‘Destiny 2’ Combat Mod Changes, Old Raid and Dungeon Origin Traits Coming

This week, um at Bungie, we got a very decent TWAB in which Destiny 2 weapons sandbox designer Mercules revealed a whole load of big changes coming in Season 18, with hints at more changes to come later will follow.

Well, Mercules, like many Bungie employees, was a part of the community itself, and he returned to his old podcast, Destiny Massive Breakdowns, to talk more about these sandbox changes three hours.

While he went through much of the existing information, there was a lot more detail that he fleshed out, including some hints at some potentially major changes to come in the future. While the podcast itself is great, I thought it would be good to summarize the main points. I relied on it kujay and Fading Shadow here who did a great job of pulling out interesting points which helped with this summary.

• High Impact Auto Rifle’s stability changes will be “very noticeable”.
• More exotic armor interactions with glaives are coming, but no specifics like Wormgods or Winter’s Guile have been promised.
• When revising perk pools the concept is now to leave the most popular perks and combos and remove the 3-4 worst perks from each column and replace them with something new.
• Lord of Wolves will be getting another overhaul and the current changes are only part one, with the PvE damage increase to compensate.
• In general Bungie tries to talk more about changes that they are very confident will make it into the game rather than things that will be shelved later (can see why they are doing this as people have years of TWAB- will quote promises). this day).

• A future goal appears to be to completely eliminate the randomness of shotgun spread, but that may not be final.
• The fully automatic setting (instead of a mod) is coming in Season 19. It might get more detailed in the future.
• Bungie spends hours a day testing changes, but the entire community playing the live game for 15 minutes is more time than a full year of Bungie playtesting, which is why some big bugs can surface “instantly,” even after many tests.
• Rampage, Surrounded, and Dragonfly spec mods are removed and their bonuses are folded into base perk buffs.
• Air Assault is still terrible and will likely get another change.
• Lorentz Driver is known as a “problem child” in the sandbox, but there are bigger problems with the linear fusion rifle class as a whole.
• SMGs may be due for a nerf in the future due to their out-of-band performance.

• Arbalest won’t get any more PvE nerfs, and instead Bungie is trying to polish other stuff to compete with it in endgame PvE.
• They add “many” more weapons that interact with subclass 3.0 keywords, both exotics and weapon perks.
• Riskrunner will not receive any changes with Arc 3.0. I’m not sure if this means no subclass interactions like Sunshot does with Solar. Or if that means it needs a nerf if it’s too strong with Arc 3.0.
• Kinetic weapons are falling behind due to lack of elemental interactions and will be explored in the future.
• When asked if Monte Carlo is getting a Glaive bayonet melee animation, Mercules winks.
• The weapons team works two seasons in advance, which is much shorter than other teams.
• Old raid and dungeon pools get new perks and their own origin traits.
• Several perks in crafted weapon columns are being explored, but it’s difficult, so no promises.
• Coming changes to combat mods like Warmind Cells, Charged With Light, Elemental Wells in Lightfall.

I think some of the most important revelations are at the end where when Everyone Non-sunset raids and dungeons are getting revamped perk pools and their own origin traits, which is a pretty big deal and would add a lot of replayability to those activities. It also implies to me that if Bungie bothers to do this for a raid or dungeon, chances are the content won’t be vaulted soon after.

I’m also very excited to see what the combat mod changes will be. A recent thing that has surfaced is how hard it is for new players to catch up simply by trying to find old mods that are sold daily at Ada-1, some of which don’t show up for months. I’m wondering if that’s changing or if there’s a more fundamental change to how they generally work here. My other complaint is that so much of your build is usually taken up by combat mods that you often don’t have room for other mods, so I’m curious if maybe they could get their own system outside of the 10 power armor slots themselves.

There’s a lot to dissect here. Appreciate Mercules speaking so frankly here.

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