Destiny 2 will kill all existing planetary materials in an economy update coming next season, putting an end to the chokehold that the likes of Spinmetal Leaves and Helium Filaments have had on the Destiny player base for over eight years.
Starting in Season 19, you won't be able to get any Dusklight Shards, Microphasic Datalattice, Helium Filaments, Baryon Boughs, Spinmetal Leaves, or Glacial Starwort. Gathering nodes will still exist in destinations, but they'll grant Glimmer, XP, and other general-use currencies instead. Some of these materials have been in Destiny since the original game launched, and with Destiny 2 updates reviving areas like the Moon and Cosmodrome, they've stuck with the game since. It's truly the end of an era. A tedious, fiddly era.
Bungie outlined the update to destination mats in its latest blog post. Design lead Josh Kulinski describes the change as part of a broader pass at Destiny 2's economy, and a way to make the game more approachable overall.
"Destiny has grown to become a much more complex game than it started as all those years ago," Kulinski says. "One of the major goals that we have on the Economy Team for Destiny 2 is making the game more approachable to new and returning players. One way that we can do that is by reducing the number of currencies that players need to understand and keep track of. This helps us reduce the cognitive load that Destiny’s economy places on the player. With fewer currencies to manage, it’ll be easier for players to learn and remember the value of the items that they have in their inventories."
The void created by the loss of these materials will be filled with – you guessed it – different, existing materials. You'll still be able to trade deprecated materials at the vendor Rahool, and this will be their only use going forward. Starting in Season 19, Rahool will start to deal in Dark Fragments, Phantasmal Fragments, and Herealways Pieces – activity-based materials for the Dreaming City, the Moon, and Europa respectively. Meanwhile, the material costs for purchasing old Exotics will be swapped for regular old Legendary Shards. Fortunately, the same costs tied to upgrade modules are being removed entirely.
Bungie's also introducing a workaround for replenishing your Glimmer, which is what most players use destination materials for. The Glimmer exchange rate at Rahool is getting a nerf, but the payout for completing a public event is getting a buff – between 10,000 and 12,500 Glimmer for a Heroic event, and 3,300 and 4,654 for a normal one, not accounting for Glimmer boosts like the new Ghost mod coming in Season 19. Hopefully this still allows for easy access to Glimmer, which greases the wheels of basically every part of the game.
This month will hopefully see the release of a fix for an infamous Destiny 2 bug that's been insta-killing players for months.
