My clan’s leader asked us today whether we think using seasonal mods and rotating champion mods is a better way to ‘control and manipulate metas’ than sunsetting.  I think it’s an interesting enough question that I thought I’d answer it here and give him a link.

First, we should recognize that the question assumes that metas will in fact be changed by Bungie.  This by itself is not accepted by all players; some players like to find a particular loadout that works for them and then use it for everything and are resentful when changes are made.  I like to use a variety of weapons so I enjoy meta changes.  Neither of these preferences is objectively ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, they are just personal preferences — see my post What Kind of Destiny Player Are You for more thoughts on this.

Assuming that Bungie will change metas, the seasonal mod system is a far better method than sunsetting.  Sunsetting was only meta changing when it removed the ability to use certain outlier weapons, like Mountaintop or Recluse, in high-level content.  But it also removed a lot of other weapons that caused no issues, as witnessed by the fact that many were reintroduced with the same perks.  And players resented having to reacquire a weapon with the exact same perks just because of sunsetting. Moreover, when non-outlier weapons were sunset other similar weapons remained available.  Patron of Lost Causes was sunset, but we had Night Watch, for example.  Thus, sunsetting served to only change part of the meta — the outliers — with high overhead that affected all weapons and armor.

The seasonal mods, in contrast, don’t permanently change any weapons or armor.  Instead, they make some weapons or subclasses stronger, for one season.  Their temporary nature means that Bungie can risk going too far, and so we have seen extremely powerful mods like Breach and Clear in Season 14 and now Particle Deconstruction in Season 15.  Those can be a lot of fun, but would lead to power creep if they were permanent.

Every season we see complaints that the champion mods are too restrictive because they mandate the use of certain weapons to deal with champions.  But in anything other than the highest difficulty level content champions can be dealt with without the mods.  It is simply more efficient to use the mods than not.  As for the most difficult content, that always requires the best loadout possible.  And it is a better system to have some weapons buffed temporarily (and therefore become the best for that time) than to have permanent changes like sunsetting.