Bungie's latest Destiny 2 blog post is a juicy one, pairing a few significant (and sometimes painful) updates with a massive list of weapon sandbox notes that will likely send the game's nerdiest players into a frenzy.
Let's rip the bandage off first: Divinity, the go-to Exotic for raid teams looking to weaken bosses and make it easy to land critical hits, is getting nerfed. The gun's headshot-enabling Arc bubble is here to stay, but its weaken effect is being reduced from 30% to 15% to make other debuffs more useful. Bungie community manager Cozmo was quick to clarify on Twitter that this change was planned long before the recent surge of player discussion around Divinity, which exploded after a three-time world-first raider argued that the gun is bad for the game.
At least today also brought some extremely good news for hardcore raiders. Bungie agrees that the Adept weapons exclusive to Destiny 2's brutal Master-level raids aren't good enough compared to their craftable and much more easily obtained counterparts. With this in mind, it's promising "changes coming in Destiny 2 Lightfall that give the new Lightfall raid Adept weapons access to enhanced perks," which is actually a really big deal.
This won't allow for craftable Adept raid guns, it seems, but with this change the Master Lightfall raid could still have the best guns Destiny has ever seen. Seriously, ever. We won't know the strength of the raid's individual weapons and perks until we see them, but this will be the first time Destiny 2 has ever combined the enhanced stats and mods of Adept weapons with the improved perks of crafted guns. So on paper, at least, the Adept Lightfall raid guns are peerless, though it's not like they'll instantly replace all of the guns we already have – but try telling that to endgame diehards who look at even 5% damage gains with silver-dollar eyes.
The rest of today's enormous blog post is mainly stuffed with little details answering old or common questions about how guns and loot work. There's also a notable nod to a recent wave of accidental bans, which included roughly 60 "false positives" according to Bungie
Here are some of the most interesting tidbits. Check out the full post for a lot more.
- Bungie's looking at Kinetic weapons "to make this a more interesting aspect" post-Lightfall.
- Yes, weapon perks really are weighted equally; you're just unlucky.
- Looking at new and popular perks like Incandescent and Voltshot, Bungie says "subclass 3.0 verbs opened up a huge amount of design space for weapons" and "the perks we've already made are just the beginning.
- Bungie's "investigating" a way to give crafted weapons multiple perks in each column so you can swap between them once unlocked, though this is apparently "a more complicated task than it appears."
- Yes, Zen Moment actually works; y'all are just mean. Dealing damage lowers recoil, and Bungie affirmed that getting five stacks of the perk "massively reduces recoil."
- Season 19 will have (at least) one Solar and one Kinetic Exotic weapon.
- Riskrunner's Arc resistance is getting nerfed in PvP, but "will still remain ridiculous in PvE."
- Glaive damage resistance is getting nerfed in an upcoming mid-season patch (unclear if it's both PvE and PvP).
In an update scheduled for this month, Destiny 2 may finally fix an infamous dungeon bug that's been insta-killing players for almost five months.
