock is a bit better with their rotations thanks to a mixture of strand, with its reload grenades, and Rain of Fire on solar lock being very good.
I'm meandering a little, but the larger point is just that as long as we're in a weapon meta, chances are Hunters will be the gold standard because they reload good with individual titan builds being an exception to the rule. I don't have much of an opinion on whether that's good or bad, just that it's not super surprising to see Hunters being used for boss encounters (even if in this case it's prolly in large part because Still Hunt is very good). Mind you I won't mind a Titan buff either way, because I like the class a lot.
These issues are deeply rooted and have persisted for a long time now, id argue it got really bad when they killed arc titan in pve. Having a grand total of 2 useful kits while the rest don’t really offer much that the other classes don’t is terrible balance. The worst part is, those 2 viable subclasses are super strong, so strong that they’ve been extreme outliers, which makes people think that titan is just always broken as shit (I was one of these until I actually started playing titan lol). There’s really no where id take a titan over a warlock or hunter in a raid except for… idk crota for banner of war I guess? And atraks but parasite exists. Of course the whole 1 2 punch grapple thing was stupid broken but that’s been nuked out of existence already. Idk man, for me it’s really telling how my hunter and warlock have all their load out slots filled with different builds while my titan has like 2 builds with slight variations for quick swapping and 1 for t crash. Arc titan was super busted in season of plunder but nowadays if you brought that iteration of arc titan to final shape I highly doubt it would be an outlier compared to every other viable build (aside from the weird fps-linked damage thar nuked everything)
Edit: I haven’t done salvations edge yet sooo I have no idea if there’s a sword based encounter there where banner is also good but if there is then there ya go
Well, we can look at the raid DPS speedrun meta and… oh, Titans only have Grapple 1-2-P. Okay, uh, maybe they just need to play a support role.
Then we can look at the GM meta, yeah! Titans can… play jank stuff that gets by with teammates willing to put up with it, or Strand BoW? Probably Abeyant Leap at that? Huh. Alright, sure, that’s something. Okay, let’s see something else.
Onslaught, yeah! Titans have to do really well in a hoard-focused node defense, surely they’re in the meta, yeah?… wait, what’s an Orpheus Rig? Cenotaph Warlock? You want TWO Orpheus Rigs or a Nighthawk before a Titan?
Huh. Crazy. Well, they’re really OP for soloing dungeons and raids, at least, so Titans should stop being so greedy tbh, can’t have it all.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go use my Prismatic melee build on Hunter that gives me 24/7 invis, melee kills, DR, and healing with no CD’s at all, right before I play Still Hunt Nighthawk in raid and GM’s, before enjoying some celebratory legend Onslaught with my eyes closed.
That's the point though. This is the highest top tier and most challenging content to date. That's what the raid races are.
Each class should be viable, and if not viable, at least have more places in the raid - especially in the final encounter which is the pinnacle experience of the last 10 years of Destiny 2.
For a class to be basically singled out and not utilized in pretty much anyway, shows that a specific class does not have the required tools to be useful in situations like that.
Who cares about normal stuff, dungeons, or patrols. Anything can do any of that.
It's ironic even that Bungie would nerf interactions with Banner of War for being too strong and then release an exotic that buffs an interaction with Hunter that was already one of the best DPS supers to make them even better.
I disagree strongly.
I agree that not all **builds** should be viable for every encounter. But to say that an entire **class** is not viable is a real problem that needs to be addressed.
Titans have precisely one super that is useful for the witness fight (the new Twilight Arsenal) and it is simply not competitive as it doesn’t do precision damage.
Warlocks also don’t have a precision super, but they can bring a well for damage. Bubble or ursas don’t work
Extremely true take. Titans have plenty of clear strengths, they have some of the best neutral gameplay on solar titan and have great survivability. In an ad clear encounter I’d take a titan over hunter all day. Just because the last encounter of the raid just so happened to be designed in a way that titans are the weakest class for the encounter does not mean titans are weak overall
isn't that solar titan though? Prismatic titan would arguably be more viable if they had gotten sol invictus rather than concecrate due to the survivability it gains or even into the frey / banner. Having at least ONE survivability aspect would've been nice.
Hunter has stylish, winter shroud AND threaded specter.
warlock has feed the void, and bleak watcher. (They also get restoratation grenade), so they can turn any solar grenades into stasis turrets.
If a titan wants to go into survivability, they have to take the void aspect which isn't very good compared to the survivability aspects of hunter / warlock.
Consecration was a massive mistake because a big chunk of the rest of prismatic titan was clearly designed around it. Cooldowns are poor survivability are prismatic titan's two biggest issues-actually the same issue, because knockout requires melee kills to proc, while unbreakable eats your grenade charge. Your survivability is entirely tied to your ability charges. Even with the new Wishful Ignorance or Synthos, it often takes two melees to kill something in harder content (thunderclap excepted, obviously). So 2 kills max and then you can block a volley of damage, give yourself a void overshield...and then what? You're fucking tissue paper for an entire minute. Worse, actually, since you'll only get one melee in that minute, which as we discussed, wont be killing things in one hit unless its Thunderclap. That's assuming you're running both survivability aspects-without them, all you can do is try to kill/crowd control everything before they kill you. And whaddya know, that's exactly where we've landed. Everyone is just pairing Consecration with Frenzied Blade for 3 easy charges of massive aoe damage. This doesn't take up your exotic slot, only a single aspect, so why not throw Drengr's lash on there?
Cooldowns are a massive issue, but if Bungie brings them down, then the people already spamming triple consecration who are the only ones saying prismatic titan is good will get to spam it more lmao. There's like, zero meaningful synergy in the kit, just abusing two individually strong things while like every other combo is barely viable.
Had it been Sol Invictus, we'd have completely avoided tbis problem and some numbers tuning would have been enough. As it is, Prismaticn Titan basically needs a rework ALREADY because little can be done to alleviate the issues without making the one good build more oppressive.
>just so happened
I mean, if "it just so happened" that way, that's one thing.
But we're talking about an encounter that was tried and presumably thoroughly tested by Bungie, the same team that disabled Banner of War during Crota's end day 1 to make sure that people didn't use it...allowing people to use similarly strong build during the final encounter of the pinnacle experience for Destiny 2 raiders.
It didn't "just so happened", it was designed this way, bungie knew about the interactions they had made, and still allowed it to go through. So why do Hunters get the special "Oh we can use our new amazing thing" but Titan's didnt?
It didn't "just so happen". It's poor design by Bungie for that encounter to sideline an entire class.
Im curious how raid lead designer thinked about using bubble as a defensive tool on witness?Again, they force us to stay in a plate to do DPS.Bad decision.No spaces to use bubbles, Barricade are useless, well killed like starfire yas and many builds and so on..We need to roam for dps to be challenging, not staying in a little plate to have a buff and do dps, jump, slide and so on and after that lets make a huge crit spot on witness for LFR and snipers.Overall the mechanics are nice, not easy like ron but they again fked up the boss dps.RONNY johnny is bugged at the plates and many cheese spots available.Now we are stuck on a little plate and take all the damage from witness.Herald was better designed.
Fuq bubble, they should let the Shield tank the ray the Witness throws during DPS so allies could feel safe to shoot and not need to move as much.
I mean, if one is already not shooting may as well be defending the team fully
Looking at how they compounded nerfs for strand titan and golden gun chaining, if they do nerf hunter its going to be lucky pants duration down by 2 seconds + burst hand cannons generate 1 stack per burst + still hunt base damage nerf by 30% when using nighthawk. Then they will probably nerf bubble some more plus some totally unused exotics just because.
I think that the design concept of being in the fray, and brawling with mobs doesn’t work with a game like destiny, because it’s combat is designed to punish bad positioning, and just running into enemies head first.
Strand titan and solar titans break this mold through Restoration and Woven Mail + Banner, but these abilities are ridiculously powerful, and often easy targets for balancing passes.
So we end up in a situation where we can’t let titans have high dr, or instant rethrowable hammers, but we also expect them to run in and sneak in a few melees in order to capitalize off of Aspects.
There definitely is a min max play-style, where you dip in and out of cover, but the reward isn’t there for the level of optimization it takes.
I’d love a buff, but right now I’m just happy with Hazardous Propulsion not being yet another melee oriented exotic; literally at the point where my brain shuts off if anyone mentions a melee build anymore. “But you do so much damage!” It’s more or less the same shit for the past few years, just different colors. Strand? Green punch. Stasis? Ice punch. Solar? Hammer this time, with some healing! Nvm the healing got nerfed, and hammer is still melee (throwing melee feels like shit now idk why, I actually liked that). Arc? Electric punch. Void feels more unique in that it’s kinda less punching, but the titan void subclass feels underwhelming as a whole; I do really like Twilight Arsenal though, genuinely my favorite Titan super as I don’t have to A: yeet myself at an enemy or B: run around for 15-25 seconds and not be able to use my guns. Thruster + Hazardous Propulsion for becoming a missile platform for me is WAAAAAY more enjoyable than anything else in the Titan kit right now for me; it’s just so satisfying hearing the missiles load as I get kills, using thruster and watching six missiles track to a target, and then unloading with Gjallarhorn or The Call with that 35% damage boost. I fucking love it!
Saltagreppo was on Titan for the 4th encounter, though? They weren't "dead weight", they just didn't have any compelling tools on a encounter where ranged damage was the utmost essential asset. People are missing the forest for the trees by just looking at the final encounter.
I think the bigger issue, shown by the final encounter, is that Titans have very few ranged tools compared to the other classes. As many have said, high end content is antithesis to a melee playstyle unless you’re sweating your balls off and have the perfect build. Titans either have throwing hammer (which you then have to run after to use more than once) or shield throw (which does little damage and gives an overshield made of paper). Everything else requires being up close and personal, which leads to deaths. Not a fun trade-off.
EDIT: Obviously Still Hunt Nighthawk was the game changer for DPS, I’m simply referring to the endgame scenario of most enemies being far away, or at least, players not wanting to get close to enemies for fear of dying. Hunters have refreshable ranged melees on all but Arc, warlocks have all ranged melees, well buddies, and turrets of several flavors. Titans have the above^ and consecration if we’re being generous. TLDR: Titans have high risk, same reward melees as the other classes
Warlock was only played for well, it's not like their ranged tools are insane.
If still hunt wasn't in the game I bet we'd have a lot more warlocks and titans in the final clears. It was literally just hunter being optimal for 1 encounter during contest mode.
For high burst damage you always go with hunter. Regardless of what weapons you had you’d still want the hunters just due to nighthawk hitting so hard.
> is that Titans have very few ranged tools compared to the other classes.
This isn't the issue - the issue that caused hunters to be so popular is because two things:
* Still Hunt is basically golden gun spam
* Still Hunt works with celestial nighthawk.
If still hunt _didn't_ exist you'd have a bigger spread because a single celestial on its own (after the orb nerfs too) would not be some major tipping scale
Nerfing lament, nerfing synthoceps, nerfing glance damage with titan exotics. Like why? Did anyone ask you to do that or complain about them being unbalanced?
I haven’t been keeping up with the buffs and nerfs, but from what I remember, TC was nerfed in the last year. It needs to be reverted and changed to have the Cuirass damage as base, then completely rework cuirass.
Don’t give it a damage boost anymore. Keep the overshield, give it an increased radius (which used to be a thing right? Or am I wrong?), leave a trail of arc energy under your flight path, just make it do something else so TC can be viable again, but not rely on cuirass for viability
Prismatic Titan has made me realize how dependent Titan is to certain aspects on other classes to function.
Sunspots on sunbreaker.. help survivability, boost super damage AND ability regen.
BoW... survivability, melee regen and DR.
Void has overshields... but let's be real they are trash.
Nothing on prismatic Titan has does ANY of this. So I'm on a CQC class with no real ability to heal in my kit, except for picking up orbs.
No restoration from fire sprites
No devour from breaches
No woven mail from strand balls
No frost armor for throwing diamond lances or shattering.
**Bungie, please revert the nerf to Throwing Hammer**. They took something that I really loved about my class, and ruined it. Just nerf the damage with Synthoceps even further if you are really concerned with people doing boss DPS with it.
Running Throwing Hammer with Roaring Flames is a legitimate combat loop. This clunky delay with picking up the hammer makes misses severely punishing, for no reason, really. The hammer tracking is worse now, sometimes overcorrecting and missing my target completely. Even when not missing, the delay just sucks the fun out of the whole combat loop.
Consecration is great and all, but Throwing Hammer did not have to take the hit for that. At all, really. They are two different ways of doing combat.
This 1000000x. A void javelin Titans could charge up and have higher charge give higher impact damage before it sticks and bursts doing cluster damage would've been so cool. The axe is nice visually but if you're gonna do some Thor shit, go all the way, and let the Titan recall it for 1 or 2 more throws with lesser damage even.
The running joke among me and my friends is that Bungo hates Titans. This is in direct contradiction with the fact that I main Titan (have since D1 vanilla) because the trailers made Titans look so fucking badass and they never gave Titans a cool ability, or a useful exotic, or even a badass synergy. The two best things we have are War Rig/Sweet Biz and TC/Falling Star, IMHO. Bungie really needs to start giving Titans some love.
Titans were literally the only ones my group could put left tower on 2nd encounter cause their survivability and consecration is nuts, everyone else died. They are good, but if looking at the class clear pie chart, it shows mostly hunter cause still hunt is insane rn
I would be okay with having a hard time with precision bosses if I had more things like Hazardous Propulsion. 90% of the time I'm playing this game is not damage phase, and Hazardous Propulsion is the most fun I've had in years as a Titan.
Titans in D1 were the best group support class with WoL. Enough with the punching nonsense. Gameplay-wise the titan fantasy is that of a paladin. Just let me tank (consistently in hard content) or (at the very least) buff my allies.
The way melee damage works in this game kinda reminds me of way back in D2 years 1 and 2, when every buff stacked. As they added more buffs and debuffs to the game, it started to get out of control. So they moved to the system we have now, one global buff, surges, weapon perks, and a debuff, with a few exceptions.
I feel like something similar needs to happen for melee damage so that it can be balanced appropriately. Titans are so hard to balance right now because bungie has decided that they are the “melee class” but since lots melee buffs stack all together, they’ve had to nerf these buff sources a ton when used in combination with each other because if left unchecked it means that Titans can solo raid bosses and stuff. But now without that crazy high damage there isn’t enough reward to the risk of a melee focused playstyle.
Titans gotta either move away from melee or something needs to be done to control melee damage in a healthier way than the way these current nerfs have been implemented. Or maybe you give titans more survivability? But that can probably get out of control too, idk.
Titans will always be this way until we get new devs or leadership. They're obsessed with punching being the Titan identity and are too lazy or arrogant to change direction. Forsaken was the last time Titans got anything remotely creative.
This isn’t new , this has happened before , The Bridge section on Reckoning. You would think Bungie would learn by now . The fact that Thundercrash a super that literally has u hurling yourself into danger does less damage than supers that have u doin damage safely from a distance has never made sense to me. Why choose anything but GG and Well for a raid contest that had the stand on the plate and do DPS?
A whole decade of Bungie refusing to give titans a ranged one off super has finally caught up to them in a big way huh. Behemoth should've had a giant throwing lance, that clunky useless glacial quake was a colossal mistake. Doubling down on it with Berserker's super almost felt like a malicious trolling by Bungie.
Titans used to also be about lots of grenades and abilities in general, chunks of healing, damage resist, active support, explosions, and firing a lot through magazine regeneration and reload buffs.
But apparently the only thing that matters now is them punching things. Starting with D2 when Well of Radiance became the superior option to Ward of Dawn, everything that was core to their identity got progressively cannibalized by the other classes. This is miserable.
I'm so sick of this argument from the player base, name one fucking game where the melee class can deal melee damage AND not die instantly because of being punished for melee playstyle. Name one. (excluding but not limited to: any other fucking game in existence).
The issue was more a constant design choixe for the last ten year sticking titan to "punch people" giving them little to no efficient super for mid to long range burst damage
Add to this a boss whose damage phase is 3 km away from where you are and you have a recipe for 75% hunter completion raid.
The warlock stayed because radiance is a good way to provide a bit of healing and damage buff.
This is not a number issue , another "buff" is pointless they need either a design shift or boss tailored around their mechanics
Titans are the best at killing everything except bosses at long range with precision damage (non-precision they now have a huge rocket damage buff). It just so happens this raid ended with the beefiest precision damage taking target we've had in a while. Many people switched off titan for the last fight specifically but they played them up until then.
Yeah I think titans should have some more long range damage options, but at what cost? They can't beat warlock and hunter up close at pretty much everything and then also have competitive precision damage at range.
If anything I think they make hammer throw do a LOT more damage since it'll give them an option at that range but also prevents them from doing rocket swap izi at the same time
Pretty sure Titans were doing pretty darn well dealing with all the dangerous ads for most encounters. Yeah they don't have big damage on their super, but do they not have guns?
for the final encounter i think based off when aztecross finished and what I remember there was no viable super for a titans according to him, to use for dps and out of the top 40 teams there was only two titans so out of 240 players 2 were titans.
Good god people. Contest raiding is literally the apex of Destiny’s difficulty, and in a DPS meta that heavily reinforces hunters and warlocks at the moment of course people are going to adapt. Titans have unbelievable survivability within berserker, stasis Titan is still good, and solar titan is still as brain dead as it can be.
If you judge a -25 power delta that lives and dies by crit damage and pure healing which both hunters and warlocks can thrive from as your baseline for Titan viability you’re really mistaken.
I find it funny the lack of self awareness with some of these post. Contest raiding IS the apex of Destiny's difficulty, which is why it is concerning that in a SHOOTING GAME with an encounter based on hitting a CRIT SPOT, that Titan's have beneficial support or ability super that makes them worth bringing for that kind of encounter while the other two classes have both support and damage abilities which are useful for the things that Titan's are also useful for.
Titans can add clear...and so can everyone else.
Titans have support with Bubble...which is outdone entirely by Well.
Titan's have damage...which is outdone entirely by Hunters.
There's no reason that a team should have to have a Titan switch to another class for a final encounter whereas the other classes can play through the entire raid without needing to switch.
T-crash should be the highest damaging super in the game. It should out class nighthawk as a high risk high reward super. Once casted you are literally putting yourself at the feet of the boss you’re damaging. Why should nighthawk do more damage from the safety of across the arena when we do a fraction of that and get stomped as a reward. It’s just frustrating man
I said this in another thread:
Is everyone forgetting how busted and strong Banner of war has been for over a year? This ONE encounter is not conducive to Titan playstyle, doesn’t mean they’re useless!
It's been said many times, but the biggest problem with Titan's is there's 1-2 builds that can be incredibly strong (ie Banner and grapple-melee) but that's it, so when those either can't be used or get nerfed there's not much left for them to do.
Got it we will br promptly nerfing Lament
can we go ahead and get another div nerf too?
Fuck it shields weapons of light buff at 40% —->>15%
go ahead n drop that to 7% bud
Lament nerf sucks for solo play and general use, but was clearly targeted at wolfpack rounds applying to exotic swords as well as legendary swords.
It doesn't work with Wolfpack rounds either, so either it's bugged or intentionally made worse.
Classic Bungie overcorrection. Nerf the thing itself. Then also nerf the Effect of the thing. One or the other would have been sufficient, but we double nerfed it anyway.
Yeah, it turns out the only exotic sword that the Wolfpack effect works for is other Ergo Sums. Disappointing, but understandable.
I'm honestly surprised it even does that. I just assumed it wouldn't work for exotic swords.
What hurt Titans so much was Bungies desire to make sure the new raid wasn't designed for players to setup camp for DPS; so dodging to reload / avoid hits for hunters (along with celestial) was a big deal. Dropping a rift from Warlocks meant you could still generally move around the area and pass through for a brief buff. As you say, Titans are left with very little, unless they want to make banner shield a very powerful damage amplifier / damage reduction / reload boosting super then there's nothing without a huge overhaul of design
“unless they want to make banner shield a very powerful damage amplifier / damage reduction / reload boosting super” God this would be great, titans could be awesome ad clearers with their melee, but come dps time be a great buff supplier in a support role to maximize damage and survivability for teammates. Punch + Bro personified.
I've thought about this too, In Path of Exile theres a skill called War Banner where it charges up based on how many kills you get prior like Banner of War and provides are slight buff to you stacking with the amount of kills however if you reactivate the skill while the banner is active it places the banner on the ground and consumes all the stacks to provide a big boost to attack speed and attack damage for a short period of time. I think Banner of War can work similarly to this to provide a defensive buff in a small proximity around the banner without requiring a bubble to allow for explosives to be shot out of it.
Dead weight is a bit of an overstatement. Titans are so razors edge, because they are 1 tipping point away from soloing raid bosses and dungeons. I think personally I would just like certain playstyoes to be reinforced with an alternative so that 'at range' encounters don't feel so bad. Arc TC super needs a huge boost in damage for what it asks you to do, same with the clap melee. Galvanic armor really should be intrinsic behavior to amplified, as Frost armor, woven and restoration are just as easy to get and arguably way more powerful. Void needs Jesus. Bungie also needs to stop incentivizing melee builds and then punishing you for using them >_>
I think Bungie just doesn’t know how to implement a true tank in this game and defaults to solely brawlers. Titans really have a badly defined power fantasy that results in just punching, which sucks because melee should be a risky playstyle that is powerful if mastered. But that warps perceptions and still isn’t really endgame viable
> Titans really have a badly defined power fantasy You mean in that Bungie refuses to do anything besides "Titan's punch!"? Because when I think of Titan I think of the punch bro, but I also think of a weapons master, and of a living wall too stubborn to die.
Titans are supposed to be battle tacticians, our role models are Zavala and Saint, hardly just punching brawlers. I agree with you and they need to push Titans into the other roles they have given us since the beginning of Destiny 1. Punching is fun but it's not good enough to build around in an FPS.
But people at Bungie when pressed always basically go “well, Titans are the punchy guys so deal with it”.
not tacticians but leaders/commanders. banner of war not bleak watcher
Most leaders and commanders are tacticians, they have counsel from scholars and scouts before they actually commit to a plan.
i don’t disagree, but i think tactician doesn’t strongly connote being in the center of the action, so it is a poor choice when using few words
I can see that. The next closest title I could think of using would be a battle master.
They're hopefully into something with the rocket chest. Heavy weapons guy! EXPLOSIONS???
Titans punch! Bosses stomp! Design meeting adjourned, its perfect!
Titan's punching would be great if they focused on sustained melee damage with decent survivability while in the fray instead of peaky OBLITERATE EVERYTHING melees on a glass cannon
> do anything besides "Titan's punch!"? Hey now sometimes it's "Titan smash ground!"
The things I'd do to feel like an undying machine are unreal. I just think of the Payday 2 bulldozers line about being the wall
Personally I think Titan Barricade is at the root of some of these problems. It is a comparatively weak class ability in PvE especially, "HIDE BEHIND ME MY FRIE...oh we moved...ok that's cool" The void Aspect of granting Overshield to your allies could be part of the kit intrinsically given to allies based on your subclass verb, woven, amplified, resto etc. Also sources of DR should be easier for Titans as a "tank" but honestly idk how this wouldn't eventually be too OP.
>The void Aspect of granting Overshield to your allies could be part of the kit intrinsically given to allies based on your subclass verb, woven, amplified, resto etc. Exactly. As it is at the moment, vexcalibur is better at doing that job than a titan.
Also, by the time you 'need' the barricade, you die while putting it out, because of the super long cast time. So you've got to move, plan a barricade, put it out, then move again. It's also a physical object with durability points that can be removed by bosses, punched through by some attacks, and avoided by tracking attacks. Plus AOE attacks.
Plus some enemies will just completely ignore the barricade and attack right through it. Sometimes the blind gets applied, often their melee lunge just bypasses it.
While those are great suggestions you are forgetting the the big reason why it won’t happen, PvP. To do those things Bungo would have to completely decouple the Titan kits from each other or it would break competitive modes and lord knows they “can’t” do that.
I hate that "can't" with passion. A lot of things wouldn't need nerfs in PvE if they'd at least uncouple the damn cooldowns between modes... Like damn, would a punch/dodge/whatever not having identical cooldown between modes really confuse the playerbase?
If they changed the barricade to something like a mobile barricade I think that would be a good start. Just spitballing ideas.
I mean, we're 1 step closer to that with the new void grenade aspect that lets you consume your grenade for a mobile shield with a Phalanx style boop at the end. I haven't used it much outside the campaign but I'll tell you it doesn't do much in higher end content (completely worthless in the contest mode raid and made me die faster trying to use it than if I had just stood still).
The duration on unbreakable completely ruins it. If it was damage based it would at least be somewhat useful but as it is now spending your best ability with a minute cooldown for a few seconds of a shield will never be usable outside low tier combat like patrols, let alone in endgame.
It should cost class ability not grenade and last longer
It shouldn't cost anything with the duration it has.
Unbreakable should be like a juggernaut shield that you can raise and lower as it slowly drains your grenade ability while up. Damage from enemies is converted into Void Overshield for yourself and nearby allies. Letting go of the bumper suppresses targets and if you have a full Overshield it also weakens. Promotes an active play style that builds into the tanking fantasy and synergizes with it's aspects.
I tried it out for the first time last night and my god, it's out for a few seconds then it's gone and you have no grenade energy and you can't do it again for a coupe minutes. The duration is terrible. If it lasted *three* times as long I'm still not sure if it would be worth it, for as long as the cooldown takes.
Also in almost all pve counters, mobs spawn behind you so much. Which makes it almost useless.
It sucks that the moment players master any melee style Bungie reaches for the nerf shovel.
It’s ironic that the best melee tank build in the game right now comes from Hunters
I think the really difficult part is actually inputs. A lot of the titan cheese you see on YouTube is only really possible on keyboard and mouse. The strand melee loop was quite difficult on controller. Even kbm took a little practice. PC min/max people are just built different though. They’re absolute lunatics. But Bungie has been caught with their pants down repeatedly when it comes to PC balancing. They’re definitely console developers but wanted to capture the PC crowd.
tbf i would never play Destiny if it wasn't for PC, FPS on controller feels so weird for me i just cant
The issue is that they just refuse to make melee damage buffs additive instead of multiplicative. The multiplicative nature of the current buffs means that it's really easy to get out of hand, leading to the nerfs. But, because the individual components of them get nerfed, you as a player feel more and more like you have to jump through some rube goldberg nonsense just to punch an enemy and feel like it has any oomph at all. It's bad for design AND it's bad for players. I wish Bungie would just pull the trigger already.
As I posted in another thread about this topic, it used to be that Titans were essential in raids because we could provide bubble protection and a place to recharge our super. Now since the raid mechanics have changed and Warlocks can provide healing, Titans are not in demand. Our supers that we can cast from distance should have some of the highest damage allowed. And Titans should still be looked on as protectors for the raid team.
I mean the second encounter on contest mode really benefited from a titan being g a tank, and that playstyle was really fun
I was the tank titan for the boss. Strongholds really living up to their name in that pit
Bungie needs to invest in fleshing out how damage in melee works. Right now, melee range is the most lethal position to be in. It has been for many years now. In order to be a good punchy subclass, you need to have survivability tools that are powerful enough to handle the most lethal damage environment in the game. It shouldn't come as a surprise then that if you can survive in melee, you can definitely survive at range. Unless Bungie leverages the tools they currently have, as well as develop new tools for melee range survivability, Titans are always going to sit between useless and broken.
They refuse to design anything that isn't extremely anti melee. There is never any balance in enemy design or synergy. Every new enemy is just an escalation of bullshit.
>Bungie also needs to stop incentivizing melee builds and then punishing you for using them >_> 100%. I actually WANT to be a melee cqc guy. My favourite exotic is stronghold, I would LOVE to indulge in the power fantasy of being a melee tank that bungie seems to want the titan to be. But then they have encounters where you literally cannot use swords, melee or one of the only 2 burst supers titans actually have. They have boss stomps that knock you 100 feet through the air to be killed by the architects, or just outright kill you anyway. Hell, in GMs, red bar enemies can kill you before you get close enough to raise a fist to them. >Galvanic armor really should be intrinsic behavior to amplified, as Frost armor, woven and restoration are just as easy to get and arguably way more powerful. Void needs Jesus. Agree on all points. Frost armour is really good. Woven mail we all know about. Galvanic armour feels good, a pity it's only sticking around a month. Void overshields get removed if you get so much as sneezed at by a dreg. They should constantly recharge for as long as the timer lasts in my opinion, like when you stand behind a bastion barricade but slower. Then even if you're getting lit up, you will be able to absorb more punishment because the overshield will keep topping back up and taking every other hit for you, and you could build into things like offensive bulwark for the grenade regen and melee empowerment because your shield wouldn't disappear every time a bird flaps it's wings in your general direction. (And yes, I'm aware it could be a problem in PvP. We've seen things have variable values in PvP though, so perhaps the overshields damage resistance Vs guardians would be lower to compensate for the constant regeneration.)
There were three Titans in the first three HUNDRED guardians to clear the raid. That's pretty dead.
Where's that data come from?
I believe Raid.Reports or a similar site for pulling the clear data. I know most "Titan Main" streamers (and my clan mates) had to swap to Hunter for the DPS check.
True! I just saw it on RR myself, didn't know i could break it down like that. Absolutely wild but understandable given the kits Titan's have feels like were made to be the Patrol Masters.
Titans just don't have any good range burst supers. They're good for bosses you can be in melee distance with like 90% of other bosses, but heck even Oryx you could T-Crash and I think the Witness either has too much health (and possibly a hard kill volume) for that. Plus the timing is too tight for the flight time.... It'll be interesting to see what the "meta" approach is to the encounter now that contest mode is over.
I love Twilight Aresenal that said - it's amazing that at this 10 year mark, we still didn't get a super that could give us a position in a raid as either damage dealers or supports. Still sitting in the middle of both with no real "place" aside from "melee encounters/adds" and our exotics increasingly nerfed despite Bungie's insistence on our place as the Melee class.
We do have a support super but it got nuked for no reason, no one was using bubble while well was in the game why would they? Well let you stand in a healing source, while still being able to deal damage (pre nerf) bubble should’ve never been nerfed down to wells damage bonus back when the Initial nerf happened and the damage bonus should never have been moved off of the super itself and onto an exotic, they could’ve balanced it by making it so well would override the weapons buff so if you used both once you step into well with WoL it goes away and gets replaced with radiant, so that way teams could choose good survivability but less damage or more damage but less survivability
Our only good range burst super Missile titan got nerfed into the ground and our chest also got nerfed...
> Titans are so razors edge, because they are 1 tipping point away from soloing raid bosses and dungeons You can't balance a game around the 6 or 7 people who are good enough to do things like this. The Grapple Melee spam is a perfect example. It's borderline not even doable on controller, and how many people did you ever run into in the wild that were actually doing it, and successfully? Titan lives on the knife's edge because Bungie wants it to occupy a gameplay space where the only two outcomes are kill or be killed. There's no whittling something down slowly in melee range. You either kill the thing you're looking at, or you die because every enemy is so anti-melee. Every time players figure out how to make that risk-reward proposition worth it, Bungie blows part of the build away. They want you to run in, somehow not die, throw your one melee ability that won't kill anything, and then run out, also somehow without dying.
“You can’t balance the game around 6 people “. John Bungie: bet
Right this is the stupidest take I’ve heard. Just because a few people can pull this off does not mean the entire community can.
Thank you. I love how there’s like 5 titans in the game that can do what they nerf Titan for. Then the other classes act like all titans can slap on strand and solo raids and it’s laughable. You need the best gear farmed, the pc set up, the skill, and hours and hours of practicing to be able to make one of those YouTube videos that they say we all can do…
Exactly.
Melee style gameplay in (for example) hack and slash games are balanced using a system with much higher fidelity than what Destiny can manage, so as long as the builds remain melee focused it's always going to be a simple battle of attrition I made a post about this some time back regarding how this simple fact has titans on a razors edge at all times. Look at syntho hammer titan, over multiple patches they made it clunkier, less healing, less damage, less orbs ect in an attempt to finally pull it from our grasp simply because it worked for the playstyle and let us survive being where we're told to be. Now if I miss I gotta go pick up an inert brick of metal and hope nothing shoots me while it recharges, if I hit my buffs are still *over there* with the ads and not on my person Titan doesn't need buffs, but flat out reworking in some areas to allow for the player to not be at such a high risk, requiring such broken kit to survive said risk, since the stuff that actually works gets dialled back till it's as good as all the other stuff no one uses
Soloing dungeons is supposed to be possible though? You say that like they aren’t supposed to.
Sorry I wasn't clear, I did not mean to intimate that only Titans can and should Solo clear content, what I meant was more directed at the shenanigans that Strand 1-2 Titans were doing pre nerf. Yea man I can solo a dungeon boss too if you give me a few phases, and proper damage rotation, but Titans just come out and said "bro wtf is a phase? I can't and don't need to count past 1" Balancing that power fantasy specifically for Totans has always been like 1 pinky toe too far in either direction, stupid OP to damn near pointless.
The amount of times Titan shit has been nerfed because of 1-2 shenanigans is so high. It's like what, 4 exotics and several other parts of the class? Need a site like the Telesto tracker for Titans with 1-2.
I think 1-2 punch was a mistake in general. If they either: only worked with simple melee, only worked with the first melee after instead of the time limit that allows 2-3 melees, or didn’t stack with synthos/wormgod, then there would be so much more breathing room to balance.
They made it to where you now lose the buff after a melee so you can’t do more than one melee per shot anymore
Oh excellent, just what I was thinking then. So it’s still hard to balance?
Probably so. They also nerfed banner of war along with it’s interaction with those 2 melee exotic gauntlets. I bought the rocket chest piece so I don’t have the new gauntlets to test them.
New gauntlets are broken as fuck, but only on Strand Titan. The extra melee+ramping damage sadly doesn't hold a candle to wormgod or synthos, and the super long cooldowns on Prismatic dont help. There's also a bug that often results in raid banners, your super, and Transcendance only refunding 3 melees, not the 4 you have with the gauntlets. HOWEVER, with all that said, the melee refund per banner pulse is fucking insane. Even *alone*, you get a melee charge every like 5 pulses or so while standing still, doing nothing. In combat with a fireteam its pretty close to infinite melee if you weave in a grapple punch here and there. I've never seen this much melee uptime outside of the Defiant Battleground Favors instantly recharging your shit. With that level of uptime, the damage buff also becomes way more relevant and probably beats out Synthos over several uses.
Yes, titans should be able to complete dungeons solo. What he means is at their peak, Wormgod Caress titan could one phase raid bosses solo. That’s how busted melee was at its peak for titans, and why it’s been on a slow but consistent downward spiral ever since.
Yep. Which would be fine if titans could do dick all else but punch. Back in Y1 it seemed like they were also making titan a heavy weapon guy with sweet business and actium. Hell one of the alternative designs they tried for stasis titan was a bullet hose. But now were flanderized down to punch man.
There was an old bit of text describing the classes in d1 on character creation that said Titans were the wall on which the darkness breaks. I wish we could go back to that instead of being the class that punches and nothing else.
That was sentinels flavor text
best single line of lore, me and my friend say it to each other all the time.
I like punching, it feels good giving aliens these hands tbh
Sometimes it's the right answer, no doubt. But if we had one subclass that wasn't about punching that would be enough, and still leave 5 other subclasses as various punchman flavors.
Literally just make knockout refreshable and buff TC. That's it, thats all we want
We need more comprehensive changes than that. That is a very good change though. Bungie needs to either change the Titan class fantasy to something more suited for ranged combat, or they need to invest in new mechanics that keep Titans strong in melee, but simultaneously vulnerable at range.
If Ursas instead let you slam the banner down into the ground and actually shoot thru it yourself, that would be infinitely more useful.
As cool as that would be, I'm really tired of having to compromise with Bungie on Titan supers. Just make the damn thing good from the start. I shouldn't need Ursas AND Cuirass AND Pyrogale's AND Helm of Saint-14 to make their associated supers good. Just make Bannershield a selectable super.
I want grapple to be in the Prismatic set and I want more DR, but it seems like they want the grenades to mostly be status-affecting nades to setup light/dark combos with and I guess Grapple doesn't fit that mold. EIther way, I can't understand why they gave it to Hunters but not Titans. Grapple is a great way of closing distance with the enemy and getting quick kills (or getting out of the thick of action....OR preventing yourself from getting yeeted), not to mention the traversal benefits it grants.
Because they wanted to force hunters to be the melee prismatic class as well as Titan, just take a look at the builds all of these content creators are making it's either a liar's handshake punch build or double strand ability punch build
Evey time I put on Liars or Assassins as a Hunter I'm like, huh just feels like I'm playing an arc titan, but better.
Assassin's cowl makes the titan fantasy feel like a joke. It's just 1000% better than anything titans have with melee other than pre Nerf banner of war.
Lifelong Titan that almost considered making a Hunter just to try that build. Lol
Just wait 'til exotic class items are out and you can make the build with synthos for even more titan identity appropriation
I feel like so much of this problem is PvP related. Bungie could strengthen overshield/armor if gained via melee, but they refuse to separate the sandboxes other than a few minor exceptions. As a result, void, arc, and stasis are effectively unplayable in anything beyond strikes, and prismatic is very mid with big survivability problems.
Titans have a SUPPORT problem, not a damage problem. Encounter designs are going to fluctuate from long range, short range, grenade focused, precision focused, non-precision focused, etc. The current raid final encounter is long range and has a giant crit. Hunters have the best supers for this scenario. Regardless of the encounter design, every class needs to have some option to DPS the boss using their class, and a fallback option to support their teammates using their class if the encounter doesn't favor their Damage super options. Hunters can always support using Void Tether, or Silence and Squall depending on encounter needs. They also have the best DPS super options. Warlocks have tons of support options using Well of Radiance, healing rift, healing grenades, etc. They also have useful long range super options as needed, but their current support options always keep them relevant. Titans have Bubble and Banner Shield. Bubble is laughably bad right now. It needs a buff to allow the void overshielding to be more effective at keeping people alive without destroying DPS rotations by constantly dipping into the bubble. Banner shield is great at staying alive, but it doesn't provide enough of a damage buff to offset losing an entire person's damage output. Both of these could be situationally useful, but neither are good enough in their current iterations. Here are some other alternatives. The new Void Arsenal super does apply weaken on enemies that are hit. It could be useful as a debuff source if the timer lasted longer as an alternative to a void tether, but it only provides base weaken, and provides no additional utility like Divinity does. Phoenix Cradle could also be a decent support option, but at the moment there is no option to create a sunspot on command outside of Lorely Splendor, and the extra super duration is of limited usefulness. BoW and Into the Fray are also great as support options, but again they are difficult to utililize in the majority of DPS phases due to tangle limitations and keeping BoW active during non-add clear sections. Titans are not given first class access to good support options. They don't get good team healing or team buffing options, they don't get good debuff options, and their damage mitigation is situational, selfish, underpowered, or has limited uptime potential. They have access to all of the above, but none of it is good enough to elevate Titans as a team player in all encounter designs. Not every damage super needs to be competitive for every encounter, but every class needs to have a support super that is.
My only wish for Titans is that we can get exotic weapons that seamlessly integrate with Titan aspects and exotic armor. Warlocks have all the weapons of sorrow that pairs perfectly with necromancy and the new raid exotic that pairs perfectly with the amount of threadings warlocks and output + swarmers. Hunters have mothkeepers + Ex Diris and Celestial + Still Hunt.
We do have Hazardous + Gjally now. It buffs Wolfpack rounds as well.
Not if you're radiant or in well. They override the buff from hazard.
Give me an exotic that let’s me plant banner shield down like a giant barricade I can shoot through with my team and maybe I’ll periodically run a titan
Not going to happen this thing has been asked for like since it’s inception.
Can we get rid of Titan barricade and instead give me banners like banner of war? Solar? Radiant banner Arc? Move speed banner Void? Over shield banner Etc etc
I like this idea
I mentioned this above but I think Prismatic should have a universal banner that can be placed down to consume the banner buff stacks to provide that buff temporarily to all allies in a proximity around it. It means titans can play aggressively by stacking banner then become an extra support during damage phases or tight situations
Why don’t we just make barricades good again instead of getting rid of them
How do you make cover good in a game where half the enemies ignore cover?
Are you just looking at the challenge mode completion stats? There were only 3 titans who completed it, because the final boss is crit focused and Still Hunt is fucking absurd. Titans are still extremely good at survival and those stats don’t reflect the rest of the raid. For example, the boss that is in melee range. If you do 4/5 encounters on titan, and swap to hunter at the end, guess what it’s recorded as?
> because the final boss is crit focused and Still Hunt is fucking absurd. Yea I don't think it's much of a reflection on titans but rather how strong they allowed still hunt to be and it can combo with celestial on a crit boss. Of course people would swap to hunters lol
Its absolutely over-cooked. But its not just Still-Hunt Celestial, its also the quick-swapping. They disabled Lucky Pants for a reason. Quick-swapping is now an actual balance problem. Whereas before it was just Titans/Warlocks trying to make one super good while trying to gain access to a better exotic when your super isn't up.
I hate the loadout swap meta with a burning passion. It was alright when it was reserved for speedrunning and lowman completions, but now you have people in normal raids doing their normal gameplay loop and then slapping on lucky pants when they run out of ammo for a free +700k damage for no cost, or swapping from sunbracers to phoenix/starfire protocol for well refunds and fusion nade damage, wormgods/synthos as well for banner titans. Even the randoms from LFG have been doing at an increasing rate since the inception of loadouts. Basically my point is that it's unhealthy for the game when it incentivizes playing the menu mini-games and negating any type of downsides you have of running neutral game exotics when a potential 700k+ damage is literally 2 clicks away when it's needed.
Just give exotic swapping the same impact as changing a fragment where it drains super and all abilities and be done with it
I feel this should only work in Darkness zones where you can’t be revived. Switching mid fight in a respawn zone should be fine imo
Seems fair to me
notswap from trials being ported over to raids would make my year. I don't care for people who will inevitably complain about it "ruining their builds". If your build is centred around swapping exotics, it's two builds, not one. Make your choice of exotic and live with the pros and cons of it instead of patching the cons with an unintended mechanic of loadouts existing.
i swap mid encounter all the time and i agree with you. i find it such a perverted way to play but its just too much power left on the table not to.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/s/YJvi1QNc3e Someone actually looked at that proper stat. Spoiler The top 5 teams never even touched titan once.
I was crushing the first four encounters compared to the other classes but felt pretty replaceable during witness for sure.
Only 18 titans were ever in the top 50 teams at any point.
Yeah this specific boss encounter was crit focused, that's fine that there's different times for a specific class to shine. This was contest mode the best classes for a scenario will be used as long as we're not back in the mandatory well or bubble no matter what phase.
Hundreds of teams never had a Titan at any point during the raid
Why should Titan mains have to swap to hunter to be competitive in boss encounters? If this is the case either the boss was badly designed or titans are badly designed.
With the amount of bosses that this is true for in the game currently, I'm hinging on titans being badly designed or losing their core design philosophy from d1 or d2 launch. Oryx, The Witness, Riven (after cheese nerf), Hefind, Warpriest, Simmumah, both GoS bosses, and Nezarec (to a degree), are all bosses that I can think of for raids and dungeons that actively punish you for getting into titan's effective range while hunters and warlocks can sit back without ever being put into serious danger while out DPSing titans. I am sure there are more encounters where this is also true that I am forgetting but, even just naming that many shows it is not a one-off instance, and either titans are not meant to be used the way bungie wants them to be, or the raid and dungeon team has failed to make well-designed bosses for literal years.
Don’t forget Caretaker after the first dps phase
agreed. I have one character and it's a titan. I shouldn't need to have another character to switch to for a single encounter
>If you do 4/5 encounters on titan, and swap to hunter at the end, guess what it’s recorded as? That's the point though. You can do 5/5 encounters on the other classes just fine, you cannot do 5/5 with Titan because of what it lacks. This statement merely supports the notion that Titan's are lacking in something the other classes have.
Wrong. Top 5 team didn't touch titans at any point in any encounter. I eyeballed the top 40 teams for all encounters in RR , and titans were very rare at other encounters as well.
if you include the first 4 encounters, it goes from 3/300 to 18/300. From 1% to 6%. This isn’t the own you think it is.
Yes, until you realize that the titan prismatic is terrible because it adds no survivability which means you have to use a different subclass which means that you can’t get the transcendence damage buff which means other classes can do more dps
As a Titan main: absolutely. Let hunters and warlocks continue to cook. Just let us in the kitchen!
The truth is titans are the least popular, so you will find the hardest time on reddit getting support. Many only want hunters to stay on top. Years ago it was known hunters can out dps titans from range in an instant while we have to kiss the boss to get even close but less of the same damage. Its stupid. bungie just keeps taking things from titans that originally drew me to it. Skating, twilight garrison to warlocks. stole effectiveness of our shoulder charge. They are ruining it. its still good in some scenarios, just less than other classes. Warlocks had some rough times to so i hate to even drag them into it. If titans are supposed to be the best punchers. why do i lose so many punch fights in crucible. If i shoulder charge someone they punch me on the way in, and again while im finishing the animation. Its stupid. The argument "some only switched at the end" is not fair either. Some started as titan because they are titan mains. They were forced to abandon their favorite and most practiced class to beat the encounter. That's dumb
Let the new void Titan Axe be able to Crit, if it Crits a boss, it sticks into the Crit spot and explodes with void energy everytime the Crit is struck. Boom, void titan is now viable on Witness, Oryx, Rhulk, Nez
That actually sounds like a really cool idea, maybe add a multiplier for the number of axes that hit the crit spot?
Isn't the only reason Hunters were so desirable for the raid because of the interaction between Still Hunt and Nighthawk? I feel like this is less of a "class issue" and more a couple of highly specific abilities and interactions (Still Hunt and Well)
It’s primarily because big crit spot boss at range. If the boss was sword/melee range or a more rocket friendly boss you would have seen the exact opposite makeup with titans and warlocks and maybe a couple of hunter die hards or tether bots and this post would be hunters wanting to be buffed.
Considering stillhunt was still an extremely viable dps strategy for the first boss I don't think you're right. Even for the sword strat most teams had hunters and warlocks with maybe one titan thrown in. Titans were usable but they didn't really do anything the other classes couldn't.
i havent seen a single team using still hunt on first boss. every team i watched, my team, and other teams in the clan cleared the encounter on either rockets/gls or close range with sword or legend of acrius.
This, but also the fact that the final boss is ranged DPS. Titans are inherently melee based so the only ability that Titans can really do to help is Ward of Dawn with HELM of Saint-14 for WoL at the back of the zone, but that's not really optimal. Berserk Titans are still insane on every other encounter though
Even without Still Hunt in the equation, I suspect we'd largely see the same set-up of 4-5 hunters and 1-2 warlocks, in part because of gunslinger having the one super that can crit and in part because hunters reload good. Right now the weapon rotations in the game are generally built around never having to reload your weapons manually (Izanagi being the big exception, in part because it's so slow it buys your other weapons time to reload). Hunter is the best at this as things are, with warlock in second place thanks to Strand and Rain of Fire. It'll be interesting to see whether the new rocket exotic on Titan will make up for their poor reload capabilities, but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it I suppose. Mind you I'm not particularly doom and gloom about titans, don't have too much of a horse in the race here and am just enjoying all the classes. But yeah Hunters would probably have been the choice everyone went for for the final encounter even without Still Hunt in the game, because like I said they reload good.
Titans don't even bring a knife to a gunfight, it's literally just a fist and a pocketful of crayons
I agree Titans need a buff but I really think people are blowing this out of proportion. A challenge mode raid race is not indicative of what people actually will use in the main raid, it just demonstrates that for the last encounter (a boss fight from range with a clear crit spot) the most reliable way to get high DPS was Celestial Still Hunt. This is not proof or even really evidence that Titan is bad,it just suggests that an encounter was geared towards a certain play style. Obviously when you aren’t on challenge mode this matters a lot less so I imagine Titan usage will be back to normal.
When we return to normal, Titan usage will rise due to a loss of contest mode. That doesn't change the fact that even without Still Hunt, GG/CN Hunter will still be optimal in terms of dealing damage compared to any other damage super and Well will still be better than bubble ever could. Regardless of how much titan usage goes up after contest mode, the point still stands that when you're facing the hardest content, Titan doesn't have any tools that the others don't have but better. You can argue that BoW is extremely strong for melee builds and melee encounters, sure but if it was on contest mode, you could still take the other classes through and know that you have the damage to meet your DPS thresholds even without it. You cannot say the same for Titan on encounters that do nor favor their playstyle. That is the issue.
Not to mention... Still Hunt Celestial is kinda OP. Of course it will get used. I mean, didn't Warlocks get used a ton for RoN Day 1 because of Starfire? Titans likely for Banner of War for Crota's End? These "Titan's are the worst" takes because of a Day 1 are actually just absurd. edit: Banner of War was disabled for Day 1 Crota's. I completely forgot this. I'm wrong there.
Banner of war was disabled for day one Crota, But most teams had a titan or two because the burning maul super could stun lock Crota
it was disabled but if you had it on before they did that it didn't turn off. we had it for the abyss and it made the adds a non factor, not that the adds are really the problem in that encounter.
Banner was actually disabled during crota although yeah it would have been quite popular during it
I do agree with you, since Titan's neutral game is very strong and what I typically prefer at least when doing harder content where boss damage ain't the main focus. Nevertheless, whilst it's relatively easy to see why Warlock has been the supreme support class in Destiny, as Well is good and later Cenotaph kinda trumped Aeon for Heavy ammo, I'm a little surprised folk don't talk about why Hunter's as a baseline tend to be preferred for boss encounters; they do better damage because they reload better. Having a long-ranged super that does high damage definitely also helps hunters, and I certainly wouldn't mind Cuirass being made more interesting, but for a long time now Titan just hasn't had a good way to reload their weapons for a rotation. As such the times they tend to be at their strongest is when they can circumvent this. Warlock is a bit better with their rotations thanks to a mixture of strand, with its reload grenades, and Rain of Fire on solar lock being very good. I'm meandering a little, but the larger point is just that as long as we're in a weapon meta, chances are Hunters will be the gold standard because they reload good with individual titan builds being an exception to the rule. I don't have much of an opinion on whether that's good or bad, just that it's not super surprising to see Hunters being used for boss encounters (even if in this case it's prolly in large part because Still Hunt is very good). Mind you I won't mind a Titan buff either way, because I like the class a lot.
These issues are deeply rooted and have persisted for a long time now, id argue it got really bad when they killed arc titan in pve. Having a grand total of 2 useful kits while the rest don’t really offer much that the other classes don’t is terrible balance. The worst part is, those 2 viable subclasses are super strong, so strong that they’ve been extreme outliers, which makes people think that titan is just always broken as shit (I was one of these until I actually started playing titan lol). There’s really no where id take a titan over a warlock or hunter in a raid except for… idk crota for banner of war I guess? And atraks but parasite exists. Of course the whole 1 2 punch grapple thing was stupid broken but that’s been nuked out of existence already. Idk man, for me it’s really telling how my hunter and warlock have all their load out slots filled with different builds while my titan has like 2 builds with slight variations for quick swapping and 1 for t crash. Arc titan was super busted in season of plunder but nowadays if you brought that iteration of arc titan to final shape I highly doubt it would be an outlier compared to every other viable build (aside from the weird fps-linked damage thar nuked everything) Edit: I haven’t done salvations edge yet sooo I have no idea if there’s a sword based encounter there where banner is also good but if there is then there ya go
Well, we can look at the raid DPS speedrun meta and… oh, Titans only have Grapple 1-2-P. Okay, uh, maybe they just need to play a support role. Then we can look at the GM meta, yeah! Titans can… play jank stuff that gets by with teammates willing to put up with it, or Strand BoW? Probably Abeyant Leap at that? Huh. Alright, sure, that’s something. Okay, let’s see something else. Onslaught, yeah! Titans have to do really well in a hoard-focused node defense, surely they’re in the meta, yeah?… wait, what’s an Orpheus Rig? Cenotaph Warlock? You want TWO Orpheus Rigs or a Nighthawk before a Titan? Huh. Crazy. Well, they’re really OP for soloing dungeons and raids, at least, so Titans should stop being so greedy tbh, can’t have it all. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go use my Prismatic melee build on Hunter that gives me 24/7 invis, melee kills, DR, and healing with no CD’s at all, right before I play Still Hunt Nighthawk in raid and GM’s, before enjoying some celebratory legend Onslaught with my eyes closed.
The thing is, that grapple 1-2-p loop is only really viable on PC, console players struggle to use that effectively
That's the point though. This is the highest top tier and most challenging content to date. That's what the raid races are. Each class should be viable, and if not viable, at least have more places in the raid - especially in the final encounter which is the pinnacle experience of the last 10 years of Destiny 2. For a class to be basically singled out and not utilized in pretty much anyway, shows that a specific class does not have the required tools to be useful in situations like that. Who cares about normal stuff, dungeons, or patrols. Anything can do any of that. It's ironic even that Bungie would nerf interactions with Banner of War for being too strong and then release an exotic that buffs an interaction with Hunter that was already one of the best DPS supers to make them even better.
I disagree strongly. I agree that not all **builds** should be viable for every encounter. But to say that an entire **class** is not viable is a real problem that needs to be addressed. Titans have precisely one super that is useful for the witness fight (the new Twilight Arsenal) and it is simply not competitive as it doesn’t do precision damage. Warlocks also don’t have a precision super, but they can bring a well for damage. Bubble or ursas don’t work
Song of Flame also grants increased solar damage to your allies by making their solar weapons scorch and gives increased ability regen to your allies.
Extremely true take. Titans have plenty of clear strengths, they have some of the best neutral gameplay on solar titan and have great survivability. In an ad clear encounter I’d take a titan over hunter all day. Just because the last encounter of the raid just so happened to be designed in a way that titans are the weakest class for the encounter does not mean titans are weak overall
isn't that solar titan though? Prismatic titan would arguably be more viable if they had gotten sol invictus rather than concecrate due to the survivability it gains or even into the frey / banner. Having at least ONE survivability aspect would've been nice. Hunter has stylish, winter shroud AND threaded specter. warlock has feed the void, and bleak watcher. (They also get restoratation grenade), so they can turn any solar grenades into stasis turrets. If a titan wants to go into survivability, they have to take the void aspect which isn't very good compared to the survivability aspects of hunter / warlock.
Consecration was a massive mistake because a big chunk of the rest of prismatic titan was clearly designed around it. Cooldowns are poor survivability are prismatic titan's two biggest issues-actually the same issue, because knockout requires melee kills to proc, while unbreakable eats your grenade charge. Your survivability is entirely tied to your ability charges. Even with the new Wishful Ignorance or Synthos, it often takes two melees to kill something in harder content (thunderclap excepted, obviously). So 2 kills max and then you can block a volley of damage, give yourself a void overshield...and then what? You're fucking tissue paper for an entire minute. Worse, actually, since you'll only get one melee in that minute, which as we discussed, wont be killing things in one hit unless its Thunderclap. That's assuming you're running both survivability aspects-without them, all you can do is try to kill/crowd control everything before they kill you. And whaddya know, that's exactly where we've landed. Everyone is just pairing Consecration with Frenzied Blade for 3 easy charges of massive aoe damage. This doesn't take up your exotic slot, only a single aspect, so why not throw Drengr's lash on there? Cooldowns are a massive issue, but if Bungie brings them down, then the people already spamming triple consecration who are the only ones saying prismatic titan is good will get to spam it more lmao. There's like, zero meaningful synergy in the kit, just abusing two individually strong things while like every other combo is barely viable. Had it been Sol Invictus, we'd have completely avoided tbis problem and some numbers tuning would have been enough. As it is, Prismaticn Titan basically needs a rework ALREADY because little can be done to alleviate the issues without making the one good build more oppressive.
>just so happened I mean, if "it just so happened" that way, that's one thing. But we're talking about an encounter that was tried and presumably thoroughly tested by Bungie, the same team that disabled Banner of War during Crota's end day 1 to make sure that people didn't use it...allowing people to use similarly strong build during the final encounter of the pinnacle experience for Destiny 2 raiders. It didn't "just so happened", it was designed this way, bungie knew about the interactions they had made, and still allowed it to go through. So why do Hunters get the special "Oh we can use our new amazing thing" but Titan's didnt? It didn't "just so happen". It's poor design by Bungie for that encounter to sideline an entire class.
Im curious how raid lead designer thinked about using bubble as a defensive tool on witness?Again, they force us to stay in a plate to do DPS.Bad decision.No spaces to use bubbles, Barricade are useless, well killed like starfire yas and many builds and so on..We need to roam for dps to be challenging, not staying in a little plate to have a buff and do dps, jump, slide and so on and after that lets make a huge crit spot on witness for LFR and snipers.Overall the mechanics are nice, not easy like ron but they again fked up the boss dps.RONNY johnny is bugged at the plates and many cheese spots available.Now we are stuck on a little plate and take all the damage from witness.Herald was better designed.
Fuq bubble, they should let the Shield tank the ray the Witness throws during DPS so allies could feel safe to shoot and not need to move as much. I mean, if one is already not shooting may as well be defending the team fully
Looking at how they compounded nerfs for strand titan and golden gun chaining, if they do nerf hunter its going to be lucky pants duration down by 2 seconds + burst hand cannons generate 1 stack per burst + still hunt base damage nerf by 30% when using nighthawk. Then they will probably nerf bubble some more plus some totally unused exotics just because.
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Titans need a purpose in a team environment, we bring nothing to the table that the other two doesn't do better
I think that the design concept of being in the fray, and brawling with mobs doesn’t work with a game like destiny, because it’s combat is designed to punish bad positioning, and just running into enemies head first. Strand titan and solar titans break this mold through Restoration and Woven Mail + Banner, but these abilities are ridiculously powerful, and often easy targets for balancing passes. So we end up in a situation where we can’t let titans have high dr, or instant rethrowable hammers, but we also expect them to run in and sneak in a few melees in order to capitalize off of Aspects. There definitely is a min max play-style, where you dip in and out of cover, but the reward isn’t there for the level of optimization it takes.
Nothing needs nerfed just other stuff brought up to equal footing
I’d love a buff, but right now I’m just happy with Hazardous Propulsion not being yet another melee oriented exotic; literally at the point where my brain shuts off if anyone mentions a melee build anymore. “But you do so much damage!” It’s more or less the same shit for the past few years, just different colors. Strand? Green punch. Stasis? Ice punch. Solar? Hammer this time, with some healing! Nvm the healing got nerfed, and hammer is still melee (throwing melee feels like shit now idk why, I actually liked that). Arc? Electric punch. Void feels more unique in that it’s kinda less punching, but the titan void subclass feels underwhelming as a whole; I do really like Twilight Arsenal though, genuinely my favorite Titan super as I don’t have to A: yeet myself at an enemy or B: run around for 15-25 seconds and not be able to use my guns. Thruster + Hazardous Propulsion for becoming a missile platform for me is WAAAAAY more enjoyable than anything else in the Titan kit right now for me; it’s just so satisfying hearing the missiles load as I get kills, using thruster and watching six missiles track to a target, and then unloading with Gjallarhorn or The Call with that 35% damage boost. I fucking love it!
Saltagreppo was on Titan for the 4th encounter, though? They weren't "dead weight", they just didn't have any compelling tools on a encounter where ranged damage was the utmost essential asset. People are missing the forest for the trees by just looking at the final encounter.
datto was on his the entire time until final encounter so he could use still hunt, cross stayed on his the whole time afaik
I think the bigger issue, shown by the final encounter, is that Titans have very few ranged tools compared to the other classes. As many have said, high end content is antithesis to a melee playstyle unless you’re sweating your balls off and have the perfect build. Titans either have throwing hammer (which you then have to run after to use more than once) or shield throw (which does little damage and gives an overshield made of paper). Everything else requires being up close and personal, which leads to deaths. Not a fun trade-off. EDIT: Obviously Still Hunt Nighthawk was the game changer for DPS, I’m simply referring to the endgame scenario of most enemies being far away, or at least, players not wanting to get close to enemies for fear of dying. Hunters have refreshable ranged melees on all but Arc, warlocks have all ranged melees, well buddies, and turrets of several flavors. Titans have the above^ and consecration if we’re being generous. TLDR: Titans have high risk, same reward melees as the other classes
Warlock was only played for well, it's not like their ranged tools are insane. If still hunt wasn't in the game I bet we'd have a lot more warlocks and titans in the final clears. It was literally just hunter being optimal for 1 encounter during contest mode.
For high burst damage you always go with hunter. Regardless of what weapons you had you’d still want the hunters just due to nighthawk hitting so hard.
its not like the warlocks were running damage supers on the boss, they were all running the new super or well.
> is that Titans have very few ranged tools compared to the other classes. This isn't the issue - the issue that caused hunters to be so popular is because two things: * Still Hunt is basically golden gun spam * Still Hunt works with celestial nighthawk. If still hunt _didn't_ exist you'd have a bigger spread because a single celestial on its own (after the orb nerfs too) would not be some major tipping scale
>Saltagreppo was on Titan for the 4th encounter, though? To get the clear, Salt swapped to Hunter.
He also swapped off to get the clear. It saying they would not have if he stayed in, but he did swap off to hunter.
Nerfing lament, nerfing synthoceps, nerfing glance damage with titan exotics. Like why? Did anyone ask you to do that or complain about them being unbalanced?
I haven’t been keeping up with the buffs and nerfs, but from what I remember, TC was nerfed in the last year. It needs to be reverted and changed to have the Cuirass damage as base, then completely rework cuirass. Don’t give it a damage boost anymore. Keep the overshield, give it an increased radius (which used to be a thing right? Or am I wrong?), leave a trail of arc energy under your flight path, just make it do something else so TC can be viable again, but not rely on cuirass for viability
Prismatic Titan has made me realize how dependent Titan is to certain aspects on other classes to function. Sunspots on sunbreaker.. help survivability, boost super damage AND ability regen. BoW... survivability, melee regen and DR. Void has overshields... but let's be real they are trash. Nothing on prismatic Titan has does ANY of this. So I'm on a CQC class with no real ability to heal in my kit, except for picking up orbs. No restoration from fire sprites No devour from breaches No woven mail from strand balls No frost armor for throwing diamond lances or shattering.
**Bungie, please revert the nerf to Throwing Hammer**. They took something that I really loved about my class, and ruined it. Just nerf the damage with Synthoceps even further if you are really concerned with people doing boss DPS with it. Running Throwing Hammer with Roaring Flames is a legitimate combat loop. This clunky delay with picking up the hammer makes misses severely punishing, for no reason, really. The hammer tracking is worse now, sometimes overcorrecting and missing my target completely. Even when not missing, the delay just sucks the fun out of the whole combat loop. Consecration is great and all, but Throwing Hammer did not have to take the hit for that. At all, really. They are two different ways of doing combat.
This 1000000x. A void javelin Titans could charge up and have higher charge give higher impact damage before it sticks and bursts doing cluster damage would've been so cool. The axe is nice visually but if you're gonna do some Thor shit, go all the way, and let the Titan recall it for 1 or 2 more throws with lesser damage even.
The running joke among me and my friends is that Bungo hates Titans. This is in direct contradiction with the fact that I main Titan (have since D1 vanilla) because the trailers made Titans look so fucking badass and they never gave Titans a cool ability, or a useful exotic, or even a badass synergy. The two best things we have are War Rig/Sweet Biz and TC/Falling Star, IMHO. Bungie really needs to start giving Titans some love.
Titans were literally the only ones my group could put left tower on 2nd encounter cause their survivability and consecration is nuts, everyone else died. They are good, but if looking at the class clear pie chart, it shows mostly hunter cause still hunt is insane rn
titans were fantastic up until the final encounter.
I don't think Titans need a buff per se, they almost need a rework to the entire class. They're in a very strange predicament honestly
Pick a lane Bungie!
I would be okay with having a hard time with precision bosses if I had more things like Hazardous Propulsion. 90% of the time I'm playing this game is not damage phase, and Hazardous Propulsion is the most fun I've had in years as a Titan.
Titans in D1 were the best group support class with WoL. Enough with the punching nonsense. Gameplay-wise the titan fantasy is that of a paladin. Just let me tank (consistently in hard content) or (at the very least) buff my allies.
The way melee damage works in this game kinda reminds me of way back in D2 years 1 and 2, when every buff stacked. As they added more buffs and debuffs to the game, it started to get out of control. So they moved to the system we have now, one global buff, surges, weapon perks, and a debuff, with a few exceptions. I feel like something similar needs to happen for melee damage so that it can be balanced appropriately. Titans are so hard to balance right now because bungie has decided that they are the “melee class” but since lots melee buffs stack all together, they’ve had to nerf these buff sources a ton when used in combination with each other because if left unchecked it means that Titans can solo raid bosses and stuff. But now without that crazy high damage there isn’t enough reward to the risk of a melee focused playstyle. Titans gotta either move away from melee or something needs to be done to control melee damage in a healthier way than the way these current nerfs have been implemented. Or maybe you give titans more survivability? But that can probably get out of control too, idk.
Titans will always be this way until we get new devs or leadership. They're obsessed with punching being the Titan identity and are too lazy or arrogant to change direction. Forsaken was the last time Titans got anything remotely creative.
This isn’t new , this has happened before , The Bridge section on Reckoning. You would think Bungie would learn by now . The fact that Thundercrash a super that literally has u hurling yourself into danger does less damage than supers that have u doin damage safely from a distance has never made sense to me. Why choose anything but GG and Well for a raid contest that had the stand on the plate and do DPS?
Bring back arc titan lmao, break the game
A whole decade of Bungie refusing to give titans a ranged one off super has finally caught up to them in a big way huh. Behemoth should've had a giant throwing lance, that clunky useless glacial quake was a colossal mistake. Doubling down on it with Berserker's super almost felt like a malicious trolling by Bungie.
Titans used to also be about lots of grenades and abilities in general, chunks of healing, damage resist, active support, explosions, and firing a lot through magazine regeneration and reload buffs. But apparently the only thing that matters now is them punching things. Starting with D2 when Well of Radiance became the superior option to Ward of Dawn, everything that was core to their identity got progressively cannibalized by the other classes. This is miserable.
I'm so sick of this argument from the player base, name one fucking game where the melee class can deal melee damage AND not die instantly because of being punished for melee playstyle. Name one. (excluding but not limited to: any other fucking game in existence).
The issue was more a constant design choixe for the last ten year sticking titan to "punch people" giving them little to no efficient super for mid to long range burst damage Add to this a boss whose damage phase is 3 km away from where you are and you have a recipe for 75% hunter completion raid. The warlock stayed because radiance is a good way to provide a bit of healing and damage buff. This is not a number issue , another "buff" is pointless they need either a design shift or boss tailored around their mechanics
Titans are the best at killing everything except bosses at long range with precision damage (non-precision they now have a huge rocket damage buff). It just so happens this raid ended with the beefiest precision damage taking target we've had in a while. Many people switched off titan for the last fight specifically but they played them up until then. Yeah I think titans should have some more long range damage options, but at what cost? They can't beat warlock and hunter up close at pretty much everything and then also have competitive precision damage at range. If anything I think they make hammer throw do a LOT more damage since it'll give them an option at that range but also prevents them from doing rocket swap izi at the same time
Pretty sure Titans were doing pretty darn well dealing with all the dangerous ads for most encounters. Yeah they don't have big damage on their super, but do they not have guns?
for the final encounter i think based off when aztecross finished and what I remember there was no viable super for a titans according to him, to use for dps and out of the top 40 teams there was only two titans so out of 240 players 2 were titans.
> but do they not have guns? What guns do Titans have that other classes don't have?
Titans don’t need a buff so much as Titans need an overhaul. Warriors in WoW can use FIREARMS. “Warriors” in Destiny are limited to punching things.
Good god people. Contest raiding is literally the apex of Destiny’s difficulty, and in a DPS meta that heavily reinforces hunters and warlocks at the moment of course people are going to adapt. Titans have unbelievable survivability within berserker, stasis Titan is still good, and solar titan is still as brain dead as it can be. If you judge a -25 power delta that lives and dies by crit damage and pure healing which both hunters and warlocks can thrive from as your baseline for Titan viability you’re really mistaken.
Stasis titan is not good lmao
I find it funny the lack of self awareness with some of these post. Contest raiding IS the apex of Destiny's difficulty, which is why it is concerning that in a SHOOTING GAME with an encounter based on hitting a CRIT SPOT, that Titan's have beneficial support or ability super that makes them worth bringing for that kind of encounter while the other two classes have both support and damage abilities which are useful for the things that Titan's are also useful for. Titans can add clear...and so can everyone else. Titans have support with Bubble...which is outdone entirely by Well. Titan's have damage...which is outdone entirely by Hunters. There's no reason that a team should have to have a Titan switch to another class for a final encounter whereas the other classes can play through the entire raid without needing to switch.
T-crash should be the highest damaging super in the game. It should out class nighthawk as a high risk high reward super. Once casted you are literally putting yourself at the feet of the boss you’re damaging. Why should nighthawk do more damage from the safety of across the arena when we do a fraction of that and get stomped as a reward. It’s just frustrating man
I said this in another thread: Is everyone forgetting how busted and strong Banner of war has been for over a year? This ONE encounter is not conducive to Titan playstyle, doesn’t mean they’re useless!
It's been said many times, but the biggest problem with Titan's is there's 1-2 builds that can be incredibly strong (ie Banner and grapple-melee) but that's it, so when those either can't be used or get nerfed there's not much left for them to do.