How did people decide what guns are best against bosses?

[cosmic hull]

Like linears vs rockets, or whether to run a div or not. Since div gives a crit and debuff why dont we always use one?

I know what loadouts are best against each boss but I only recently realized that I dont know why/how the community decided on that

[feral sandal]

Very generally, in my experience, it comes down to length of the damage phase and ammo economy. If the damage phase itself is long, then linears are the play because you have tons of ammo to use, like for oryx or templar

(more so for master mode, as normal templar can still be bursted down with rockets).

I'm also thinking in terms of cataclysmic, you want to make the most of that bait and switch timer, which is better suited for longer damage phases.

If the damage phase is shorter, then you use rockets because you can use a full reserves of rockets fairly quick, like for caretaker, explicator, and rhulk or nezarec

(who has a longer damage phase, but his teleporting can make it inconsistent so rockets are used since they can be fired quickly and adapt to what he is doing).

Then on something like the DSC fuses and atraks, we use very different guns because the situations are so different from other damage needs in the rest of the game.

Things like aeon's gauntlets and the new warlock exotic helm can change the ammo economy too and make previously sub par weapons for the encounter much better.

And rockets are just the meta in general right now which can get past the benefits of using linears if the boss can be killed quickly enough anyway.

[smoky surge]

trial and error + people talk about what they use which leads to using eachothers strats and then strats become refined due to that

[cosmic hull]

Thank you!! That whole explanation made a lot of sense

Still have one question tho, what about Div? Why do we sometimes choose to use it and other times not?

[smoky surge]

Div is great for bosses that have difficult-to-hit crit spots (Wizards, Rhulk, Taniks Phase 2)

so if your team can't hit their shots w/o div its better to use div

but if everyone can hit their shots they're better off having everyone dmging

[cosmic hull]

Ohh okay that makes a lot of sense (: Just asking because I sherpad a raid yesterday and someone asked why we only used div on one boss and I couldnt answer

[cosmic hull]

Thank you!! First time putting a question on here are you completely answered my question

[feral sandal]

It used to be mandatory because it gave a 30% damage debuff to the enemy and that loss of dps for one person was made up by the others.

now that it's only a 15% debuff, the trade off in missing a person for dps has to be considered more.

but like they said, you use div when the boss is hard to hit so that more people hit their shots. if the boss is easy to hit then don't use div to have full fireteam dps

[dusky mirage]

Look up Aegis Destiny 2 on youtube, he has good videos explaining how to choose for boss dmg