In a recent blog post, the development team at Bungie revealed that some of the most beloved weapons in Destiny 2 will be nerfed soon.
As preparation for the upcoming Season 14, Bungie revealed that Ada-1 is taking over Banshee’s job, meaning that several weapons and perks need a rebalance. The Lament and the Falling Guillotine are some of the weapons that will no longer be as powerful in the next season.
Bungie’s weapon feature lead Chris Proctor revealed all the changes that players will have to endure in their search for power ahead of the next season.
Weapon Archetypes
- Aggressive (120 rpm) Hand Cannons are very dominant in PvP, and we’ve received enough feedback that we want to rein them in a bit without completely taking away their range benefits.
- These weapons will now have damage and aim to assist falloff distances reduced by between 2 and 4 meters, based on the Range stat.
- This roughly halves the range buff they received in Beyond Light.
- Vortex Frame Swords – With Falling Guillotine now viable forever, we need to adjust it a little, as its damage output is flat out higher than all other Legendary swords. With this change, we allow it to keep its high damage output but are reducing its full-reserves damage output by reducing the number of Heavy attacks you’ll be able to perform.
- Full energy Heavy attack ammo cost increased from 4 to 6.
- Chip damage – Certain weapons (Swords and Bastion) bypass shields by varying amounts, which has caused numerous issues with Stasis-encased enemies, encounter mechanics, and other content.
- We have removed chip damage from Swords and Bastion.
Perks
- Quickdraw – This perk is intended to provide faster swap speed, but it also passively buffs handling by +100. This completely negates the downside of using low-handling weapons (such as Aggressive Shotguns, Sniper Rifles, and Hand Cannons), which isn’t something we want to encourage. Those weapons should have downsides, and working around those completely via a perk isn’t healthy. We don’t think allowing a fast-swap to the Shotgun subfamily with the highest one-hit-kill range is great either.
- The Handling bonus is now removed one second after switching to this weapon or upon aiming down sights.
- Replaced Quickdraw with Surplus on new and existing drops of Felwinter’s Lie and Astral Horizon.
- Frenzy – This perk has extremely high uptime in PvE, to the point where it is clearly a better choice than most other damage perks. We like the high uptime and want to preserve that, but we want it to award less damage than harder to activate damage perks.
- Reduced bonus damage from +20 percent to +15 percent.
- Reservoir Burst – Now increases magazine size in addition to its other effects, reduced full battery bonus damage from 33 percent to 25 percent.
- Upcoming content requires revisiting the Power Level of a damage perk that can be activated simply by having a full magazine.
- Wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more…
Exotics
- The Lament – This weapon is a clear outlier for Sword damage, so for the health of Heavy weapon diversity, we’re pulling it back a bit.
- Reduced damage of revved Heavy attack by approximately 16 percent.
- Note that The Lament retains standard anti-barrier despite removing chip damage.
- Bastion – Since we’re removing chip damage, Bastion gets something else instead. We’ve noticed increased feedback on Bastion and higher than normal usage in PvP, so we are making a small change here and will revisit Bastion later.
- Intrinsically staggers Unstoppable Champions.
- Increased spread angle by 13 percent.
Bungie
is working hard developing The Witch Queen expansion which will introduce a new narrative with characters, arcs, heroes, and villains that persist over multiple future releases.
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