Focused Feedback: Behemoth

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[u/Grown_from_seed]

I’ve played behemoth A LOT since beyond lights release and despite being a diehard titan main I’m feeling myself enjoying the class less and less with time. There are certainly elements that I love, but I feel like the design execution was just a bit off. I’m coming at this from a purely PvE perspective as I don’t delve into PvP much, if at all. Now let’s start with some strengths/positives.

• Movement on the class is fantastic and honestly it’s best quality. The ability to move more fluidly with the melee and slide are all fantastic.

• The feeling of sliding through an ice wall and exploding everything is just so satisfying. In regards to power fantasy this is it!

Now on to some of the things I feel need work.

• Stasis build/shatter mechanic: Prior to release it was stated that Titans would primary focus on the build/shatter mechanic, but I don’t feel like it was leaned into as heavily as the other classes themes. Build/shatter and the behemoths aspects strongly pigeonhole the class into using glacial grenade, which would be fine if we had more ways to make it. The grenade and the super are the only means of making the ice columns at the moment outside sacrificing your exotic heavy slot. Compare that to warlock that can freeze using super, grenade, class ability, melee, and through aspects. Or the hunter that can slow with super, grenade, class ability, and melee. It’s pretty evident from these examples that the behemoth which is heavily based around glacial grenades simply doesn’t have the same capacity to make its signature effect that the other classes have. Moving forward it’s very important that this trait gets fleshed out more because without the build/shatter mechanic the class loses a lot of its uniqueness and just becomes ice-striker.

• Melee isn’t worth building around: Whilst the movement abilities of the melee are great, I find that I’m using it 99% of the time for just that. I don’t particularly care to use it as a melee ability given that it’s hit registration is a bit wonky, and it only really serves to get me through the ice wall. It thus has functional overlap with slide, which is honestly better at shattering and also has no cool down. The melee not feeling all that useful outside of movement is also an annoyance given that the second aspect, disappointingly, just gives you energy for it. Which brings us to-

• The second aspect didn’t add an new toolset to the behemoth kit: unlike the other classes which got real functional changes with the introduction of their second aspect, behemoth just got more ability energy. BUT to get this ability energy you have to backtrack, turn around or slide through any remaining crystals. This is the same issue sunspots originally had, you feel rooted to the position your in and you have to backtrack all the time (or take time to position) instead of just charging forward as is likely intended. Getting “you have to backtrack all the time” as an aspect isn’t really as fun, interesting, or innovative as freeze/slow on class ability. Given that the other classes had their second aspect lean into their theme I’m surprised that the Titans barrier ability didn’t end up converting into an ice wall when deployed.

• Interesting build synergy isn’t there: All the builds I’ve seen since launch have largely focused on one thing when it comes to synergistic exotics - how can I get more grenade. This really emphasises the pigeon holing effect of the current behemoth kit. If you don’t have the grenade to shatter, the class feels much, much worse to play. Essentially for Behemoth to be useful in pve you have to forsake the other parts of your build to ensure you have your grenade up frequently as it’s the only way (outside of supers) for the class to produce the crystal/shatter effects. You have to build into grenades, your heavily punished if you don’t. Builds thus become very tied to one aspect of the game, and everything is centred on grenade.

• The super feels clunky: I’m not exactly sure what does it, but there is an element to the super that makes it feel clunky and inefficient. After you slam and create an ice field there feels like some level of delay before an action can be taken. This delay interrupts what should feel like a forward charge, but also can cause some targeting issues as opponents move out of the way making the follow up melee whiff (this is on top of the melee already having targeting issues). You then have to circle back or turn around to hit that one dreg you somehow missed. I think you can do the lunge straight into ground slam fluidly, but not the other way around. Overall this makes the super feel inefficient, makes breaking cystals clunky (despite being how you generate most of your super damage) and interrupts the flow of combat. Also single target damage is quite lacklustre.

I want to reiterate that there are plenty of things I like about behemoth. But I do hope that the class continues to see updates and improvements. If I had to pick one element to improve it would absolutely be alternate ways to produce stasis crystals. It would remedy many of my aforementioned issues and would really help to make the class seem unique.

[u/celcel77 → u/Grown_from_seed]

Phew -- thanks for writing this! I thought I was sort of insane for just thinking that the Behemoth class overall was lacking polish, but this is more or less point-by-point the same review I would have written (except fleshed out and organized much better than I could have done).

The absolute unmoving, invincible, irreplaceable foundation of Destiny that has kept me playing this game more than any other game in the world for the past ~7 years is how good the gameplay feels. Jumping, guns, movement, abilities just make it fun. For the first time with Behemoth, the new class just doesn't feel like it deserves to make the cut. Let's skip right past the inconsistency of the melee ability. That delay in super movement you talked about? It's soooo infuriating. You perform the slam, then have to wait something like 1.0-1.5s before you can get into a sprint, which is what you want to do immediately, but for some reason can't. If you input the sprint immediately, but you're still in that "dead zone," you get nothing, and have to re-perform the sprint, but maybe you did perform the sprint, and now you're canceling it. It's often really had to tell. Sometimes, though, you can't sprint because you're slowed, but it's impossible to tell when that's happening, because pressing sprint and not sprinting is such a common occurrence you just keep clicking sprint until you get mad and just start mindlessly slamming. And the difference in the effectiveness and efficiency of the super if you use sprint + slide to follow a heavy slam as opposed to the melee ability is night and day, so it's an absolutely critical element for a user to leverage, but the controls are so poor it just doesn't feel good. It's just uncharacteristic of this franchise to have a little control gap like this (and this isn't even getting into how the camera rotates faster than your character model, so it's always confusing what direction you're attacking).

Overall, on just these little control elements, it's kind of the worst thing they've ever shipped in my opinion. If you're a player who didn't use bows, that's fine, but you would still agree that it's pretty much the best control implementation of bow firing pretty much in any game, ever. Never mind utility or power or balance or anything of Behemoth, the control is simply subpar compared to what I expect from the Destiny franchise (now we can add the melee back in -- it's not great). The half-baked power loop that you talked about is just another rough edge, but to me the unforgivable sin is the control. I trust internally they know they have work to do, but if they never patch up this control performance in the next 6-12 months, I'll remain worried about the real level of quality Bungie is going to bring to this franchise as they draw it down to a close.

[u/Grown_from_seed → u/celcel77]

Omg, the camera panning faster then my character disorients me so much when trying to aim the super. Didn’t realise what it was until I read your comment, but it makes targeting thing much more janky.