https://www.bungie.net/en/News/Article/45661/7_Destiny-Hotfix---21417

Crucible
Special Ammo
Adjusted Special ammo economy in all gametypes
Players start Crucible matches with Special ammo
Special ammo is now lost upon death
Sidearms are not affected by this change
Special ammo crates now appear every 60 seconds (initial spawn and respawn)
Special ammo crates are shared with allies within 75m (down from 100m)
Special ammo timing in Mayhem is unchanged
Elimination Gametypes
Round time limit has been reduced to 90 seconds (down from 2 minutes)
Players only start with Special ammo for Round 1 in Elimination gametypes
Special ammo timing is 30s initial, then 45s respawns
Special ammo is wiped at the beginning of subsequent rounds

Weapons
Hand Cannons
Significantly increased initial accuracy (returns to Launch / Year 1)
Reduced base range to 35m from 40m
Reduced Aim Assist and Magnetism at longer ranges
Reduced minimum damage after falloff from 50% to 33%
Auto Rifles
Increased Precision Damage modifier to 1.3x (up from 1.25x)
Increased base damage of low rate of fire Auto Rifles by 2.5%
Increased in air accuracy
Pulse Rifles
Reduced rate of fire for very high rate of fire Pulse Rifles by 7.7%
Increased rate of fire for low rate of fire Pulse Rifles by 5.3%
Reduced Magazine Size of Clever Dragon and Grasp of Malok by 6
Reduced the effect of High Caliber Rounds for Pulse Rifles
Increased in air accuracy
Scout Rifles
Increased in air accuracy
Shotguns
Shotguns no longer deal precision damage
The Chaperone and Universal Remote are unaffected by this change
Note: Universal Remote only deals precision damage when ADS
Shotguns now have significantly less magnetism when fired from the hip
Shotguns now have significantly less in air accuracy
Shotguns no longer have a movement penalty
Shotguns now deal 20% more damage to combatants
Rangefinder on Shotguns now increases ADS time by 25%
Reduced Universal Remote’s Magazine Size to 3 from 5
Universal Remote now takes longer to reload

Exotics
Young Wolf’s Howl
Reduced "Howling Flames" ammo cost from 10 to 5
Truth
Reduced Magazine size from 3 to 1

Classes
General
Reduced Health of Guardians with Armor values above 10
Increased damage of Flux Grenade, Magnetic Grenade and Shoulder Charge to ensure effectiveness across all Armor values
Blink now disables your Radar and HUD for a short time after activation

Hunter
Throwing Knife now deals Solar Damage on impact
Hungering Blade*
Immediately starts Health regen
Restores more Health per kill
Gives a flat amount of Health/Shield per activation
Does not immediately start regenerating Shields
Bladedancer’s Quick Draw Perk no longer readies your weapons instantly, but now grants a large increase to weapon handling speed

Warlock
Viper Totemic on Ophidian Aspect no longer readies your weapon instantly, but now grants a large increase to weapon handling speed
Stormcaller's Thunderstrike melee range reduced to be consistent with other Warlock Subclasses
Amplitude will continue to grant small range boost to new base range
Landfall now reduces the total time in Stormtrance

Titan
Juggernaut is now disabled after being in the air for a short time and cannot be activated while in mid air

General
Outbreak Prime no longer triggers The Corruption Spreads by shooting at Ward of Dawn
Shinobu’s Vow no longer adds an additional seeker to Skip Grenades
Removed intrinsic Perks Kneepads and Icarus on some Talent grids
Fixed an issue where High Caliber Rounds were not functioning properly on Hand Cannons, Scout Rifles, Machine Guns and Sniper Rifles
*Hungering Blade changes were also inadvertently applied to the following Perks, for more information check this post
Transfusion (Striker Titan)
Cauterize (Sunbreaker Titan)
Lifesteal (Voidwalker Warlock)
Red Death Perk
Suros Legacy Perk (Suros Regime)
No Backup Plans
Ward of Dawn cast
The Ram
Apotheosis Veil
Embrace the Void (Voidwalker Warlock)

https://www.bungie.net/en/Forums/Post/222240682

Over the last couple of days, as we continued to test the patch, it came to our attention that the changes we made to Hungering Blade were unintentionally shared among a number of additional elements (list below). While we considered delaying the hotfix to remove the shared change, we ultimately decided to live with the patch we’d made and tested. We believe that Hotfix 2.5.0.2 is an important step forward to maintain the health of the game and that getting it out to you ASAP is in everyone's best interest. And besides, no one wants to show up empty handed on Valentine’s day.

List of affected elements:
• Hungering Blade (Arc Hunter)
• Transfusion (Striker Titan)
• Cauterize (Sunbreaker Titan)
• Lifesteal (Voidwalker Warlock)
• Red Death perk
• Suros Legacy Perk (Suros Regime)
• No Backup Plans
• Ward of Dawn cast
• The Ram
• Apotheosis Veil
• Embrace the Void (Voidwalker Warlock)

Over the next couple of weeks, we will be diligently watching and listening to what you have to say about these changes. While we will be unsurprised if additional tweaks need to be made, we are honestly super interested to see how these changes, intended or not, play out. We will be relying on you to give us your feedback as you grow accustomed to the feel of the game over the next couple of weeks. We will also be with you ingame, playing along and making our own notes… Apparently, I have to redeem myself for my stream performance anyway.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a 1st date with a potential Skorri fix…

Truth
Reduced Magazine size from 3 to 1

?!?!

I've been out of touch for about a month now, and I know Truth has always been powerful, but it takes an exotic slot which is quite costly....so was Truth really becoming that much more of a problem?

there really is no point in Truth now.

That's... woooof.

So in applying a nerf to hunters, Bungie nerfed every other classes way more inadvertently.

I use all these abilities regularly. If it had been up to me, I would have delayed the patch.

Aside from it being 99% reliable to kill? I've always thought it's a bit strong.

I was ready for them to drop it to two by removing the hidden Tripod perk, this stings a bit more. Guess they want me to take a closer look at my other rocket launchers. :) Still, it's a launcher with tracking, grenades and horseshoes, and max blast radius, so it still might win out when I'm not using MIDA or Trespasser.

I'm always going to be using Trespasser, aren't I?

Yeah... that'll be interesting. Sounds like they were using the same regen health effect everywhere and forgot. I'd always suspected it was the same thing across classes and weapons. Cool to have proof of that. Interesting that No Backup Plan had that invisible perk... I thought they simply activated the overshield. Did not know they also kicked off healing...

Hopefully they can quickly do something like create a Hungering Blade specific regen effect and just change the shared one back to how it was. Or, to be more foolproof, maybe each item should have its own regen effect so future changes won't break everything else?

This means it still holds the same total number of rockets but has to be reloaded between each one? If so, that seems fair. It's still very good at getting a kill in almost ridiculous angles.

Truth
Reduced Magazine size from 3 to 1

?!?!

I've been out of touch for about a month now, and I know Truth has always been powerful, but it takes an exotic slot which is quite costly....so was Truth really becoming that much more of a problem?

The biggest ammo count for rockets, tripod, Horseshoes, and 99.9% accurate tracking?

They should have nerfed it ages ago. Of all the gear that requires zero skill, Truth was above even MIDA.

If I understand this correctly, you get the following benefits for any of the affected perks:

Immediately start Health regen
Does not immediately start regenerating Shields
Restores more Health per kill
Gives a flat amount of Health/Shield per activation

Affected perks:

• Transfusion (Striker Titan - kills with storm fist immediately trigger health regen)
  
• Cauterize (Sunbreaker Titan - enemies brought down by your fire regenerate your health)
  
• Lifesteal (Voidwalker Warlock - Damaging an enemy with Energy Drain immediately restores a significant portion of your health)
  
• Embrace the Void (Voidwalker Warlock - Killing enemies with Nova Bonb or any grenade triggers Energy Drain and restores your health)
  
• Ward of Dawn cast
  
• Red Death Perk (Each kill heals you and speeds up reloads)
  
• Suros Legacy Perk (The bottom half of each magazine deals bonus damage and has a chance to return health on kill)
  
• No Backup Plans (Shotgun kills trigger force barrier and Force Barrier's duration is increased)
  
• The Ram (Increased armor. All voidwalker melees trigger life steal on hit)
  
• Apotheosis Veil (gain increased health from orb pickups)

I suppose it comes down to the new distinction between health and shield behavior, but I"m assuming that it's just adding a delay to the shield regen since otherwise they would have said "Gives a flat amount of Health per activation" instead of "Gives a flat amount of Health/Shield per activation". If it's just a delay (and not a long one), this should be manageable.

Truth
Reduced Magazine size from 3 to 1

Fuuuuuuuuuck that. Wow.

Bladedancer’s Quick Draw Perk no longer readies your weapons instantly, but now grants a large increase to weapon handling speed

Huge nerf here. Wow.

*Hungering Blade changes were also inadvertently applied to the following Perks, for more information check this post
Transfusion (Striker Titan)
Cauterize (Sunbreaker Titan)
Lifesteal (Voidwalker Warlock)
Red Death Perk
Suros Legacy Perk (Suros Regime)
No Backup Plans
Ward of Dawn cast
The Ram
Apotheosis Veil
Embrace the Void (Voidwalker Warlock)

Bungie testing does it again! This is going to make Red Death really really good.

Truth
Reduced Magazine size from 3 to 1

?!?!

I've been out of touch for about a month now, and I know Truth has always been powerful, but it takes an exotic slot which is quite costly....so was Truth really becoming that much more of a problem?

The biggest ammo count for rockets, tripod, Horseshoes, and 99.9% accurate tracking?

They should have nerfed it ages ago. Of all the gear that requires zero skill, Truth was above even MIDA.

Yes because everyone was running truth all the time in PvP and Trails. Oh wait, they weren't.

Yes because everyone was running truth all the time in PvP and Trails. Oh wait, they weren't.

Exactly my point in asking "WHY?" for this change. :-/

Either way, your argument that "not everyone used it" is a pretty crappy one with regards to what needs nerfing.
Truth needed a nerf, Bungie looked at the mountains of data that you have zero access to, and they agreed with me.

Either way, your argument that "not everyone used it" is a pretty crappy one with regards to what needs nerfing.
Truth needed a nerf, Bungie looked at the mountains of data that you have zero access to, and they agreed with me.

Look at how many of their buffs and nerfs they roll back on. Bungie has an awful track record with balancing. It's just another overreaction like they do in every patch. Then the pendulum swings back the other way next time, to repeat over and over.

Truth was fine.

You don't lose gained ammo upon death when using a sidearm lol

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Well... they did say they weren't changing them much. :p

I was just chatting with a former game developer in the UK about test driven development (we were talking specifically to web development). He told me he got so into TDD now because they never did it for game development.

Once you start TDD and writing unit tests, it's hard to go back, and you easily avoid this stuff because you see exactly what you broke with each change.

Just based on this observation, it seems they likely don't have unit tests to know when they break one. Testing does take up a considerable amount of development time, so they may feel they don't have that kind of time to spend. The trade off being you break things inadvertently and spend time later fixing what you broke.

They could probably hire a slew of interns to write unit tests for their code base and avoid this problem in the future.

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Yeah, it sounds like instead of your shield instantly starting its recharge you'll have to wait for that short delay where your health has stopped recharging but your shield hasn't started yet. Just as if you healed from very low health. End result should be that you can still chop through people with hungering blade but chopping one guy and staying out of sight for a second or two won't get you back to full health like it did before.

It might even be a plus if you're under fire the whole time. If we're getting more health/shield back per activation of any of these perks and then immediately take a light hit (like from an auto rifle) we might end up with more total hit points and either way we wouldn't be regaining more health / shield...

It will be interesting to play and see how this works and feels!

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Plus you only have heavy dropping once per game = 3 rounds max per game.

I still feel this nerf is completely unnecessary.

I can't agree with completely unnecessary. I think it was definitely optional, and 3 to 1 nerfs it pretty hard... I think they are trying to encourage variety. Between truth and gjallarhorn, most PvE bases are covered, and PvP at the competitive level is all about velocity, blast radius and horseshoes. There are other archetypes that are out there that I think they are trying to find a place for.

But yeah, I wouldn't call truth overpowered by any particular measurement.

You don't lose gained ammo upon death when using a sidearm lol

During the stream last week, they specifically addressed this and said that Sidearms were not affected by this change.

After they made all the primary and secondary exotics bad for PvP (and god-roll legendaries way easier to get), everyone just threw on Truth or Ghally. So now their usage has gone way up and Truth gets nerfed.

I actually agree. I've ALWAYS thought Truth seemed out of balance stats-wise, from the first day I got it. I mean, ALL of its stats are upper-tier, even without taking its tracking into account. Having a huge blast radius, or mag size, or reload speed are all fine, but usually you expect if one or two of those are good, the others will be reduced to balance it out. But Truth didn't do that. And anyway, Truth's reload is so quick that I doubt I'll really notice that much.

I'm (potentially) much more annoyed with the magazine changes to Universal Remote. It might be that the base damage increase combined with it still having precision damage will mean that it's just as effective with 3 rounds as it used to be with 5. We shall see. But if it isn't, it'll be another instance where a weapon I liked got ruined because it was a menace in PvP, which I don't play.

They do briefly state that sidearms are unchanged right before talking about shotguns.

What they didn't make clear is if sidearms only got ammo from their intrinsic perk of ammo upon spawn or if they were completely left alone from losing any ammo upon death.

https://www.bungie.net/en/News/Article/12433/7_Destiny-Update---12012014
- Increased Magazine size from 1 to 3

https://www.bungie.net/en/News/Article/13474/7_Destiny-Update---09082015
- Blast Radius distance slightly increased
- Grenades and Horseshoes perk proximity detonation distance reduced to 1.3 meter (was 2 meters)

https://www.bungie.net/en/News/Article/45661/7_Destiny-Hotfix---21417
- Reduced Magazine size from 3 to 1

We just went full circle and now worse than when it started.

https://www.bungie.net/en/News/Article/12433/7_Destiny-Update---12012014
- Increased Magazine size from 1 to 3

https://www.bungie.net/en/News/Article/13474/7_Destiny-Update---09082015
- Blast Radius distance slightly increased
- Grenades and Horseshoes perk proximity detonation distance reduced to 1.3 meter (was 2 meters)

https://www.bungie.net/en/News/Article/45661/7_Destiny-Hotfix---21417
- Reduced Magazine size from 3 to 1

We just went full circle and now worse than when it started.

See what I mean about the pendulum balancing Bungie does?

https://twitter.com/2Calico/status/831513804999647236

The sad thing is, this is really easy to write a test for and a function to ensure that the mag is filled from reserves, not ex nihilo.

Like Replenish, RM's perk description doesn't say anything about using your reserve ammo.

In Y1 they buffed the mag from 1 to 3 in order to make it even remotely usable. Now everything is so bad that they had to change it back and it's still the best rocket in the game.

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It's very close to a pendulum as well in that it never quite becomes good again due to air resistance. The guns will eventually all settle to a crap tier of sameness.

Hungering blade change seems fine as well but I hope they fix the other perks it works.

What I don't like is loss of universal remote as a fun gun, and it really shows they don't care much about non-crucible.

They have buffed shotguns in the normal game, which is fine, and seems like a decent trade off, but they absolutely annihilated the most fun thing in Destiny: primary burn extra jump damage universal remote nightfalls.

I mean, way to make nobody ever use a gun again in the real game, Bungle. Universal remote is now out of my life.

I was just chatting with a former game developer in the UK about test driven development (we were talking specifically to web development). He told me he got so into TDD now because they never did it for game development.

Once you start TDD and writing unit tests, it's hard to go back, and you easily avoid this stuff because you see exactly what you broke with each change.

Just based on this observation, it seems they likely don't have unit tests to know when they break one. Testing does take up a considerable amount of development time, so they may feel they don't have that kind of time to spend. The trade off being you break things inadvertently and spend time later fixing what you broke.

They could probably hire a slew of interns to write unit tests for their code base and avoid this problem in the future.

Oh, I could see them having good test coverage with unit tests for their code, but not for the data that makes up the weapon/armor/ability stats(data?) <edit> and the cascading effects a change can create </edit>. I imagine that's really the root cause of these bugs. It appears they don't "unit-test" their data, looks like they should.

In Y1 they buffed the mag from 1 to 3 in order to make it even remotely usable. Now everything is so bad that they had to change it back and it's still the best rocket in the game.

I'd argue that my iron banner vendor Tormod's Bellows is now the best RL in the game. 3 rounds in the tube, fast rockets with big explosions and G&H. It's pre-nerf Truth without the tracking. And it's legendary, so you can use an exotic in a different slot.

But the fact that this is so top tier also concerns me. It was purchased from an IB vendor over a year ago. That means the barrier to entry for players who missed it is incredibly high. You're talking about an insanely lucky roll on a legacy engram (or can you even get legacy IB guns from those engrams? I've never paid much attention to them, so I'm unsure)

I like aspirational PvP, but when the ability of have-nots to get into the upper echelon of gear is so extreme as to be practically exclusive, well, I don't like that very much at all. Your path to getting a good gun should not be "go back in time 16 months."

Of course I should probably just shut up so bungie doesn't read this and nerf the bellows as well. Lord knows they'd rather nerf an existing good gun than add a new better one.

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They have to make way for the new exotic: Alt-Truth.

Alright. I'm done. ;P

(Seriously though, I'm as surprised as the rest as you lot. The three in the slot was what made it exotic for me.)

Yes because everyone was running truth all the time in PvP and Trails. Oh wait, they weren't.

Exactly my point in asking "WHY?" for this change. :-/

Wait... really? My team always switched to all Truth, all the time for heavy ammo round in Trials. Granted I've only gone to the lighthouse once, but i've played my share of top teams and everyone did this (seriously, Lucky and Buttwipe are insanely good).

I actually agree. I've ALWAYS thought Truth seemed out of balance stats-wise, from the first day I got it. I mean, ALL of its stats are upper-tier, even without taking its tracking into account. Having a huge blast radius, or mag size, or reload speed are all fine, but usually you expect if one or two of those are good, the others will be reduced to balance it out. But Truth didn't do that. And anyway, Truth's reload is so quick that I doubt I'll really notice that much.

I'm (potentially) much more annoyed with the magazine changes to Universal Remote. It might be that the base damage increase combined with it still having precision damage will mean that it's just as effective with 3 rounds as it used to be with 5. We shall see. But if it isn't, it'll be another instance where a weapon I liked got ruined because it was a menace in PvP, which I don't play.

I have a feeling that you're right. Universal remote, especially after the latest changes to special ammo, is too damn good in pvp.

When you write tests, you generally mock your data, so you don't really write tests for it. You write tests for those functions/classes etc that receive, manipulate, and output your data. Examples: The Rangefinder nerf did the opposite of what it said it would do, this could have been found with a test. If they had tests for all perks, when testing the Hungering Blade nerf they would have seen broken tests for all the other classes that got accidentally nerfed.

When you write tests, you generally mock your data, so you don't really write tests for it. You write tests for those functions/classes etc that receive, manipulate, and output your data. Examples: The Rangefinder nerf did the opposite of what it said it would do, this could have been found with a test. If they had tests for all perks, when testing the Hungering Blade nerf they would have seen broken tests for all the other classes that got accidentally nerfed.

Yes, Exactly! But also, no. What I'm saying is that they likely have units tests for the ADS code, and it works correctly <edit>with their mocked up data</edit>. However the actual data that modifies the time to ADS for the rangefinder perk is probably NOT embedded in the code (and thus would not be caught by a unit test) but found in a data file somewhere. The rangefinder 'bug' is likely in the data file, not the code.

(Side note: apparently it's up in the air if this rangefinder bug is indeed a bug, apparently they said in the livestream that ADS would be faster, but in the patchnotes that it would be increased (poor choice of words there, when I read it I was like, "wait, so is it going to be slower or faster?")).