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Bungie has nerfed a popular Destiny 2 perk that allowed players to use certain swords to travel vast distances in a hurry, which hasn’t gone down very well in the community due to unintended consequences.
To catch you up, some swords in Destiny 2 can roll with the Eager Edge perk, allowing you to gain “increased sword lunge distance immediately after switching to this weapon”. Players use the perk to skip PvE encounters, flex on unfortunate souls in the Crucible, and just swoosh around the map for fun.
Now, though, Bungie has taken another stab at balancing the perk to prevent people from clearing encounters in ways that haven’t been designed for. As revealed in Destiny 2’s latest patch notes, the developer has “fixed an issue where Eager Edge could be used multiple times in a single activation”.
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Simply put, the change has caused a massive stir within the community. One player has collected many common complaints in a Reddit thread: the gist is that movement is now broken in odd ways, you can still use Eager Edge to grief players by pushing them off the map without them being able to return using the same perk, and most speedrun skips are still possible. There's also a general feeling among some that this is another change that makes the game less fun.
In response, senior community manager Dylan Gafner clarified on Twitter that the perk was nerfed because the team "was finding numerous issues where the perk could be used to skip encounters, break mechanics, and generally cause issues with the game."
Gafner also says that the team would typically call out a change like this ahead of time with developer insight for community transparency, though this change "slipped through" due to an increase in hotfix cadence. "We're talking to the team on how we can better prep in the future," he adds.
The explanation hasn't won everyone over, though, with prominent Destiny 2 content creator Fallout remarking that the change feels like "salt in the wound" since hours of grinding for a specific perk on a certain weapon can go to waste depending on how a patch influences the combat sandbox.
"This is a piece of the prioritization pie when it comes to tuning," Gafner says in reply. "Anything that takes large amounts of time to acquire (or great feats of skill, for that matter) can be tricky to touch upon. The team tries its best to maintain that importance and meaning whenever diving in."
Whether Bungie takes another pass at balancing the perk remains to be seen, though Gafner did thank players for their constructive feedback, affirming that it "helps us a ton when bringing your voices to the development table".
Elsewhere, Destiny 2 PvP civil war continues as Bungie adds quitter penalties to the casual playlist.
