Board Thread:Destiny Forum/@comment-25548717-20150131113335

Last night I'd earned a few Vanguard Marks and thought I'd like to try "Another NitC", which is a Legendary Vanguard Scout Rifle that you can purchase from the Vanguard Armourer. My main avatar is an L31 Titan, with which my favourite weapon has slowly but surely become A.1F19X-RYL, the original Legendary Scout Rifle that you can obtain from the Armourer. [ Please note - there are now 2 Legendary Scout Rifles available for purchase - both have the same damage-per-round, and in this post I am discussing the version with the greatest effective magazine/clip.

A-NitC is more powerful on paper - at 331 maximum damage it's a tiny bit more than 10% more powerful than A-RYL... but what do you give up if you make the change? For me the answer to this question lies in the magazine. A-RYL maxed out offers me 27 rounds in the clip; A-NitC limits me to 20 with no route to upgrade... So the question then becomes: in a firefight, would you rather get 10% more damage per shot, or have 7 more rounds in the clip?

So: could we get to a simplistic answer through simple math? Maybe. 20 rounds doing 331 units of damage per round will yield a grand total of 6620 units of damage per clip. Meanwhile, 27 rounds doing 300 units of damage per clip will yield 8100 units of damage... So if we assume that we are 100% accurate, then perhaps the original Legendary Scout Rifle is actually more effective than it's replacement.

It's just a *little* too early for me to give you a more subjective, nuanced answer. This is because, of course, I am going to need to work with A-NitC for a little while to get it fully "experienced" and upgraded to maximum potential. However, my preliminary view, having tried them both, is that A-NitC represents a *backward* step in terms of effectiveness. I will reserve final judgment pending completion of that model's full upgrade, but I will admit to being very disappointed thus far.

I'm sure Bungie have their reasons for all the architectural decisions that they have made and are making, but this one doesn't seem that good from a first look. If there is any crumb of comfort I can take from this, it is simply that I have retained a complete complement of the  "original" Legenday weapons, and have no intention of giving them up...

Thinking back, I had exactly the same experience with the two Legendary Hand Cannons - "The Devil You Know" and "The Devil You Don't" - I discovered the hard way that the original version was actually far, far more effective through it's larger clip than it's "improved" replacement.

What do others think? What do you reckon to the evolution of the game artifacts? Are Bungie heading in the right direction? Is this a "toning down" because they thought the first round of hardware made the game too easy? Something else? 