Some of them are quite powerful already and some are getting buffed... I also feel like their rarity (or relative lack thereof) of is not an issue because of the restriction. You can't simply collect more and be more powerful in a vertical sense. Also plenty of players haven't seen their first yet
You're getting more powerful throughout the entire game in a vertical fashion since you're leveling and getting stronger at the same time, so that's moot.
Some of them are more powerful than others, and thankfully there will be some buffs to the subpar ones, but it's kind of a wack restriction mainly because you can literally collect exotics and stockpile them regardless of their rarity (that just means some folks will take longer than others). There's no context behind the restriction. It's just there for whatever reason we can come up with, and it's agreed upon that it's for balance - in both crucible and pve.
I find that to be hogwash. Balance shouldn't be a brick wall that's spread across the entire game. Balance, in its best form allows everyone to do whatever they want, and then work backwards from that point of 'feeling OP'. If folks want to play a more restrictive mode in crucible similar to the ones we have now, then of course keep them. For folks who want to run around with whatever insane gear they have, there's Iron Banner which honestly should be its own mode. At the moment, the only sense it makes to restrict players from using whatever gear they have whenever they want is because the 1 exotic weapon/1 exotic armor restriction was from being shortsighted or rushed in the designing of the game's several loops and systems, and that this was the easiest solution.
We don't know how gear is going to be handled in the future, but if weapons are going to yield a higher attack while the guns currently in this game are capped at 300, we're going to replace our legendaries and exotics anyway, so as far as moving up from purple-tier weapons and armor, we'd be replacing our gear with better stuff regardless - we just won't be doing it now.
As often as it's referenced in this thread, Diablo 3 is an example to look at how having ridiculous abilities at endgame can still allow the game to retain balance. You get to the point to where you're dealing millions of damage, and the highest tier of gear you equip releases characters from certain core gameplay restrictions, such as with the Wizard who has the ability to summon a mammoth hydra that shoots walls of fire. With some of this gear I've mentioned, the Wizard is able to summon two mammoth hydras instead of only one, yet the Wizard is just as ridiculous as the other four classes.
The insane damage and abilities make Diablo 3 considerably easy for the most part, until you crank up the difficulty into the higher Torment levels where the game is trying its hardest to murder players and does a good job for the most part.
Destiny has the potential to get to this level, if Bungie does decide to go this route, but I can't say they will since it's unclear what this game's future holds as far as upcoming content and the changes they'll bring. IMO, Destiny has the right idea with exotic bounties. Like right now I have to get 10k guardian kills. That sounds ridiculous and that's because you'd think an exotic weapon would be ridiculous, however it's for Bad Juju I think and that gun is laughable at the moment. Same with Thorn, which is conceptually the kind of weapon that should be exotic and rightfully deserves the upcoming buff it'll receive. Thorn has an exotic bounty as well that has you fight a secret boss. That's the kind of stuff we should be doing for every exotic in the game. But no, our exotic gear are gotten through RNG. All of them, considering how random exotic bounties are to obtain and how we gotta hope Xur has whatever we're looking for on sale every Friday and Saturday.
Right now, the restriction on exotic gear has little reason to be in place. The only legitimate explanations supporting it have to do with people not having them or any, or keeping them from tearing up in the Crucible's current modes. While these are valid for the present state of the game, I don't think this should last past what we're playing in Destiny now.
