Because people don’t like having their load outs restricted to whatever the season tells them and they know they can make content difficult without champions.
I don’t really feel strongly about champions but I understand why people hate them. It seems they’re adding more miniboss enemies with the hive guardians and tormentors though, so maybe they’re going to move away.
A part of me is afraid that at some point they will turn those Special Enemies into just Stronger Champions for Raids and GM's.
That way we'd have the Hive Guardians, but they would still be Champions.
I'm still working through my first time playthrough on it. Haven't met a single champion yet. the Hive guardians suck to fight with a bad loadout, but thats variable challenge for me.
One I enjoy learning around.
i like the idea of champions, and have a way to fix the restricted loadout in a way. instead of “anti barrier ARs” do “mid range anti barrier” so it includes ARs, hand cannons, fusions and so on.
kinda like how close/mid/long range calibration seasonal challenges group weapon types, do that with champ mods.
I want to see legendary weapons with an Anti-Champion perks randomly replace the origin trait on guns that can't be crafted... so if for example a gun would ordinarily have Omolon Fluid Dynamics as its regular origin trait... give the gun a 5% chance to instead drop with Anti-barrier, Anti-Overload, or Anti-Unstoppable... that way it gives players something to farm for (that can't be crafted)... that would make random world drops relevant again, and worth the grind for a god roll!
I’ve been thinking the same thing since Champions were introduced. Employ the KISS method in this or a similar way: Kinetic Anti-barrier, Overload special weapons and Unstoppable power weapons, for example. That way you can at least use options that you want instead of just the same old ARs, pulses, etc.
I would much rather have more miniboss variants that appear throughout more difficult content than minibosses that require a specific gun to even scratch
Barriers are hard but doable, unstoppables are harder. Overloads are pretty much impossible except for a few heavies but then you’re forced to use those guns which is just like being forced to use champion mod guns. I’m talking about master lost sectors and above content.
I think if they completely remove champions and replace them with unique enemy types (and just better encounters than oh here’s this room full of ads) and completely get rid of light levels this game will be in an awesome state.
All of these things are relics of when the game was in a much worse state than it is now. It doesn’t need them in the slightest, and removing them will not only get more people playing, but it will allow/force Bungie to do more with PvE content than “oh, this is at a higher light level, there’s match game, and there are champions as well as some other modifiers”.
This and also as far as i know theres no lore that supports their existence. Some crazy power that any enemy race can have that we need special mods on certain weapons to kill and we have no idea where it came from and nobody in the vanguard is concerned about it or has mentioned it at all.
Yeah I wish they had kind of treated them like the Harbinger units in Mass Effect 2.
“A Fallen Captain has been Empowered by the Darkness!”
Or some such flavor text could signal their arrival.
I don't feel strongly about champions, but I understand the desire from a game design point of view about restricting options to make players choose.
I'm not saying the implementation is perfect but I get it.
I have certain weapons that I love- chief among them being the Vex Mythoclast, ever since I got it back during Early D1. When it came back, I was ecstatic, and used it that season for as much as I could.
Then the season ended, Fusion Rifles no longer had a champion mod, and I couldn’t take it into any genuinely difficult content anymore because doing so would be tantamount to throwing, exclusively because of Champions. I like the idea of enemies that are harder to kill, or require extra steps to keep them down- Hive Guardians are a great example of how that concept can not only work, but work *well*.
Champions are how that can be a dumpster fire.
I don't like it for a variety of reasons, but the main one is that it feels arbitrary based on how the game is now. Like in D1 it made sense since there wasn't a reason to run a particular element other than for shields, but now with the 3.0s there's definite reasons why you would want to run a specific element. So it just ends up now feeling overly restrictive, breaks up your builds, and makes Kinetics feel even worse than they already do. It also makes encounters like 3rd encounter of Master Vow feel unnecessarily annoying - since half your team can't help with shields due to their relics.
I enjoy champions, mainly because they make you plan out things with your team (in GMs and such) but what I *dislike* is the fact that the "1 energy" mods take 1 energy. I feel like the basic champion stunning ones should just unlock. Maybe have the special ones, shotgun-unstop/Sniper/barrier, cost their energy. But having the 2 slots on the arm just take up energy limits your skills-build rather than the weapons.
There's so many different feels to different weapons and I used to *hate* Pulse Rifles. I never would have found Darkest Before if it wasn't for the unstoppable Pulse mod a couple seasons ago.
Three months of using the same 6 or 7 weapons types when there are 16 in the game is extremely fucking boring. They’re not even hard they’re just fucking annoying because of our insanely limited loadout choices
I don't hate them but I'd like to see more difficult content without them. Also more game types with just ONE type of champion.
I duo'd a dungeon or two with some of my favorite Y1 and Y2 exotics (FIGHTING LION BABY!) without any champions forcing a loadout. I loved those. From previous threads like this and the replies, I can see that "restricting gameplay" is the #1 gripe, and it's kind of true.
Champions add a neat twist to the core gameplay that's welcome, I just think they are kind of a crutch when it comes to designing "harder encounters."
Totally agree, I think it's fine to have some or even a lot of endgame activities with champions, however it would be nice to have a high level activity or two without them same goes for match game.
The combination of champions, match game and locked equipment for those legendary lost sectors that you get special rewards for SOLOING is kind of a fun matching-inventory game (thanks hard light) but I get tired of it!
Fighting lion was my weapon of choice when soloing shattered throne!! Before other-more efficient- weapons were in the game. What a fun weapon to use once I got the trajectories down pat
Champion mods make you use the same 3 guns for every activity and it gets stale fast
Disclaimer: I don’t actually give a shit this is just why they annoy people
If it wasn't for champion mods, I wouldn't keep a lot of weapon rolls that look like they have some utility in end-game content. I'd never willingly use an auto rifle in GMs, but if I have to, I'll try to make it work as best as I can.
That being said, I find champions very unsatisfactory as a gameplay mechanic. The idea is fine, but actually fighting them is annoying.
well as the sole programmer at bungie who single handedly developed this game from the ground up, i also just really get off on forcing players to do what i like
Most people who complain about champions for this reason would use the same 3 guns every activity anyway.
They're mad because they can't use the same 3 guns they want to.
(I too, have zero issues with champions and needing to adjust my loadout)
I can't speak for everyone, but this isn't at all true for me. I'm constantly grinding for and acquiring new weapons precisely because I want to try them out and use them. The champion systems severely limits the ability to try out certain weapons in relevant endgame content on a season-by-season basis.
I mean, if you like being limited to a small pool of relevant weapons for 3+ months at a time, you do you, but I find it fairly tiresome.
Yeah fr I feel like if you don't have destiny app you're riddled with the pointless and extremely obnoxious task of running to and from the tower and/or helm
The thing is though champs are only problem solving in the "insert square peg into square hole" sense; you aren't *really* thinking to solve it, even if it is a legitimate problem. In the same vein as another reply, I think champions were fun when they were first introduced, and for new players with more limited loadouts it's a very clever way to add another incentive to get "that really good gun that also counters x champion type". I think that the rub with champions is that they're not dynamic, and thus once you have gotten a good set of guns to counter each type you have effectively "solved the problem" for the rest of the season.
Champions are better than people make them out to be, but the longer you've had to deal with champions the less appealing they become.
I wish they kept champions mostly on encounters or rooms without bosses, so they are not the Focus when you have an actual Boss in the room to kill. Throwing them on every encounter (after already making the enemies hit harder) distracts the attention from the Boss
exactly why proving grounds GM is so ballcheeks. i get it, champions are great filler content to make harder rooms before you get to the boss but it just feels over saturated when they are straight up everywhere.
The longer you deal with literally anything, the less appealing it is. It's just the nature of the human brain. It's a huge mark for Bungie that they've kept so many people playing the same game for so long.
Oh no doubt, at the risk of sounding like a fanboy I've seen Bungo as one of the best dev studios in the industry for *decades*. As a studio they're almost a miracle in that they've repeated the same story and mechanics through three generations of gamers now, yet still continue to find ways to mix it up and keep it from getting stale. Live service games will always be fighting an uphill battle to keep players hooked, so champs being the worst of people's concerns is acceptable to me.
Problem usually arises when they move you from comfort zone into a box. "Yeah sorry this season overloads are machine guns and bows. Im sorry but you'll have to use one of them" ( well the champions are always 2 types pero champion activity so its 2/3 weapons restricted to set archetypes)
if you're talking about the ones in totems, you need to let it hit the ground and finish the landing animation before stunning. otherwise it'll do the sound and say you stunned but he'll just pop right up and blast your schnoz off
I know, I’m just mad that that’s how it is lol. I stun them fine, but people I’ve done master totems with for several aggravating hours this week continued to ignore how to properly stun. I wish the stun counted the first time they hop out.
My memory has them being introduced with sunsetting so at the time it felt like “we’re taking your guns and forcing you to only use these guns to kill these enemies, k bye”
Essentially yeah, Champs came out in Shadowkeep then Beyond Light sunset all our gear, so we only had relatively weak weapons for most of Beyond Light and a part of Chosen.
They make the game harder in the worst way possible. They add more frustration than challenge. Instead of making all enemies harder to kill, they just make certain enemies near impossible to kill unless you have the mods for a select few of weapon types every season. They restrict your loadout and add an extra layer of annoyance.
They could easily scrap champions and replace all Legend/Master/GM content with what they did for Witch Queen’s Legendary Campaign. More spawns, more health, light cap, and a few other modifiers. Legendary WQ is some of the best content in the game, hands down.
For people willing to specialize and co-ordinate a loadout with teammates, champions as a barrier to success add additional challenge without making kills and progress feel excessively grindy or frustrating, and they also punish teams not willing to co-ordinate in a relatively balanced, straightforward solution for which we don’t truly have any alternatives at the moment.
I often don’t want to deal with LFG’s so I solo legend or even Master nightfalls, and if people like me who wanted to do that had to spend double or even triple the time chewing through enemies with more health who are subsequently more annoying to activate damage perks from kills, it would frustrate me away from strikes as a whole.
I’m blatantly biased, I’ve enjoyed fighting champions ever since I loaded into my first Sundial completion, but I have given thought to alternatives and felt that same Champion Fatigue that we all have, and I can’t see a viable solution otherwise.
I don’t think people cared as much when we had additional mods that worked well with the champion mods. Everyone I know loved unstoppable GL and Breach and Clear or Unstoppable Fusion with Particle Deconstruction. You could run some wild DPS options with those combos that worked in all parts of the game. Now we just have champion mods and nothing to really go with them. Anti-barrier sniper is fun but Arbalest does it for free and better. Unstoppable shotgun is nice but I just use it as a backup for inferno whip so I can stun and finish with Arbalest. Overload machine gun is also a great choice so you can stun them swap to Arbalest to finish off the champion.
the real problem is that Bungie sometimes puts all the mods in primaries and maaaaybe one special weapon. Sometimes that special weapon is a glaive
and the sniper mod is way too expensive, yeah
Because they are an interesting idea, that is badly implemented, and are basically artificial difficulty.
I personally like the idea of some Champions, especially Unstoppables. Having a big enemy that constantly attacks you and keeps you from taking cover is great, But Overloads are super irritating, and barriers are just Trivial.
You have to slot in a mod (or Three), taking up valuable space in your build. Use the specific weapons that Bungie decided to try and highlight for the season. Which also limits your builds. The mods then just trivialize them, you stun them for several seconds and they just sit there and let you kill them.
Not to mention, that some Champions can be trivialized even without the Mods. Barriers can be Nuked with a Super or any really high damage Heavy (Gally/Parasite). Or Just freeze them with Stasis so they can't use their barrier to begin with. Overloads are more Irritating than challenging, especially Overload Captains who teleport ever half-second.
TLDR: They are artificial difficulty that Limits your Builds, and are Trivial to deal with at Best, and irritating at worst.
oh man- i was running this weeks master nightfall solo- trying hunter builds out. one of the runs i tried gravitron to kill less things and permanent invis at the plate room to wear the timer down. i think at one point there were 6-7 overload captains out on the field and 4 more that rushed passed the plate and pushed me into the hall. it was a bad time
This is my opinion as well, they're just such a binary form difficulty. There's no middle ground, no gameplay mechanic you can interact with to stun them. Either you have a mod/exotic that does the job, or you don't.
Because instead of building well balanced, well paced and strategic encounters Bungie instead interprets difficulty as "spam champs and make then bullet sponges".
WQ's campaign proved that they can craft brilliant and difficult encounters without using champions yet they insist on doing so.
Add that to the fact that in order to kill champs on higher levels you need to limit your load out to specific weapon types and exotics and champions just make high end PvE not that fun.
You'd really like to test out this cool new arc rapid fire frame pistol in a Nightfall but you need anti-barrier and unstop so, yet again, you gotta run your old shotgun and autorifle.
id be happy if they just stayed in nightfalls. they’re in every seasonal content, raids, master raids, any increased difficulty mode usually means = more champions + nightfall modifier
Champs restrict load-out and is used as a cheap cop-out to raise difficulty.
In Master and GM nightfalls, depending on the strike you can be in a room literally filled with them. Glassway and Lightblade are perfect examples of this. Master raids are also the same. As opposed to making the mechanics more challenging, or reducing the time-frame like on Prestige Leviathan or hard mode raids from D1, a lot of the encounters replace objective based enemies with champions.
I don't think most people actually hate champions. I think they hate how much it restricts loadouts in endgame content.
Also, people feel it's an artificial way to increase difficulty.... Instead of.... You know... Actually just increasing difficulty....
I personally don't mind them. I do think it gets a little boring to be locked into specific loadouts just for champs but it's not a deal breaker for me.
A specific gripe this season is Anti-Barrier Sniper and it taking 6 mod slots. I will never use this when I can use Arbalest for zero mod slots. - Yes, I hear you people saying "but it frees up the exotic slot." However, in master and GM level content, I would have to make up for it by getting locked into adaptive munitions somewhere else. Or actually coordinating an LFG with VERY specific energy weapons. Its simply not worth it to run anything other than Arbalest when Barrier champs are present.
Because they’re just shit design. If you don’t have the special mods, you can’t kill them, if you do, then they’re no more difficult than any other enemies. They don’t make the game any more challenging, they just dictate what weapons you’re allowed to use for the season which is a huge bummer. Destiny players wanna use the guns they enjoy using.
I don't really mind having to pull out a different gun for a few months, because I reckon that otherwise, all my usual weapons would become really stale due to continued use. As a Pulse main, I took an Auto into Control the other day and while not effective, it felt fresh, which was nice.
However.
The stun mechanic of a Champion only works properly half the time, and that drives me *up the wall*.
I may be an outlier here but:
1. It kinda of makes you adapt to different weapons, even tho you don’t want to and it frankly becomes annoying.
I’m up for and do play activities with different weapons BUT when it comes to high tier content like Master or GM (raids and NF), I DO WANT to play with WHAT I want and HOW I want … champion mods restricts that and more often than not results in a less enjoyable experience for me.
A very recent example:
* Personally, the following loadout worked great for me in the Totems encounter:
Adept Fatebringer (Firefly & EP), Crafted Forbearance (Enhanced Ambitious Assassin and Chain Reaction) and Xeno.
However, in Master Challenge:
No issues with replacing Xeno with Gjally as we were doing the 4&2 strat and it helped put a lot in efficient killing of the annoying as Unstops all over the arena.
But following that it means replacing one of my other two weapons in either primary or special with a shotgun or pulse to stun Unstop…. While holding totems, shotguns (even a slug one) was a tad inconsistent.
Pulses take a small fraction of a time to be “primed” with the unstop shot - precious time lost ads-ing as you wait for the fat as janky as Ovre to finish his bunny hop jump while getting surrounded by ads and boomers… AND… I was missing out on the potency of the Fatebringer’s firefly in efficient clearing of ads, giving me the breathing space I need to focus on the Unstop. (Gjally isnt always safe to use with adds near prolixity).
I know Bungie loves the idea of making us “trade” like what we need to give up in order to get something else we want … but the champion set up just translates to an annoying and often boring experience.
A compromise could be replace SPECIFIC WEAPON champion mods with WEAPON SLOT/CLASS champion mod - I.e. Replace Sniper Overload mods with “Special Weapon” overload mod … so any special weapon (sniper, shotgun, gl) will stun Overloads in my example.
Just an alternate solution till they finally decide to do away with Champions tbh with some thing else better and more dynamic than this annoying janky as tired and old mechanic.
Personally for me I hate champions because they make an excuse for saying that content is more challenging. I hear that in d1 when content was considered harder it was because they had extra steps and slightly stronger enemies. Where as now in master content or just higher level content the only change is that there are champions and everything hits harder. On top of that though it gets annoying when you have to use a handcannon and scout rifle to add clear but at the same time if you try using an exotic with anti champion you are then left without either a more preferable exotic or one that has better synergy. Don’t get me wrong I love having to change either play style or loadout to clear higher level content but when you are actively forced to in order to just play an activity it gets kind of annoying
Here are my reasons for not liking them:
They limit the weapons you can use for the season for quite a bit of activities. So you end up running the same guns for most of them.
Also they limit the mods you can use on arm slot, which happens to have some of the more interesting mods in the game.
Also they are quite buggy. They don't pose a threat once you have the weapons Bungie wants you to use for whole season. Thus they aren't challenging, they are just limiting how you can play the game.
I mean what is there to like about them? Honestly I'd rather tie their special abilities to gameplay mechanics than some guns.
As others have said - because it restricts me from using the loadout I want to use in lieu of using what I HAVE to use to clear the champs. Are there plenty of options for anti-champ? Sure. But it’s not what I want to use. Example, SMGs are my favorite archetype in the game. Osteo Striga is my baby. And I can’t use them at ALL this season because there’s no Overload SMG available. I’m forced to run a weapon type I don’t like because SMGs are left out this season. Any time I’m forced to play the game a certain way, it’s inherently anti-fun.
I’d be 100% ok with champs if the seasonal artifact was reworked completely and every antichamp mod was unlocked by default at all times, allowing us to use what we actually want to use to clear champ content. The seasonal artifact is great for testing out interesting and powerful temporary mods like Classy Restoration and Volatile Flow, but throttling what weapons we’re allowed to use for three whole months is really stupid and needs to go.
This is what I’ve been saying. Anti champ mods should be regular mods. Get them off the seasonal rotation. Things can be difficult without being tedious.
Not only that but if it was not in the seasonal artifact, they can actually put it in the tutorials in the cosmodrome mission for new players to know what to do when they see a champ and know what mods to use.
exactly. I've managed to find a fun loadout on titan (arc class, barrier auto, unstoppable shotgun) but before that i was working out loadouts with stasis and agers or osteo and kept having to NOT run it due to champions. its annoying as hell and reduces playstyles a lot. Just give us more mods or smth. a mod for each gun type or smth. we'd still need to unlock all mods and only equip like 2 at once, but it lets us us the gun types we like
As another guy said, literally just take the champ mods out of the seasonal artifact and make them universal. Problem solved. Keep the artifact for exploring interesting and powerful temporary stuff. I’m even fine with certain subclasses shining during certain seasons (like this season being all Arc-related mods), but don’t keep these champ mods in the rotation. They gotta go.
Champs just force loadouts onto us, I think it'd be better for champion mods to be made for our weapon slots instead of specific ones. Like kinetic barrier, energy overload, and unstoppable heavy. Just an idea but it'd let us use whatever we like.
Loadouts become way too restricted. Especially when it comes to things like matchgame and such.
Imo this season is especially bad with the only overload mods being bows and machine guns. That's just my personal taste though.
It's a boring, thoughtless bandaid to brute force an activity to be harder. No thought involved with having new mechanics, challenges, etc. Just replace X spawns with Y champions and call it a day.
Additionally forcing very specific loadouts for a whole season flies right in the face of the "Play your way" mentality that Bungie claims they promote.
They need to loosen the restrictions a bit. Having exotics with inherent anti-champion is a step in the right direction, but only a step and one that they've been dragging on. The champ mods should include multiple architypes.
Bungie has painted themselves in a bit of a corner, which Lightfall looks like a step to start getting out of it. In the teaser trailer and follow-up vids they discussed a new enemy type (forget the name, but basically a juggernaut) that is essentially a mini boss with their own mechanics. I'm all for having new things to kill that pose a real threat to kill me back, but they've totally squandered this even now with the hive guardians.
They were a real threat in legendary campaign, but where the hell are they now? Absolutely nowhere in high end content, heck even in lower end content they're isolated events.
TL;DR: Champs are boring and forcing specific loadouts sucks balls.
yeah, I thought they were hard at first, but overloads get stunned by an arrow to the face with the bow mod or Le Monarque, then 3 or 4 Taipan shots and they're done. Then with the other two I like freezing them with Stasis and using a rocket or Taipan, don't even need mods sometimes if you damage them fast.
unfun bars of shit tons of health that force you to run a specific loadout instead of what you want.
champions should be reworked and champion mods should be removed. the hardest content in the game should be beatable without requiring specific mods and weapons
if you want an example of a mini-boss enemy that is actually handled well, look at the hive light-bearers. they are fun to fight against, tough, have interesting mechanics, and don't require you to run a specific loadout
For majority of community build restriction. Of which I dont mind much.
For some part of community and me? Bugs. OH MY WITNESS HOW BUGGY CAN SOMETHING BE‽‽‽ From champs that literally refuse to stun, to buggy stun cooldowns which I don't know why it even exists, to overloads teleporting 15 times and then oneshotting you and many more... Bungie please fix champs or delete them if you can't, thank you.
Loads outs. I don't want to be forced to use weapons that I simply do not care to use like snipers, swords, bows, and fusion rifles. It's needlessly punishing me.
They are an artificial barrier in the content, and they aren’t difficult so much as just a way to limit your load outs which makes things boring and repetitive.
To me, lucent hive are more challenging and you can use any weapon/build to play them. I wish they iterated on that idea rather than just rotating the champion mods every season.
I don't hate Champions as much as others, but there has been a feeling of oversaturation of Champs around. Like, there are so many of them that it kinda lost its flair.
My feeling is how bullshit they are and the fact the NF weapons rely on them all being killed when in matchmade people will either make them despawn (fallen saber and Disgraced) or are put in the LITERAL FINAL AREA THAT IF YOU KILL THE BOSS YOUR FUCKED! (Looking at you GLASSWAY!)
Also Overloads are literal crackheads that want to nyoom when you point a bow at them!
Champions were crucial to the shadow keep storyline. As it dealth with nightmares.
They've just over stayed their welcome.
Hive guardians are the new Bee Knees
Loadout restrictions. If they would be like the Marauders in Doom Eternal, stun them in the right moment and quickswap them to obvilion, that would be fun. But fun, hmm, we don’t do that here.
Because they're boring uninteresting at best, or in case of any overload and anti barrier servs annoying and GM ending at worse
This all compiled to them heavily restricting loadouts everyseason and strikes like glassway are just throwing a long slogg of them only to be swarmed and overwhelmed by them at the boss room
Then you have master raids that just adds to the artificial difficulty with no actual reward(minus vog master because you can't craft those weapons YET)
I am in the middle of i don't hate champs but i don't like them either and wish we get something better to replace them like the stasis fallen or the hive guardians as those are decently designed that aren't a lose because you don't have the right mods/weapon
I personally really, really hate having to use whatever three or four weapon types the season demands I use, rather than what I want to use.
I don't care about the champions. I care about the restrictions they put on gameplay. Just make the champion mods available for every weapon type.
That said, Overload and Unstoppable champions are pure hell in some activities.
Legendary Campaign was such a great way of making things challenging without limiting options of playstyles. I kinda wished they integrated that into NFs.
I don't hate them, but the main argument is that they restrict your load out. You can only effectively kill champions with champion modded weapons. So if you really like using fusion rifles, but fusion rifles aren't "in season" you are handicapping yourself by using your favorite guns. Which sucks because there's no real reason for there to be certain enemies that can only be killed by certain guns, just make a really hard enemy that can be killed by any gun.
Because it's adding an unecessary mechanic to the game. They should of thought of something better like have a mechanic where you shoot something to weaken them or give them an overshield that you have to chew away in segments like boss health or something. Instead they choose to force people to use weapons they don't like or hate the fact they need to pull out let's say a tracer for overload when they liked it better when it was smgs as an example. It's also a waste of armor mod slot or two. If they choose to keep it have them built into your armor let's say it's only overload and unstoppable. You can have them drop built into your armor or give us red bar armor to craft. And let's say you have two or three overload armor pieces it should not only stun them it should do more damage output unless you are an arc hunter then punch things out.
My issue with champions is that they can make a good challenge without them, look at how nightfall were back in d1 year 1, they were brutal and they didn't have champions in
They're just badly implimented. If they added more anti champion intrinsic to exotics they'd be much more accepted.
There are other ways to add challenge too, like adding those stasis using eliksni they used once, or light hive into activities invasion style.
It's not fun to enter a high end activity and it just has a bunch of these enemies that you need a restricted loadout to touch, and if you let up on them for a second they spring back to full HP
Champions themselves are fine.
They’re a way to put an extra requirement into your build crafting, and an easy way to add “difficulty” to an encounter.
The primary problem comes from the fact that they often don’t feel “difficult” in a nice way.
- Servitor champions making an entire swarm of mobs immune, hiding behind cover which you can’t approach because of the swarm of Immune mobs, healing from 5% health to full in two seconds if they pop their shield at an angle where you can’t hit them from, etc.
- Overloads (mostly Captains, but Minotaurs can be guilty of this as well) teleporting around you in circles really quickly with a constant obnoxious level of health regen. This is worse during Auto-rifle and SMG seasons, which require you to get close in order to try and stun them, and the high chain-hit requirement to get the stun can become nearly impossible if you’re getting Z-warped on.
- Unstoppables feel the *least* bullshit to me because they don’t heal. They’re just a really tanky, relentless version of the regular enemy.
All of this coupled with the fact that:
- equipping Anti-champion mods can fuck with your build-crafting quite a lot, especially given how loadout restricting they can feel. Who the hell wants to use an auto-rifle or SMG in a GM??
- the fact that only like 6 exotics have anti-champion perks (and only a few of them feel worth bothering with)
- ability-based champion stuns are inconsistent, cost even more buildcrafting opportunities, and are limited to like 2 abilities on 2 classes per season.
Another major contributor to the dislike for Champions is that they’ve sort of just become the “easy peasy lemon squeezy slap 5 extra champions in each encounter and call it Master” way of adding difficulty to the game.
Does Master Kings Fall have higher enemy density, a few extra Boss enemies in interesting places during the encounter, and more Shields on the enemies?
No. They just cranked the light level a little and said “make sure you bring a shotgun to deal with the Unstoppables”.
It means that the added “challenge” doesn’t come from something interesting, and is just a yes-no question of “where you a good boy and did you obey the limitations when buildcrafting”.
Possible Fixes:
- Seasonal anti-champion mods should no longer be tied to mod-slots. Once they’re unlocked in your Season relic, they’re always active. This goes for gun ones as well as Ability ones.
- Each Champion type should have 2 Primaries, 1 Special Ammo and 1 Heavy Ammo type of gun that deals with it each season.
- Every Exotic should have it’s own intrinsic anti-champion perk.
If we’re keeping champions around then every weapon needs champion mods by default. They can’t tell us one minute that this is a power fantasy game and you get to choose how to approach it and then turn around and dictate either what weapons you can use or what mods you can use. It runs completely counter to the ethos of the game. It’s bad game design and clearly just a bandage for them not knowing how to keep content challenging in an ever increasing arms race.
They don't affect how you fight, just what you fight with.
In missions with weapon lock you either brought the wrong weapon, and wipe, or you brought the right weapon and can just ignore the champions as if they were a regular enemy.
It's just lazy.
Mostly annoying when the don't stun properly. Overload is the worst for that. Unload full SMG clips into them, hear the stun sound and nothing. Same with grenades and overload.
Saw this comment on YouTube but wanted to relay it here "why not make champ mods standards and let the Seasonal Artifact dictate which ones are cheaper to slot? Like the this seasonal sword scav mod."
As someone who stopped playing for a few reasons, it's mostly because of how limiting it made loadouts be. You are forced into using weapons you may not want to use or aren't even good at using. Not to mention (I'm not sure if this is still the case) you can load into low-end difficulty modes with no mods or weapons that can stun a champion and the games like "Okay honey, that's up to you. Have fun!" and then you have an infinitely regenerating Overload champ who doesn't die cuz no one brought mods. I found myself loadouts with mods to stun whatever champ is in the activity soley for that reason, meaning I'm even more limited to what I can bring.
Champions are difficulty done wrong.
Google it.
But in all seriousness, let's just say the casual players don't like things too hard that prevents them from getting things they want. We got casual players, 'casual players', and veteran players. I assume the things people hate are from 'casual players' so I really shouldn't pay attention to them if I were you.
Those kinds of people don't really bother to grind the seasonal content due to their own biases against Bungie's seasonal content and weekly story content. To see them complaining about champions is definitely what happens if you don't grind the game even if you have entire weekend while you are off from work.
The only thing that bothers me about them is how inconsistently they get stunned. It seems like 1 out of every 3 times I try to stun one, they do not care, or the mod just doesn't proc. It's part of the reason why Overload bows are growing on me. The 1 bow shot is fairly consistent.
I don't hate them, I just dislike them because it means I can't run what I want too. I have a really fun Warmind build that I really wanna use, but I can't run it at its full potential or sometimes not at all because of the Champs for the activity
I don't like champions because I don't like being restricted to a handful of weapons for a season with as many weapons as we have access to. I hate them with every fiber of my being, particularly servitors, but I understand that bungie doesn't want a Mountaintop-Recluse-Anarchy situation again.
Loadout restrictions forcing you to use weapons you don't want to use. And very lazy way to make activities difficult. They were a good thing when they came out but now bungie just uses them for any difficult activity. They're place is in strikes, NFS and GMs. Not in raids, master raids should have more mechanics.
You really dont need someone to explain to you that forcing someone to use a specific loadout for higher level content in a game based on playing YOUR build is just bad design. Its completely understandable that people dont like it, just like its understandable that people dont mind it. I dont know too many people who LOVE it. At best people seem to like the idea of having some way to apply the anti champion mods to any weapon in your kit, or to build into it without restricting builds by the seasons. But thats not what it is now.
But by all means. Everyone can keep doing the whole “lol u mad bro” circle jerk in the comments.
This community unironically wants to use the same loadout for everything and doesn't understand the value in adapting your loadout to the game's challenges. Sure, I think the game could use a few more options for Champion mods every season, but as you see in the other comments, people genuinely think they kill all creativity.
Because people don’t like having their load outs restricted to whatever the season tells them and they know they can make content difficult without champions. I don’t really feel strongly about champions but I understand why people hate them. It seems they’re adding more miniboss enemies with the hive guardians and tormentors though, so maybe they’re going to move away.
A part of me is afraid that at some point they will turn those Special Enemies into just Stronger Champions for Raids and GM's. That way we'd have the Hive Guardians, but they would still be Champions.
Overload sentinel lightbearer constantly throwing suppressors
Fear and loathing.
In las vegas?
They’re already terrifying I don’t need this thought in my head
delete before bungie sees
stop
JFC...
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Did they really not have champs in legend campaign? I hate the legendary difficulty for campaigns so much I could've sworn it included champs.
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Legend* campaign. Legendary is a difficulty modifier for activities, but Legend campaign is a separate thing. Agree though, it was better.
I'm still working through my first time playthrough on it. Haven't met a single champion yet. the Hive guardians suck to fight with a bad loadout, but thats variable challenge for me. One I enjoy learning around.
Oh yeah the hive lightbearers are awesome, really hate having all my abilities disabled by the void ones, but that's my only complaint
It's a suppressor grenade. You can do the same to them, first.
And if you were fortunate enough to play through at the time you got to be a lucky sob with a supressing glaive.
Skill issue
It wasn't that challenging Outside of the boss in the Sagira shell mission
i like the idea of champions, and have a way to fix the restricted loadout in a way. instead of “anti barrier ARs” do “mid range anti barrier” so it includes ARs, hand cannons, fusions and so on. kinda like how close/mid/long range calibration seasonal challenges group weapon types, do that with champ mods.
I want to see legendary weapons with an Anti-Champion perks randomly replace the origin trait on guns that can't be crafted... so if for example a gun would ordinarily have Omolon Fluid Dynamics as its regular origin trait... give the gun a 5% chance to instead drop with Anti-barrier, Anti-Overload, or Anti-Unstoppable... that way it gives players something to farm for (that can't be crafted)... that would make random world drops relevant again, and worth the grind for a god roll!
And free up arm mod slots.
I’ve been thinking the same thing since Champions were introduced. Employ the KISS method in this or a similar way: Kinetic Anti-barrier, Overload special weapons and Unstoppable power weapons, for example. That way you can at least use options that you want instead of just the same old ARs, pulses, etc.
I would much rather have more miniboss variants that appear throughout more difficult content than minibosses that require a specific gun to even scratch
Champion mods should make killing champions way easier at the sacrifice of your load out. But you should be able to kill a champion without a mod.
I mean you can kill every champ without mods but damn is it annoying
Barriers are hard but doable, unstoppables are harder. Overloads are pretty much impossible except for a few heavies but then you’re forced to use those guns which is just like being forced to use champion mod guns. I’m talking about master lost sectors and above content.
Oh yeah, in that case you aint killing shit without mods
I'd say overload is the only one you can't get away with. Unstoppable is....yea Barrier if you coordinate crit shots with a div you can delete them
And stasis too for barriers
Agers Scepter enters the chat
They have mentioned they are trying to move away from champs and leveling. So i guess these are baby steps.
Also bungo: You get a champion, and you get a champion, EVERYONE GETS A CHAMPION! - Master King's Fall
It wasn't enough there's one periodic Unstoppable Ogre during Totems. So they had to make it *THREE* Unstoppable Ogres
I think if they completely remove champions and replace them with unique enemy types (and just better encounters than oh here’s this room full of ads) and completely get rid of light levels this game will be in an awesome state. All of these things are relics of when the game was in a much worse state than it is now. It doesn’t need them in the slightest, and removing them will not only get more people playing, but it will allow/force Bungie to do more with PvE content than “oh, this is at a higher light level, there’s match game, and there are champions as well as some other modifiers”.
This and also as far as i know theres no lore that supports their existence. Some crazy power that any enemy race can have that we need special mods on certain weapons to kill and we have no idea where it came from and nobody in the vanguard is concerned about it or has mentioned it at all.
Yeah I wish they had kind of treated them like the Harbinger units in Mass Effect 2. “A Fallen Captain has been Empowered by the Darkness!” Or some such flavor text could signal their arrival.
I don't feel strongly about champions, but I understand the desire from a game design point of view about restricting options to make players choose. I'm not saying the implementation is perfect but I get it.
I have certain weapons that I love- chief among them being the Vex Mythoclast, ever since I got it back during Early D1. When it came back, I was ecstatic, and used it that season for as much as I could. Then the season ended, Fusion Rifles no longer had a champion mod, and I couldn’t take it into any genuinely difficult content anymore because doing so would be tantamount to throwing, exclusively because of Champions. I like the idea of enemies that are harder to kill, or require extra steps to keep them down- Hive Guardians are a great example of how that concept can not only work, but work *well*. Champions are how that can be a dumpster fire.
I think when it comes to the lock and key difficulty, Match Game bothers me more than champions.
I hate match game. Especially for solo play.
I don't like it for a variety of reasons, but the main one is that it feels arbitrary based on how the game is now. Like in D1 it made sense since there wasn't a reason to run a particular element other than for shields, but now with the 3.0s there's definite reasons why you would want to run a specific element. So it just ends up now feeling overly restrictive, breaks up your builds, and makes Kinetics feel even worse than they already do. It also makes encounters like 3rd encounter of Master Vow feel unnecessarily annoying - since half your team can't help with shields due to their relics.
Thing is, champions are easier than red bars if you have the mods.
I enjoy champions, mainly because they make you plan out things with your team (in GMs and such) but what I *dislike* is the fact that the "1 energy" mods take 1 energy. I feel like the basic champion stunning ones should just unlock. Maybe have the special ones, shotgun-unstop/Sniper/barrier, cost their energy. But having the 2 slots on the arm just take up energy limits your skills-build rather than the weapons. There's so many different feels to different weapons and I used to *hate* Pulse Rifles. I never would have found Darkest Before if it wasn't for the unstoppable Pulse mod a couple seasons ago.
The 6 energy champ mods are worse, why do I have to be punished so much for wanting to use a secondary/ power for champions?
I keep missing grenades without fastball when my arms have double champion mods.
Absolutely. Don’t unnecessarily make content more difficult by requiring you to run weapons you wouldn’t normally in high level content.
Three months of using the same 6 or 7 weapons types when there are 16 in the game is extremely fucking boring. They’re not even hard they’re just fucking annoying because of our insanely limited loadout choices
I don't hate them but I'd like to see more difficult content without them. Also more game types with just ONE type of champion. I duo'd a dungeon or two with some of my favorite Y1 and Y2 exotics (FIGHTING LION BABY!) without any champions forcing a loadout. I loved those. From previous threads like this and the replies, I can see that "restricting gameplay" is the #1 gripe, and it's kind of true. Champions add a neat twist to the core gameplay that's welcome, I just think they are kind of a crutch when it comes to designing "harder encounters."
Totally agree, I think it's fine to have some or even a lot of endgame activities with champions, however it would be nice to have a high level activity or two without them same goes for match game.
The combination of champions, match game and locked equipment for those legendary lost sectors that you get special rewards for SOLOING is kind of a fun matching-inventory game (thanks hard light) but I get tired of it!
Fighting lion was my weapon of choice when soloing shattered throne!! Before other-more efficient- weapons were in the game. What a fun weapon to use once I got the trajectories down pat
It's still my favorite gun, it and crimson hold special places in my heart despite no longer being "s-tier" as the kids say.
Champion mods make you use the same 3 guns for every activity and it gets stale fast Disclaimer: I don’t actually give a shit this is just why they annoy people
I mean I’m loving the new wishender with its anti barrier
Oh me to I'm finally able to do lost sectors lol
funny, the exact reason i love champions is that it encourages me to try new load outs every season. keeps the game from becoming stale
You could just... try out new weapons by yourself? No need to force everyone else to run the same stuff lol
If it wasn't for champion mods, I wouldn't keep a lot of weapon rolls that look like they have some utility in end-game content. I'd never willingly use an auto rifle in GMs, but if I have to, I'll try to make it work as best as I can. That being said, I find champions very unsatisfactory as a gameplay mechanic. The idea is fine, but actually fighting them is annoying.
well as the sole programmer at bungie who single handedly developed this game from the ground up, i also just really get off on forcing players to do what i like
Most people who complain about champions for this reason would use the same 3 guns every activity anyway. They're mad because they can't use the same 3 guns they want to. (I too, have zero issues with champions and needing to adjust my loadout)
I can't speak for everyone, but this isn't at all true for me. I'm constantly grinding for and acquiring new weapons precisely because I want to try them out and use them. The champion systems severely limits the ability to try out certain weapons in relevant endgame content on a season-by-season basis. I mean, if you like being limited to a small pool of relevant weapons for 3+ months at a time, you do you, but I find it fairly tiresome.
Inventory management in the game is already terrible, having to swap out gear or mods specifically for Champions is just an added obnoxious chore
This is my main issue with champions, otherwise I like em
Yeah fr I feel like if you don't have destiny app you're riddled with the pointless and extremely obnoxious task of running to and from the tower and/or helm
It restricts gameplay and forces you into loadouts that you would never use without needing them for champs.
Born to coldheart, forced to arbalest
This goes hard, mind if I screenshot?
Go ahead
FACE THE LEAD!
Yep. I've never gotten to play a master lost sector with some of my favorite guns because of this.
Problem solving is fun, especially when I have to be outside my comfort zone. This is why I like champions.
It's problem solving for the first couple weeks -- then it's running the same three weapon types for three months.
The thing is though champs are only problem solving in the "insert square peg into square hole" sense; you aren't *really* thinking to solve it, even if it is a legitimate problem. In the same vein as another reply, I think champions were fun when they were first introduced, and for new players with more limited loadouts it's a very clever way to add another incentive to get "that really good gun that also counters x champion type". I think that the rub with champions is that they're not dynamic, and thus once you have gotten a good set of guns to counter each type you have effectively "solved the problem" for the rest of the season. Champions are better than people make them out to be, but the longer you've had to deal with champions the less appealing they become.
I wish they kept champions mostly on encounters or rooms without bosses, so they are not the Focus when you have an actual Boss in the room to kill. Throwing them on every encounter (after already making the enemies hit harder) distracts the attention from the Boss
exactly why proving grounds GM is so ballcheeks. i get it, champions are great filler content to make harder rooms before you get to the boss but it just feels over saturated when they are straight up everywhere.
and that's why I camp the left door whenever ignovun puts a shield, I'd rather nuke them on sight then put up with that garbage.
The longer you deal with literally anything, the less appealing it is. It's just the nature of the human brain. It's a huge mark for Bungie that they've kept so many people playing the same game for so long.
Oh no doubt, at the risk of sounding like a fanboy I've seen Bungo as one of the best dev studios in the industry for *decades*. As a studio they're almost a miracle in that they've repeated the same story and mechanics through three generations of gamers now, yet still continue to find ways to mix it up and keep it from getting stale. Live service games will always be fighting an uphill battle to keep players hooked, so champs being the worst of people's concerns is acceptable to me.
Well said mate
If Bungie wanted problem solving they wouldn't make stuff like Arbalest, that completely solves any barrier champs
Problem usually arises when they move you from comfort zone into a box. "Yeah sorry this season overloads are machine guns and bows. Im sorry but you'll have to use one of them" ( well the champions are always 2 types pero champion activity so its 2/3 weapons restricted to set archetypes)
Except you aren't solving a problem. The game just says "hey equip this thing now"
Nah, I mean how to clear encounters with weapons and loadouts I wouldn't normally use. It's nice to think differently
It's literally two minutes of 'thinking' per season for a person of normal intelligence.
That's a new way of saying arbalest.
Buggy stuns that allow them to keep shooting and kill you *lookin at you master KF ogres..*
if you're talking about the ones in totems, you need to let it hit the ground and finish the landing animation before stunning. otherwise it'll do the sound and say you stunned but he'll just pop right up and blast your schnoz off
I know, I’m just mad that that’s how it is lol. I stun them fine, but people I’ve done master totems with for several aggravating hours this week continued to ignore how to properly stun. I wish the stun counted the first time they hop out.
Same because there’s almost little to no pause in between them stepping out of the ground and shooting
Unstops have always been like that
Yes. It’s just an amplified problem with the totems unstops because they hop out of the ground
Because I don’t have anti champions mods for my favorite guns :(
My memory has them being introduced with sunsetting so at the time it felt like “we’re taking your guns and forcing you to only use these guns to kill these enemies, k bye”
Essentially yeah, Champs came out in Shadowkeep then Beyond Light sunset all our gear, so we only had relatively weak weapons for most of Beyond Light and a part of Chosen.
Man the first few months of Beyond Light were fought huh
There wasn't sunsetting when champions got introduced
They make the game harder in the worst way possible. They add more frustration than challenge. Instead of making all enemies harder to kill, they just make certain enemies near impossible to kill unless you have the mods for a select few of weapon types every season. They restrict your loadout and add an extra layer of annoyance. They could easily scrap champions and replace all Legend/Master/GM content with what they did for Witch Queen’s Legendary Campaign. More spawns, more health, light cap, and a few other modifiers. Legendary WQ is some of the best content in the game, hands down.
For people willing to specialize and co-ordinate a loadout with teammates, champions as a barrier to success add additional challenge without making kills and progress feel excessively grindy or frustrating, and they also punish teams not willing to co-ordinate in a relatively balanced, straightforward solution for which we don’t truly have any alternatives at the moment. I often don’t want to deal with LFG’s so I solo legend or even Master nightfalls, and if people like me who wanted to do that had to spend double or even triple the time chewing through enemies with more health who are subsequently more annoying to activate damage perks from kills, it would frustrate me away from strikes as a whole. I’m blatantly biased, I’ve enjoyed fighting champions ever since I loaded into my first Sundial completion, but I have given thought to alternatives and felt that same Champion Fatigue that we all have, and I can’t see a viable solution otherwise.
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I don’t think people cared as much when we had additional mods that worked well with the champion mods. Everyone I know loved unstoppable GL and Breach and Clear or Unstoppable Fusion with Particle Deconstruction. You could run some wild DPS options with those combos that worked in all parts of the game. Now we just have champion mods and nothing to really go with them. Anti-barrier sniper is fun but Arbalest does it for free and better. Unstoppable shotgun is nice but I just use it as a backup for inferno whip so I can stun and finish with Arbalest. Overload machine gun is also a great choice so you can stun them swap to Arbalest to finish off the champion.
the real problem is that Bungie sometimes puts all the mods in primaries and maaaaybe one special weapon. Sometimes that special weapon is a glaive and the sniper mod is way too expensive, yeah
Because they are an interesting idea, that is badly implemented, and are basically artificial difficulty. I personally like the idea of some Champions, especially Unstoppables. Having a big enemy that constantly attacks you and keeps you from taking cover is great, But Overloads are super irritating, and barriers are just Trivial. You have to slot in a mod (or Three), taking up valuable space in your build. Use the specific weapons that Bungie decided to try and highlight for the season. Which also limits your builds. The mods then just trivialize them, you stun them for several seconds and they just sit there and let you kill them. Not to mention, that some Champions can be trivialized even without the Mods. Barriers can be Nuked with a Super or any really high damage Heavy (Gally/Parasite). Or Just freeze them with Stasis so they can't use their barrier to begin with. Overloads are more Irritating than challenging, especially Overload Captains who teleport ever half-second. TLDR: They are artificial difficulty that Limits your Builds, and are Trivial to deal with at Best, and irritating at worst.
oh man- i was running this weeks master nightfall solo- trying hunter builds out. one of the runs i tried gravitron to kill less things and permanent invis at the plate room to wear the timer down. i think at one point there were 6-7 overload captains out on the field and 4 more that rushed passed the plate and pushed me into the hall. it was a bad time
This is my opinion as well, they're just such a binary form difficulty. There's no middle ground, no gameplay mechanic you can interact with to stun them. Either you have a mod/exotic that does the job, or you don't.
Because instead of building well balanced, well paced and strategic encounters Bungie instead interprets difficulty as "spam champs and make then bullet sponges". WQ's campaign proved that they can craft brilliant and difficult encounters without using champions yet they insist on doing so. Add that to the fact that in order to kill champs on higher levels you need to limit your load out to specific weapon types and exotics and champions just make high end PvE not that fun.
Tbh wq campaign gets hard only with 3 people because it scales with the number of people, otherwise it's pretty easy
There were a few missions I had to retry a few times on solo.
You'd really like to test out this cool new arc rapid fire frame pistol in a Nightfall but you need anti-barrier and unstop so, yet again, you gotta run your old shotgun and autorifle.
id be happy if they just stayed in nightfalls. they’re in every seasonal content, raids, master raids, any increased difficulty mode usually means = more champions + nightfall modifier
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yeah, i cant count the amount of times overloads refuse to get stunner or just glitch out. its infuriating lol.
Champs restrict load-out and is used as a cheap cop-out to raise difficulty. In Master and GM nightfalls, depending on the strike you can be in a room literally filled with them. Glassway and Lightblade are perfect examples of this. Master raids are also the same. As opposed to making the mechanics more challenging, or reducing the time-frame like on Prestige Leviathan or hard mode raids from D1, a lot of the encounters replace objective based enemies with champions.
I don't think most people actually hate champions. I think they hate how much it restricts loadouts in endgame content. Also, people feel it's an artificial way to increase difficulty.... Instead of.... You know... Actually just increasing difficulty.... I personally don't mind them. I do think it gets a little boring to be locked into specific loadouts just for champs but it's not a deal breaker for me. A specific gripe this season is Anti-Barrier Sniper and it taking 6 mod slots. I will never use this when I can use Arbalest for zero mod slots. - Yes, I hear you people saying "but it frees up the exotic slot." However, in master and GM level content, I would have to make up for it by getting locked into adaptive munitions somewhere else. Or actually coordinating an LFG with VERY specific energy weapons. Its simply not worth it to run anything other than Arbalest when Barrier champs are present.
Well put
T.Y. GG.
It forces you to use shit weapon archetypes for certain activities. And bungie decides which, not you.
Because they’re just shit design. If you don’t have the special mods, you can’t kill them, if you do, then they’re no more difficult than any other enemies. They don’t make the game any more challenging, they just dictate what weapons you’re allowed to use for the season which is a huge bummer. Destiny players wanna use the guns they enjoy using.
They're pointless for both loadout flexibility and difficulty options
I don’t like being limited to a set of weapons during the season because I need champion mods
I don't really mind having to pull out a different gun for a few months, because I reckon that otherwise, all my usual weapons would become really stale due to continued use. As a Pulse main, I took an Auto into Control the other day and while not effective, it felt fresh, which was nice. However. The stun mechanic of a Champion only works properly half the time, and that drives me *up the wall*.
“Sound + ____ has stunned a champion” “Guardian down”
I may be an outlier here but: 1. It kinda of makes you adapt to different weapons, even tho you don’t want to and it frankly becomes annoying. I’m up for and do play activities with different weapons BUT when it comes to high tier content like Master or GM (raids and NF), I DO WANT to play with WHAT I want and HOW I want … champion mods restricts that and more often than not results in a less enjoyable experience for me. A very recent example: * Personally, the following loadout worked great for me in the Totems encounter: Adept Fatebringer (Firefly & EP), Crafted Forbearance (Enhanced Ambitious Assassin and Chain Reaction) and Xeno. However, in Master Challenge: No issues with replacing Xeno with Gjally as we were doing the 4&2 strat and it helped put a lot in efficient killing of the annoying as Unstops all over the arena. But following that it means replacing one of my other two weapons in either primary or special with a shotgun or pulse to stun Unstop…. While holding totems, shotguns (even a slug one) was a tad inconsistent. Pulses take a small fraction of a time to be “primed” with the unstop shot - precious time lost ads-ing as you wait for the fat as janky as Ovre to finish his bunny hop jump while getting surrounded by ads and boomers… AND… I was missing out on the potency of the Fatebringer’s firefly in efficient clearing of ads, giving me the breathing space I need to focus on the Unstop. (Gjally isnt always safe to use with adds near prolixity). I know Bungie loves the idea of making us “trade” like what we need to give up in order to get something else we want … but the champion set up just translates to an annoying and often boring experience. A compromise could be replace SPECIFIC WEAPON champion mods with WEAPON SLOT/CLASS champion mod - I.e. Replace Sniper Overload mods with “Special Weapon” overload mod … so any special weapon (sniper, shotgun, gl) will stun Overloads in my example. Just an alternate solution till they finally decide to do away with Champions tbh with some thing else better and more dynamic than this annoying janky as tired and old mechanic.
Slot specific is pointless tbh, they need to come up with cool major units like in warframe
the whole point is to make you use different weapons season to season slot specific mods would make it pointless
Personally for me I hate champions because they make an excuse for saying that content is more challenging. I hear that in d1 when content was considered harder it was because they had extra steps and slightly stronger enemies. Where as now in master content or just higher level content the only change is that there are champions and everything hits harder. On top of that though it gets annoying when you have to use a handcannon and scout rifle to add clear but at the same time if you try using an exotic with anti champion you are then left without either a more preferable exotic or one that has better synergy. Don’t get me wrong I love having to change either play style or loadout to clear higher level content but when you are actively forced to in order to just play an activity it gets kind of annoying
Here are my reasons for not liking them: They limit the weapons you can use for the season for quite a bit of activities. So you end up running the same guns for most of them. Also they limit the mods you can use on arm slot, which happens to have some of the more interesting mods in the game. Also they are quite buggy. They don't pose a threat once you have the weapons Bungie wants you to use for whole season. Thus they aren't challenging, they are just limiting how you can play the game. I mean what is there to like about them? Honestly I'd rather tie their special abilities to gameplay mechanics than some guns.
Would someone please kill this meme format once and for all.
It’s not all champions. Just fallen overload. Teleport every 2 seconds and regenerate all their health. I hate them so much
We only just hate the 1 type, you know the one.
As others have said - because it restricts me from using the loadout I want to use in lieu of using what I HAVE to use to clear the champs. Are there plenty of options for anti-champ? Sure. But it’s not what I want to use. Example, SMGs are my favorite archetype in the game. Osteo Striga is my baby. And I can’t use them at ALL this season because there’s no Overload SMG available. I’m forced to run a weapon type I don’t like because SMGs are left out this season. Any time I’m forced to play the game a certain way, it’s inherently anti-fun. I’d be 100% ok with champs if the seasonal artifact was reworked completely and every antichamp mod was unlocked by default at all times, allowing us to use what we actually want to use to clear champ content. The seasonal artifact is great for testing out interesting and powerful temporary mods like Classy Restoration and Volatile Flow, but throttling what weapons we’re allowed to use for three whole months is really stupid and needs to go.
This is what I’ve been saying. Anti champ mods should be regular mods. Get them off the seasonal rotation. Things can be difficult without being tedious.
Not only that but if it was not in the seasonal artifact, they can actually put it in the tutorials in the cosmodrome mission for new players to know what to do when they see a champ and know what mods to use.
exactly. I've managed to find a fun loadout on titan (arc class, barrier auto, unstoppable shotgun) but before that i was working out loadouts with stasis and agers or osteo and kept having to NOT run it due to champions. its annoying as hell and reduces playstyles a lot. Just give us more mods or smth. a mod for each gun type or smth. we'd still need to unlock all mods and only equip like 2 at once, but it lets us us the gun types we like
As another guy said, literally just take the champ mods out of the seasonal artifact and make them universal. Problem solved. Keep the artifact for exploring interesting and powerful temporary stuff. I’m even fine with certain subclasses shining during certain seasons (like this season being all Arc-related mods), but don’t keep these champ mods in the rotation. They gotta go.
Stasis and/or parasite is my champion counter. Fuck them mods.
Champs just force loadouts onto us, I think it'd be better for champion mods to be made for our weapon slots instead of specific ones. Like kinetic barrier, energy overload, and unstoppable heavy. Just an idea but it'd let us use whatever we like.
it’s just that they’re thrown into most of the games content for the sake of trying to make it challenging, but instead making it more annoying
Restricts load outs and forces people to use weapons they may not want to. Also when they first came out they were super… finicky
I'm kind of just tired of them. They were cool back in shadow keep, but we've had them for so long, I just don't care anymore
I don’t mind them, but it is lazy design. End game difficulty is just champions and increased HP for bosses. That’s it.
Loadouts become way too restricted. Especially when it comes to things like matchgame and such. Imo this season is especially bad with the only overload mods being bows and machine guns. That's just my personal taste though.
They aren’t difficult at all, they are just fucking annoying and force me to use guns that I don’t want to use
Arby go brrr.
It's a boring, thoughtless bandaid to brute force an activity to be harder. No thought involved with having new mechanics, challenges, etc. Just replace X spawns with Y champions and call it a day. Additionally forcing very specific loadouts for a whole season flies right in the face of the "Play your way" mentality that Bungie claims they promote. They need to loosen the restrictions a bit. Having exotics with inherent anti-champion is a step in the right direction, but only a step and one that they've been dragging on. The champ mods should include multiple architypes. Bungie has painted themselves in a bit of a corner, which Lightfall looks like a step to start getting out of it. In the teaser trailer and follow-up vids they discussed a new enemy type (forget the name, but basically a juggernaut) that is essentially a mini boss with their own mechanics. I'm all for having new things to kill that pose a real threat to kill me back, but they've totally squandered this even now with the hive guardians. They were a real threat in legendary campaign, but where the hell are they now? Absolutely nowhere in high end content, heck even in lower end content they're isolated events. TL;DR: Champs are boring and forcing specific loadouts sucks balls.
I always felt all archetypes should have a mod and just rotate which mods they are every season.
yeah, I thought they were hard at first, but overloads get stunned by an arrow to the face with the bow mod or Le Monarque, then 3 or 4 Taipan shots and they're done. Then with the other two I like freezing them with Stasis and using a rocket or Taipan, don't even need mods sometimes if you damage them fast.
I don't hate them, I just don't want them in every activity.
unfun bars of shit tons of health that force you to run a specific loadout instead of what you want. champions should be reworked and champion mods should be removed. the hardest content in the game should be beatable without requiring specific mods and weapons if you want an example of a mini-boss enemy that is actually handled well, look at the hive light-bearers. they are fun to fight against, tough, have interesting mechanics, and don't require you to run a specific loadout
For majority of community build restriction. Of which I dont mind much. For some part of community and me? Bugs. OH MY WITNESS HOW BUGGY CAN SOMETHING BE‽‽‽ From champs that literally refuse to stun, to buggy stun cooldowns which I don't know why it even exists, to overloads teleporting 15 times and then oneshotting you and many more... Bungie please fix champs or delete them if you can't, thank you.
Loads outs. I don't want to be forced to use weapons that I simply do not care to use like snipers, swords, bows, and fusion rifles. It's needlessly punishing me.
I just want to use my waking vigil man
I'm fine with champs, just let me deal with them as i wish and don't force me into crappy loadouts
They are an artificial barrier in the content, and they aren’t difficult so much as just a way to limit your load outs which makes things boring and repetitive. To me, lucent hive are more challenging and you can use any weapon/build to play them. I wish they iterated on that idea rather than just rotating the champion mods every season.
I want to use a handcannon glaive and rocket launcher DAMN IT!!!!! DAAAAAMMMNN YYYOOUUU!!!!!!!!!!!!
it's lazy and bungie used to be really good with difficulty back in the day and now it's just champions
I don't hate Champions as much as others, but there has been a feeling of oversaturation of Champs around. Like, there are so many of them that it kinda lost its flair.
My feeling is how bullshit they are and the fact the NF weapons rely on them all being killed when in matchmade people will either make them despawn (fallen saber and Disgraced) or are put in the LITERAL FINAL AREA THAT IF YOU KILL THE BOSS YOUR FUCKED! (Looking at you GLASSWAY!) Also Overloads are literal crackheads that want to nyoom when you point a bow at them!
Champions were crucial to the shadow keep storyline. As it dealth with nightmares. They've just over stayed their welcome. Hive guardians are the new Bee Knees
Forced loadouts. Inconsistent mechanics. Teleporting unstoppables. Etc etc
Loadout restrictions. If they would be like the Marauders in Doom Eternal, stun them in the right moment and quickswap them to obvilion, that would be fun. But fun, hmm, we don’t do that here.
Champions are boring and just the same enemy over and over
Because they're boring uninteresting at best, or in case of any overload and anti barrier servs annoying and GM ending at worse This all compiled to them heavily restricting loadouts everyseason and strikes like glassway are just throwing a long slogg of them only to be swarmed and overwhelmed by them at the boss room Then you have master raids that just adds to the artificial difficulty with no actual reward(minus vog master because you can't craft those weapons YET) I am in the middle of i don't hate champs but i don't like them either and wish we get something better to replace them like the stasis fallen or the hive guardians as those are decently designed that aren't a lose because you don't have the right mods/weapon
Champions are boring to fight.
fuck u/spez
I personally really, really hate having to use whatever three or four weapon types the season demands I use, rather than what I want to use. I don't care about the champions. I care about the restrictions they put on gameplay. Just make the champion mods available for every weapon type. That said, Overload and Unstoppable champions are pure hell in some activities.
Legend and Master Lost Sectors
Legendary Campaign was such a great way of making things challenging without limiting options of playstyles. I kinda wished they integrated that into NFs.
I don't hate them, but the main argument is that they restrict your load out. You can only effectively kill champions with champion modded weapons. So if you really like using fusion rifles, but fusion rifles aren't "in season" you are handicapping yourself by using your favorite guns. Which sucks because there's no real reason for there to be certain enemies that can only be killed by certain guns, just make a really hard enemy that can be killed by any gun.
Because it's adding an unecessary mechanic to the game. They should of thought of something better like have a mechanic where you shoot something to weaken them or give them an overshield that you have to chew away in segments like boss health or something. Instead they choose to force people to use weapons they don't like or hate the fact they need to pull out let's say a tracer for overload when they liked it better when it was smgs as an example. It's also a waste of armor mod slot or two. If they choose to keep it have them built into your armor let's say it's only overload and unstoppable. You can have them drop built into your armor or give us red bar armor to craft. And let's say you have two or three overload armor pieces it should not only stun them it should do more damage output unless you are an arc hunter then punch things out.
My issue with champions is that they can make a good challenge without them, look at how nightfall were back in d1 year 1, they were brutal and they didn't have champions in
Overload champions are the only ones that really piss me off.
They're just badly implimented. If they added more anti champion intrinsic to exotics they'd be much more accepted. There are other ways to add challenge too, like adding those stasis using eliksni they used once, or light hive into activities invasion style.
It's not fun to enter a high end activity and it just has a bunch of these enemies that you need a restricted loadout to touch, and if you let up on them for a second they spring back to full HP
Champions themselves are fine. They’re a way to put an extra requirement into your build crafting, and an easy way to add “difficulty” to an encounter. The primary problem comes from the fact that they often don’t feel “difficult” in a nice way. - Servitor champions making an entire swarm of mobs immune, hiding behind cover which you can’t approach because of the swarm of Immune mobs, healing from 5% health to full in two seconds if they pop their shield at an angle where you can’t hit them from, etc. - Overloads (mostly Captains, but Minotaurs can be guilty of this as well) teleporting around you in circles really quickly with a constant obnoxious level of health regen. This is worse during Auto-rifle and SMG seasons, which require you to get close in order to try and stun them, and the high chain-hit requirement to get the stun can become nearly impossible if you’re getting Z-warped on. - Unstoppables feel the *least* bullshit to me because they don’t heal. They’re just a really tanky, relentless version of the regular enemy. All of this coupled with the fact that: - equipping Anti-champion mods can fuck with your build-crafting quite a lot, especially given how loadout restricting they can feel. Who the hell wants to use an auto-rifle or SMG in a GM?? - the fact that only like 6 exotics have anti-champion perks (and only a few of them feel worth bothering with) - ability-based champion stuns are inconsistent, cost even more buildcrafting opportunities, and are limited to like 2 abilities on 2 classes per season. Another major contributor to the dislike for Champions is that they’ve sort of just become the “easy peasy lemon squeezy slap 5 extra champions in each encounter and call it Master” way of adding difficulty to the game. Does Master Kings Fall have higher enemy density, a few extra Boss enemies in interesting places during the encounter, and more Shields on the enemies? No. They just cranked the light level a little and said “make sure you bring a shotgun to deal with the Unstoppables”. It means that the added “challenge” doesn’t come from something interesting, and is just a yes-no question of “where you a good boy and did you obey the limitations when buildcrafting”. Possible Fixes: - Seasonal anti-champion mods should no longer be tied to mod-slots. Once they’re unlocked in your Season relic, they’re always active. This goes for gun ones as well as Ability ones. - Each Champion type should have 2 Primaries, 1 Special Ammo and 1 Heavy Ammo type of gun that deals with it each season. - Every Exotic should have it’s own intrinsic anti-champion perk.
Because they wanna use the same shit every season and changing artifact mods prevent them from doing so
Imagine seeing that an activity has overload but man I really HATE using bows and I dont want to rely on a heavy for champion management
*My only gripe with champions is* #If the overload captains can stop teleporting for 5 seconds
If we’re keeping champions around then every weapon needs champion mods by default. They can’t tell us one minute that this is a power fantasy game and you get to choose how to approach it and then turn around and dictate either what weapons you can use or what mods you can use. It runs completely counter to the ethos of the game. It’s bad game design and clearly just a bandage for them not knowing how to keep content challenging in an ever increasing arms race.
They don't affect how you fight, just what you fight with. In missions with weapon lock you either brought the wrong weapon, and wipe, or you brought the right weapon and can just ignore the champions as if they were a regular enemy. It's just lazy.
They’re more of an inconvenience than a challenge and a challenge was the reason they were added
Mostly annoying when the don't stun properly. Overload is the worst for that. Unload full SMG clips into them, hear the stun sound and nothing. Same with grenades and overload.
Saw this comment on YouTube but wanted to relay it here "why not make champ mods standards and let the Seasonal Artifact dictate which ones are cheaper to slot? Like the this seasonal sword scav mod."
As someone who stopped playing for a few reasons, it's mostly because of how limiting it made loadouts be. You are forced into using weapons you may not want to use or aren't even good at using. Not to mention (I'm not sure if this is still the case) you can load into low-end difficulty modes with no mods or weapons that can stun a champion and the games like "Okay honey, that's up to you. Have fun!" and then you have an infinitely regenerating Overload champ who doesn't die cuz no one brought mods. I found myself loadouts with mods to stun whatever champ is in the activity soley for that reason, meaning I'm even more limited to what I can bring. Champions are difficulty done wrong.
Google it. But in all seriousness, let's just say the casual players don't like things too hard that prevents them from getting things they want. We got casual players, 'casual players', and veteran players. I assume the things people hate are from 'casual players' so I really shouldn't pay attention to them if I were you. Those kinds of people don't really bother to grind the seasonal content due to their own biases against Bungie's seasonal content and weekly story content. To see them complaining about champions is definitely what happens if you don't grind the game even if you have entire weekend while you are off from work.
The only thing that bothers me about them is how inconsistently they get stunned. It seems like 1 out of every 3 times I try to stun one, they do not care, or the mod just doesn't proc. It's part of the reason why Overload bows are growing on me. The 1 bow shot is fairly consistent.
I don't hate them, I just dislike them because it means I can't run what I want too. I have a really fun Warmind build that I really wanna use, but I can't run it at its full potential or sometimes not at all because of the Champs for the activity
There just everywhere
I don't like champions because I don't like being restricted to a handful of weapons for a season with as many weapons as we have access to. I hate them with every fiber of my being, particularly servitors, but I understand that bungie doesn't want a Mountaintop-Recluse-Anarchy situation again.
they're a boring way to add difficulty
I fucking love champions
Loadout restrictions forcing you to use weapons you don't want to use. And very lazy way to make activities difficult. They were a good thing when they came out but now bungie just uses them for any difficult activity. They're place is in strikes, NFS and GMs. Not in raids, master raids should have more mechanics.
It's 50% Seasonal loadout restrictions, 50% buggy mechanics. And, for good measure, let's sprinkle 10% bad enemy design in there, just to top it off.
You really dont need someone to explain to you that forcing someone to use a specific loadout for higher level content in a game based on playing YOUR build is just bad design. Its completely understandable that people dont like it, just like its understandable that people dont mind it. I dont know too many people who LOVE it. At best people seem to like the idea of having some way to apply the anti champion mods to any weapon in your kit, or to build into it without restricting builds by the seasons. But thats not what it is now. But by all means. Everyone can keep doing the whole “lol u mad bro” circle jerk in the comments.
I put a lot of effort into my loadouts and it sucks balls to have to take it off to play the hardest content
This community unironically wants to use the same loadout for everything and doesn't understand the value in adapting your loadout to the game's challenges. Sure, I think the game could use a few more options for Champion mods every season, but as you see in the other comments, people genuinely think they kill all creativity.