The King Of Destiny Exotics Gets Taken Down A Few Notches This Fall

If you continue to lament the random number generator’s stubbornness about giving you a Gjallarhorn, Bungie is going to puts some salve on that burn. Destiny’s best weapons are going to be rebalanced come this fall.

Bungie’s sandbox designer Jon Weisnewski says that the team has noticed an unfortunate side effect of Gjallarhorn’s strength. Some teams are using possession of it as a pass/fail for allowing people to join raids and nightfall strikes. 

“We strive for Destiny to be a place where a single weapon or strategy does not dictate how, or with whom, you spend your time,” Weisnewski writes. “In the new world Gjallarhorn is still worthy of its legacy as an exotic Heavy Weapon, but we hope it promotes inclusive behavior rather than exclusivity.”

It’s not the only exotic that is getting some heavy tweaks in the 2.0 update. Thorn, the bane (or blessing) of many a Crucible player will see its damage-over-time reduced. Icebreaker, the go-to exotic for strikes, is also getting hit with a nerf bat.

In fact, many of the standby exotics are getting tuned down a bit. Some, like the comedic No Land Beyond, will be getting dialed up to make them more useful. Here’s the full list:

Black Hammer

• Increase ammo inventory to 18 rounds
• White Nail perk now pulls ammo from your inventory

Gjallarhorn

• Reduce damage of Wolfpack Rounds

Hard Light

• Increase base Stability to 80 (was 65)
• Increase bounce count for Hard Light projectiles
• Hard Light projectiles are not affected by damage falloff

Hawkmoon

• Add a stack limit to Luck in the Chamber and Holding Aces so that only 2 of the bonus perks will ever stack on one round. This should prevent Hawkmoon from 1-hit killing full health players in PVP
• Add 2 rounds to Hawkmoon’s magazine when Holding Aces is unlocked
• Luck in the Chamber damage bonus reduced by 3 percent

Icebreaker

• Increase recharge time for Ice Breaker rounds to 1 every 8 seconds. Was 1 round every 5 seconds

The Last Word

• Reduce Range stat to 10 (was 20), reduce Stability to 20 (was 30).
• Reduce effective range while in ADS.
• Increase accuracy and precision damage aim assist scale when firing from the hip. “Get three coffins ready.”
• Fixed bugs with Hipfire damage bonus applying incorrectly

Necrochasm

• Increase base Stability to 60 (was 40)
• Increase magazine size
• Cursebringer perk will always trigger on a precision kill
• Cursebringer explosion has increased radius and deals more damage

No Land Beyond

• Increase weapon handling speed for faster time to aim, ready, and stow
• Adjust sights to fix overlap/parallax issue while aimed
• Increase time decay of The Master to 8 seconds
• Add an additional 20% Precision Damage bonus while The Master is active

Thorn

• Reduce base damage of Thorn’s Mark of the Devourer DoT (Damage over Time) to roughly 1/3 of what it was in PVP and PVE
• Allow DoT to stack up to 5x across multiple landed projectiles -
• This is a net buff for Thorn’s DoT, but reduces the lethality of the weapon in PVP

Weapon types are also getting tuned up for the 2.0 patch. Here’s what to expect:

Auto Rifles

• Increased base damage
• Damage falloff starts closer to the player
• Minor reduction in base stability
• Damage boost of 10 percent in PvE

Pulse Rifles

• Reduced base damage for medium rate of fire weapons by 2.5 percent
• Minor reduction in base stability
• Increased magazine size

Scout Rifles

• Increased base damage for medium and high rate of fire guns
• Increased magazine size
• Firing from the hip will be less accurate
• Damage boost of 5 percent in PvE

Hand Cannons

• Damage falloff starts closer to the player
• Minor reduction in accuracy while aiming down sights to limit snap-shot reliability at long range
• Firing from the hip will be less accurate
• Reduced magazine size
• Reduce zoom so that aiming down sights favors width over depth

Shotguns

• Perks that increase lethality at range will be less effective when weapon already has high range stat
• Reduced Shot Package accuracy buff by 30 percent
• Rangefinder adds a 5 percent base range increase on ADS (was 20 percent)
• Precision damage multiplier reduced by 10 percent
• PvE damage reduced 10 percent

Fusion Rifles

• Slow charging, high impact guns have decreased range
• Projectile speed slightly reduced to force players to lead targets beyond medium range
• Improved accuracy at short range
• Reduced accuracy at long range

Sniper Rifles

• The perk Final Round will only affect precision damage

Rocket Launchers

• Minor increase to blast radius
• The perk “grenades and horseshoes” to have reduced proximity detonation

Finally, while there will be some reduction to stat perk benefits on year one weapons, big changes are coming to The Taken King. Weapons will feature a stat perk upgrade column.

This introduces the concept of weapon specialization and trade-offs to customizing your weapon. Because these are upgrade nodes, you can tweak them at any time (provided you’ve unlocked that part of the grid), but you’ll see decreases in some areas while others are buffed by perks.

You can read the extensive blog post about upcoming weapon changes on Bungie’s website.

[Source: Bungie]

Our Take
Whew. That’s a lot of hefty changes coming, especially for Crucible players. While there are some impacts to PvE play, I suspect that this will have more to do with the Crucible meta than anything. That does, of course, except the Gjallarhorn and Icebreaker changes. Those are probably necessary, but a little sad, too.