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It must be a day that ends in Y, because Destiny 2 players are excited to revisit some stuff they first played years ago. (It's me, I'm players.) Destiny 2 Episode 3: Heresy launches Tuesday, February 4, and we're going back to the Dreadnaught ship introduced in Destiny's Taken King expansion for a Hive and Taken-focused not-season. The kicker, as Bungie revealed during a dev stream today, is that "Oryx is back," at least in "some capacity," according to the game's narrative lead.
Oryx looms over the Heresy lead art, but the late Taken King's role in the Episode remains to be seen. The main cast is filled out by Hive expert Eris Morn, weird stuff enthusiast Drifter, and the slightly Taken-ified Sloane. The Dreadnaught itself has been warped by one of the Echoes that have defined the ongoing epilogue arcs, but some areas still feel just like home.
Alongside the Sundered Doctrine dungeon coming February 7 and a big Trials of Osiris overhaul, Heresy features a new core activity called The Nether. Bungie says it wanted to build on the rewards and roguelite elements of previous activities like the beloved Coil, turning The Nether into a still rogue-ier mode with no health regen or ammo drops, draftable boons that buff your stats and alter abilities, and randomized encounters and objectives. You have way more base health and your healing perks will still work, but they'll be severely nerfed. You're also limited by revive tokens, so I'm just hoping that this Nether health economy play actually works well and isn't super frustrating in high-end difficulties.
The rub is that you can play The Nether solo or in a group of three, either jumping into an easier patrol mode, the baseline matchmade version, or the harder advanced version. Harder versions will spit out more loot, and Bungie stresses that clearing the whole activity is the best way to get rewards, seemingly addressing feedback about it being loot-optimal to dip out of previous activities after a few rounds.
Destiny 2 community lead DMG also fielded feedback on Episode 2's fiddly tonic loot system and repetitive narrative delivery. Heresy, it seems, will make it easier to target and acquire specific guns, and Destiny 2 purportedly has some new narrative tech to break up the helm-holo-helm-holo routine that players are mighty familiar with by now. Heresy also seems to have a larger injection of new guns, hopefully offsetting the underwhelming loot pools of recent Acts.
Heresy is rounded out by a big Arc subclass shakeup, some long-awaited Stars Wars collab armor, an assassin-themed Void Hunter aspect, and craftable weapons coming to the reprised Vault of Glass raid. Grind the Vault of Glass for, I don't know, the millionth time? I told you it must be a day that ends in Y.
