Official Weapon Tier List And "tiering Up" Weapons

[Laecerelius]

I remember a while back during a devstream Scott mentioned that there will be weapon tiering.  Some weapons will be inherently stronger than others and as such will be Mastery Rank locked.  I'd like for there to be an official weapon tier list that shows us where you think these weapons should fit in our progression.  One weapon might be very weak compared to another weapon but it's balanced within its tier.  It's supposed to be that weak because it's for early game and as such is low tier.  It's easy to notice this with weapons that have Prime, Vandal, or Wraith equivalents but it's also pretty obvious when you compare say a Braton MK-1 to the Soma.  Since we don't have an official level system to tell us how strong we are or how powerful a weapon should be compared to another one, this will help clear up misconceptions and help people understand how powerful they really are.

 

This also leads me to my second point.  Do you really like a low tier weapon but want to be able to bring it with you to end game content?  Did you miss an event allowing you to grab up a Wraith or Vandal?  Well since we'd have official tier lists we could also have something I call "tiering up."  This would allow you to use an item similar to a Forma to buff the base stats of a weapon so that they correspond to the general power balance of weapons in the next higher tier.  Much like Forma they can be used when a weapon is rank 30 and unranks the weapon it's used on and you can use as many as you want on a weapon until it has reached the highest official tier allowable for weapons.  This means that you don't have to worry about missing out on an event weapon because it'll be just like the base weapon but one or two tiers higher.  Don't like the look of a Prime weapon?  You can tier up the regular version and it'll be just as good.  No longer would you have to worry about potentially wasting Catalysts and Forma on a weapon just to have it replaced by the Prime version.

 

But why even have Prime, Wraith, and Vandal weapons anymore now that the base weapon can be just as good?  Well they're inherently higher tier than the base weapon so you get a head start on tiering it up, plus you might get an extra polarity slot or two.  This also means that in the end Prime, Wraith, and Vandal weapons are essentially skins of existing weapons but you won't have to get rid of them and mess up leveling Mastery by just making them skins.

 

Will this require a ton of effort to do?  Definitely, between making up the new UI elements, the coding, figuring out how many weapon tiers to have, balancing each weapon within those tiers, plotting out how each weapon should upgrade between tiers, and stuff like that there will be a lot of work to do.  But I think the results will be well worth the effort put in when people can truly use whatever weapon they want even if it takes them some extra effort.

[(PSN)x35_DOuBLeTReYx]

If this happens then I assure you my Grakata will be the best weapon on the game

[Skaleek]

I tiered up when I got the akbronco prime.