This Week At Bungie - 3/11/2021

This week at Bungie, we prepare for Grandmaster.

For years, we've been fighting to keep the Last City and its people safe. Our latest efforts off-world to keep Cabal leaders from strengthening Caiatl's War Council have been fruitful, but sometimes, the danger is closer to home than you'd think.

If you haven't seen the cutscene that went live on Tuesday, we won't spoil it for you. All we'll say is that what happened will not be taken lightly.

For the TWAB this week, we have a refresher on Grandmaster Nightfalls for the New Lights out there, a preview for some Stasis tuning coming next week, and results for our Festival of the Lost armor ornament vote. Let's get to it!

Grandmasters of the Universe

Are you ready for a challenge? Starting on March 16, Grandmaster Nightfalls become available.

Never heard of a Grandmaster Nightfall before? No problem. Let's get you up to speed.

• Strike difficulty is set to 1350 Power.
• Minimum Power required is 1325.
• Contest Mode is enabled, so even if you go higher than 1325, you will be capped.
• Each strike will have a specific set of modifiers to ramp up the difficulty, so make sure to inspect each one to know which Champions you'll face, and what other challenges await you.
• One Grandmaster Nightfall will be available each week until April 20
• Starting April 20, you'll have the opportunity to blaze through all available Grandmaster Nightfalls through a direct launch playlist.
• If you miss a week, the final three weeks of the Season are your opportunity to catch up!

This Season will also be your first opportunity to earn Adept weapons through a PvE activity. While Shadow Price, Palindrome, and The SWARM have each been available when completing lower difficulties of Nightfalls, Adept versions will only be available through Grandmaster difficulty.

These weapons grant additional stat bonuses when Masterworked, and can be socketed with Adept weapon mods. You can earn these mods in Trials of Osiris and you'll be able to earn them through Grandmaster Nightfalls as well.

Additionally, this will be your first opportunity to earn a Gilded version of the Conqueror title. If you see someone sporting this in a few weeks, know they went through an ordeal to earn it. Well, not just one... but many.

Now's the time to form a fireteam and start strategizing how you'll work together to overcome the challenge. Smoke bombs might come in handy when things are looking dire, or a well-placed Nova Bomb to eliminate some Champions that have been stunned near each other. Word on the street is that the Cult of Aeon is rising up through the ranks, helping Guardians to keep their ammunition stocked during the fight.

We're excited to see what strategies you create in the face of challenge, and to see what sweet loot you claim from the hands of your enemies.

Eyes up, Guardians.

Patch Note Previews

Over the last few weeks, numerous teams throughout the studio have been working on bug fixes ranging from strikes to Sandbox. Our current target for Destiny 2 Update 3.1.1 is next Tuesday, March 16. While this isn't the largest patch we've shipped, we're excited to get these fixes out in the wild.

Additionally, we made a commitment to some balance passes for Stasis in the Destiny 2021 Update: The Road to The Witch Queen. We had a few notes on how we'd be tuning the Titan Behemoth, Hunter Revenant, and Warlock Shadebinder subclasses.

Destiny 2 Update Preview for March 16 Patch

Strikes:

• Fallen S.A.B.E.R.:
  • Fixed an issue where the strike Boss would not spawn until all players were alive and present.
  • Improved objective waypoint behavior.
  • Fixed some grammatical errors in player-directive text.
  • Fixed a bug where a fireteam member entering the area late could cause the Warsat falling visual effects again.
  • Fixed an issue where Zavala's dialog in the first area could play multiple times.
  • Fixed a bug where a fallen energy shield could be seen sticking out of a wall.
• Devil's Lair:
  • Sepiks Prime now has a Boss health bar.
  • Fixed some floating environment objects.
  • Fixed an issue where some monster spawn points looked like accessible doorways to players.
  • Fixed an issue where an Overload Captain could spawn with the wrong name.
  • Fixed an issue where the Fallen Walker and Fallen Brigs could respawn after they were defeated.
  • Fixed an issue where physics was missing from a wall early in the strike, allowing players to get lost out of environment.

Armor

• Fixed an issue with the Linear Actuators Exotic perk for the Titan Exotic Dunemarchers, which was not triggering properly. The perk now behaves as expected, triggering on each/subsequent melee strike after an appropriate amount of sprint time.
• Font of Might no longer displays a generic "Damage Boost" string when its benefit is active.
• Fixed a bug where the Mantle of Battle Harmony and Omnioculus Exotics were not displaying their flavor text.
• Omioculus also no longer grants melee energy when making only yourself invisible under some circumstances.
• Cuirass of the Falling Star no longer grants an Overshield when used with Supers other than Thundercrash.

Weapons

• Fixed an issue where flavor text wasn't appearing for several seasonal weapons.
• Added rumble to the end of Dead Man's Tale's reload.
• Adjusted Riskrunner perk VFX that were causing epileptic issues.
• Reduced Arbalest's aim assist, making it harder to hit headshots in Crucible.
• Set the Frenzy and Cranial Spike perks to use the correct buff icons.
• Fixed Ticuu's Divination's missing kill feed icon.
• After a few weeks of development and playtests, we also have a round of Stasis balancing slated for March 23.

Stasis Tuning Preview for March 23 Patch

Before we dive in to the patch notes, we have a few words from the team to walk through the goals of this tuning pass:

Hey everyone, Gameplay Team at Bungie here. We made some targeted changes to Stasis in Season 12 and wanted to see how they landed before making any more adjustments. Now that we've have several weeks of data to analyze, we're ready to make some further changes to address additional pain points of Stasis in PVP. Our goal with these changes is to reduce some of the frustrations when fighting against Stasis subclasses in the Crucible, while maintaining their power in PvE content wherever possible. With that said, some changes required us to adjust the global behavior of some abilities. In the patch notes below, we've explicitly mentioned which changes will affect Crucible functionality only. We'll be closely monitoring ability performance and feedback as Season 13 continues. Thanks for playing, and we're excited to see how the future of Stasis unfolds.

Hunter

• Shatterdive
  • Removed damage resistance from Shatterdive.
  • Added a 4s cooldown between activations of Shatterdive.
• Withering Blade
  • Decreased Withering Blade damage against players from 90 to 65 damage. PvE damage is unchanged.
  • Decreased Withering Blade slow stacks applied to players from 60 to 40 stacks. PvE slow stacks are unchanged.
  • Decreased the target acquisition range of Withering Blade after it impacts a player from 12m to 8m. Range after impacting PvE enemies is unchanged.

Titan

• Glacial Quake
  • Removed AoE freeze against players on super cast. Will still freeze PvE enemies on cast.
  • Reduced damage resistance while in super from 60% to 50%.
  • Increased the energy cost of using Shiver Strike while in Glacial Quake from 3% to 7% Super energy.
  • Using the combo of a Shiver Strike into a Heavy slam attack will now cost the full Super energy of both the Shiver Strike and the slam (previously only costed energy for the slam).
• Shiver Strike
  • Increased downwards velocity applied to Shiver Striking players when they are slowed to pull them out of the air more strongly.

Warlock

• Winter's Wrath
  • Improved tracking of Winter's Wrath projectiles, now tracking strength decays from its max value over 10s instead of 2.2s.
  • Increased the size of the warlock super projectile's proximity detonation radius 1.5m - 1.65m
  • The proximity detonation now starts at it's largest and scales down to 40% over time.
• Penumbral Blast
  • Decreased Penumbral Blast damage against players from 80 to 30 damage. PvE damage is unchanged.
• Iceflare Bolts
  • Fixed a bug where Iceflare Bolts would continuously try to switch targets.
  • Increased target acquisition range of Iceflare Bolts by 33%.
  • Increased turning speed of Iceflare Bolts so they can more effectively hit nearby targets.
• Chaos Reach
  • Decreased the amount of Super energy refunded when cancelling Chaos Reach early.

General

• Duskfield Grenade
  • Reduced how strongly Duskfield Grenade pulls players inwards, effectively reducing the pull range from 9.5m to ~6m. PvE pull impulse is unchanged.
  • Reduced the slow stacks applied to players by the grenade detonation from 20 to 10 stacks. Detonation slow stacks are unchanged against PvE.
  • Reduced the slow stacks applied to players on each tick of the grenade from 10 to 5 stacks. Per-tick slow stacks are unchanged against PvE.
  • Adjusted the UI presentation of the "Slowed" status to display Slow stacks as X/100 instead of X/10, to increase readability when adding Slow stack amounts that are fewer than 10.
• Stasis Crystals
  • Reduced crystal shatter damage against players from (85 max, 55min) to (55 max, 25 min). PvE damage is unchanged.
• Whisper of Chains
  • Reduced Whisper of Chains damage resistance bonus while in Super from 25% to 5%. Damage resistance when not in Super is unchanged. This only affects damage from other Guardians.
• Whisper of Torment
  • Fixed a bug where players could continuously proc Whisper of Torment while standing inside an opponent's Barricade.
• Stasis Fragment Quests
  • Significantly reduced objective completion values for all Crucible fragment quests.

If any issues are found over the next week, some of these changes may be delayed to a future date. Check out the Player Support Report below for more details and stay tuned to @BungieHelp for updates on our timelines.

They Do Vote in Herds

If you missed the TWAB last week, we held our first ever community survey to determine which upcoming Festival of the Lost ornament set would be available. Movie Monsters vs Dinosaurs, or #TeamMonsters vs #TeamDinos if you were watching Twitter trends. Truth be told, we saw many more votes than anticipated. There were just over 200,000 votes cast, but a clear winner emerged. Our scientists were more preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should! All said and done, we have a clear winner.

Dinosaurs win!

(Community art by Jarhinge)

For all of you monster-movie lovers, do not fret! While #TeamDinos have won the day by a fairly significant margin (Ex: Titans voted #TeamDino at 81% to #TeamMonsters at 19%), there's still opportunity in the future for these sweet armor ornaments to see the light of day.

Many thanks to all who participated in this first stab at a community vote! This wasn't just exciting to watch unfold throughout the community conversation, but we had a great time watching the data as it built a clear story of which ornament sets would be chosen. While we won't hold votes for everything we do in Destiny, we're excited to do more of these in the future. Stay tuned!

Patch Prep

Next week brings another update to Destiny 2, but for some Guardians in the states, you'll also be setting your clocks forward an hour. Yes, the age-old tradition of losing an hour of sleep for reasons that people can't seem to remember anymore is here once again. Alright, now that I've gotten my complaints out of the way, let's get to the important stuff from Destiny Player Support.

This is their report.

KNOWN ISSUES LIST  #HELP FORUMS  BUNGIE HELP TWITTER

SPRINGING FORWARD
Daylight Saving Time 2021 begins on Sunday, March 14, in the United States. The daily and weekly ritual reset will be at 10 AM Pacific (1700 UTC) while Daylight Saving Time is active from March to November.

For more information, please visit our Destiny 2 Ritual Reset Guide.

UPDATE 3.1.1 AND MAINTENANCE TIMELINE
Next Tuesday, March 16, maintenance for Update 3.1.1 will begin. Below is a timeline of events:

• 9 AM PDT (1600 UTC): Maintenance begins.
• 9:45 AM PDT (1645 UTC): Players are removed from activities. Destiny 2 is brought offline.
• 10 AM PDT (1700 UTC): Update 3.1.1 will be available across all platforms and regions. Players will be able to log back into Destiny 2.
• 11 AM PDT (1800 UTC): Destiny 2 maintenance is expected to conclude.

Below are some issues that will be resolved with Update 3.1.1. A complete list will be shared when the update goes live.

• Dunemarcher's Linear Actuator Exotic perk will now properly trigger on melee strikes, and chain to combatants, after sprinting for the appropriate length of time.
• The Double Trouble Dreaming City Triumph can now be obtained.
• The Braytech transponder signal on Europa will no longer be removed if player dies with 2/3 completed.
• Completing the Forfeit Shrine Ascendant Challenge will now grant progress towards the Ascendant Champion and Honed for Speed Triumphs.

CLAN XP
As a result of testing being done on clans to help resolve an ongoing issue, clan XP will be temporarily disabled on Tuesday, March 16, from 11 AM PDT (1800 UTC) to 12 PM PDT (1900 UTC). During this time, clan XP from all sources (bounties, activities, etc.) will be lost and won't count towards clan XP totals.

Stay tuned to @BungieHelp on Twitter for more information.

PRESAGE SCANNABLES
In the Presage mission, the scannables are on a weekly lockout. Players need to find and scan the first set of scannables in their entirety and complete the associated Triumph before the next set of scannables become available upon the next weekly reset.

Players who only partially complete the scannables for a given week will not have the next set of scannables available at the weekly reset.

Players who observe other issues should report them to our #Help forum.

TRIALS OF OSIRIS
We have resolved an issue that prevented the Trials of Osiris from being active the past two weekends. Trials of Osiris will be re-enabled and active at the daily reset on Friday, March 12.

Players who observe other issues should report them to our #Help forum.

WEEKLY KNOWN ISSUES
While we continue investigating various known issues, here is a list of the latest issues that were reported to us in our #Help Forum:

• Players report their veteran dialogue got removed from Shadowkeep missions after completing the New Light quest.
• Veteran players report that after completing the New Light quest the Stardust campaign doesn't acknowledge them as veterans like other players who didn't complete the New Light quest.
• The Zydron Nightmare Hunt doesn't acknowledge veteran players if they completed the New Light quest but weren't new players.
• In the Presage mission, players can respawn into areas that instantly kill them.
• The Frozen in Time ornament for No Time to Explain says it's an Exclusive Item for players who own it and can't be equipped.
• Warlock's Bleak Watcher Stasis turret does not shoot enemies at certain angles.
• The Turbo-Kickers Hunter Exotic ornament for St0mp-EE5 shows a checkmark on the icon in the Bright Dust section, but it can still be acquired.
• It is intentional that the In It for Infamy Seasonal Challenge only counts major ranks up rather than sub-ranks.

For a full list of emergent issues in Destiny 2, players can review our Known Issues article. Players who observe other issues should report them to our #Help forum.

12 What Now?

I'm going to be real with you all. I'm terrified of flying. It's one of my biggest fears, even if there shouldn't be anything scary about flying through the air in a huge metal tube at ridiculous speeds. In any case, the winners this week capitalized on my fears, as they decided to go over the max weight limit of a Fallen Skiff.

Movie of the Week: Max Occupancy Has Been Reached

I would love to see the pilots face ? pic.twitter.com/fVCq3j1c9A

— Chrizmo (@Chrizmo__) March 7, 2021

Movie of the Week: Affection

Shanty of the Week: Runnin' To Europa

Alrighty, that's it! Show's over! You don't have to go home and you're more than welcome to stay here, but still ... show's over! If you'd like to submit a video for MOTW, throw a post on the Bungie.net Creations page. Make sure to link your Bungie.net profile in the description so we know where to deliver your emblem when you win.

#SecretServitor

While hunting for Art of the Week picks this week, I noticed a fun hashtag on numerous posts throughout the feed: #SecretServitor. A few community members put on a fun art exchange, full of kickass Warlocks, beautiful images of Crow, and some other fun surprises. It's always awesome stumbling across group- or clan-hosted events. Below you'll find a handful of their submissions, but we highly recommend scrolling through the hashtag for more!

Art of the Week: Season of the Chosen Render

Here's something fresh after yesterday's spam- I made a Season of the Chosen render for the Destiny Model Rips discord banner contest! I'm super proud of the lighting on this render, it turned out so well!

#Destiny2 @Destiny2Art @rDESTNYCREATION @A_dmg04 pic.twitter.com/MeKYVMfv36

— kat (@henloimkat) March 9, 2021

Art of the Week: Nova with no Warp

Nova with no warp

Made for @henloimkat as part of @TR_BlueJay's #SecretServitor 3D artwork giveaway! Hope you like it!#Destiny2 #Destiny2Art #destinyart @rDESTNYCREATION pic.twitter.com/4fUX2Ok0Zl

— Ohlac ? (@Ohlac3D) March 8, 2021

For the winners, expect a direct message from us. We have a sweet emblem for you to sport in Destiny 2! If you'd like to submit art to be featured in future weeks, make sure to tag your content with #DestinyArt, #Destiny2Art, or #DestinyArtBread! Well, that last one is totally optional, but we would love to see what you're cooking up.

Here we are. A full year of working remotely. Last year, I said that our weekly TWAB installments have been helping to keep my head focused on what day it is, but I must admit, I find myself asking what year it is more often than not. It's been March for about 12 months now, but I'm happy to say that things are starting to get brighter with each passing day.

Cheers to the fireteams that have been keeping each other company over this last year. Cheers to those who have been staying safe, supporting charities, and doing whatever they can to help their communities through these times. You continue to serve as a light for those enduring some dark times, and this world is a better place thanks to you.

As we head into the weekend, I'll be spending some time with my Grandmaster fireteam figuring out what days and times we'll be hitting the activity. We earned our initial Conqueror titles in Season of Arrivals together, and I'm pretty excited to go for Gild with the same group. Yeah yeah, "friendgame is the true endgame" gets meme'd on every so often, but I'll be damned if I don't admit that this fireteam has been the sickest loot I've ever gotten from Destiny.

I hope you're able to form the similar bonds through clans and friendships found in the Destiny community. They don't come often, but when they do, they can last a lifetime.

Cheers,
dmg04