This Week in Destiny, we're getting ready to race in Revenant. That's because we've not only got a new dungeon coming in a couple weeks, but we also have the first-ever Dungeon Race to commemorate its launch! We've got all the details to share, so let's jump in.
Topics for the week
Vesper's Host, the new dungeon coming with Revenant, will be released on Friday, October 11. Not only will it be the first dungeon to have Contest Mode enabled, but we're also excited to announce the Vesper's Host Dungeon Race.
As we've done with raids in the past, we're inviting the top fireteams in the world to compete for glory (and prizes) in a race to the finish line. It's going to be a bit different compared to a raid: this time, the first three fireteams to finish the dungeon will be crowned winners and rewarded. For those brave Guardians looking to take on the challenge, here is what you can expect.
Details
Entry Requirements
Completion Criteria
For full details on eligibility and requirements for the race, please visit our official rules.
Contest Mode Details
Contest Mode applies some very specific rules to raids, and now dungeons. Enemies are more aggressive, encounters feature resurrection tokens, and some encounters will have an enrage mechanic that limits the number of phases or the time players have left to complete it. Also, character Power does not provide an advantage above the recommended level.
Those of you that triumph over this challenge during the first 48 hours after the dungeon launches will earn bragging rights, a special emblem, and the dungeon Exotic weapon. Yes, it's a guaranteed reward during Contest Mode. You have plenty of time to prepare for what's to come and to put together an incredible fireteam.
For those who aren't interested in Contest Mode, you won't have to wait 48 hours to take your shot at the new dungeon. Normal Mode will be enabled as soon as the first three fireteams have completed the dungeon.
We are just a few weeks away from the release of the new dungeon, Vesper's Host. And with it comes an epic challenge between the top fireteams in the world as they race to the podium to win our inaugural Dungeon Race. To celebrate the occasion, we're partnering with Twitch Rivals to broadcast some of the streamers participating in the race!
If you are a creator looking to be part of the event, sign-ups begin today, and will be open until October 4 at 5 PM PT. Registered and approved creators will be provided with the following exclusive Twitch Drops while the race is taking place:
Effortless Flow Emblem: Watch at least two hours of any creator with Twitch Drops enabled.
Broadcasting from the Dark Emblem: Subscribe to your favorite Destiny 2 streamer.
Destiny 2: Revenant is launching on October 8, and we are excited to give you a closer look at everything we've been working on. Tune-in on October 1 at 10:00 AM PT for our Developer Livestream where we'll share a detailed look at everything coming in the first act of Revenant along with an early chat detailing some of the upcoming changes that will arrive with Codename: Frontiers.
We'll have a new emblem you can earn via Twitch Drops, so watch at least 15 minutes of the livestream to earn "Revenant Echo." Make sure you have your Twitch account linked on Bungie.net to collect your loot.
Revenant Echo Emblem
Hey, Guardians. It's the PvP Strike Team here with an update on what you can expect in Revenant. Before we get into the details, here is a quick outline of what we'll be covering.
We have another substantial Crucible update planned for 2025, and we'll have more to share on this in the future!
To set expectations, we will be relatively quiet during Revenant, outside of some work on Trials of Osiris rewards and general sandbox, spawn, and map tuning. We are now working on a substantial overhaul of multiple PvP systems for Heresy and beyond, built on the knowledge we've gained from our experimentation over the last six months. We will share some small details and a selection of our goals below, but we will have more info for you later once the changes are more solidified. In the meantime, to help hold you over, we do have a handful of changes going live in Revenant that we can share.
For Revenant, we're bringing back a fan favorite, with a Reprised version of Solitude! This updated version has some small changes to geometry and spawn locations to improve map flow and has been set up to immediately drop into our Competitive and 6v6 modes. We're going to hold off adding it to Trials for a bit, while we verify the competitive integrity of the map in the live game.
We've made several UI changes that should help provide information more clearly during combat. To start, Class Icons will return, displaying in place of Guardian Rank on enemies.
We've also added "Assisted by..." callouts to the death screen that will tell you when the person who defeated you was assisted by another Guardian or Guardians.
Finally we've updated the tombstone icon for your allies to show you their tool of destruction, in case you missed it in the kill feed.
In Revenant, we have done a pass over our mercy rules for 6v6 playlists. Initially, these rules were set to only activate during a small window of time in the match, which has led to occurrences where a game that should have been a mercy has bypassed the window and dragged on to completion. Additionally, there was a portion of time where a game would not mercy, but it would turn Join in Progress (JIP) off, so games could go down several players but neither the mercy rule nor the backfill feature would kick in as expected.
Moving forward, we have extended the window within which a game can mercy and closed the gap between disabling JIP and enabling a mercy, so that JIP will only be disabled if a mercy is imminent. Due to the increased window, we expect the number of games that end in mercies to increase, but as soon as we have enough data, we will tune the mercy trigger limits for the corresponding game modes as needed.
We have two changes coming to our Competitive playlist in Revenant that may sound small, but that we think will have a noticeable positive impact on the experience:
It wouldn't be a PvP Strike Team update without some mention of lobby balancing! In Update 8.0.5, we had planned to ship a new variant of Snake Draft designed to improve upon some of the issues caused in the base version, but we ran into a bug where, in some abnormal situations, fireteams could end up split between the teams, so we had to disable that system while we got a fix in place.
While unfortunate, this situation did give us an opportunity to test out a new Lobby Rank Averaging system that was originally intended to be a fallback for Snake Draft should it ever not be able to effectively make a match.
Lobby Rank Averaging works much the same as Average Skill, except we rank the players in the lobby from best to worst (so from 1-6 for 3v3, or 1-12 for 6v6) and then balance the teams based of each player's rank within the lobby instead of their exact skill values. This allows us to still generally balance the lobby, but it makes it highly unlikely that the best player in the lobby will end up with more than the fair share of lower skilled players in order to drag down the actual skill average, because it caps both how high and how low the skills can be perceived.
Under this system, most matches end up with skill allocations like what we would expect from Snake Drafting. However, while there are fewer ways the players can be balanced while achieving the same average on each team compared to Average Skill, we still experienced some situations where the top three players could be placed on the same team alongside the bottom three players. This can end up creating an odd team dynamic where the critical mass of highly skilled players on one team rolls over the opposite team composed of mostly the average players, despite half of the winning team contributing very little to the outcome.
Because of the described occurrence, Lobby Rank Averaging in practice was generally worse than both Average Skill and Snake Draft for balancing the outcomes of all solo matches, but significantly better than the initial iteration of Snake Draft when dealing with fireteams, where the above scenario was unlikely to occur. We believe with some minor modifications to the rules to prevent the situation described above, it will be a sufficient fallback lobby balancer for the future.
All told, this makes four different variants of lobby balancing that we have tested in the live game, and now that we believe we have corrected the issue in our improved Snake Draft system, we'll be rolling it out as our fifth. We're still saving the deep technical jargon and explanations on how lobby balance works for a later article, but to give you a heads up on what we're changing, here's a TLDR:
We're excited to get this newest iteration out in the wild (again), and we'll continue to iterate and tune the formulas as needed until we can strike the correct balance for Crucible.
There's lots to talk about in the sandbox, but we had an abilities and gameplay preview last week, and next week will have a weapons and armor preview, so we're not going to spend too much time on it here.
We did have one note we missed last week: In Revenant we are going to be placing a cap on the amount of crouch inputs you can enter per second to equalize Hold to Crouch with Toggle Crouch in terms of its behavior. This limit is something that can be tuned, and because a tactical crouch or two during an engagement is an expression of skill and not something we want to discourage, we verified in our playtesting that our first pass was set so that it would be difficult to tell a limit existed if you were crouching at a normal cadence. However, our goal is to reduce the amount of untargeted crouch spamming, done either manually or via macros, encountered while playing Crucible, and we can further change the value as needed to prevent this behavior.
In addition, we also want to focus on a small bit of weapon balance we'll have upcoming and generally give a summary of where our meta sits currently.
As you can see from the charts below (Kills Over Expected displayed on the Y-axis and Percent of Kills on the X-axis), we don't have a ton of outliers. Hand Cannons are the clear favorite at high skill levels, but Auto Rifles and Pulse Rifles are both making a strong showing, and our more niche Primary weapons (Submachine Guns, Sidearms, and Scout Rifles) are all similarly clustered.
Primary Weapon Meta Since 8.0.5 - All Skills
Primary Weapon Meta Since 8.0.5 - High Skill
Primary Weapon Meta Since 8.0.5 - High Skill (Detailed)
However, when we check the detailed stats, we can see that a handful of weapon subfamilies are making up most of the representation for the well-performing archetypes: Adaptive Hand Cannons, Adaptive Auto Rifles, and High-Impact Pulse Rifles. None of them are egregiously too strong, so for Revenant we want to focus on bringing up the low performers more than nerfing the strongest options, but we are going to be making some minor changes to both ends.
Most of the changes we are making to underperforming weapons are focused around increasing their forgiveness or allowing them to better interact with damage boosts; in general, we do not want to be moving optimal times-to-kill around too much from where they are now. The one exception is Heavy Burst Pulse Rifles which are also getting an RPM change, but we will discuss that in more detail next week.
While we continue to work on our new Ammo Meter system, we don't have much to share on Special weapons at this point. In Revenant we are going to begin walking back some of the flinch increase that Sniper Rifles received to try to find a good balance between taking damage knocking them off their shots, and the movement of the camera itself feeling too jarring to use. We'll also be slightly buffing Trace Rifle starting ammo and ammo from crates.
The Crucible Heavy weapon meta is dominated by a single weapon with a single roll: Hammerhead, an Adaptive Machine Gun, with Fourth Times the Charm and Killing Tally.
While the numerical dominance of this one weapon is concerning, it would be difficult to tune it down without nerfing the perks themselves or the Adaptive Machine Gun sub-family, despite none of the other members overperforming by anywhere near the same margin. Instead, initially we're going to look at slightly reducing the prevalence of Heavy ammo in our 6v6 modes overall, while buffing other underperforming Heavy weapon types slightly to better compete (specifically without increasing the actual uptime of Heavy ammo).
Our first pass in Revenant will be reducing the total number of Heavy ammo spawns in Control from 5 to 4, and in a future release we'll also ook at how Heavy ammo works in other modes like Iron Banner Fortress. If this is not effective in spreading out the usage, we can revisit the amount of ammo certain Machine Guns earn from Heavy crates.
We're also investigating Heavy ammo Linear Fusion Rifles for a future release, looking to branch them from their Special ammo brethren by reducing their flinch taken from players.
We've identified several issues with Trials of Osiris that are contributing to its current state, and over the next two Episodes will be working towards addressing them Revenant will feature a smaller push to address some of the low-hanging fruit, while Heresy will have a significant rebuild of the Trials of Osiris experience. We will share more info on our goals below but expect a full preview of those changes to come later.
In Revenant, we want to address the first handful of issues by improving our map rotations, making sure our weapon rewards are strong and meta relevant, and improving how the game's sandbox feels when played at a high-intensity level.
In the future, we have an additional handful of issues we'd like to address by adding new aesthetic rewards that allow players to show off both determination and skill, further improving the trio experience so players are motivated to play with friends, and our overall goal is to make Trials more fun and more rewarding for all different types of players
During the next Episode, we are currently planning on running Trials with the following maps (with a handful of flex weeks slotted in throughout the season):
We are interested to hear your feedback on the above selection of maps. Which maps are your favorites for Trials?
In terms of rewards, we want to add new and exciting rewards, improve the ones that currently exist in the Trials loot pool, and to strike a better balance in terms of what rewards can be earned each week.
For Revenant, we will be introducing a newly buffed, strongly statted Heavy Burst Hand Cannon to the loot pool, Yesterday's Question, alongside a revision of the Rocket Launcher, Tomorrow's Answer:
To improve the existing rewards, we have buffed some of the Trials reward sub-families as mentioned in the sandbox section:
We've also updated the post-game standard (non-Adept) weapon reward. The weekly weapon now has a focused 50% drop rate compared to the others, instead of being the only weapon that can drop. This way, even if the weekly weapon is not something you are interested in, you still have a good chance to earn the other Trials weapon rewards.
We have already detailed a number of changes coming from the ability and weapons sides that we believe will lead to a more balanced experience and promote variety of gameplay at the high end.
To take a bigger swing at things, we are also going to be running a very special variant of Labs: Class-Based Trials Labs!
No more than one of each class per team, so every team must comprise of a Titan, Hunter, and Warlock, with no duplicates! We currently have this scheduled to run twice during the Season, and we are very interested to hear your feedback on how it plays. Matchmaking will be active so you can play solo or in a duo and the matchmaking will find players who do not match your class to fill out your team.
There are also a couple of additional changes that are currently being tested, and we hope to have them available to release sometime during the Episode:
Now isn't the time to share all the details, but we give a short preview of what we are working towards with our Trials of Osiris rework for Heresy:
Trials isn't the only thing that is going to be getting a major overhaul in Heresy. We're also making big changes to the way we organize and schedule our playlists, rebuilding our skill tracking system, and making some substantial updates to the way Rank is rewarded in our Competitive playlist.
We are investigating additional Crucible-specific tuning for ability uptime. We do not have details to share at this point, but as soon as we have narrowed down the values, we will communicate them. We are also looking at Crucible-focused tuning for the Storm's Edge Super and the Knucklehead Radar Exotic armor piece.
The modified Supremacy mode, Hardware, will also be returning to labs after Revenant's first Iron Banner weeks.
We're going to focus on offering a good variety of options, with minimal overlap in terms of experience, without splitting the population into too many individual silos. Our goal is to use what we've learned over the last year, with an aim to consolidate and solidify our playlists into options that better represent the experiences Destiny PvP can offer, without negatively affecting matchmaking times or connection quality.
We are planning to offer a more relaxed variant of Iron Banner, with minimal matchmaking stratification and a focus on the less serious game modes like Fortress, Eruption, and an improved version of Tribute. We want to improve the Iron Banner experience, especially for casual and mixed skill fireteams, so we're investigating:
We want our skill system to be more transparent and easily understood so players can get a better feeling of where they sit relative to other players for matchmaking purposes. Competitive point gains should feel like they make sense, and the ladder you climb should be more easily understood, so we're going to move back to a system where player performance in-match has more of a direct impact on how much you gain or lose. Winning and losing will always be the biggest factor in your points, but your performance can help to give you a boost upwards or offset a close loss, and each player should be easily able to understand why they earned the amount they did at the end of each game.
Speaking of Competitive, we also want to improve Collision's gameplay and investigate ways to make the matches feel fairer and make the game mechanics more predictable. Current examples include:
We'll have a lot more details to share with you later this year, but for now, we'll see you in the Crucible!
Known Issues List | Help Forums | Bungie Help TwitterNew Fireteam Finder Categories for Encore
With Update 8.0.5.5, we've added some activity-specific titles to Fireteam Finder for Exotic Mission: Encore. These options should help players better communicate their goals to potential fireteam members. For example, "Epilogue" runs on Expert difficulty can now make use of a "Speedrun" category to help players looking to obtain a specific Triumph/emblem. Here is a full list of the categories added.
Overture, Concerto, Coda:
- Let's Do Secrets
- Exotic Catalysts
- Looking For Collectibles
- Mining Nodes
Encore ("Epilogue") Expert-only:
- All of the above
- Speedrun
Maya might not seem like a fearsome enemy upfront but think twice about it. She is someone that can grab hundreds, if not thousands, of copies of her long-lost partner and wipe them out of existence without remorse because they are supposedly not perfect. Control is the end of love.
A lovely animation covering all the big content updated launched in these past ten years, both for Destiny and Destiny 2. We have a lot more coming.
That's everything we have for this week. We'll be back next week with a lot more details on Revenant, so you have the best understanding of what's to come, including one article on Wednesday focused on the Artifact. Until then, prepare yourselves, gather materials, and finish those challenges and Triumphs you may have left.
We are almost there.
Destiny 2 Community Team
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