Ice Breaker
Recharge time for Ice Breaker's self-replenishing rounds increased to 1 every 8 seconds. Was previously 1 round every 5 seconds. The intent here is to add extra tension to those moments when Ice Breaker will utterly destroy the problem in front of you, but you're still waiting for that one.. bullet... to reload...
Balancing Destiny’s weapon roster is a lot like patching up a punctured bouncy castle, while standing on said fully inflated dirigible fortress, and wearing track spikes while you do so. Every time you take a step forward to repair or improve something, you’ll turn around to find something else busted up directly behind you. Alongside, no doubt, an unhappy child and a long, deathly ‘prhprhrphrhrrp’ noise. That’s just the nature of a massive, malleable shooter with eight billion guns (give or take), a ton of stat variants, and a huge PvP element. And when you have the same weapons and gear shared across a rich suite of vs. and co-op modes? Egad. Egad indeed.
The best approach to dealing with that unwieldy, inconsistently buoyant beast? Every so often you’re going to have to take the whole thing down, submerge it in a bowl of water (you have very large bowls), see where the bubbles come out, and deal with them all in one fell swoop.
Today is one of those days. With update version 2.0.0, Bungie has dropped a major, across-the-board rework of its weapon balancing, making notable changes to basically everything. Every class of gun has had fundamental changes made, and for the first time we have a raft of tweaks addressing specific, popular, but rather problematic Exotics. Thorn and Gjallarhorn, your great reckoning is finally at hand.
The broad overview? Auto rifles have been pitched yet further into the medium-range comfort zone, shotguns have had a reduction in the effectiveness of their range-boosting perks, scout rifles are now resolutely long-range weapons, and hand cannons are no longer pocket snipers. And you’re going to have to work a bit harder to get the best out of snipers and fusion rifles too. So hurrah.
In all, it sounds like a very sensible, well thought out, and long-needed set of changes that is inevitably going to make a lot of crybabies go purple with impotent range because they think that the removal of their unfair advantages is itself unfair. But who cares? Destiny is going to be even better in the long-run, and that’s what counts.
And even more excitingly, Bungie is teasing that the released notes only relate to the guns and systems we know about. Apparently there’s more being tweaked and reworked to take into account September’s major Taken King expansion. With the sheer amount of content also set to come along with that add-on, in a couple of months we should be playing a Destiny almost unrecognisable evolved from its form at original release.
You can get the (many) complete details over at Bungie’s full blog post on the update, but the 10 biggest changes are handily laid out in the gallery above. Enjoy!
