[2022] Nightfalls, Trials, and Iron Banner Weapons rotating out of the drop pool when Witch Queen releases

Hey all,

Thanks for the feedback. Here are some general notes I'll be passing up to the team:

• Removal of weapons outright (not providing alternate acquisition sources) can be frustrating after multiple seasons of hunting a specific weapon and not getting a drop, or a "good" roll. (Good is in quotes as this can be subjective based on the player!)
• Players would like to see many of these weapons shifted to umbrals, or in the case of Rituals, shifted to a focusing system akin to Trials

Wanted to give some more details on the "why" for this as well:
The team has been full steam ahead on the next year of Destiny content. Witch Queen, Season 16, and more. While they'd love to maintain some acquisition sources for many of the weapons being rotated out, we don't have infinite resources to dedicate to this. I've posted on here before about prioritization in development and how some things need focus over others, and this is another one of those examples. Allocate team members to building out a bunch of umbrals, creating new icons, putting them on various vendors, testing them, spending a bunch of time on them if bugs arise... or spend that time fleshing out new systems coming online with Witch Queen, new umbrals, new weapons, etc?

While the team did have bandwidth to add many of these weapons to the Xûr rotation, this is by no means seen as a perfect solution by anyone at the studio. We do have more vendors being updated over the next few seasons to align with the focusing system on Saint for Trials loot, but this takes time. We can't upgrade every vendor immediately, so we're plotting out updates season over season. This doesn't help the immediate feedback of "I never got a good Multimach!", but hopefully in future seasons when Iron Banner is updated, we can avoid this sort of feedback coming up again. The team is opting to remove the bloat now, rather than have another season of "I'm still hunting that multimach, but also trying to get some of the new guns, and even trying to get some guns from a season or two ago because some perks were tuned to make that gun a bit more desirable..."

When looking at "bloat" in all sources (Nightfall, Legendary Engrams, IB, Trials) , removing a few weapons frees up a lot of space for some new things to come online and helps us tighten up the calendar of rotation so players (new and old) don't have to wait too long before the weapons come back around.

Re: "Why are you bringing back old weapons?"
With the amount of new perks that have come online over the last year, and some new ones that will come in future seasons, the team is excited to rotate a handful of older weapons back in with updated perk pools. Summoner has been a pretty frequent request, and bringing it back opens up opportunity for a few new spicy rolls (while maintaining old desirable perk combos). The two returning Nightfall weapons never had random rolls in the past, so there's a bit of opportunity to make them feel completely new and badass! Hitting that perfect mix of "old gun, new tricks" and "new gun, old and new tricks" is a challenge the team takes on every season. We haven't even covered a bunch of the new loot coming online in just a few weeks. Some will be covered in a TWAB or two, while others will be left for you to find in the field.

Ah, and to touch on a last question - "Why wasn't this in the TWAB?"
While we've been putting a bit of effort into covering what bounties were being removed, we hadn't dug in to the ritual weapon offering with the team. We'll keep this in mind for future seasons and expansions to hopefully get the information out a bit earlier.

Cheers to all who've been giving the feedback. We'll make sure it gets to the team.