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This week, uh at Bungie, we got a very decent TWAB that had Destiny 2 weapons sandbox designer Mercules revealing a whole lot of big changes that are coming in Season 18, with hints about further changes coming later.
Hercules, like many Bungie employees, used to be a member of the community, and he visited his previous podcast, Destiny Massive Breakdowns, to discuss the sandbox modifications in more detail for three hours.
While he covered a lot of the already known material, he also provided a lot more detail, including some indications of probable future significant changes. Although the audio is excellent in and of itself, I thought it would be helpful to highlight the main ideas. Here, I had to rely on Kujay and Fading Shadow, who did an excellent job of highlighting noteworthy information that was helpful for this overview.
The steadiness of the High Impact Auto Rifle will vary in a “quite apparent” way.
No specifics, such as Wormgods or Winter’s Guile, were promised, but more glaive exotic armor interaction is on the way.
The idea behind changing perk pools is to keep the most well-liked perks and combos and remove the three to four worst perks from each column and replace them with something new.
The current adjustments to Lord of Wolves are only part one of a larger overhaul, which will also include an increase in PvE damage.
In general, Bungie is trying to talk more about changes they are extremely confident will make it into the game, rather than things that end up getting shelved later (can see why they’re doing this as people will quote years-old TWAB promises to this day).
It appears that eliminating shotgun spread randomness altogether is a future aim, though that may not be certain.
Season 19 will introduce the complete auto setting (instead of a mod). In the future, it might be more precise.
The community playing the live game for 15 minutes is equivalent to one year’s worth of Bungie playtests, which is why some major flaws might appear “instantly,” even after extensive testing. Bungie spends hours a day playtesting modifications.
The gains from the Rampage, Surrounded, and Dragonfly spec modifications will be incorporated into the base perks, which will be improved.
Unfortunately, Air Assault will likely undergo yet another alteration.
Although Lorentz Driver is regarded as the “problem child” in the sandbox, the linear fusion rifle class as a whole has more issues.
SMGs might soon receive a nerf as a result of their “out of band” behavior.
Arbalest won’t receive any additional PvE nerfs, and Bungie is attempting to enhance other content instead so that it can compete with it in endgame PvE.
They are introducing “several” additional weapons that combine with exotics and weapon perks included in subclass 3.0 keywords.
Arc 3.0 won’t bring any updates to Riskrunner. Uncertain if this excludes interactions between subclasses like Sunshot and Solar. Or whether that indicates that it might need a nerf if Arc 3.0 makes it too powerful.
Due to the lack of elemental interactions, kinetic weapons are lagging behind and will likely be developed in the future.
Hercules winks in response to the query regarding Monte Carlo having a glaive bayonet melee animation.
The weapons team works much more quickly than the other teams, two seasons in advance.
Older dungeon and raid pools will receive new benefits and unique Origin Traits.
There are no guarantees because it’s challenging to study multiple perks in columns for handcrafted weapons.
Combat modifications in Lightfall including Warmind Cells, Charged With Light, and Elemental Wells will undergo changes.
The most important information is, in my opinion, revealed at the very end. If all non-sunset raids and dungeons have new perk pools and unique origin qualities, that would be a huge deal and offer those activities a tonne of replay value. Additionally, it suggests to me that if Bungie bothers to accomplish this for a raid or dungeon, it is likely that it won’t be content vaulted anytime soon.
I am also quite interested in learning about the adjustments that will be made to combat mods. The difficulty for new players to catch up by simply trying to find old mods offered at Ada-1 daily—some of which may not show up for months at a time—has recently come to light. I wonder if that is the change or if there has been a fundamental shift in how things are done around here. Another issue I have is that combat mods frequently eat up all of your builds, leaving you with little room for other mods. Because of this, I wonder if they might get their own system in addition to the 10 energy armor slots.
Lots to analyze here. Thank you Hercules for being so honest.
