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Starting in the Season of the Worthy, Bungie will disable Power boosts from Artifacts in Trials of Osiris and Iron Banner. Artifact mods, however, will still be accessible.
Destiny 2 director Luke Smith announced the change on Twitter yesterday, just days after Bungie confirmed the launch of Destiny 2 Trials of Osiris. Artifact Power will remain disabled until Bungie "can implement a Power cap feature," Smith explains. "This cap will allow us to weave Artifact and Power Pursuit together while preventing unbound Power growth in PvP. Somewhere down the road (but before we implement the Cap!), we're going to talk about what effect Power has on combat in PVP (think deep dive/numbers/etc)."
When Trials was revealed, Bungie maintained that Artifact Power would be enabled in the activity, but that it may change its position based on player feedback and data. It would seem that the explosive outcry from the Destiny 2 community, most notably on the Destiny subreddit, expedited this change.
Bungie revealed yet more PvP changes in its latest This Week at Bungie blog post, which is decidedly Crucible-focused. With Trials positioned as the central activity for next season, the studio is working to tighten PvP overall, starting by nerfing one-hit abilities for all classes. Here are the nerfs for all three classes:
- Titan - Shoulder Charge: reduced auto-targeting and reduced lunge distance.
- Hunter - Weighted Knife: reduced tracking and added "new tracking tech that will make the knife more faithful to its initial throw trajectory." Note that Hunters are also gaining - or regaining, more accurately - another one-hit ability, as Tripmine Grenades will now sticky-kill Guardians.
- Warlock - Handheld Supernova: increased charge time, reduced hold time, reduced range by a whopping 20%, tightened horizontal spread of bolts, added self-damage to bolts, and reduced bolt explosion radius by around 17%.
The Season of the Worthy will also see broader changes to multiple classes, but Bungie was less specific about what these will be. Top-tree Stormcaller, bottom-tree Striker, and bottom-tree Arcstrider will be nerfed in some capacity, while bottom-tree Voidwalker, bottom-tree Nightstalker, and middle-tree Striker will be buffed. Some core abilities are also being tweaked: Titan Barricades will have more health and Warlocks will have more melee range.
"In the spirit of transparency, we take no joy in nerfing the abilities, weapons, and armor that we all love to use," Bungie says. "We wish the answer to keeping the game balanced and fresh was always to buff the underperforming elements. But such an approach leads to power creep - the slow and steady increase of the average power of everything in the game - which trivializes the incredible game modes and encounters that the other teams at Bungie work hard to create."
Here's another balance bombshell: in the not-too-distant future, Destiny 2 will start retiring old Legendary weapons.
