Bungie Update: Road to the Witch Queen

Link

Witch Queen Stuff:

Witch Queen delayed to 2022
"The Witch Queen will light the fire on a strongly interconnected narrative across Lightfall and beyond, unlike anything we’ve ever attempted before, with characters, arcs, heroes and villains that persist over multiple future releases. Even more importantly, the conclusion of these releases will also conclude the “Light and Darkness Saga,” the conflict we first introduced with the launch of Destiny many years ago. "
More to share in Summer 2021

Gear Sunsetting Changes:

"We’ve made the decision that any weapon or armor that can currently be infused to max Power will continue to be able to reach max Power permanently. Starting in Season 14 we won’t be capping the infusion on any weapons or armor that have not already reached the cap as of the start of Season 13. This means you’ll be able to take your Trustee, your Falling Guillotine, and all the high-stat armor you’ve earned this year to take on the raid in The Witch Queen."
"we don’t believe that infusion caps are the right answer. We’re taking time this year to research and validate a plan that creates a fresh and balanceable ecosystem for our most aspirational content, one that doesn’t make our rewards feel like they have an expiration date."
It will impact how OP some variables are and fine-tuning those will be down the line.

Power:

Goes up by 10, rather than 50
Intended to reward those who went beyond soft cap of previous season while eliminated the feeling of a complete reset each season.

Crucible:

We know we've been ignoring it. Here's a new plan:
Goodbye 3rd person when you don't have ammo

Stasis Nerfs/Fixes Sub-list:
Titans: Decrease Super damage reduction. Increase Super energy cost when performing light attacks. Remove freeze AOE on Super cast. Reduce travelling efficacy of Shiver Strike when slowed.
Hunters: Decrease Withering Blade damage and tracking. Decrease slow stacks applied to targets. Remove Shatterdive damage reduction.
Warlocks: Fix bug where Iceflare Bolts wouldn’t track towards targets immediately on creation. Fix bug where Shadebinder Super projectiles were not tracking until a certain distance travelled.
All: Decrease crystal shatter damage.
Archetype changes to increase diversity in weapon choices. Fusion Rifle nerf incoming. Also, abilities may be nerfed to increase reliance on gunplay.
Prosecuting Cheat Developers
Fix Trials rewards and matchmaking pool (Solo Trials?)
Iron Banner will get looked at after Trials

VOG Returns:

Season 14
Changes will be made to fit the D2 experience: "Our philosophy behind bringing things out of the Destiny Content Vault is to keep them feeling like the content you remember while updating them to meet Destiny 2 difficulty and raid standards. So, while the high-level experience remains the same, you should expect the raid team to have a few tricks up their sleeves when you tackle the depths of Venus this summer."
Contest for World First also includes other challenges as prerequisite.
GrandMaster Raids in 2021 with Adept Gear.

Universal Ornaments:

Season 14
Ada-1 returns to manage this
Grind
Every season Ada will offer players a set of bounties that highlight various activity types. Players can complete these quests and receive the materials they need to power up Ada’s Loom, which can turn any piece of armor in your collection into a permanent universal ornament. Players short on time will also be able to purchase Synthesis tokens for Silver.
New Appearance Screen will let you manage applying shaders to all gear and looks for each thing from one screen.
Shaders will be permanent unlocks. No need to hold onto stacks

Other Stuff:

Crossplay Season 15, tests in 14. PC users need to invite console users if they want to get dunked on by Mouse and Keyboard players in PVP.
Ikora hasn't been forgotten and will be around in Witch Queen
Stasis weapons will be coming in Season 15
Title Gilding updates let you tell people how many hours you've lost to Destiny. :-)
Concept art with Armor that has ammo/doodads stored in every orifice.

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I'm super glad to hear about Ikora and the fixes to Trials. I couldn't care less that the release date for WQ has been pushed; this is another case where they prove the team really has been listening to feedback. I see a ton of change for the good.

Super excited for Cross-play.

Super excited for VoG.

I've been pretty happy with Season of the Chosen so far, and all of this news has me more optimistic for the future of Destiny than I have been in some time.

I just really would like to see new Gambit and Crucible maps. ;P

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All sounds pretty good. Too bad they didn't sunset sunsetting last season - I already miss my Dawn weapons.

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All sounds pretty good. Too bad they didn't sunset sunsetting last season - I already miss my Dawn weapons.

I wish they would sunset Crows mask. Why hide that beautiful face!?

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Reading these... I can't help but think of folks like cheapLEY ("Power level only goes up 10 for each non expansion season") or CruelLEGACEY ("Any weapon or armor that can currently be infused to max Power will continue to be able to reach max Power permanently"). Looking forward to the comments.

As for me? Well... still chewing on it. I've seen enough of these now that, well, I guess it would be crazy if I wasn't a little jaded or something. I can say through, I was really hoping to see something about light subleases getting the sort of "mod" treatment that Stasis has. Wasn't there some talk about giving that sort of customization to light subclasses? Eh. Nom nom nom, back soon with words no one understands and stuff.

And .gifs because reasons and brand name posts™ or whatever.

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This all sounds truly great. Those all sound like solid changes. I wish they would just go ahead and revert sunsetting completely though. Maybe keep the old Pinnacle/Ritual weapons sunset if they really feel like they need to, but let everything else come forward. My Trust or Midnight Coup or Bygones or Blast Furnace wouldn’t hurt anything. The biggest issue there is I’d be upset because I sharded most of that stuff already.

The power thing is a decent change, although I’m not thrilled that it means that it will be straight Pinnacle leveling for an entire year between expansions. I’d be happier if they let Primes help during the Pinnacle phase, and if they could implement a catch up system, so I could still earn all available Pinnacles for the season if I miss a week or two. But I’ll take it, as doing it once and hitting max will mean I would have a reasonable power deficit all year long.

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Seriously. Oh you didn’t play last week? Here. You can get last week’s rewards plus this week’s if you do it twice. How is this so hard.

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Seriously. Oh you didn’t play last week? Here. You can get last week’s rewards plus this week’s if you do it twice. How is this so hard.

This already happens with Clan engrams. They're powerful, but if you don't need them, you can just leave them with Hawthorne and pick them up next week. (I think you can only have two weeks' worth at a time there, but I've never really tested it.)

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Seriously. Oh you didn’t play last week? Here. You can get last week’s rewards plus this week’s if you do it twice. How is this so hard.

This already happens with Clan engrams. They're powerful, but if you don't need them, you can just leave them with Hawthorne and pick them up next week. (I think you can only have two weeks' worth at a time there, but I've never really tested it.)

Someone was complaining about how the current clan system hurts small clans. What do they mean by that? Curious what changed.

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Seriously. Oh you didn’t play last week? Here. You can get last week’s rewards plus this week’s if you do it twice. How is this so hard.

This already happens with Clan engrams. They're powerful, but if you don't need them, you can just leave them with Hawthorne and pick them up next week. (I think you can only have two weeks' worth at a time there, but I've never really tested it.)

Someone was complaining about how the current clan system hurts small clans. What do they mean by that? Curious what changed.

The first time your clan completes certain activities (Strikes, Crucible, Gambit, and Raids), everyone in the clan gets one Powerful Engram from Hawthorne. I think that’s always roughly been how it’s worked.

In addition, there are tiered Clan Bonuses that unlock after hitting certain XP thresholds. Most of them are fairly useless, but some reward extra upgrade materials and the like. Big clans like can level up to get those bonuses fairly quickly, while small clans might not even be able to get done at all, because each player can only earn a set amount of XP per week per character. So even if a small clan of just a few people play all three characters every week, it’s still not possible for them to get all the way through that progression, as it resets with different bonuses every season. It sucks, but most of the bonuses are pretty insignificant. I couldn’t even tell you what they are right now, because I just don’t pay attention to them.

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Clans level up based on member XP, but member XP is capped each week. So a clan with 10 members vs a clan with 100 members is at a distinct disadvantage.

That affects what kind of passive rewards the clans give; in addition to that all members of a clan get a decent engram if any group of clan members completes (wins?) crucicble, nightfall, gambit, raid, etc. So obviously this would happen faster / more reliably with a bigger clan. But wouldn't be as big an issue as #1.

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This all sounds truly great. Those all sound like solid changes. I wish they would just go ahead and revert sunsetting completely though. Maybe keep the old Pinnacle/Ritual weapons sunset if they really feel like they need to, but let everything else come forward. My Trust or Midnight Coup or Bygones or Blast Furnace wouldn’t hurt anything. The biggest issue there is I’d be upset because I sharded most of that stuff already.

The power thing is a decent change, although I’m not thrilled that it means that it will be straight Pinnacle leveling for an entire year between expansions. I’d be happier if they let Primes help during the Pinnacle phase, and if they could implement a catch up system, so I could still earn all available Pinnacles for the season if I miss a week or two. But I’ll take it, as doing it once and hitting max will mean I would have a reasonable power deficit all year long.

I think the reason they aren't retroactively removing sunsetting is because their plans needed the currently sunset batch to be.. well... sunset. Like it or not, those guns and armor are gone now for the endgame, maybe partly due to people sharding all of them, but because they were looking to get rid of them in general.

They do mention there will be some other method to rotate the endgame, so it was likely easier to account for the currently-not-sunset stuff in those plans. Remember that they said a while back that the whole way power works will be reworked/rebooted, so perhaps sunsetting in the way it was currently implemented wouldn't make sense in whatever the upcoming power concept system is. That, and the decision was to either keep the current sunset selection sunset or go back and nerf the heck out of them, so, decisions..

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This couldn't wait. I'm just chuckling uncontrollably, and I just have to get this thought out. So here it is.

- - - - - - -

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all myself. ~ Romeo and Juliet (Act 2, Scene 2)

It matters not what something is called, what matters is what it is. A simple enough prospect, but since when are things ever so simple when a group of chefs are involved on a labor of love? Where am I going with this? I want to speak for a moment about Destiny 2, Destiny 3, and Sunsetting now that it is to be concluded. An observation I've made that's not quite Schadenfreude, but it is in the same vein. A sort of, (and yes this is a meme,) "that sounds like X with extra steps".

Back in June 2020 (which somehow is only 8 months and change ago) we got this little update here. In it we get this paragraph quoted thus;

With Destiny 1, we solved the “ever expanding, exponential complexity” problem by making a sequel in Destiny 2. We left behind all of Destiny 1’s content and many of the features players grew to love. We believe now that it was a mistake to create a situation that fractured the community, reset player progress, and set the player experience back in ways that took us a full year to recover from and repair. It’s a mistake we don’t want to repeat by making a Destiny 3. We don't believe a sequel is the right direction for the game and for the past two years we have been investing all of our development effort into new content, gameplay, and new engine features that directly support a single evolving world in Destiny 2.

See it? Here I'll pull out the relevant bits...

We left behind all of Destiny 1’s content and many of the features players grew to love

and

It’s a mistake we don’t want to repeat by making a Destiny 3.

ALL ELSE ASIDE, with the conclusion of Sunsetting upon us, we now are in the same (or... ok... relatively the same) boat as we were Destiny 1 to Destiny 2! Had Bungie gone and made Destiny 3: Beyond Light official... well... here we are!

LOL!

Anything Sunsetting affected from BEFORE this season is GONE! Anything AFTER this season... welcome to Destiny 3!

We’ve made the decision that any weapon or armor that can currently be infused to max Power will continue to be able to reach max Power permanently. Starting in Season 14 we won’t be capping the infusion on any weapons or armor that have not already reached the cap as of the start of Season 13. This means you’ll be able to take your Trustee, your Falling Guillotine, and all the high-stat armor you’ve earned this year to take on the raid in The Witch Queen.

LOL!

IT REALLY IS DESTINY! They worked so hard to avoid a conclusion, only to make the very conclusion they wanted to avoid!

*Chef Kiss*

Bravo Bungo, please don't do it again. If you had told the community some of your ideas ahead of time, all this could have been avoided. Clearly (it's just about all we've talked about).

(Oh... and RIP my Void Basilisk Shotgun. For realzees this time it seems. I kept it in hope. :()

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So we got all of the downsides of a sequel with none of the benefits?

Even their idea of the Content Vault was half assed. We got half the Cosmodrome and now that’s just it. No updating old zones to make any sort of sense in the modern context and story of Destiny, just one half of an old patrol zone and some old strikes. Sweet deal! So glad I can’t run Leviathan or Scourge of the Past or Zero Hour anymore so we had room for half assing one old patrol zone!

Instead of trying to make all of Destiny one cohesive experience, we literally got the worst of either option.

I also like how they all excited about Master Raids like it’s some grand new thing. We used to have Hard Mode raids, but apparently those were too much work. So now what’s the difference? I really hope it’s not just a power level deficit, annoying modifiers, and a fuckload of Champions like the Nightfalls are.

Edit: I don’t mean to sound as bitter as I know that does. I absolutely think Bungie should be given leeway to change the game, even if those changes aren’t immediately popular. I want them to experiment and try new things. I just wish they didn’t seem to have to learn the exact same lessons multiple times in a row. Sunsetting was an immediately obvious mistake, one that they already fucking made! Most kids only have to touch the hot stove once.

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So we got all of the downsides of a sequel with none of the benefits?

Even their idea of the Content Vault was half assed. We got half the Cosmodrome and now that’s just it. No updating old zones to make any sort of sense in the modern context and story of Destiny, just one half of an old patrol zone and some old strikes. Sweet deal! So glad I can’t run Leviathan or Scourge of the Past or Zero Hour anymore so we had room for half assing one old patrol zone!

I'm confused. Why are you counting Cosmodrome, but not Europa?

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Sure, that’s a fair point.

Maybe because a new zone is expected for a fall expansion, and we were sold the whole “vaulting” thing with the Cosmodrome returning in all its glory as one of the benefits of doing so.

I don’t even disagree with their decision. I’d rather see new stuff than bring old stuff back. I just don’t like feeling lied to. I also really don’t like seeing stuff that feels half assed. They brought the Moon back and did it well. It was a nice nostalgia trip with plenty and of new tucked in the edges. Why not do that with the Cosmodrome? Bring it back with big updates and additional spaces. They gave us the reason—they want to focus on new things. Cool! Then why did they bring it back at all? Again, the answer is obvious—they needed a decent new player experience instead of just dropping them in the Tower. And I think the Cosmodrome is actually pretty great in that regard. I played through that quest, and it’s a better introduction to Destiny than what was in Destiny back in 2014.

But . . . well, I’d have to go back and see what they actually said about bringing back the Cosmodrome and what I just filled in for myself. It sure seems like I remember it being sold as much more than just a new player zone, though, and I think they feel like they had to in order to justify removing half the game.

I don’t want to be so cynical, but it constantly feels like we’re being fed half-truths if not outright lies. I honestly have no problem believing that’s not intentional and really is just the result of uncertainty for the direction of the game and changing plans, but holy god damn, it really seems like they should have at least a little bit of that figured out by now.

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GrandMaster Raids in 2021 with Adept Gear.

Well this should be good.

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Bungie Update: Road to the Witch Queen (Destiny)

Gah! Ninja'd! You win this one Robot!

Mwahahaha

<3<3<3

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