This Week in Destiny, we are sharing a lot of changes coming to the Destiny 2 sandbox in just a few weeks.
Here's the list of topics for today:
Let's do this!
You can fight like a Krogan, run like a leopard, but you'll never be better than Titans cosplaying as Commander Shepard and awkwardly dancing in the middle of the Tower. They are alone on the dance floor because Hunters are busy with calibrations as Garrus Vakarian, and Warlocks can't stop arguing about the best biotic Void build as Dr. Liara T'Soni. And this is all possible thanks to the new Destiny 2 x BioWare collaboration!
Look for the Normandy Crew Bundle at the Eververse in-game, where you'll find these looks as well as the Flux Dance emote and Omni Strike finisher. You can also pick up the Alliance Requisitions Bundle at no cost, which includes the Enhanced Defense Ghost Shell, Alliance Scout Frigate ship, and Alliance Drop Ship Sparrow.
To celebrate this collab, we want to see your strongest builds inspired by Shepard, Garrus, and Liara. Maybe you like charging with a Shotgun and punching everything in sight? Or staying behind and shooting from a vantage point with a long-range weapons? If you prefer to go nuts with your abilities, that's fine, too.
Show us using the #NormandyCrew hashtag and we'll reward our favorite ones with a very special emblem called Felis Galaxias. You have only until the next TWID.
Update 7.3.5 arrives on March 5, and it includes changes across weapons and abilities, as well as some Crucible-specific tuning. This is intended to set up the sandbox for success in the new PvP landscape as well as the new content coming with Destiny 2: Into the Light in April. Let's first dig into abilities. Take it away, Combat Gameplay team!
Hey folks, Combat Gameplay here with a quick update. This is a lightweight one for us, as we are heads down on The Final Shape, but we have a few changes coming that we wanted to share.
As a quick rundown, Update 7.3.5 will bring the following:
Threaded Specter
Threaded Specter is currently overperforming in high-level PvP activities, particularly Trials of Osiris. We believe there are two core issues that drive this overperformance, so let's talk about each separately. First, uptime on Threaded Specter is significantly higher than we think is healthy, particularly with the fast cooldown of the Hunter's dodge combined with the two Threadling Grenade charges granted by Widow's Silk. For Update 7.3.5, we're implementing a change that applies the same class ability regeneration penalty that Ensnaring Slam uses when the player creates a Threaded Specter.
We don't want this change to have a significant negative impact on Threaded Specter's performance in PvE, so we're reducing the duration of that regeneration penalty by 50% when in PvE activities (which will also apply to Ensnaring Slam, increasing its uptime in PvE). In addition, we're increasing the Threaded Specter's detonation damage vs. PvE combatants by 25%, with the goal that while you may be able to create fewer shadow clones overall, each one will be more impactful to compensate.
Threadlings
The other half of Threaded Specter's PvP potency comes from Threadlings themselves. Like Axion Bolt projectiles prior to Update 4.0.1, we believe that Threadlings are currently too difficult to clear off the battlefield. To address this, we're implementing a change to make them easier to shoot and reduce instances where it feels like your bullet went straight through a Threadling without it detonating.
In addition to their potency as a distraction tool, Threadlings deal enough chip damage to players to significantly change the outcome of an engagement. So, we're slightly reducing their damage vs. players (both at base and with Thread of Evolution equipped). Finally, we've identified a bug where groups of Threadlings were not chain detonating as intended when one is destroyed, which is being fixed.
We realize these changes are not localized to Threadrunner and will also affect Broodweaver potency in the Crucible. To compensate for this, we're pulling some other buffs forward that we originally planned to ship in The Final Shape to keep the power of their overall kit in roughly the same place. With Update 7.3.5, we'll be increasing Arcane Needle's aim assist and tracking strength, making it significantly more consistent against close- to -mid-range or fast-moving targets.
Restoration and Radiant Updates
Update 7.3.5 will also bring an update to the Restoration and Radiant keyword buffs, which currently have a number of buggy interactions with timer extensions, most notably the Ember of Empyrean Fragment in combination with Ember of Mercy. We've rebuilt a significant portion of these keyword buffs to store their timer data more safely.
Alongside these changes, we'll be adjusting both the Ember of Empyrean and Ember of Mercy Fragments. Left unchanged with the dramatically increased consistency resulting from this bug fix, these two Fragments (particularly when paired together) would vastly exceed our power bar. We believe that even with these changes, the experience of using each of these Fragments (whether alone or paired) should be equivalent or better than the experience in the experience in the game right now.
Solar Ability Buffs
Let's stick with Solar for a bit. In combination with the Arcane Needle improvements detailed above, we have a small number of Solar ability buffs that were originally slated for our balance update coming with The Final Shape. We now feel confident enough to move those buffs up to this release, in conjunction with the Solar-aligned Seasonal Artifact.
For our Sunbreakers, we're improving the consistency of Consecration, making it better able to catch floating targets or enemies that jump too late. We're also increasing the travel distance of both the scorch wave and ignition wave and further increasing the ignition wave's travel speed (both with and without the Pyrogale Gauntlets Exotic armor equipped).
We've also heard some consistent feedback about Gunpowder Gamble's self-damage resulting in untimely misadventures, so we're reducing it to make the Gamble slightly less risky.
That's it for us this time. When Update 7.3.5 goes live on March 5, we'll be keeping an eye on how these changes are landing, so please keep the feedback coming. See you soon.
G'day G'dians, it's Chris Proctor and the Weapons team here with what's planned for Update 7.3.5 (and a little tease of what's coming later).
Each release we make changes to weapon archetypes, Exotic weapons, perks and more, intended to improve the balance of the game and introduce some more variety. In this release, we have some small adjustments to PvP tuning for weapons (the bulk of the PvP changes are PvP-specific, in the Crucible Sandbox section, hefty PvE changes to Rocket Launchers, Drum Grenade Launchers and Caster Swords, and a set of weapon perk changes (mostly buffs).
Weapon Archetypes
When we created the new Heavy Burst Hand Cannon subfamily for Warden's Law, we inadvertently included some content that made them harder to control while playing with a mouse and keyboard.
Bows continue to be hard for some players to counter in PvP. They've always been strong, but we recently made them easier to use by making their fully drawn projectiles hitscan at longer distances, which makes them much more reliable at range. We're keeping that change, but we're adjusting some aim assist data to require more skill to use them at extended range.
We shipped Breakneck with one fewer perk than intended in the right column. Oops.
Lightweight Scout Rifles have always had a following, but they've suffered from being unforgiving when missing crits. We're making a change that reduces the proportion of crits required for optimal time to kill (TTK) from 4 crits to 3 crits + 1 body.
Despite being less popular than some other special weapons in PvP, Sniper Rifles are disproportionately oppressive to play against, particularly in 3v3 game modes. We're making them slightly harder to use by nerfing aim assist a little bit.
The Rocket Launcher meta has become more set than we'd like, with Adaptive and Aggressive subfamilies outperforming the rest. We're making changes to the Precision and High-Impact subfamilies that give them more reserve ammo than the others, as well as making other adjustments to give them some unique strengths.
We've touched Heavy Grenade Launchers a few times lately, and while they're fairly strong mathematically, it hasn't moved the needle. It's time to make some more substantial changes. We're pushing them more into sustained damage and add clear, and we're also tweaking Spike Grenades to make them less of a dominant pick. Note that this change is not a nerf to overall Grenade Launcher damage output, as we've increased impact and detonation damage to compensate and dramatically increased reserve ammunition.
Wave Frame Heavy Grenade Launchers have struggled to find an identity, with not enough ammo to really work for add clear (as addressed above) and not as much single-target damage as standard Grenade Launchers. With these changes, they will be able to compete with other Grenade Launchers, and it will be easier to land damage.
Caster Swords are the only Swords that have a ranged attack (for now), and the tradeoff for maintaining distance was damage. This reduction was more extreme than it needed to be, so we've brought the heavy attack damage up to approach other Swords, while also reducing the heavy attack energy cost to grant higher uptime on the projectile attack.
Exotics
Vigilance Wing is strong in PvP already, but it's fairly hard to control with how much that 5-round burst kicks, so we've made that easier to compensate for.
Vex Mythoclast fires like a High-Impact Auto Rifle. Other High-Impact Auto Rifles have a larger aim down sights (ADS) damage falloff scalar, so we've increased Mytho's to match.
Wish-Ender's True Sight is a big part of its Exotic identity, so we wanted to retain that, but in its current form, it's far too useful in PvP, particularly with the Oathkeeper Hunter Exotic Gauntlets equipped.
Edge of Action's bubble isn't intended to compete directly with Ward of Dawn, and with the Glaive changes from Season of the Wish, we hit its health too hard. There's room to make it a lot more durable in PvE.
Manticore shipped with a unique airborne playstyle, but it has several usability issues that we aim to address, including the need for a reliable way to drop out of the air (and prevent accidentally activating antigrav), survivability in PvE, and synergy with builds that utilize Void overshields.
Players enjoyed the Ex Diris Grenade Launcher for delivering on the Boomer Knight fantasy, but ultimately it just wasn't hitting hard enough in PvE to be a top-tier pick. Fortunately, this was easy to address by bumping the damage and rate of fire.
Perks
Heal Clip wasn't as valuable to the activating player as we wanted it to be, so we fixed that.
Trench Barrel was originally designed in a world where there were few ranged melee attacks, and it wasn't desirable to make them even more valuable by allowing them to activate certain perks. That's no longer the case, and we're starting to open these up.
Barrel Constrictor was fairly experimental, so we shipped it in a constrained state. We're now removing some of those limits.
Loose Change is strong in a PvE subclass build, but it isn't particularly interesting for PvP. We're adding some buffs to help with that.
Dual Loader takes up a trait slot, which is a sufficient enough cost that it doesn't need a penalty. The wording also locked it to Shotguns, when there are other continuous reload weapons in the game that already load more than one round at a time.
Since we're shipping a couple of Tex Mechanica Legendary weapons in 7.3.5, we wanted to take another pass at the Tex Mechanica Origin Trait. It wasn't really landing the hip-fire fantasy of the foundry. With this change, landing damage while firing from the hip will make it easier to land follow-up crits.
Häkke Breach Armaments, Deconstruct, and Sundering felt like they should work against more targets that look like constructs or vehicles.
Häkke Breach Armaments has one specific edge case that increases the complexity of the perk and is no longer needed, so we're reducing the number of different damage bonuses this perk has.
As an Origin Trait, Sundering has a fairly high uptime in Warlord's Ruin because of the number of Eye turrets. However, a perk themed around "breaking stuff" feels like it could apply more broadly, and shield break is an obvious activator.
Hatchling is a fun perk, but weapons that can technically crit but are bad at it suffer from precision kills being the only activator on certain weapon types.
Target Lock is a large part of the reason why Submachine Gun (SMG) popularity has remained high despite changes to the weapon archetype. With this change, it's still a solid perk, but is much less oppressive in PvP.
Envious Assassin's loop works well, but with certain weapon types, the payoff was far too great for the amount of effort involved. For example, even with the above large buffs to Drum Grenade Launcher reserves, it was possible to shove all of your reserves into your magazine, making the perk the best option by far. With this change, it's still very strong, but its potential has limits.
Bait and Switch is a little too strong in its current form, outpacing most other options. But at the same time, it doesn't need a massive change.
And to finish the perks section, we're making these two additional fixes.
Mods
Bonus damage against minibosses should have been part of Boss Spec, not Major Spec. We've updated these mods to correct that.
The Future
We've pulled a lot of balance changes from The Final Shape and Destiny 2: Into the Light into Update 7.3.5, but we'll still have a number of small but exciting changes shipping in Into the Light, touching content many players haven't thought about in several years.
In The Final Shape, we're rebalancing many weapon types in PvE, buffing underperforming weapons, and leaving most high performers untouched. Since we're looking at PvE weapon tuning anyway, over the course of the year of The Final Shape we'll be looking at weapon mods that feel mandatory, and we intend to make some changes that will increase player choice, particularly in PvE. We're also making substantial changes to several of the least used Exotic weapons (we see a lot of requests for these, see if you can guess which Exotics we touched), and adjusting some perks (including a long-requested change to Chill Clip, making it more viable to use on slower-firing weapons).
You can also look forward to being able to enhance many more weapons. We'll be back with more information on weapon enhancement soon.
Hey folks, the PvP Strike Team has a lot to talk about in the coming weeks—in this section we're covering the changes to PvP-specific tuning for weapon types, Exotic weapons, abilities, and Special ammo generation.
Note: These changes are not applied to Mayhem, Momentum, and Checkmate. They retain their own custom modifiers. Checkmate has been retuned to be more representative of its original intended form, and there will be more info on that from the PvP Strike Team next week.
Our base Crucible sandbox currently faces a number of issues. What we'll talk about here today represents a large, macro pass designed to begin to address several of these concerns, and it will be followed by additional micro-tuning in the future. The symptoms of these issues affect players across the skill spectrum, from 2,000-hour veterans to New Lights, so it's important that we begin to address them as best we can. Let's identify our goals, what the symptoms are in terms of how our gameplay is affected, and then we can discuss the root causes and the corresponding changes.
Goals:
As we've increased the prevalence and strength of some sandbox elements, the ability to clearly understand what is happening from a target's perspective has suffered. It is increasingly common to be defeated instantly (or so quickly that there is no time to react), and often so many different things are happening that it's nearly impossible to determine the sequence of events that killed you.
When a defeated player has difficulty recognizing and reacting to how they were defeated, it creates a situation where it feels like there was nothing they could have done, making it hard to learn what to do better next time. It also places a strong focus on being the one to deliver as many of these types of unreadable kills as possible, while utilizing buildcrafting to avoid becoming the recipient. Then sandbox elements that do not benefit either of those paths fall out of favor.
Additionally, while the average skill of our players has crept up over the years, the weapons' sandbox has not grown alongside it. For example, a much higher percentage of our players can hit optimal time-to-kill with SMGs, peek-shoot with Hand Cannons, or "blint" (look it up) with Wish-Ender today than could several years ago.
In large part, this is because a certain amount of forgiveness was baked into many Primary weapons to allow more players to utilize them at their full potential. For example, high-reward weapons like Precision SMGs or Aggressive Hand Cannons only requiring 67% critical hits to achieve optimal time-to-kill, and Wish-Ender allowing you to follow up the Bow swap with a body shot from a Hand Cannon. This leniency allows players to make mistakes and still benefit from the full strength of the playstyle.
That made sense when the average player skill was lower, but in the current ecosystem, a far larger number of players can take advantage of those benefits. This is manifesting itself in multiple places, but it's most noticeable in the significant compression of the skill gap at high levels of play. An additional byproduct is an increase in difficulty for new players finding their footing in a game where many veteran players have near-mastery of these existing playstyles, which increases the friction of refreshing the pool of players in Crucible.
Finally, at high levels of play, things like high body shot damage, generous aim assist, Primary weapon flinch, and low critical hit requirements all contribute to the feeling that putting in the time to improve your skill with Primary weapons is generally not worth the effort.
With many meta Primary weapons, hitting optimal or near optimal time-to-kill is less representative of mastery of the weapon and is instead merely an expectation of standard play. Similarly, at lower levels of play, players can still lose relatively quickly to an inaccurate opponent, which minimizes the time they have to figure out the sandbox and learn, often making them feel like they are playing higher skilled players than they really are.
These symptoms are all generated by a handful of root causes, each generally linked to the others in a cycle of balance that encourages us to touch all of them at once if we're making big changes, or in smaller increments if we are modifying things individually:
To help keep those builds in check:
And to keep Primary weapons competitive:
All that leads to:
Simply put, we have a risk vs. reward problem. Over time, we pushed some of our sandbox elements to have higher rewards without offsetting them with the risk of punishing sub-optimal play. Some elements take it a step further. Instead of just rewarding the attacker, they punish the target (e.g., the Explosive Payload Hand Cannon's flinch and Wish-Ender's True Sight).
To begin to address these issues, the following changes will be applied to the Crucible starting with Update 7.3.5. on March 5.
Player Health
We have two goals with the following increase to player health: It gives us far more granularity to balance our current and future sandbox elements and it lets us decrease the relative lethality of multiple sandbox elements (e.g., grenades and body shot damage) all at once and universally.
Ability Cooldowns
These values, combined with the changes to the mod economy earlier this Season, will move us to a place where ability uptime is healthier for the Crucible.
Ability Damage
To account for the increased player health and the reduced uptime, we have made some general changes to melee and Super damage (and one grenade) to make sure that we maintain moment-to-moment muscle memory and retain our current general rules of most Supers killing in one-shot and most melees killing in two.
Primary Weapon Archetypes
To maintain the same optimal time-to-kill rates as the current sandbox with the new HP values and to place an increased emphasis on precision, all Primary weapons except Bows will have their critical hit damage increased. We will also reduce the flinch dealt by Hand Cannons, as they were a consistent outlier, even compared to other high-damage Primary weapons like Scout Rifles and Bows.
Special Ammo Acquisition
After a lengthy test period in Crucible Labs, we are ready to move the Special ammo meter system into the wider Crucible. We have made several changes between the initial version and this one, so here are the details on how it will work now:
Special Weapon Archetypes
To offset the increased health and partially make up for the reduced uptime, we have increased the base damage of several Special ammo weapons.
Heavy Weapon Archetypes
Heavy ammo Grenade Launchers have been the meta pick for PvP for a long time, and we wanted to make sure that they did not get any better with the PvE changes outlined above. (In fact, due to the increased health, it will be a little more difficult for them to kill high-resilience Guardians when using Proximity Nades.) Machine Guns have long been in the shadow of other Heavy weapons, so we wanted to give them a little boost upward as well.
Exotic Weapons
Some Exotic weapons partially bypass the Special ammo economy changes, and in a world with reduced Breech-Loaded Grenade Launchers and Fusion Rifles, they quickly rose to the top of the list of annoyances. Crimson, like other Hand Cannons, has long been dealing extreme amounts of flinch to other players, and this was exacerbated by the fact that it fires in a burst. It has been custom tuned to deal slightly less flinch than other Hand Cannons. There were also a couple of Exotic weapons that we felt deserved to come up a bit, so that they were not punished by the changes.
Whew! That's a lot to cover, and there's even more coming next week from the PvP Strike Team, including info on new rewards, game modes, matchmaking details, spawn tuning changes, Trials updates, and more.
February 10 marked the start of the Lunar New Year, so let's celebrate together and welcome the Year of the Dragon. Very fitting, don't you think? Riven would be pleased. To honor this occasion, we have a very special emblem called Risen for you all. It can be redeemed using this link or the code below.
THR-33A-YKC
We also have new items available at Eververse as part of the celebrations for the Lunar New Year. The Leporine Jubilation Riskrunner ornament is back, and we have a new ornament for Two-Tailed Fox called Herald of Spring. There's also a Year of the Dragon Bundle, which includes the Auspicious Exotic Ghost Shell, the Lunar Omen Exotic ship, and the Firecracker Exotic Sparrow.
Do Guardians want to play Multiplex next? Maybe Distant Shore? How about Dead Cliffs? We asked for input last week, and the community voted via email for which map would be featured in Trials of Osiris starting tomorrow. Polls are closed, and we just got the results. The winning map with 43% of the votes is none other than...
Dead Cliffs
Now, go make Saint-14 proud once again, fight with honor, and reach the Lighthouse to prove you are not just worthy, but flawless. You will earn additional Trials ranks this week in the process by the way.
From February 13-27, the Destiny 2: The Story So Far Bundle will be available at Humble Bundle. The Steam versions of all currently available Destiny 2 expansions along with the 30th Anniversary and Forsaken Packs can be acquired by tiers. And as is custom with Humble Bundle, when you pay for a higher tier, you get the contents of all the lower tiers, too.
The top tier bundle will get you the Forsaken Pack, Shadowkeep, Beyond Light, 30th Anniversary Pack, The Witch Queen, and Lightfall + Annual Pass (which includes the Ghosts of the Deep and Warlord's Ruin dungeons and the four Seasons launched during 2023)... all for $40!
On top of that, 5% of all the proceeds will go directly to the Bungie Foundation. So not only are you expanding your collection of Destiny 2 content, but you're also supporting the humanitarian efforts of our nonprofit charity organization at the same time.
Check out the Destiny 2: The Story So Far Bundle on the Humble Bundle website.
"But when he first opened his eyes, his words were only, 'Saint, my love.' That was all. And that was enough."
Closer to the Heart Triumph Information
Due to an issue related to the delay of The Final Shape, the Closer to the Heart Triumph located in the Season of the Wish Triumph area appeared earlier than intended. The mission that will complete this Triumph will become available later this Season.New Subforums
To help us more efficiently help you, we've created two new subforums within our Help forum:
- Fireteam Finder Help
- This subforum will help us find issues that players are reporting regarding our new Fireteam Finder feature.
- Accessibility
- As we continue supporting new accessibility initiatives, this subforum will be valuable to find live issues where we can help make access more equitable for all our players.
Claiming Game2Give Rewards
If you were one of the fundraisers who helped bring in more than $100+ in our recent Game2Give campaign, you should have received an email with a code for your earned rewards. For those still missing rewards, please review the troubleshooting steps listed in this article to track down that email.
For those unable to locate any email from Game2Give, please submit a ticket here.Known Issues
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
We weren't expecting to go down memory lane this early in the morning, but damn, is this video well edited. Also, Fallout: don't threaten us with a good time.
Breathtaking Ride
Osiris has gone through a lot, but right now he is this very chill and lovely grandpa that has a very specific reaction to certain topics or attitudes...
Granpa is back to normal', by Sylenth via X/Twitter
And that's it for the TWID this week. We hope the sandbox changes we shared today have you hyped for what's to come. We'll have more details to share in the following weeks, too! Until then, let's focus on the present. How are you doing with Moments of Triumph? Have you been farming some nice Adept weapons in Grandmaster Nightfalls? Don't forget, the weekly Riven's Wishes are still available.
That's all for now (and that's a lot!).
Destiny 2 Community Team
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