Destiny 2 weapon crafting is getting big changes in response to player complaints

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Unlocking weapon patterns will be less stressful after Lightfall, Bungie says

Destiny 2
(Image credit: Bungie)

Destiny 2 is reworking weapon crafting to make it less time-consuming and hopefully  less frustrating, though the biggest changes won't arrive until the Lightfall expansion coming next year. 

The studio's latest blog post includes a promising outline for crafting changes coming in Lightfall. Bungie singles out some "pain points," like overabundant but relatively useless Deepsight weapons which you have to manually level to get full value out of. It also acknowledged that the optimal way to level weapons – killing a thousand respawning dudes – is super boring and can disrupt your loadout by forcing you to run random crappy guns. 

"To address these points, the team is actively working on some changes coming with Lightfall," Bungie says. "While these changes are being developed, tested, and finalized, we wanted to share our list of goals and some strategies behind them." 

To stem the Deepsight flood, uncraftable weapons won't drop with Deepsight resonance anymore and Bungie's looking at "alternate ways" to get crafting materials. To "reduce loadout stress," it's looking to make actually equipping Deepsight and crafted weapons less essential – presumably by giving them Pokemon-style XP share, but that's just speculation. 

Perhaps most importantly, Bungie's looking to "reduce bad luck in weapon recipe unlocking." This has been a white-hot issue this season, and honestly it has been ever since the release of the Duality dungeon, with many players complaining that they haven't unlocked specific weapon patterns even after dozens of hours of grinding. With that in mind, Bungie is eyeing "opportunities within the crafting system to allow users to deterministically choose what weapon to target." It sounds like this will add another layer of actionable grinding to weapon crafting, which could address the RNG pitfalls tripping players up. 

Ahead of Lightfall, Destiny 2 has some other good news for weapon crafters. Next season, the Deep Stone Crypt raid from Beyond Light is getting craftable weapons, and they'll also come with new perks. Bungie effectively revived all the old raids with the addition of the new rotating legacy playlist, but with this change, it's giving players a big reason to get back in the DSC and grind themselves to dust, especially with unlimited drops (including weapon patterns) during featured weeks. For reference, when informed of the updated raid guns, my Destiny-loving PC Gamer colleague Tim Clark had this to say: "ACTUAL BEAST MODE". 

Bungie's also addressing feedback on craftable raid weapons, promising enhanced adept perks for the Lightfall raid – potentially leading to the best guns the franchise has ever seen. 

Austin Wood
Austin Wood
Senior writer

Austin has been a game journalist for 12 years, having freelanced for the likes of PC Gamer, Eurogamer, IGN, Sports Illustrated, and more while finishing his journalism degree. He's been with GamesRadar+ since 2019. They've yet to realize his position is a cover for his career-spanning Destiny column, and he's kept the ruse going with a lot of news and the occasional feature, all while playing as many roguelikes as possible.