Destiny 2's Big July Patch Permanently Ups Crucible Player Count To 6v6, Adds Prestige Raid Lairs

July 17's Destiny 2 update, 1.2.3, holds several major updates in the lead-up to September's Forsaken launch. Crucible will never be quite the same, and Prestige raids will be a little more varied. Or at least, have better motivators to entice you to play them.

Bungie has laid out its plans for the update. The biggest change to the Crucible comes to the more lax Quickplay playlist, which sees a long-requested return to six-on-six matches. On top of that, the Supremacy game mode will be demoted from regular rotation to being a featured weekly playlist. Meanwhile, Rumble (the free-for-all mode) will become a full-time, separate playlist for anyone to play at any time. The last major, non-numerical change involves numerical changes: Now you can earn Valor (the sort of "experience" currency you can't lose) from any Crucible playlist besides Rumble and private matches. The full change log is as follows:

Crucible Playlist Update

• Quickplay
  • Increasing player configuration to 6v6 and updating the playlist description
  • Removing Supremacy from the pool of available game modes
  • Control
    • Updating Control win score to 150
    • Control Zones will initially be neutral
  • Clash
    • Updating Clash win score to 100
• Competitive
  • • Bomb Fuse timer in Countdown lowered from 40 seconds to 35 seconds
• General
  • Rumble will become a full-time playlist
  • Supremacy will be added to the weekly featured playlist, updated to 6v6, and have a win score of 150

Crucible Ranks Update

• Players will be able to earn Valor rank from additional playlists:
  • Competitive
  • Crucible Labs
  • Iron Banner
  • Trials of The Nine
     
• Joining a game in progress will protect your Valor Win Streak for that game
  • If you lose: No penalties incurred to your Valor Win Streak
  • If you win: Valor Win Streak increases
     
• Players will be matched using their Glory rank
  • This means your opponents will be of similar rank to you
  • The higher you climb, the tougher the opponent
     
• Glory Loss Streaks will be re-tuned to be less punishing over time
  • Consecutive losses will decrease the Rank Points lost instead of increasing
  • Streaks will still cap out at 5
     
• All Rank Streaks will no longer reset once they hit their cap

If you're more of a co-op player, there's reason yet to plug away at Warmind. Once 1.2.3 hits, you'll be able to chase the first 400-power weapons in the prestige versions the two raid lairs, Eater of Worlds and Spire of Stars (the proper Leviathan raid will not contain these changes). Not only that, but raids will now drop ornaments for raid gear, as well as Masterwork catalysts that only drop in certain activities from the raids.

What are these activities? Basically, you'll bonuses restrictions and modifiers to consider when playing the raid lairs (the fundamental encounters of which remain unchanged), such as having to use three specific kinds of guns (though you can still swap out individual guns), and deal with new modifiers (such as the old Prism modifier that cycled the amount of damage each element dealt on regular basis). These modifiers will rotate every week. For the full breakdown on the prestige raid lairs, check out the full blog post.

Finally, the team took to answering a few questions about how collections will work after Forsaken hits. Some highlights:

• Collections will compile all of your weapons, armors, ghosts, ships, sparrows, emblems, and shaders for reacquisition in Year 2.
• Anything in your inventory after the launch of Warmind is safe to dismantle and will be a part of your collection.
• You will not be able to re-acquire Year 2 gear through the collections feature.
• Once you collect a particular shader, you'll be to apply to it to everything you own by drawing it out of your collection one at a time, but there will be a cost per draw.

That won't be the only Destiny 2-related thing to look forward to next month. On July 31, the Solstice of Heroes event will arrive, bringing with it 400-power armor.