Destiny 2: The Witch Queen is bringing some huge balance updates to go with its new, craftable weapons, and they're going to change the guns you use forever.
The latest blog post from Bungie – which was recently bought by Sony, if you haven't heard – outlines how weapon crafting will work in The Witch Queen and how the expansion's changing up weapons in other ways.
Weapon crafting starts with a new ability called Deepsight which gives randomly rolled weapons a chance to drop with Deepsight Resonance. This unique property lets you extract the "essence" of guns and apply their traits to a craftable weapon. You'll also need collectible patterns to craft specific guns, and only a set pool of patterns will be available at launch, but more will be added over time. This being Destiny 2, obviously crafting also involves a host of other currencies, as evidenced by the screenshots Bungie shared today.
To boil things down, once you have the pattern you need and the essences you want, you can forge a gun with any combination of perks provided they're supported by that weapon's archetype. After you make a gun, you'll have to put it through its paces by clearing activities and shooting aliens, and Bungie reckons "this is where the bulk of your crafting playtime will be."
"The more you use your weapon, the faster you'll unlock its full potential," Bungie says. As you level it up, its stats will increase, seemingly to a degree "far beyond what Masterworking could offer." And if you like a gun but eventually decide you want to change a perk or even a barrel option, you can always reshape crafted weapons without needing to start from scratch. Further customizations include cosmetic "mementos" that drop from core playlists and end-game activities.
Some Exotic weapons can also be crafted, and like Hawkmoon and Dead Man's Tale, craftable Exotics can be fitted with slightly different stat profiles. The new Exotic SMG Osteo Striga, as well as the newly revealed class-specific Exotic glaives, can all be crafted once you get the right pattern.
Seemingly to make space for weapon crafting, The Witch Queen will roll out sweeping changes to weapons and perks. There's a laundry list of individual buffs and nerfs for Exotics, weapon archetypes, and some underused traits, and then there's the biggest change of them all: all Exotic primaries are getting a 40% damage buff against red-bar enemies in PvE. This will take the likes of Vex Mythoclast and The Huckleberry, which can already shred through enemies, to new heights, and it should finally make more Exotic primaries a competitive pick for harder content.
There's also a whole other class of weapon trait in this update. Origin Traits will appear on the 42 new legendary weapons coming in The Witch Queen along with returning Trials of Osiris, Iron Banner, and Nightfall weapons. These are extra traits found in a new, extra column on guns, and since they won't be added to existing weapons retroactively, we're going to have to replace a lot of our arsenal if we want access to all those bonuses.
The first wave of Origin Traits will provide bonuses for stunning Champions, small health bonuses after kills, improved reload out of combat, and other effects. Some weapons can also drop with more than one Origin Trait depending on their source activity and their manufacturer, with the likes of Suros and Hakke now offering unique foundry traits. Between these traits and weapon crafting, we're going to have way more weapon options available to us in the coming seasons, but parsing them all will take some doing.
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