This Week At Bungie - 3/5/2020

This Week at Bungie, we prepare for the worthy.

We're just five short sleeps from Season of the Worthy. Last week, you completed the Empyrean Foundation event, lighting a beacon for Guardians to follow back to the Lighthouse and Trials of Osiris. On Tuesday, we unveiled Season of the Worthy all up. If you haven't seen the trailer, there is a new threat for you to confront.

Bungie.net also has a dedicated page for the new Season, jam-packed with information to get you up to speed before next Tuesday's launch.

Before we get started with the rest of the TWAB, I wanted to take a quick moment to highlight another blog post that went live earlier today. In response to the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak, our teams have been working hard to build out an infrastructure that would enable Bungie employees to support Destiny 2, and the impending Season 10 release, safely from remote locations. Season of the Worthy is still planned to release on March 10, followed by the return of Trials of Osiris on March 13. While there is a possibility that this change could affect our patching cadence in the short term, we will be sure to keep players informed about those schedules as much as possible. Stay tuned to @Bungie and @BungieHelp for any future updates.

Now, we have some housekeeping to do before we arm an ancient Warmind. Let's get to it.

#TrialsReturns

Moments after the announcement that Trials of Osiris would return with Season of the Worthy, we witnessed numerous Guardians sharing their favorite memories from this beloved corner of the PvP endgame. Moments of spectacle, joy, heartbreak, insanity, and everything in between. Trials of Osiris was the source of some awesome community highlights—a thing that some of our newer Guardians may have yet to experience. We'd love to see more of your stories and bring them into the scene.

Using the hashtag #TrialsReturns, share your favorite clips from Destiny 1's Trials of Osiris. You can post them to Twitter, upload them to YouTube, and even post them to our Community Creations page. We'll round up our favorites to be featured in next week's TWAB.

If your video is selected, you and your fireteam will take home a Movie of the Week emblem. Make sure to include links to the Bungie.net profiles of every team member.

Power Gains

With each new Season, you're faced with new challenges that require a bit of Power acquisition to take on. In Season of Worthy, you'll be challenged in not only Trials of Osiris, but in Legendary Lost Sectors and Grandmaster Nightfalls. Here's a quick update from the Dev team on what's changing on day-one, and what our plans are for a mid-season update:

Dev team: We're raising the 'cap' for gear drops 40 points—powerful gear will now drop up to 1000, with pinnacle drops going up to 1010. The soft cap has also been effectively raised 50 points. Gear drops from nearly all sources will continue to be upgrades until 950 Power, and powerful reward sources will not be required to progress to 950. We're looking to present an element of gear progression available each Season, as well as prepare underlying systems for future updates like the forthcoming one for Legendary weapons mentioned by Luke Smith in the Director's Cut 'Weapons Forever' section.

We're also looking to make some quality of life updates in the pinnacle band. Starting in 2.8.1. (coming mid-Season), we'll be upgrading some existing powerful rewards to pinnacle rewards. These are the weekly Crucible, Strike, and Gambit challenges, as well as the weekly clan engram. With this change, we want to increase the total number of pinnacle power sources in the game, broaden pinnacle drop access, as well as increase the pools of items that can drop in the pinnacle band.

Slot imbalances can also affect pinnacle progression. When we say slot imbalance, this could be explained as those times you have a chest piece drop from pinnacle sources a few times in a row. We've been looking at player feedback for some time, and are investigating a few approaches to the problem space. We're looking to have an update on that at a later date. Until then, we hope the additional sources will help you on your climb.

While we have the Dev team here, they also wanted to give an update on Artifact Power for Trials of Osiris.

Dev team: With Trials just around the corner, we wanted to address the "Artifact Power problem" as quickly as we could. As Luke said last week, our short-term fix is to disable the Artifact's Power bonus while in Trials and Iron Banner. Unfortunately, Season of the Worthy has already been released for certification, so we won't be able to disable the Artifact's Power for the first Trials weekend. We have the fix in-house to disable it and are testing it this week, and hope to deploy it on Tuesday, March 17. We really wish we could have gotten it in for the launch weekend, but we also expect the first Trials weekend to be the one impacted by the Artifact the least. Players will have much less time to increase their Artifact Power, so the majority will be close to each other outside of Pinnacle drops.

Our long-term plan is to enable a Power cap for Trials and Iron Banner and we're investigating the work required for this. This will roll out no earlier than midway through Season of the Worthy, but we don't have a firm date yet—we'll make sure to communicate it when we do! We also plan to look at the damage curves for Power-enabled PvP modes to determine what, if any, adjustments should be made. Assuming we discover it's necessary, the timeline for a change is still TBD. With both changes, we plan to provide more detailed write-ups before they go live, explaining the details of the change and the design philosophy behind why we are making those decisions.

Just for clarity, I'll echo Luke's statement from last week: we're going to disable the Artifact Power bonus in Trials and Iron Banner until we can implement a new Power cap system for those playlists. I hope you all enjoy Season of the Worthy, and may your run to the Lighthouse be swift and merciless.

Season of the Worthy: Eververse Update

With the turn of each Season, we hope to keep players up to date on how the Eververse Store is evolving. This Season, we have a few changes concerning Bright Engrams, and a new path to directly purchasing some previously featured Eververse items.

Bright Engrams
In Season of the Worthy, Bright Engrams will no longer be available for purchase from the Eververse Store. As said in the February 2020 Director's Cut:

"We want players to know what something costs before they buy it. Bright Engrams don't live up to that principle so we will no longer be selling them on the Eververse Store, though they will still appear on the Free Track of the Season Pass."

This Season, we are continuing to focusing our efforts on direct purchasing through the Eververse Store.

Daily Rotation of Returning Items
In the place of Bright Engrams, a new module will become available on the Eververse Store starting in Season of the Worthy. This daily-rotating module will feature one item from a small selection of ships, Sparrows, Ghosts, and finishers that were offered in previous Seasons. These items will be available to purchase directly for Silver at a discount from the original price.

Aside from these changes, there aren't any other major shifts coming for Eververse. We'll be monitoring the conversation through launch and beyond, and will be sure to update you before any large changes come. Here's a quick preview of some upcoming items coming with Season of the Worthy:

Hunter Finisher

Titan Finisher
 
 Warlock Finisher

The Final Preview (of Patch Notes)

Over the last few weeks, we've been giving some previews how your sandbox will be evolving in Season of the Worthy. Not just weapon tuning, but the ability to change the Elemental Affinity on your armor pieces. This week, we'll be taking a wider look at Destiny 2 Update 2.8.0. Exotic armor tuning for PvE and PvP, UI updates, bug fixes, and more...

Exotic Armor

• Hunter
  • Assassin's Cowl
    • The invisibility and healing effect now triggers on powered melee (both against combatants and Guardians) and finishers.
    • The duration of the invisibility granted by this Exotic increases based on the tier of the enemy defeated.
    • Arc Staff kills no longer activate this perk.
  • FROST-EE5
    • Changed the ability regeneration so that it no longer stacks multiplicatively with other class ability energy-generating perks.
  • Khepri's Sting
    • All smoke bombs deal 150% damage while wearing this Exotic.
  • Orpheus Rig
    • The maximum amount of Super you can regain from this Exotic with a single use of Shadowshot is 50%.
  • Young Ahamkara's Spine
    • Increases the explosion radius for Tripmines by 14%.
• Titan
  • Ashen Wake
    • Killing an enemy with a Fusion Grenade while wearing this Exotic now refunds grenade energy. The amount of grenade energy refunded scales based on the tier of enemy killed.
  • Anteus Wards
    • The shield created during a slide no longer allows chip damage through.
  • Doomfang Pauldrons
    • Fixed a bug where Doomfang Pauldrons would sometimes grant Super energy from melee kills while in your Super.
  • Dunemarchers
    • Increase the radius of the static charge to 20 meters, up from 12.
  • Mk. 44 Stand Asides
    • Reduced the delay from the start of sprinting until the overshield comes in to 0.5 seconds, down from 1.25.
  • One-Eyed Mask
    • The target marking from this Exotic has been replaced with target highlighting, eliminating the ability to detect targets through walls.
    • No longer provides a damage bonus when defeating your marked target.
    • Restored the previous overshield granted by defeating your marked target, which now has a duration of 6 seconds, down from 8.
  • Severance Enclosure
    • The explosion now triggers on powered melee (both against combatants and Guardians) and finishers.
    • The radius and damage of the explosion created by this Exotic increases based on the tier of the enemy defeated.
• Warlock
  • Apotheosis Veil
    • This Exotic is now guaranteed to drop with a minimum +16 to Intellect.
  • Contraverse Hold
    • Reduced the damage reduction granted by this Exotic to 20%, down from 40%.
  • Sanguine Alchemy
    • Sanguine Alchemy has received a complete redesign. Its new perk, Blood Magic, allows the wearer to pause the countdown timer of any Rift they are standing in by getting weapon kills, extending the Rift's duration.
  • Ophidian Aspects
    • Now increases the lunge range of all Warlock melee attacks, even if the ability is on cooldown.
  • Verity's Brow
    • The buff provided by this Exotic now increases your grenade damage by 10% per stack.
    • The buff to allies' grenade recharge rates now kicks in when you cast your grenade.
    • This Exotic now provides a buff text notification indicating how many allies are currently benefiting from your increased grenade recharge.

Investment

• Legendary Engrams
  • Increased the number of armor sets available from world drops to 11 sets, up from 3.
  • This will include Faction Rally armor. Players who own previous Faction Rally Ornaments may apply them to these sets.
  • Several sets that were previously unavailable or extremely difficult to acquire are now available as world drops.
• Armor Stats
  • Prime Engrams will now more reliably drop armor with higher overall stat rolls and spikier distributions.
  • Exotic armor will now more reliably drop with higher overall stat rolls.
  • Legendary armor now has an improved chance of receiving higher overall stat rolls, though low rolls will still be present.

User Interface

• The Settings screen UI layout on consoles has changed to match the experience on PC, allowing for future updates.
• Added the ability to change the color of the reticle on consoles.
  • Players can choose from seven different colors, matching PC.
• Added hint text during loading screens.
• Added comma separators to the Glimmer count in the loot stream.
  • No longer keeps me awake at night.
• Added categories to the Quests screen.
  • Quest items will now be automatically filtered to any of the seven categories:
    • New Light
      • Note: This category will hide if there are no active New Light quests in the character's inventory.
    • All Quests
    • Shadowkeep
    • Seasonal
    • Playlists
    • Exotics
    • The Past

Performance

• Fixed UI stuttering and framerate drops when loading or applying mods.
• Improved framerate in Gambit and Gambit Prime.
• Fixed framerate issues during the Sanctified Mind encounter of the Garden of Salvation raid.
• Fixed framerate issues in the Pit of Heresy dungeon, specifically in tunnel encounters.
• Fixed stutter at high framerate on PC.
• General improvements to performance on PC when a lot of debris is on the ground.

While this list is pretty lengthy, we'll have more patch notes to share with you next Tuesday around 9 AM PDT, an hour before Season of the Worthy begins.

Some of you may be asking, "Wait, 10 AM? Don't patches usually ship at 9 AM?" Daylight Saving Time begins on Sunday, March 8. If your region takes part in jumping forward, your weekly reset time will be an hour later than you're used to. More information from the Player Support team below.

Systems Check

Before we dive headfirst into Season of the Worthy, we have a patch to ship. Destiny Player Support has your itinerary in hand, and a quick list of some resolved issues. 

A NEW SEASON
Next week, Season of Dawn ends and Season of the Worthy kicks off with the release of Destiny 2 Update 2.8.0. Please see below for the rollout timeline.

• 8 AM PDT (1500 UTC): Destiny service maintenance begins.
• 8:45 AM PDT (1545 UTC): Destiny 2 is taken offline on all platforms.
• 9 AM PDT (1600 UTC): Destiny 2 Update 2.8.0 begins rolling out across all platforms and regions. Players will be able to log back into Destiny 2 at 10:01 AM PDT.
• 10:01 AM PDT (1701 UTC): Destiny 2 is back online on all platforms; Season of The Worthy begins.
• 12 PM PDT (1900 UTC): Destiny service maintenance concludes.

For future release timelines when they are available, players should visit our Destiny Server and Update Status help article. For live updates as this maintenance occurs, players should follow @BungieHelp on Twitter or monitor our support feed at help.bungie.net.

UPCOMING RESOLVED ISSUES, PT. 2
Below is a continuation of a list of issues that will be resolved when Season of the Worthy and Update 2.8.0 become available on March 10:

• Hunter's Tempest Strike melee ability can now be performed when using PC controls where Sprint is set to "Hold."
• Character subclasses with ranged melee abilities will now count towards Melee Kill bounties and Triumphs. These include Titan Hammer Throw, Hunter Throwing Knives and Corrosive Smoke Bomb, and Warlock Celestial Fire and Ball Lightning.
• The Fastidious Miser Triumph will now correctly progress and complete for players who've found all 30 Ascendant Chests across the three Curse Weeks in the Dreaming City, and have claimed those corresponding Triumphs.
• Weekly Strike bounties for Hive and Vex boss kills will now award progress to players for killing Savathûn's Song, Xol, and Dendron the Root Mind.

While Update 2.8.0 is released to the world, Destiny Player Support will be on standby in the #Help forum, ready to assist anyone who is experiencing issues. 

Dawn Comes to an End

Season of Dawn has been a fun ride. We saved a Legend, stopped the Psions from changing time itself, and had the opportunity to watch a lot of Community Creations along the way.

Movie of the Week: Creatures of Destiny: A Nature Documentary

Honorable Mention: This player should be banned for such an unsatisfying montage

Honorable Mention: Riven's Heart Theme Keyboard Cover

Cheers to everyone who submitted a video, art piece, or anything to the Creations page during Season of Dawn. We're excited to see what you cook up over the next few months.

It's crazy to think that next week a new Season begins. It feels like just yesterday we were watching you all explore the Corridors of Time. It's no secret that I'm pretty excited for Trials to return, and I'm also looking forward to see you share your memories with the #TrialsReturns hashtag.

See you next week. Maybe we'll bump into each other on our way to the Lighthouse. No hard feelings when you lose, okay?

Cheers,
Dmg04