So i had a long conversation with a few people yesterday, some of which work for other industry companies. We were just talking over the reveal and some interesting points were made.
The main topic of discussion was that the Dawnblade subclass for Warlocks in its current iteration looks both broken and unnecessary. Some of the reasons why include:
-Its striking similarity to Sunbreaker. Ability wise, the Dawnblade is functionally a reskinned solar hammer and it's hard to imagine that Sunbreaker, in the likely event that it returns, will see any significant changes to differentiate them. All of the classes in Destiny 1 were unique enough to be different, so this is the first time we have two Supers with very similar mechanics. Furthermore, the Dawnblade projectiles home not unlike the Boltcaster Exotic Sword, which makes it even easier to use than the Sunbreaker.
-However, there lies an additional concern in that the Dawnblade, along with all Warlocks, have a Healing Rift ability. When standing inside it, it appeared to give the player a full overshield and continuously healed the player in the current build. Since all of the Super's now require two Super hits to kill one another, the Dawnblade was able to tank 3 Golden Gun shots from a Gunslinger by using the Healing Rift as an Overshield. This video shows this in action:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5qXzz_VR4I
-The Dawnblade class has a dive ability that allows them to fastfall, and the Sunsinger's Angel of Light ability that allows them to fire their weapon in the air (with perfect accuracy) while hovering in place.
So these neutral movement abilities combined with the Sunsinger's strong grenades and versatile super are looking to create a subclass that is by all counts hilariously broken in a multiplayer environment. We have obviously not seen the other 6 classes, but I don't see them doing anything to any of them that isn't either redundant or even more broken than Dawnblade, and at that point we'll just switch to that one anyway. We already saw this in Year 1 when the Bladedancer had a roaming Super with health regen, the best evasive mechanic in the game, arguably the best melee attack in the game, and some of the best grenades, which switched utility throughout but otherwise remained in the meta. On paper however, Bladedancer was a lot less alarming than the Dawnblade, and therefore its effects weren't known for a while.
During the discussion we agreed that it's weird for Bungie to homogenize the classes, but include these minor differences between them. It gives the illusion of choice by making them similar to the point that it ought not to matter, but then it does because of the subtle differences that make one simply
better rather than different. I don't see any drawbacks to the Dawnblade class at this point.
Furthermore, it seems that we lost a unique mechanic - the Fireborn revive - in favor of another roaming DPS super that is functionally a reskin of an already existing super. Hell, the Sunbreaker even had an overshield mechanic built into its super and now that is woefully redundant to the Healing Rift available to all Warlocks, so it'd be very odd to see that return. I'm not sure why Bungie did this at this point because I haven't seen the other classes to judge their synergy. However, based on what was shown and what footage has portrayed, I find this change both detrimental to the overall design of the class system and the future meta of the Crucible.
