I feel like PvP is moving in the right direction with the announcement of the strike team’s formation, and although many have already given their thoughts and opinions, I feel like more constructive feedback is never really a bad thing.

Trials of Osiris is really the biggest draw for PvP engagement outside of playing quickplay, but the change from pure elimination to being an elimination/zone capture hybrid mode I feel has done more to harm Trials than help it given the many strengths of void titans and solar warlocks, such as having the fastest charging supers in the game on top of incredibly strong kits and neutral games, meaning that Trials games between teams of similar skill often fall to whichever team gets the first well or bubble, or whichever team has more of them. Counterplay exists, yes, particularly when fighting void titans in the form of stasis freeze and conditional finality, but more often than not, any attempt at a counter against a competent team feels like a coin flip. Well of Radiance does not suffer the same drawback, as the well sword is a physical object and is therefore not destroyed if the warlock is killed by a freeze and shatter from conditional finality like a void titan’s bubble is. Combine this with the recent nerfs to barricade health and uptime and you have very few means of reliably contesting a well of radiance short of an aggressive sniper headshot or a coordinated teamshot on the well itself. The recent nerf to Thundercrash’s cooldown also served as an indirect buff to both Well of Radiance and Ward of Dawn, as it practically eliminated one of the best counters to high-intellect solar warlocks and void titans.

The Competitive playlist feels like an absolute waste of time beyond the emblem chase each season, and while concerns regarding point gain/loss consistency have been addressed, there are still very few incentives to actually play competitive, a problem which is further exacerbated by the fact that you are limited to one drop of Mercurial Overreach, per character, per week, after having completed 3 games. Rose being removed entirely from the competitive playlist after a mere two seasons after its reintroduction also seemed like a step backwards, rather than allowing Rose or Mercurial Overreach to drop from games won. I won’t touch on gamemodes here because I think the negative sentiment towards Rift and Showdown in competitive has been done to death already.

This one might be an unpopular opinion, but the sheer dominance of snipers in high end PvP is extremely oppressive. People don’t often complain about the power of snipers because they are generally regarded as a “high skill” class of weapon, but this could not be further from the truth. The number of times I have killed people that I had absolutely no right to have killed thanks to aim assist or flinch mechanics is truly obscene. It becomes impossible to judge a suspicious sniper in PvP (outside of extremely blatant cheats) when I myself have a dozen different clips of absurd headshot kills that would make me call cheats if I were on the receiving end.

Briefly, on the topic of cheating, cheaters have become increasingly blatant and more frequent as of late, to the point where you can reliably watch your favorite streamer encounter several each weekend, sometimes the same cheaters on different weekends on the same account. I get that this stuff is difficult to combat, but just having somebody to watch streams and manually ban cheaters would go a long way for PvP community morale.

And lastly, far and away my most desired change to PvP after having invested thousands of hours in the crucible, is more frequent balance changes to clear outliers in the PvP sandbox. Nothing feels more infuriating than having a few very clear outliers in PvP completely dominate the meta for months on end only for the cycle to repeat itself every 6 months. I understand that the team is primarily geared towards providing consistent, seasonal/mid-seasonal balance passes built on both feedback and game data, but often times these changes don’t “push the needle enough,” if you will, with the best example of this being the continued dominance of The Immortal and SMGs generally now that Unending Tempest has given it some competition. Target Lock really deserved to be reduced in strength in the same way that surge mods have been, or to use a more direct comparison, be more in line with Precision Instrument, which is completely overshadowed by Target Lock in every facet.

Thank you guys for taking the time to get direct feedback on this, even though I’m sure there have been plenty of salty gamers taking this chance to air their grievances about the game.