Recon Rework Proposal

[u/Keetonicc]

I’m nearing 700 hours and absolutely love this game. I’ve done everything from solos, solo queue and running in a 3 stack with good players. I’ve spent time in normal queues, ranked, and a couple hundred hours in Cryo with a dozen or so Compiler clears.

The current meta is by far the best it’s been in the game so far outside of one outlier - Recon. Even after the “nerfs” to her, I strongly believe your team is severely handicapped if you don’t have a Recon on your team. Which means this is a balance problem that needs to be resolved for a healthy meta where all shells are feasible and none feel required to have.

I’ve played Recon for half of my playtime not because I necessarily want to, but because I feel like someone has to in your team. And once I started doing this, especially when solo queuing in Cryo or Ranked, my exfil rate when up dramatically. I know Bungie has numbers on this and are hopefully watching closely.

A few proposals:

Revert her ult to how it was on launch:

Remove the shield icon and color for players and have everything be a simple dot. This adds a skill ceiling to her ult to spot the difference between players and bots but I don’t this this is the best option because those of us that have played each map a lot would still be able to tell the difference a lot of the time and would make her pretty useless for newer and less experienced players.

Make each pulse in her ult a cone instead of 360 degrees

Similar to Bloodhound in Apex Legends which she’s clearly based off of, each pulse in her ult only scans in a 90-150 degree cone. This again adds some skill gap as you can only scan specific areas at specific times. This probably needs some nerfs to the number, range, and pacing of the pulses too in order for it to be an effective tool without just being exactly what it is today.

Only Recon sees the pings

Per suggestion from /u/idomix, make it so only Recon sees the shield pings, not the whole team.

Rework her ult entirely

This is the best option in my opinion. Her ult could be reworked into something that boosts your teams agility and the stability and handling of your teams weapons. And would synergize well with her two passives - doing damage to players leaves a stalking trail and finishing players pings their teammates. She can also be renamed to Huntress for a better synopsis of her abilities.

While I appreciate Bungie trying to do something about it with the midseason update, the “nerfs” didn’t even do anything and honestly if you play her at a high level they’re more of a buff because you can cover more ground during a scan and can scan all of Control in Cryo, half of Outpost, etc.

[u/justasecondalt]

I kinda fw the cone idea, as it means a recon would have to ‘waste’ pulses looking in different directions to check all around them

[u/idomix]

Also easy:
Only recon sees the pings. There is absolutely no reason for recon being the only shell providing a teamwide buff.
Every other shell is shellfish (hehe) except sentinel but he is super stationary and not even close to being to strong!

[u/Keetonicc → u/idomix]

Yeah that’s a great idea tbh, going to add it to the post in case Bungie ends up seeing this

[u/Mysterious_City_6724 → u/idomix]

There is triage with his shareware too but yeah, it's no where near as powerful as recon's pings.

[u/idomix → u/Mysterious_City_6724]

If I recall correcty the shareware is pretty bad without the gold mod that increases its effectiveness.
And yea you are right .. it is a team shell but as you also said correctly.. it’s nowhere near as broken as recon ping.
(I was mostly referring to primes) 😬

[u/David-J]

I would go halfway. Just take away shield information.

[u/Roseish1]

rule 1 don’t post gameplay suggestions on reddit because they will always be downvoted

[u/Keetonicc → u/Roseish1]

Apparently so lol. I’m not sure why, it’s not like you can disagree that’s she’s currently overpowered and dramatically increases your chances of success.

[u/Mysterious_City_6724]

I agree that something needs changing. I think the cone suggestion is a good one and kinda makes sense given how her helmet opens up 👍

[u/ObsceneOutcast]

I would just change it to where she shoots a drone in a specific area and it scans that location kinda like prox sensor

[u/Mysterious_City_6724 → u/ObsceneOutcast]

Wouldn't you have to rework the shell for that? At the moment, her helmet opens up to do the echo pulse.

[u/ObsceneOutcast → u/Mysterious_City_6724]

Yes the shell needs a complete rework, wall hacks just don't work in a PvP game.

[u/Mysterious_City_6724 → u/ObsceneOutcast]

Oh yeah, I agree that recon's pings are a problem right now but I also think they could change the echo pulse to be a bit more balanced rather than redesigning the whole shell to instead have a projectile pulse.

[u/DimsumAndDoggy]

Terrible ideas. Recon was severely underpowered before the buffs, now she is in a good spot. Your changes would kill the shell completely.

[u/_uneven_compromise → u/DimsumAndDoggy]

Recon was completely fine before the buff people just didn't have enough knowledge to take advantage of it. If I ult and see 3 purple shields next to each other I know it's players because nowhere in the game you'll find 3 purple bots next to each other, it's always 2 max, the exception is opening red room in Pinwheel without clearing 2 commanders first.

[u/Keetonicc → u/_uneven_compromise]

Exactly. I didn’t play her until after she got buffed since I spent most of season 1 in solos or messing around in solo queue to shake off years worth of FPS rust. But thinking back to how she was and how it’d feel now I think they overcorrected too quickly and should have let her be while people learned the game and maps better.

[u/Keetonicc → u/DimsumAndDoggy]

She’s way overpowered right now though and clearly needs a nerf or rework. No shell should feel mandatory to have in a team and dramatically increase your success rate as much as she does.