Meta Descriptions have a restriction of about 150-160 characters and have the same weight on the first several words of a sentence.

To check this, do a Google search and look at the results of the keywords listed in both the meta Titles and Descriptions. Most of them are within the first sentence that Google displays.

Descriptions don't require pipes, they just need to be more engaging to a user because as our example shows, a user is most likely going to read that first sentence so you need to add your top keywords but also convince them to click on your link.