You've probably heard talk of a Destiny 2 Lord of Wolves nerf if you played any of the latest Iron Banner event. Bungie community manager Dylan "dmg04" Gafner previously said the Exotic shotgun was being looked at in response to mountains of player feedback, and during Bungie's slot on the recent Guardiancon charity livestream, Destiny game director Luke Smith confirmed that a nerf is on the way. Smith also explained why the gun wasn't disabled during Iron Banner, why the nerf isn't coming for a few more weeks, and how players will be compensated for enduring the reign of the wolves.
"We talked all week about what to do with Lord of Wolves," Smith said. "It was this ongoing discussion we had together. We have several options and we explored the options, it's always this thing where you can make different decisions and the community recommends stuff like my dude Ari, TripleWreck, saying 'take it away, just turn it off.' That is an option. We have that sort of blunt force trauma option, but we're actually not gonna do that.
"What we're gonna do is leave it in, and if you play Iron Banner this week, one of the things we're doing is we're gonna add a Triumph to the game that's kind of like an 'I remember when' Triumph," he continued. "We haven't done something like this before, but we think Destiny and games in general are spaces where you can build and form memories. What we're gonna do is add a Triumph to the game and if you play Iron Banner this week it's gonna come with a nameplate that's like some cool, artistic, rendition of 'that week where Lord of Wolves was super hot.' So yep, the Wolves are gonna howl a little bit. We're definitely gonna heel them later this year. We're gonna nerf 'em shortly."
Smith also highlighted another silver lining from the great Lord of Wolves debate. While looking at the weapon's recent Crucible stats, Bungie noticed that the power level of roaming Supers like Dawnblade, Spectral Blades, and Fists of Havoc had gone down because Lord of Wolves can shut down Supers like nobody's business. With this in mind, Smith said the team is also looking at reigning in Super armor in a PvP update coming this fall with Destiny 2 Shadowkeep. As for the Lord of Wolves fix, Smith said it's scheduled for sometime in July and will launch alongside a larger patch, and that the team chose not to rush the fix in order to preserve the work-life balance at Bungie.
"We have a patch that we're readying right now," Smith explained. "The patch is gonna come out in like a couple weeks. We could take the patch off the patch factory, more or less, and ask a bunch of people to work super long and add this thing in. And we're having the conversation about is it worth doing that or is it better to preserve the work-life balance and ship it later in July? That's the 100% God-honest truth. We don't know, but it's always a cost-benefit analysis for people who are working super hard. Taking something out of a release candidate [patch] is something we don't like to do very often. For instance, we just did it recently with the contest modifier we added for the [Crown of Sorrow] raid. To ask the team to do that back-to-back, full disclosure, is just not a thing we want to do. We try to be careful about stuff like that."
Lord of Wolves is definitely a problem in the Crucible, so much so that I'll probably avoid PvP entirely until it's nerfed, but I certainly wouldn't ask anyone to work overtime to fix it. There's plenty of other stuff to do in the meantime, from the Destiny 2 Truth quest to spamming Destiny 2 Menagerie rune combos in search of the perfect roll. Plus I'll never turn down a free Triumph.
Speaking of big changes: here's everything you need to know about the massive Eververse changes coming this fall.
