Let’s start with Stasis. Shortly after the release of Stasis, we shifted focus to the back-to-back launch of the Bungie 30th Anniversary Pack and Void 3.0, and we haven’t really let up on the gas since. As a result, other than smaller changes we’ve been able to make here and there, it’s been difficult to evaluate the relationship between Stasis and our other damage types and make larger feature-level updates to it. This was something we wanted to change with The Final Shape. In particular, we wanted to upgrade the Stasis Shard Overshield that lived on the fringes of the damage type to make it a full-on keyword that we could incorporate into abilities, armor, or weapon perks.
Frost Armor is a stacking buff that reduces incoming damage, with greater damage reduction as your stacks increase. At launch, Frost Armor will be granted from a variety of sources, including the Tectonic/Grim/Glacial Harvest Aspects, Fragments, and Exotic armor. By default, you can build to a maximum number of 5 stacks of Frost Armor that last 9 seconds, but with the newly reworked Whisper of Rime Fragment, Frost Armor’s maximum lifetime increases to 13 seconds and can build to a maximum of 8 stacks. Unlike the Stasis Shard Overshield, Frost Armor remains active when your Super is cast, though its effectiveness is significantly lower while your Super is active.
One long-standing piece of feedback we’ve received is that Stasis Shards felt too limited, requiring a specific Aspect to generate. Because Stasis Shards are created for all allied players at once (rather than being a shared consumed resource like Tangles or a local-only resource like Firesprites, Ionic Traces, or Void Breaches), it would be easy for the number of Stasis Shards on the field to spiral out of control if we were to make their creation intrinsic to the damage type. Instead, we’re increasing the number of sources that players can build into to generate them—more on this shortly—and increasing their value when collected with a Harvest Aspect equipped.
When Tectonic, Grim, or Glacial Harvest is equipped, in addition to their previous behavior, collecting any Stasis Shard now grants a small amount of health and a stack of Frost Armor. Alongside this increased potency, we’re also implementing a shared cooldown on rapid Stasis Shard creation. This cooldown is intended to be pretty generous, and primarily limits cases of oppressive behavior, like triple Behemoth Trials squads.
Our intention is that Frost Armor can be granted through a variety of sources. As part of this, we’ve updated Renewal Grasps and Ballidorse Wrathweavers to directly grant Frost Armor, rather than their own custom damage resistance or Stasis Shard Overshield.
To help increase players’ capabilities to generate Stasis Shards, we’ve created a brand-new Fragment that offers a straightforward method that can slot into many different build types: Whisper of Chill.
As part of this effort, we’ve also reworked Whisper of Chains. This Fragment has been a popular choice since its inception due to its ease of use and stat bonus. However, its gameplay benefit was frequently difficult to read and ran counter to core gameplay loops revolving around creating and destroying crystals (and the core human compulsion to destroy every crystal you see).
To make Whisper of Chains fully successful, it required cooperation from teammates in a way that sometimes took success out of the user’s hands. This resulted in situations where, by shattering a Stasis crystal for damage, players could unknowingly reduce their (or their teammates’) combat effectiveness. This introduced negative social friction that we wanted to remove outright. We’ve pivoted Whisper of Chains to instead focus on chaining creation of Stasis Shards and Frost Armor when paired with a Harvest Aspect.
Next on our list of Frost Armor Fragment reworks is Whisper of Fractures. With Stasis Shards granting melee energy as a base behavior, relying on a difficult-to-read passive melee energy regeneration bonus felt like a place we could reduce overlap and build in support for the new keyword.
Our final Fragment rework is Whisper of Torment. This Fragment is a sleeper pick that does its job well, but its actual output has too many variables to keep track of and required the player to be at critical health for its largest bonus, so we’re simplifying things a bit.
Finally, we’ve created one more brand-new Stasis Fragment. Whisper of Reversal is a close-combat tool for our Frost Armor users, adding chances for additional crowd control if you’re willing to take the risk.
Now, let’s talk shatter. While we want the focus of Stasis to be primarily in high-value crowd control abilities, in the current sandbox, shattering a frozen target doesn’t always result in the payout that other damage types are able to deliver with their capstone keywords. Especially in high-difficulty activities, misjudging your ability to capitalize on a freeze can lead to dire consequences. To help address this, we’re bumping base shatter damage vs. PvE combatants from 200 to 400 (note: this does not affect Stasis crystal detonations), but simultaneously, we’re fixing an issue where boss combatants received double damage from auto-shattering, so we don’t quadruple the shatter damage
Okay, that’s it for our general Stasis updates. In addition to these changes, we made a number of updates to subclass-specific Stasis abilities. Let’s go through them class by class.
Up front, we believe that Shadebinders are largely in good shape across all game modes, relative to our other Stasis subclasses. Therefore, we’ve limited our focus here. We’ve added a small boost to Iceflare Bolts’ ability to lock down rooms over the course of a combat encounter before going on cooldown.
Let’s talk Revenant. With Winter’s Shroud included in the Prismatic Hunter kit, we knew we needed to increase its viability in high-difficulty content, where getting up close and personal gets much riskier. We also wanted to provide a smoother gameplay loop between Winter’s Shroud and other Revenant abilities. We’ve updated Winter’s Shroud to provide a moderate boost to class ability regeneration when you slow a target from any source and added a brief window of damage reduction from PvE combatants when activated.
Touch of Winter has been widely used by our Stasis Hunter players since its introduction in Season of the Splicer, primarily when paired with Duskfield Grenades for high-uptime zone denial or Glacier Grenade for Shatterdive combos. The latter has struggled in PvE content in recent Seasons as the sandbox has matured, so we’re making a targeted change to increase its PvE potency without returning to an era of the Crucible where you had to fear rounding any corner into a barrage of ice. In addition, Touch of Winter’s Coldsnap Grenade upgrade has been widely underused since its inception, so we’re implementing a larger rework to its functionality.
While Silence & Squall are still effective at locking down rooms full of enemies, we’ve done a small touch-up on its ability to roam the battlefield and how quickly it converts from a slow to a freeze on PvE combatants. We think this will increase its viability in target-rich environments.
For our Behemoth players, we’re making several quality-of-life improvements. We are making Shiver Strike and Glacial Quake more reliable, improving the ease-of-use of Diamond Lances to fit into the cadence of combat on the Prismatic Titan, and tweaking Cryoclasm to be more intuitive.
Shiver Strike is a melee ability with a higher barrier to entry than most of our roster, and while that is intended at a high level, there are instances where it can misread the player’s intent and fail to find a target as a result. To help mitigate this, we’re increasing its ability to find and lunge towards targets in its now-larger search area and are increasing its damage vs. PvE targets. These changes also affect the Glacial Quake light attack. In addition, Glacial Quake will now auto-sprint when the player starts moving forward—so no more awkwardly bashing your face into a crystal you were meaning to shatter after performing a heavy slam.
We’ve had a number of iterations on Cryoclasm since its initial release in Beyond Light, with its current version requiring a sprint windup to activate. While this solved the Behemoth mobility balance issue at the time, it resulted in a state where it can be easy to mistime your slide just before Cryoclasm is ready to activate. To address this, we’re returning to a middle ground between Cryoclasm’s original release and now. We’re removing the sprint requirement but implementing a cooldown after a single extended slide.
For Diamond Lance, we’re making a couple of quality-of-life changes to help make it easier to pick up on the battlefield and are generally improving its ease-of-use by increasing the size of its thrown projectile detonation vs. all targets and its slam attack vs. PvE combatants.
Back in November, we briefly touched on Well of Radiance and Ward of Dawn and how we were evaluating their place in the sandbox. With the launch of The Final Shape, we’re making some larger changes to both of these Supers to push them into more distinct identities and to reduce the fire-and-forget nature of Well of Radiance.
Well of Radiance’s core fantasy has always been a supercharged healing-empowering rift combo, offering a rally point for your fireteam during moments of focus. In its current form, its healing and damage resistance offer effective invulnerability, which removes any other defensive option from consideration on top of providing a sizable boost to your fireteam’s offensive output. We’ve chosen to push Well of Radiance further towards that offensive capability by allowing its radiance to persist for a short duration after players leave the well. We’re also pulling back on its defensive output (both damage resistance and healing rate) by a significant margin.
Ward of Dawn, on the other hand, is meant to be a highly defensible safe haven for you and your team. In practice, our combat encounters don’t have a lot of opportunities for this type of gameplay to shine, so we’re making a change to allow Ward of Dawn to provide defensive capability while fighting around the dome, not just in it. We’re also reworking Armor of Light to make your current health state while in the dome of Ward of Dawn more understandable, and we’re pushing Ward of Dawn away from its current offensive capability, unless you specifically build into it.
Additionally, we’ve seen that the Supers above and burst damage Supers in the same tier have increasingly dominated the Crucible landscape due to their uptime. While we do want to maintain some texture across a match when Supers become available, the delta is currently a bit too high, especially in 3v3 game modes. To reduce this a bit, we’re making a change to all Supers with The Final Shape. While different types of Supers will have different passive recharge times, all Supers will now use the same damage-based rechargers.
This means that no matter what Super you have equipped, dealing a specific amount of damage to a specific enemy type will result in the same amount of Super energy gained, whereas previously that value could vary by about 30%. This effectively increases the real-world uptime of our roaming Supers in the slowest recharge tier and reduces the uptime of our fastest-recharging burst Supers.
Now let’s dive into each subclass for some more general balance changes.
In general, Arcstrider has found a solid niche in mid-level PvE content but struggles to execute its gameplay loop at our highest tier of challenge. With a new Super and Aspect on the way, we’re not making any large changes to the kit with this release, but we plan to evaluate how it’s feeling with the full package as we go. For now, we’ve focused on adding keyword utility to Arc Staff and increasing the uptime of Disorienting Blow to make it a stronger choice in comparison to Combination Blow. We’re also increasing players’ ability to survive when using Tempest Strike, which now grants a short duration of PvE damage resistance.
We’ve made a corresponding change to Stormcaller’s Lightning Surge in the same vein, with more survivability when you aggressively teleport into groups of enemies. We’ve also increased the proximity detonation volume (we call this an “arming shape”) for Ball Lightning, fixing an issue where the projectile would pass above a target that it could damage but fail to detonate.
Chain Lightning has been a staple of Stormcaller’s identity since its inception as an upgrade to the Thunderstrike melee in the original Destiny. With the introduction of jolt in Season of Plunder and its propagation across the sandbox, however, it’s started to feel a bit left behind. We’re increasing the damage dealt by its chains by 100% to help increase its effectiveness against crowds of enemies and make it feel like a worthier option in comparison to Warlock’s many ranged melees.
Like with Tempest Strike for Hunters and Lightning Surge change for Warlocks, we’re implementing the same extra damage resistance vs. PvE combatants during the Thunderclap windup to help Titans stand their ground during a full charge. However, because Thunderclap doesn’t allow Titans to move until the strike is finished, we’re increasing both the minimum and maximum damage output to help offset the tradeoff in mobility against PvE combatants. We’re also increasing the maximum damage output vs. players to ensure that a fully charged Thunderclap can overcome player damage resistance or Overshields.
It’s been difficult for us to find a solid place for the Knockout Aspect across game modes. In part, this is due to the harsh difference in the value of unstunning passive health regeneration in different combat environments. Knockout’s passive health regeneration is very quick at max recovery but can be interrupted. Generally, in PvP encounters, players are dramatically less likely to take chip damage after resolution of an engagement, resulting in much more health recovery than we think is comfortable.
By contrast, with the increased number of enemies in PvE encounters, Knockout’s passive healing can feel ineffectual because there are many more sources of incoming damage in a given moment. To help address this, we’re reworking the way Knockout’s healing works altogether. Rather than unstunning passive regeneration, defeating enemies with melee attacks now grants a chunk of health in a very short window (0.1 second), and that chunk of health increases based on the type of target you defeat. We’re also increasing the bonus damage granted to powered melee attacks vs. PvE combatants while Knockout is active.
With Update 6.3.0.5 in January 2023, we implemented a change to drastically reduce the travel speed of Touch of Thunder’s Storm Grenade upgrade to reduce its potency across the board, with a specific focus on the Crucible. We’re not in love with how that’s shaken out in PvE game modes, so we’re making a targeted change to increase its speed only when tracking PvE combatants. This will help it better roam across an encounter space and catch multiple targets.
Keeping with Touch of Thunder, its Lightning Grenade upgrade is currently a bit too spicy, so we’re making a change here to curb the amount of immediate burst damage it can deal, especially outside of its actual effective detonation range. Following this change, Lightning Grenade will apply its jolt immediately after the initial damage occurs, preventing the jolt from zapping its chain lightning instantly on creation.
Storm Grenade is also getting a bit of a boost outside of the Touch of Thunder variant. We’re increasing the base version’s damage vs. PvE combatants by 20%. Skip Grenade is getting a 15% boost to its PVE damage, and we’re also increasing Arcbolt Grenade’s damage vs. PvE combatants by 15%. Give it a shot on Prismatic Hunter and let us know how it’s feeling!
Wrapping up Arc, we’re making some quality-of-life changes to our Arc Fragment suite. Spark of Recharge is one of the few sources of direct ability energy regeneration outside of Ionic Traces in the Arc subclass kit, and we feel it’s currently too difficult to make use of. So while it will still initially activate when becoming critically wounded, we’re extending the duration of its benefits until the player returns to full health, rather than deactivating as soon as the player has any shields.
Spark of Beacons has always been relatively popular and has spiked in usage with the release of Indebted Kindness. We don’t mind this spike and are extending Spark of Beacon’s activation triggers to include Arc Power weapons as well—time to break out the Thunderlord.
Finally, for Spark of Frequency, we’re bringing back just a hint of the old Frontal Assault Striker talent.
For Solar, in addition to our Well of Radiance changes detailed above, we’re making some targeted improvements to abilities that are included with Prismatic as well as making some improvements to standalone abilities that needed some love.
For our Gunslinger friends, we’re taking a look at Lightweight Knife, which has struggled to find an identity for itself. Our overall goal for this ability is to provide a low-barrier-to-entry melee with a payoff for high-skill usage. However, it’s not currently hitting our fantasy bar. With the release of The Final Shape, this melee is getting a small rework. It now has two melee charges by default and can be thrown back-to-back dramatically faster.
To support this, we’re also updating Knock ‘Em Down’s internal cooldown on its melee refund. This was initially intended to prevent situations where Knife Trick could refund many charges at once, but with the Lightweight Knife update, we felt it was important to enable a faster cadence of potential refunds.
Some raid teams have a niche strategy of Hunters fully stacking Golden Gun – Marksman to instantly refund each other’s Supers with the Orbs of Power created on precision hit in combination with the additional Super energy granted on Orb pickup by Star-Eater Scales. While we always appreciate this kind of buildcrafting ingenuity, this level of Super chaining isn’t very healthy for the game. Therefore, we’re reducing the strength of the Orbs created by Golden Gun – Marksman’s precision hits perk and making some targeted adjustments to the specific combination noted above.
For our Sunbreakers, we’re taking a look at Consecration. We made some improvements to Consecration in Update 7.3.5 that landed pretty well, but with its inclusion in Prismatic, we wanted to make sure Consecration could stand on its own without relying on Roaring Flames. We also wanted it to have some interesting interactions with other Prismatic Titan abilities. As a result, we’ve increased the damage of ignitions caused by Consecration vs. PvE combatants and further increased its consistency against floating targets. You’ll still need a different tool to take down a pesky Grim, but a Servitor or Shank should cause less frustration.
Another Sunbreaker ability featured on the Prismatic Titan is Hammer of Sol, which we feel is too reliant on the additional damage granted from the Sunspots created by Sol Invictus. We’re making a change to Hammer of Sol that only affects the Super when Sol Invictus isn’t equipped. This will increase the number of shrapnel submunitions created on impact based on the primary projectile’s lifetime and the damage those submunitions deal.
Finally, a few weeks ago we revealed the abilities coming with each Prismatic subclass, and some Hunters raised an eyebrow at the inclusion of Swarm Grenade. We agree, so we have boosted Swarm Grenade’s ease-of-use and PvE damage output to make sure it shines in that kit.
Nightstalkers are generally in a pretty strong place, as seen by their high popularity in Onslaught. A large portion of that is driven by the potency of Shadowshot and its ability to lock down hordes of incoming enemies and not necessarily its neutral game offering, so we’re making a few changes to help shore up that side.
With the release of Void 3.0, we removed the Corrosive Smoke melee ability in favor of Snare Bomb, leaning further into the trap-laying trickster fantasy. We want to walk that back a little bit and are baking in small, escalating damage over time to the Snare Bomb’s now-longer smoke volume. This will help Nightstalkers capitalize on an incapacitated enemy caught in their trap. These changes also apply to the smoke volume created by Trapper’s Ambush.
We’re also updating Stylish Executioner to allow its weaken effect while active to be applied by Glaive melees as well.
For Sentinels, we’ve focused on a large consistency pass for the Shield Throw melee attack. While we want this to feel weighty and impactful, our previous passes haven’t done enough to make it able to deal with groups of minor combatants. We’re taking a much stronger swing here, resulting in a much larger improvement to its consistency. We’re also increasing its PvE damage to help ensure that any combatants who are hit have a meaningful dent left in them.
We’re also making a small change to Offensive Bulwark. This is partially a preventative fix to stop players from getting into a bad timer state (similar to the Ember of Empyrean issue resolved earlier this season), so we’re making a quality of life change to offset it.
Finally, our Voidwalkers are getting a number of improvements, starting with Chaos Accelerant. It’s overcharged Magnetic Grenade has fallen by the wayside since its inception as Handheld Supernova with Forsaken. To help remedy this, we’re increasing its damage output and knockback capability as well as its uptime.
From the first minute of your experience with Prismatic, Pocket Singularity will be available to equip and use. A piece of feedback we’ve heard for a while now is that Pocket Singularity struggles in high-level PvE content, and we agree. While we want its overall primary fantasy to remain displacement and knockback, we’re giving it a sizable damage increase vs. PvE combatants.
Finally, we’re taking a look at Nova Bomb to improve its overall damage output without the need of a Super-boosting Exotic. For Cataclysm Nova Bomb, we’re increasing its maximum secondary seeker count and making it more consistent, and for Vortex Nova Bomb we’re increasing the lifetime of the lingering damage-over-time volume.
Last up is Strand, which has remained a popular pick since its introduction last year with Lightfall. Our focus for Strand with this balance pass is primarily to bring in outliers at both the top and very bottom ends of the spectrum, rather than the larger reworks we’ve seen with other damage types. As we evaluate how these changes are feeling and how the Strand abilities included with Prismatic are playing, we’ll be taking another look in the future.
Before we get into individual subclasses, the first outlier we’d like to address is the Thread of Warding Fragment. While we appreciate the defensive value it provides by granting Woven Mail, it is currently too potent. It overshadows the role of Berserker’s Into the Fray Aspect of being the best source of Woven Mail for your fireteam.
Threadrunner’s Ensnaring Slam has remained popular throughout Strand’s life and has seen a small bump in PvE popularity following the increased uptime post-Update 7.3.5. However, it is currently too powerful against other players, with a detonation radius that is very difficult for victims to understand, so we’re reducing its overall area of effect vs. players.
Similarly, Threaded Spike is a little too potent against enemy players, with very forgiving tracking and high damage for its ease of use, so we’re making a small reduction in its damage vs. enemy players. We’re also changing the catch mechanic. so that catching your Threaded Spike manually no longer breaks invisibility. We wanted to prevent this from happening on Prismatic Hunter in combination with Stylish Executioner.
For Broodweavers, our focus for this update is Weaver’s Call. One major piece of feedback is that Threadling uptime for Broodweavers doesn’t match up to the fantasy. With Rift cooldown times being relatively long to match the combat utility of the heal or damage increase, Weaver’s Call could feel too spiky in its output, with a lot of downtime. We agree with that feedback and are updating Weaver’s Call to allow it to generate perched Threadlings through normal gameplay—namely, by defeating targets with any source of Strand damage.
Before we get into Berserker, let’s take a pit stop and talk about Grapple Tangles and Grapple melee. When we initially built the Grapple Tangle as part of the Widow’s Silk Aspect, we intended for it to be used primarily as a traversal tool, allowing Hunters to give their fireteam a fast Grapple path through combat spaces. However, that intention was quickly subverted, and we now see Grapple Tangles primarily used to fuel an infinite number of high-output Grapple melees, particularly on Berserker. We want to keep some degree of freedom in how Grapple Tangles are used, but we don’t believe that using a single attack back to back like this is particularly interesting or healthy gameplay, so we’re taking a few steps to address it.
First, Grapple Tangles no longer fully refresh their duration when a player uses them. Instead, they have a flat number of seconds added to their timer, and that added time decreases with each successive Grapple to the same Grapple Tangle.
Additionally, Grapple melee will no longer be able to be used after firing your weapon. This is primarily intended to reduce the number of difficult-to-understand Grapple melee deaths in the Crucible, where players can Grapple toward you, fire a single Hand Cannon shot, and then follow up with a Grapple melee for a very fast cleanup. But it also reduces the number of melee damage stacking sources—which can spiral out of control very quickly—that are easily achievable with Grapple melees by removing One Two Punch from the equation.
Looping back to Berserker, while we’re happy with how the fantasy has landed, there are a few balance outliers that we want to address to make sure that it’s not dramatically out of band with our other subclasses. Our changes here are relatively small and targeted at specific issues, and our goal is that the overall fantasy and gameplay style of the subclass remains intact throughout.
Into The Fray offers a high degree of survivability and melee ability uptime. We’re generally okay with the survivability, as it’s critical to the fantasy of the subclass, but in combination with the accelerating passive regeneration of Frenzied Blade as charges accumulate, the melee ability regeneration it provides is slightly too high, so we’re bringing it down a bit.
When we released Update 7.3.0 last December, Banner of War was still new, and we didn’t have much time to holistically evaluate its potency. Now that we’ve had more time to sit with it, we have a few targeted changes to make. Having a relatively easy upkeep bonus fits well with the Berserker playstyle, but its lengthy duration results in too little time pressure to fit the high action-per-minute gameplay loop, so we’re reducing its maximum timer length by 20%.
Above we mentioned that melee damage stacking can quickly spiral out of control, and Banner of War is a good example of the result. When paired with something like the newly reworked Wormgod Caress or the evergreen staple Synthoceps, Banner of War’s relatively modest melee damage boost becomes a very large force multiplier for the melee damage boost granted by those Exotics. That isn’t healthy long term. We still want Banner to provide some value to the player when using these Exotics, as they’re a natural pairing, but we are implementing diminishing returns when either are active.
Finally, for Frenzied Blade we’ve identified an issue where the melee lunge target point was being offset too far forward from the actual lunge target, resulting in some odd behavior when using Frenzied Blade at very close ranges.
Whew, that’s everything we have for now. We’re extremely excited to see how the next era of the Destiny 2 sandbox unfolds after the launch of The Final Shape, and we’ll be closely monitoring the impact of these changes. As always, keep the feedback coming, and we’ll see you next time.
