It's to keep us grinding. The "new" stuff will be mostly reskinned old stuff with other perks.

Bungie is too lazy to create anything fresh so its the same old recycle over and over

Power creep is like what other people said already. As content gets released/new gear/etc, players level/increase power level to meet those challenges. In the end, by doing this over and over, you get players who are impossibly overpowered with ridiculous stats several iterations in. Like with world of warcraft, having 2000-3000 HP was a big deal for PVP and stuff in 2004. By 2015, players had over like...well over a million HP. And its all because of power creep. If Bungie doesn't do something about power creep now, you run into problems like what WoW encountered a decade later. I don't know how they fixed it but it just puts more work on the game developers to rework game mechanics/stats/etc. Its just better to take care of it early than put it off.

Power creep can be summed as this: You start out weak, and get stronger. New content comes, and you get only stronger, but enemies don't pose much more of a challenge than they did before. More content comes, you get even stronger and more power, but because enemies don't scale like you do, they are weaker. The best way to represent this in Destiny was Forsaken and the entire year up to Shadowkeep. We had absurd power creep. Well of Radiance, sniper buffs, grenade launcher buffs, bosses were getting shredded and we were practically immortal by the time Opulence rolled around. Even the heroic Menagerie basically depended on cheesing guardians to achieve any form of difficulty, in the form of strong enemies and mechanics that required high risks. And even then, people found ways to solo it by the end of the season. Basically, power creep causes the game to be in a state where the players are always too strong and new content is not challenging enough or has to be made absurdly difficult in order to stop players from burning though content.

You’re not missing anything, doesn’t make sense. Especially when bungie has proven they can avoid power creep with raid mechanics like crota, Kings fall, and wrath of the machine.

What do you mean re-releasing content?

[quote]Am I missing something?[/quote] Yes. [quote]WTF is powercreep ???[/quote] Power creep is a problem that afflicts loot games, and other games where power progression (players chasing after in-game power) is a focus of the game. Once a players reaches a certain level of power, there is no motivation to chase after anything NEW in the game...unless its more powerful than what they player already has. But you can't keep giving the player power forever. If you do, you eventually break the game. In Destiny terms, we eventually just become so powerful that nothing in the game remains a threat (we're one-shotting everything)...and the game becomes either ridiculous or boring. That tendency for loot to become more and more powerful....and players more and more powerful is "Power Creep"....and its a serious risk to the health of these kinds of games. [quote]If I have to grind for weapons I already had. What's the dang point of sunsetting?[/quote] Because thats how games like this----all successful ones----keep power creep out of the game, while prerserving your motivation to chase loot. In short, they take either your gear away (by not allowing you to level it up)...or they take its POWER away from you..... ...so they can give it back to you in some other part of the game. ALL of these games are a dance of giving the player power with one hand, while you take it away from them with the other. That way you always have a source of power to chase...but you dont' turn the game into a hit-and-giggle affair through power creep. But you also don't strangle the game by correcting for power creep so strongly that there is no power to chase (which is where Destiny 2 is trappped right now). [quote]I'm going to be able to get the same weapons again so why not let me infuse the ones I already had?[/quote] That's not what suseting is. Think if the original Pinnacle weapons. Becuase they are the clearest example of power creep...and the problem of letting us keep weapons forever. I have Loaded Question. Great weapon. Underrated weapon. One of the NASTIEST crowd-control special weapons in the game. I've made entire ad-waves DISAPPEAR with a single shot. I feel powerful when I play with it. BUT ITS A GAME DESIGN DEAD END. I basically haven't used ANY other arc fusion rifle since I got it. Because I can just keep leveling it up and use it everywhere. [i]So HOW do you make any other arc FR relevant in a game with Loaded Question? [/i] The only way to do that is to: 1. Make a fusion rifle even more powerful (power creep). 2. NERF the weapon so that something else ---of equal power can take its place. (Which is what Bungie has been doing for the last two years). 3. Rotate the weapon out of the game by LIMITING your ability to infuse it (increase its item level). So once you progress to a certain point....you can no longer use the weapon in the hardest content...and you have to go out and replace it. Every other loot game in existence uses Option three. Because it is the option that allows you to both manage power creep, and preserve the drive to chase after loot. Option 2 has forced Bungie to dilute the power of weapons down to a bland sameness...and break any standouts...because NOTHING ever leaves the game. So the game lurches from power-creep problems....to loot motivation problems and back again with no middle ground. What Bungie is doing is broken..and they never should have promised to let us keep gear forever in the first place. It just took them 5 years longer than it should of to realize that its not possible. [quote]I'm going to have the same damn gun at max power anyway so what's the frickin poin[/quote] You won't. Because Bungie doesn't have to give you that power back in the same place. IOW, sunseting will allow them to do what they are currently doing....but in a far more elegant way. They can shift the meta around to keep the game fresh...but without having to BREAK weapons by nerfs. In a world of Sunsetting, Bungie could have moved LMGs out of the "meta" for boss damage in the end game by simply limiting our ability to infuse them.....rather than BREAKING THEM with a 20% damage nerf. The result is Bungie gets their meta shift....but we get left with weapons that are still USABLE in other parts of the game. So I'd be able to happily use my LMGs in the strike play list and for doing boss damage in Gambit....rather than having them sit in the vault because they feel like I'm shooting a pellet gun at them.

You’re not going to get the exact same guns again. Only world drops and faction weapons will come back. Or a select few vendor items like menagerie brought.

My thoughts exactly. Goes to show how lazy Bungie has become since the Shadowkeep "expansion" that's just basically a reskin of everything we've had since D1. Sunsetting weapons, then making us grind for new ones with similar perks (definitely gonna happen, I'm telling you) is cold, hard evidence that they'd rather take the easy way out at the expense of players' time and money instead of truly working hard to make great content. It's the epitomy of developer laziness. So yeah Bungie can svck my a$$.

Its not much but its honest work :D

Power creep is something that applies to y1 armor and weapons but not recently released exotics.

If they rerelease gear you should be able to upgrade your previously earned gear. Or you know - just don’t sunset at all since it’s a dumbass move.

https://www.bungie.net/en/explore/detail/news/48758

[well, bungie’s habit of rereleasing guns also tends to include adding new perks to those weapons perk pools, allowing for a potentially more powerful version of the gun you once had.]