As the dust settles after Destiny 2: Lightfall and the release of Strand, the space MMO is making some huge balance changes to bring up its old Light subclasses, along with significantly smaller buffs to the oft-forgotten Stasis element.
Bungie outlined the big Season 21 update in its latest blog post. "We’re taking this opportunity to evaluate the state of our subclasses and systems, focusing on adjusting abilities that are either overshooting or not quite hitting our power bar," the dev team says.
For starters, all one-slot Aspects now have two slots, which is a huge win for buildcrafting in general. All roaming Supers are also getting a 20% damage resistance buff for PvE, making it markedly harder for enemies to kill you in your Super and, hopefully, making them worth using in difficult content. Several Supers are also having Light 3.0 verbs like scorch folded in. Here's the short version of that laundry list.
- Golden Gun - PvE damage increased 20%
- Arc Staff - PvE damage increased 20%
- Spectral Blades - PvE damage increased 35%, heavy attack applies weaken
- Gathering Storm - PvP direct damage increased, tick damage decreased
- Fists of Havoc - Super cost decreased for light and heavy attacks, PvE damage increased 33%, heavy attack now blinds
- Glacial Quake - Shiver Strike speed in Super increased by 10%, light attack damage increased 20%
- Sentinel Shield - PvE damage increased 20%
- Hammer of Sol - PvE damage increased 10%
- Burning Maul - PvE damage increased 10%, creates a Sunspot on cast with Sol Invictus, heavy attack applies scorch
- Nova Warp - PvE damage increased 15%, fully charged hit now applies volatile
- Nova Bomb - PvE damage increased by 20% (any space magic enthusiasts out there?)
- Stormtrance - PvE damage increased 25%, landfall now triggers jolt
- Chaos Reach - PvE damage increased 25%, sustained damage triggers jolt lighting strike, adjusted Super camera to keep your character from blocking your view
- Winter's Wrath - PvE damage increased 10%
Phew! Those are some capital-B Buffs, so Season 21 might actually shake up the established PvE Super meta. Strand is getting some changes of its own, with every class's melee due for power and quality of life enhancements. The Strand grappling hook is also getting a 23-second base cooldown reduction (and it could probably use about triple that, but I digress).
Surprisingly, Stasis, which has gone pretty underused since Strand ate its lunch for crowd control, is getting much milder buffs than the Light. The Light is getting chunky damage percent increases while Stasis subsists on stuff like "increased maximum tracking strength" for Withering Blade and "decreased maximum downward influence of gravity while in flight" for Shiver Strike. Cool, I guess. Here's hoping that new Stasis Shard-enabled Armor Charge mod is enough of a Stasis buff in its own right.
Check out the full patch notes for an extremely granular breakdown of additional changes coming to several Aspects, abilities, and keywords. Even then, Bungie says "this isn’t the complete list of abilities changes coming with Season 21’s launch later this month," which almost sounds like a threat given how long the list is already.
Three weeks ago, Bungie laid down the smackdown after a Destiny 2 community summit led to a big Season 21 leak, though the accused streamer still denies what the studio calls "irrefutable evidence."
