In this, my third Destiny article today alone, I wanted to talk about finishers, which are not the most high profile arrival in Shadowkeep, but may turn out to be one of the most significant all the same. Armor 2.0 is going to take a while to parse out to fully gauge its impact, given that few people are heavily investing in it now, nor really can they, with so few mods available.
Finishers, on the other hand, are something that everyone has access to from moment one. They feel very un-Destiny-like at first, like something out of a fighting game where suddenly you’re outside your FPS view, watching your character do a move. Only class abilities or emotes do this, and this is even more cinematic than those, so at first it’s kind of jarring.
Then, it’s sort of addicting.
This is very much the DOOM system of executions, where you damage an enemy enough, a little dot will appear over them and they’ll flash, saying that they’re ready to be finished off. Each class has their own unique moves, but more are for sale in the Eververse store or up for grabs in the season pass. It’s admittedly pretty clever of Bungie to create both a cosmetic aspect to these that can be sold, and a gameplay aspect that can’t be, and instead has to be earned in-game.
Some important points on finishers that I think a lot of people may not realize, and why I like them so much.
Finishers have an absolutely insane range on them. I mean, you can’t use them across the entire map, but you can be miles outside traditional melee range and have them activate, allowing you to practically warp to staggered enemies to kill them. Give this a try, you’ll be surprised how far you’ll teleport forward.
Finishers ignore all kinds of shields. Say you tag a Wizard and get it down to execution range, but it floats away and recharges its shield. Well, no need to burst that down again, you can execute enemies through a recharged shield, as only their health matters. The same thing is true for Hive Knights who create a physical shield right around the time they get staggered. You can finish them straight through it, ignoring it completely. The same goes for Cabal Phalanxes.
Finishers can kill off larger enemies than you may think. So far I’ve been surprised to see the kinds of targets I can execute which include HVTs in the world and in Gambit, Envoys in Gambit and big Lost Sector bosses, all of which can be finished. “True” bosses can’t be, but a lot of big stuff can. I think these types of enemies need to be at lower health than normal enemies (I’ve seen red bars staggered at practically half health sometimes), but it still means you’re often saving yourself a bunch of standard melee attacks or another full clip of ammo, as finishers do proportionally a ton of damage, given that they’re insta kills once in range.
I am also having fun with at least one new exotic that uses finishers in a unique way, the new Hunter Veil helmet which allows you to go invisible after a finisher kill, making it a defensive, as well as offensive move. It makes me look forward to other exotics utilizing the concept in some unique way.
I am less sure how I feel about the class item mods for finishers, which so far can do things like reload your guns, generate special or heavy ammo, or heal your team. Those are cool perks but…they cost anywhere from 10% to 50% of your super. To me, that’s a problem. Not only because super generation is more precious than ever after recent nerfs, but once you have one of these equipped, there is then no way to do a finisher and not lose your super for one of these perks, which means you are giving up all the other positive points of finishers that I just went through, since you no longer will be able to do it nearly as often unless you never want to have a super for an entire activity.
I understand that it would be bad to have every single finisher generate a heavy brick without any sort of cost, but I also feel like equipping most of these just seems like a bad call given how often I’m using finishers otherwise. I think some sort of cooldown system would be better, like you can only generate a heavy brick once a minute or heal your team every 30 seconds or something. Costing super energy with no way to make it not cost that once equipped feels bad.
Ultimately, I think that finishers are a great addition to the game and one that feels like an important addition, even if so much other stuff has been the focus of the expansion. I am looking forward to seeing how Bungie iterates on the concept going forward, but I really like what I’m seeing so far.
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