This Week In Destiny - 11/14/2024

This Week in Destiny, we are getting ready for Act II of Revenant. Only a few more days until November 19! What better way to prepare for the new activities and story content than by sharing some of the changes coming to roaming Supers?  But let's not spoil everything in the intro. Here are today's topics:

• Act II livestream recap
• Check the new Artifact perks
• Act II sandbox preview
• An update from our PvP Strike Team
• Our last spooky pumpkin and fashion winners
• Check out the Street Fighter collab

Let's do this!

Act II of Revenant Starts November 19

We hope you all enjoyed our latest Developer Livestream on Tuesday. We focused on the content to come when Act II of Episode: Revenant arrives on November 19. We shared some details about new weapons, new Artifact perks, and of course our new activity, Tomb of Elders. Let's not forget about our latest collab and what The Dawning will bring this year.

If you were busy, or want to just simply rewatch it, we've got your covered below.

Check the New Artifact Perks

Act II of Revenant arrives next week, and that means that the Artifact will expand and gain a new row of perks to shake up the meta a little bit. If you have melee-focused builds, you will be very happy. If you are looking to empower your Arc builds, we recommend you put on Retinal Burn and try it with the new fifth column addition. We’ve also been hard at work to get Act I’s Grenade Launcher capstone mod, Kinetic Impacts, working once more with your favorite Heavy Grenade Launchers.

Sandbox Updates Coming With Act II

Many changes are coming very soon to Destiny 2, as soon as next Tuesday when both Act II and our Update 8.1.5 are available to players. We have some nerfs to outliers like Storm's Edge, some buffs for roaming Supers as a whole, and then some weapons and armor pieces getting a bit of both. Let's jump right into it.

Roamin’ Around at the Speed of Sound

Howdy y’all, Abilities Team here. We wanted to take a moment to discuss a major change we’re bringing with Act II.

Way back in Update 3.4.0, we outlined a change to how Super energy was gained. We wanted to ensure that Super energy was awarded for participating in combat through giving and receiving damage, as opposed to mainly passive generation supplemented by Orbs of Power. Then we supported that by changing the cooldown tiers of the various Supers based on several factors, including potential number of enemy defeats, which meant a lot of roaming Supers took longer to charge than their one-off counterparts.

Then, with the launch of The Final Shape, we moved all Supers to use the same standardized damage-based recharge parameters to further bring outliers like Ward of Dawn and Well of Radiance cooldowns in line with other Supers, mostly inside of PvP. However, all these changes created an extremely lopsided pick rate for one-off Supers versus their roamer counterparts. We believe the power fantasies and intrinsic gameplay of roamers are fun and integral to the core of Destiny, but we understand that the mechanics of second-to-second combat are better optimized with one-off Supers. Therefore, we’re taking a first step at addressing that.

Starting with Act II, we will be changing the damage-based recharge parameters for all roaming Supers against PvE combatants only and increasing the amount of Super energy gained when damaging combatants  by roughly 3x the amount it is today.

The intent here is that you are more likely to have a roaming Super when you need it for that panic activation or to jump an enemy spawn point. In our internal playtests, we’ve been having a blast with extra activations per encounter or activity and it is especially spicy with fireteam coordination. As a reference, if you were using between 3 and 5 Nova Bombs while playing an Advanced Nightfall, you can now charge around 6 or 8 Nova Warp activations in the same activity.

We respect that Super choice is an essential part of buildcrafting and not every encounter or strike is a perfect fit for every roaming Super. But we do think this change entices a fireteam to bring a roaming Super where they otherwise might not have.

In addition to this, we’re upping the damage roaming Supers do against champions by 30-55% depending on the Super. This roughly brings all roaming Supers to a similar damage profile against Champions and will give them a distinct advantage in your next Grandmaster Nightfall over a one-off Super.

You can expect these changes for these Supers:

Hunter

• Arc Staff
• Golden Gun
  • Excludes Celestial Nighthawk variant as it is classified as a one-off Super.
• Spectral Blades
• Silkstrike

Titan

• Fists of Havoc
• Burning Maul
  • Excludes Pyrogale Gauntlets variant as it is classified as a one-off Super.
• Hammer of Sol
• Sentinel Shield
• Glacial Quake
• Bladefury

Warlock

• Stormtrance
• Daybreak
• Nova Warp
• Winter’s Wrath

This is a major change, so we will be keeping an eye on this over the coming weeks and months while we keep evaluating how roaming Supers are performing. See you in Act II!

Electrifying Exotic Armor Updates

Hey y’all! The Armor Team has been hard at work on content for both our next Episode, Heresy, and the further-out Destiny 2: Codename Frontiers, but it didn’t stop us from getting changes in for update 8.1.5!

We are overall happy with how the changes we made for Act I landed with players, but we think these further changes will help out a few Exotics that are still struggling in the sandbox. We also made a change to reduce the potency of a certain Hunter Helmet in the Crucible.

Point Contact Canon Brace

We felt that the lightning strikes provided by Point Contact Canon Brace are the main focal point of using the Exotic, but they lack buildcrafting depth beyond being visually flashy. So, in Act II, we are putting more emphasis on them contributing to your overall gameplay loop instead of relying completely on Thunderclap defeats.

• Amplified lightning bolts now do 100% increased damage over base, up from 50%.
• Lightning strike defeats now also refund melee energy.
  • Reduced Thunderclap refund by ~10% to compensate for increased energy gains on average.

Raiden Flux

It is our goal that the two Arc Staff Exotics, Blight Ranger and Raiden Flux, have distinct identities. Blight Ranger’s is rooted in defense, and we want Raiden Flux to be all about offense. However, we felt it could benefit from a little more punch, especially in harder activities. 

• Synapse Junctions’ Super damage benefit increased to ~20% per stack (up from 14% per stack).
  • Max benefit is now ~70% damage increase, up from 50%.

Ballidorse Wrathweavers

At the start of this Episode, Ballidorse Wrathweavers were updated along with other Super damage-increasing Exotics to give a little more potency to Shadebinder’s Super. Unfortunately, in this case, the change didn’t land where we’d like it to, so we are increasing the benefits of shattering targets.

• Increased shatter damage to 150% up from 100%.
• Fixed an issue where enemies were inconsistently getting the boosted shatter damage which led to decreased overall damage.
  • Increased shatter damage now shows as a yellow number to aid with visibility of the perk.

That’s all for now but we have plenty of updates and tweaks to other Exotics coming down the road in Heresy with many aiming to provide more potency to our roaming Supers. But in the meantime, we will keep an eye on how these changes play out.

Fixing Telesto (and Hoping for the Best)

And now, a short update from the Weapons Team. Most of our weapon-focused updates are aimed at PvP for this patch, and we will discuss those in more detail below as part of the PvP Strike Team Update, but we did have a couple minor changes directed at PvE that we think will help to add a little flavor back to some old favorites.

Breech Grenade Launchers

We have heard the feedback loud and clear that the nerf to Mountaintop felt unnecessarily strong, so we have walked back some of the speed limit reduction we previously gave to the blast’s damage impulse.

• Micro-Missile Frame
  • Increased the velocity players can generate with the rocket jumping blast.

Telesto 

In Update 8.1.5, we have corrected an issue with Telesto not dealing the appropriate amount of blast damage against players in Crucible, and we thought while we were in there we might as well give it a little something extra for PvE too.

• Increased Telesto detonation damage by 20% in PvE.

PvP Strike Team Update

Hello all, it’s the PvP Strike Team here with a quick update on where things stand in Revenant. First, let’s talk about the Crucible Sandbox.

Sandbox

When we look at the high-skill Primary weapon meta for the last month, we can see that Rose, Elsie’s Rifle, Graviton Lance, and Bygones have distanced themselves from the rest of the pack. Bygones alone is egregiously out of band, thanks almost entirely to the High Ground perk, which we will be taking a first swing at addressing below. We will continue to keep an eye on the other top performers, but the current thought is that most of these weapons are very close to the upper end of what we want Primary weapons to be able to do in their current roles, and we’re more interested in bringing other options up to meet them then hammering these options down by more than small amounts.

While the meta has moved away from closer range engagements, we believe the consolidation around these specific weapons is due in large part to a combination of two things:

1. The difficulty of engaging in the medium- to close-range combat windows with the current level of ability uptime, stemming largely from our Prismatic subclasses.
2. The lack of competition among our medium-long range primary options, outside of Pulse Rifles.

In Update 8.1.5, we’ll be buffing some more options in that engagement range as well as reducing the amount of ability usage able to be generated by Prismatic subclasses. Let’s get to it.

Abilities

Prismatic

It has become clear that the Prismatic subclasses-allowed combinatorics are problematic for Crucible in a way that we cannot easily solve with spot tuning. While we want to keep the power fantasy for PvE, in PvP the dominance is concerning and needs a more labor-intensive fix than we can provide inside of a mid-season patch. As such, we’ve made the decision to give all Prismatic subclasses a blanket 15% additional ability cooldown penalty inside of Crucible, which should help to offset the current king-making strength of these subclasses and provide some reasons to run the base abilities on standard subclasses. This penalty stacks on top of the current overall PvP ability cooldown penalty of 15%.

Storm's Edge

Even with the cooldown increase, Storm’s Edge still feels like too much of a win button with little to no counter play, even for a Super. As such, we have reduced the damage resistance during the cast, and reduced the height of the damage impulse, so that it will be easier to fight back against while still retaining its up front strength.

• Reduced height of damage impulse from 5m to 3.75m.
• Reduced damage resistance against players from 53% to 45%, both on cast and during the spin attack.
• Moved from tier 3 to tier 1 Super cooldown.

Armor

Knucklehead Radar

This Exotic’s ability to provide information to PvP players without requiring them to engage in combat and giving that information for as long as it does, has contributed a bit too much to the strength of the longer-range meta options.

• Changed how to activate the perk; now requires the wearer to damage a player to mark the target.
• Target is marked for 3s, down from 7s.

Weapon Archetypes

Bows

When we made the changes to the weapons sandbox to generally make Primary weapons less forgiving, Bows were one of the first large outliers that we had to tune down. We hit them hard and have been gradually walking them back to a place where it feels like they can compete in the right hands, without being oppressive at longer ranges.

• Precision Bows
  • Increased body shot damage by 10% (this change does not affect Le Monarque).

Hand Cannons

We have been hesitant to allow Aggressive Hand Cannons to kill in two crits and one body shot natively in PvP while Igneous Hammer remained one of the most effective weapons, but the addition of the new mods on weapons that can be enhanced has served to narrow the stat gap between it and other options like Crimil’s and Something New. In addition, we now have more options than just High-Impact Pulse Rifles that are usable in the 35-40m range of engagements, so it makes sense to bring the 120 HC sub-family up to compete. This has been paired alongside a minor stat nerf to Igneous, to prevent it from immediately becoming the top dog again, and we will continue to evaluate its place in the meta after these changes.

• Aggressive Hand Cannons
  • Increased damage by 3% (this allows them to kill all resilience levels in 2C1B).
• Igneous Hammer
  • Reduced Stability, Handling, and Aim Assist stats by 3.

Better Devils is a classic weapon with a host of interesting perk combinations, but the lower base stats have left it out in the cold even with the new mod additions. We decided to requisition Igneous Hammer’s stats over to Better Devils, taking from a weapon that has excess and giving them to one that really needs them.

• Increased Stability, Handling, and Aim Assist stats by 3.

Yesterday’s Question has been benefitting from the aim assist buff provided by Headseeker, but not the damage increase, so we have corrected that issue so that we can witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational Hand Cannon.

• Corrected an issue where Headseeker was not appropriately increasing critical hit damage after dealing body shot damage.

Machine Guns

Adaptive Machine Guns have been the Heavy weapon meta for much of the last Episode and a half, but while they have prospered, other sub-families have floundered. We have made a change to the scalar that determines how much ammo you can pick up from a Heavy ammo crate that reduces most Adaptive Machine Guns ammo allotments by 2-3 shots, while increasing the amounts gained for the sub-families with magazine sizes on the high and low ends like High-Impacts and Rapid Fires.

• Changed the scalar that determines how much ammo you can pick up from a crate.
  • Magazine sizes of 50 or less get 21 rounds.
  • Magazine sizes between 51 and 59 get between 21 and 26 rounds.
  • Magazine sizes between 60 and 80 get between 26 and 27 rounds.
  • Magazine sizes between 81and 99 get between 28 and 44 rounds.
  • Magazine sizes over 100 should get 45 rounds.

Perks

High Ground

All told, High Ground offers too much of a damage buff to be triggered on such a “low” barrier. For now, we have reduced the stacks that are given for dealing damage with a primary weapon, specifically against players, down to one from three. This should make the damage boost significantly less powerful in PvP but will leave the efficacy alone in PvE. If this change is not enough, we will address it again in a future release, either by requiring a greater height differential which cannot be so easily triggered in PvP, or by greatly reducing the damage bonus against players as a whole.

• Dealing damage to a player with a Primary weapon now only grants a single stack of the damage buff.
• Dealing damage with a Special weapon, or against combatants, continues to grant maximum stacks.

Explosive Payload

Explosive Payload was nerfed when we originally made the Into the Light weapon sandbox changes as part of our efforts to reduce forgiveness of Primary weapons, but the nerf was heavy handed and overly punishing on a great many weapon types where the perk was not problematic. When we rolled those changes back into the base weapon stats, we did not have a good way to adjust the perk correspondingly, so we shipped it in Revenant in its fully un-nerfed state while we investigated better options. We have since been able to add more tuning levers and have reduced the efficacy of the perk only on Legendary Hand Cannons, which allows the perk to continue to work on other weapon types and Exotics like Sunshot.

• Reduced Splash damage from the perk when used on Legendary Hand Cannons by 7% against players only.

Exotics

Telesto

As you might expect, Telesto has a lot of custom tuning going on under the hood, and when we did the all-up Fusion Rifle tuning for Revenant, it was unfortunately missed in the kerfuffle.

• Corrected an issue where Telesto was doing less damage than intended in PvP.

Eriana's Vow

Eriana's Vow is another one-off weapon type that had its intrinsic damage buff incidentally removed with the Update 8.1.0 damage changes.

• Fixed critical damage bug in PvP.

Thorn and Lumina

These weapons have felt a bit power crept in PvP by the addition of the new mod systems, so we wanted to at least partially bridge the stat gap.

• Increased base Stability by five.

General Crucible

Lobby Balance

Since Update 8.1.0, we have been running a variant of snake draft lobby balancing in our 6v6 and Quickplay playlists, called Paired Player. Alongside this, we have continued running the standard random lobby balancer in Trials, and the previously discussed Lobby Rank Average balancer in Competitive (while we ironed out some additional issues with Paired Player that presented themselves in this mode), which provided us with real time comparisons.

The Paired Player system in 6s has resulted in improved performance compared to both the previous iteration of the snake draft, as well as compared to the Lobby Rank Average and random systems when we look at match outcomes (average score difference between the teams) and match fairness (average skill difference between the teams, and average skill difference within the teams). In Control, for example, compared to Echoes, games that hit the mercy score threshold have decreased by 10%, while closely contested matches (games where it is difficult to accurately predict a winner before the match starts) have also increased by 7.5%.

As you can see from the above chart showing Control, we’ve been making steady improvements in decreasing our prediction accuracy, which is an indicator of matches becoming more even over time, reducing it from an average of 68.5% to 67%.

Simultaneously, our percentage of total games with relatively even win predictions (neither team has more than a 70% chance of winning) is increasing, up from 59% to 64%. In addition, the chance of one team having more than a 90% chance of winning has decreased from 5.5% to less than 2%.

Trials, on the other hand, which we have used with random lobby balancing as our baseline, has only around 33% of its games where neither team has more than a 70% chance of winning, with nearly an equivalent chance (31%) for one team to have a greater than 90% chance of winning, and consequently our pre-match win predictions are correct more than 80% of the time.

While Paired Player still underperforms pure average skill lobby balancing in terms of making teams as close to evenly skilled as possible, we’ve seen significantly less instances of all the lowest skilled players being stacked onto a team with the highest skill players, outside of fireteam compositions that demand that allocation. For now, this will be the system we move forward with in our 6v6 and Quickplay Playlists, and we are ready to experiment with turning it on again in Competitive but will be quick to roll it back if it negatively impacts the experience.

In Heresy, we will be drilling deeper into what goes into our determinations of player skill on a micro level and look forward to sharing that data with you. We’re also looking to offer a way to view a proxy for player skill in game and start to peel back the opacity surrounding the system in a healthy manner.

Mercy Rules

When we rolled out the new mercy rules in Revenant, we knew that it would increase the number of games ending in mercies correspondingly. The mercy trigger threshold was set at a very low value, only 40% of the score needed to win, because the window within which it could trigger was very small. Once we opened that window up, the number of games that could end in mercies increased dramatically, but this has not actually reflected a reduction in match quality. In fact, in prior systems we had been holding steady for years with approximately 30% of Control games hitting the mercy threshold at some point during a match, but only ~8% of them ended in mercies. 

With the initial system we shipped with Revenant, combined with the new lobby balancer, only 27% of Control games were hitting the mercy threshold, but 23% of games ended with mercies, indicating our mercy threshold was set too low for the current window. We wanted to get the number of games ending in mercies back down closer to where it was before we opened the rules, hence our experimentation with the mercy score thresholds from last week's patch. This has brought down the number of games hitting the threshold to 18%, with the number ending in mercies reduced to 13%, and we will continue to keep an eye on match outcomes as the Episode progresses.

The increased mercy window has had the improvements of decreasing both the number of quitters, and the number of matches going to time, so we’re striving to keep those improvements alongside these changes.

Until Next Time, Festival of the Lost

Candy season in the Tower is soon to be over, so pay another visit to abuelita Eva Levante and hunt down some final Headless Ones to complete your Event Card, earn your rewards and some last-hour weapon rolls. We recommend you complete any unfinished FOTL business before November 19.

As a sendoff for this year's celebrations, we have some final picks for both your #FOTLFashion2024 and #FOTL2024 submissions. Thank you for sharing so many of them! It's always a pleasure to see so much care and imagination put into your creations.

Yuna's Meow

Hm... Hmmm... Oh, pardon me, I was absorbed in thought

My fireteam never meets the quota :(

Would this Titan make good friends with Elsie Bray?

Traveler's Light restores a little HP to a fireteam member

Somewhere in the radiolaria...

We hope those spiders are fake

Booooooo

Hive Eris was spooky

Amazing paint job!

Street Fighter x Destiny 2

We all know that Destiny 2 is all about weapons, but don’t you think punching and kicking your enemies also feels amazing? We’ve seen Titans go ➡️⬇️ ↘️ + 👊 on Cabal tanks until they are no more, Warlocks can ⬇️ ↘️ ➡️ + 👊 till no one else is standing and Hunters often terrorize their opponents by (Hold)⬇️ ⬆️ + 🦶 everything in their path. That’s why our latest collab seems so fitting!

Prepare to your way through the enemies of Humanity when the Street Fighter x Destiny 2 collaboration goes live on November 19. With it comes some new Street Fighter-inspired looks in the Eververse store to celebrate the occasion. We’ve got a Blanka-inspired Universal Armor Helmet ornament for all classes, three new Ghost Shells based on Cammy, Ryu, and Chun Li, and a handful of new emotes and finishers.

Player Support Report

Ex Diris Damage Buff Update

At the start of Revenant, we issued a patch note stating that Ex Diris would be receiving a 33% increase to direct impact damage on top of spawning more moths on hits and getting increased ammo reserves. This note was left over from internal playtesting.

While we originally planned to increase its damage, we found the weapon was overperforming across numerous activities. We continue to monitor the performance of the weapon in the live environment and are happy with its current place in our overall weapons sandbox.

Known Issues List

• Players cannot Blink during Onslaught: Salvation.
• gives the Chest Armor buff instead of the Arms buff.
• The Vow of the Disciple raid is missing the Master option in Fireteam Finder.
• Players are able to pick up a previous Solstice quest from Eva during Festival of the Lost.
• The Arcane Embrace Shotgun curated roll from Eva has the Trench Barrel perk on it, which should not be an available perk for this weapon.
• The Acosmic Grenade Launcher can't swap perks.
• If players advance to the point where the Ice Breaker Catalyst is meant to drop before they own the weapon, the Triumph for the Catalyst will be auto completed, and the player will not be able to acquire the Catalyst.
• Some players are unable to craft tonics on specific characters.
• Health is not regenerating in Vanguard Ops.
• Garden of Salvation's Voltaic Tether Triumph is unobtainable due to encounter soft-lock when following Triumph requirements.
• GUITAR errors are occurring at an elevated rate.

Golden Tears

We all love Eris, right? Of course we do. She has been through a lot, yet here she remains, strong as ever. Like the moon, a beacon of Light in the darkest places.

By Savathûn's Lap Worm. Via Twitter/X

Sci-Fi Horror

There are horrors out there that not even Guardians can comprehend.

Just like that, the TWID is over, friends. There’s just a few more days until Act II starts. Do you have everything in order? Builds ready, weapons enhanced and fashion on point? It's better to prepare than to keep your friends waiting while you change ornaments and mods. Don't forget to visit The Last City to check on Eido and Mithrax. You know what? We are paying them a visit right now...

But before we all leave, would you check this crazy video of a group of old school Guardians working together to get every single Exotic from Destiny 1?

GG, folks!

Destiny 2 Community Team