It’s been a long week for everyone at Bungie, our community, and most importantly, for all the amazing and talented teammates we had to say goodbye to. Last Wednesday, we delivered a message detailing a reduction in force that affected a large portion of our team. We appreciate all of you who’ve shared your kindness and empathy toward everyone who was impacted, and patience with everyone here at Bungie as we process these changes. We cancelled the TWID last week, and several other planned comms across our channels out of respect for everyone affected, but we don’t want to leave you in the dark for an extended period of time.
Now, here are the TWID topics for this week.
Solstice has returned, and we’ve made some changes this year. We’re offering more flexibility in how you can play while earning your armor and we’re also adding some new goodies to look forward to. So, let’s walk you through everything you can find with Solstice this year.
To kick off the festivities, head over to Eva Levante to grab the new Solstice Forge item. The Solstice Forge will be your new hub for earning your armor this year. Here, you’ll find bounties next to each Solstice armor piece which you can complete to unlock that piece of armor.
While carrying your Solstice Forge, completing activities will reward Silver Leaves which can be used to purchase the Forge bounties. You can earn them through a variety of activities, so if you want to keep grinding Nightfalls or ranking up in Crucible you’ll have the option to play your way while still raking in the leaves. You’ll also be able to use Silver Leaves to reroll bounty sets, offering even more flexibility in playing how you want.
As you complete Solstice Forge bounties, you’ll be rewarded with Alloys, which will be used to unlock your new armor and glows. Once you’ve reached enough Alloys for a piece of armor, you’ll be offered a quest to take on the Bonfire Bash, with the armor piece rewarded upon completion. After you’ve unlocked the armor, you can follow the same process to earn your glows. You can track your progress directly in the Solstice Forge, so you’ll always know where you stand on each piece of armor.
Now that you know how the new system works, let’s get to the new goodies.
While we gave a brief preview of the concept designs for this year’s Solstice armor during our Act 2 Developer Livestream, you can now feast your eyes on the completed armor in all its glory.
Armor is great, but you know what else is great? Weapons. Previous Solstice offerings will be returning (we’ll be hunting for a certain 120 Hand Cannon that can roll Precision Instrument…), alongside the new Fortunate Star Void Combat Bow which is being added to the Solstice loot pool. We’re thinking a Repulsor Brace and Destabilizing Rounds roll may be a bit of fun out there.
Head over to a Bonfire Bash to start building your arsenal.
Getting the weapon and the god roll is only one part of the battle. The other part is making it look as amazing as possible. We are making this easier for you with a new Solstice Memento. Once you’ve earned the armor glows for a complete set of Solstice armor, you’ll unlock the Solstice Keepsake. Check it out:
Hey, Guardians, it’s the Weapons Team here to provide info on the weapon balance update that went live earlier this week and our thoughts behind those changes. We are currently working on changes for Episode Revenant, and we’ll share details about those as we get closer to release.
Aggressive Scout Rifles have lagged behind almost all other Primary weapons in PvE DPS, so we wanted to bring them more in line with other options.
Legendary Heavy Burst Pulse Rifles displayed the wrong RPM when inspected; they should be in-line with Revision Zero and Graviton Lance. This does not affect the weapons actual RPM; it is just a visual fix. Graviton Lance was affected by an unrelated change, and we are working on a fix to its fire rate being slower than intended.
Snipers have struggled in PvE for some time, and so we’re taking a pass at giving them significantly more usability in our endgame arenas. In the second Episode, we have taken an additional, and much larger, swing at them, substantially buffing damage versus non-boss combatants and further reducing incoming flinch from combatants.
Glaives have some utility, but in their current state there is often little reason to use the Glaive melee over the standard melees available to Guardians. Increasing their damage by 20% should allow them to more easily taken down combatants and help to balance the risk versus reward component of their close-range playstyle.
Lightweight Shotguns inadvertently had their movement speed and Mobility stat bonuses removed; we have corrected this oversight.
Rocket Assisted Frame sidearms are extremely potent in PvE, and a large part of this is how generous they are with ammo. Upon investigation, we discovered an issue where they were counting as Primary weapons for Ammo Finder contributions, instead of Special weapons as intended, so we have corrected this. Players will have to be a little bit more deliberate with their ammo now, but we expect them to still be a top PvE option even after this change.
Under specific situations, such as stacking multiple Sticky grenades and detonating them all at once, players could launch themselves with massive acceleration and break traversal in ways Mountaintop wasn’t intended to. To address this, we’ve added a cap (20 meters per second, or 44 miles per hour for anyone using imperial units) to the speed you can gain via Mountaintop jumping.
Note: We’re investigating player reports of some use cases besides stacking stickies being adversely affected, and will see whether we need to revisit the tuning of this limit.
Bows have taken a beating in PvP since our 7.3.5 changes, and while Lightweights see some use, Precisions have completely fallen off the charts. We’re buffing their damage just a bit to help differentiate them from their faster firing brethren, and we will evaluate their effectiveness after this change to see if there is room to buff them further.
Duality is technically a Pellet Shotgun at heart, and so it was inheriting the same aim down sights (ADS) damage falloff scalar of 1.0x from that frame. We have corrected it to fully work like a slug when ADS, increasing the damage falloff range by a noticeable margin.
Conditional Finality usage has decreased slightly with the introduction of Someday and the reduction in potency of Well and Ward, but it still remains the most effective Shotgun in Crucible by a wide-margin, with a Kills Over Expected more than 2.5x higher than the next closed competitor in the Top 10 (Chaperone, for those who are curious).
Even with the added Ignition on shield break effect, Eriana’s Vow felt like it struggled against Barrier shields in higher level content, so we have greatly increased the damage it does to Barrier Champion shields.
A surprise to be sure, but a welcome one.
Due to an issue with the construction of the Recombination perk, a rare condition could sometimes cause the perk to deactivate before the bonus damage was applied, so we have rebuilt it on the backend to maintain the same functionality but activate consistently, as intended.
The buff that Threat Remover applies is a strong one, but the activation requirements felt prohibitive in PvP, and the duration felt too short. We have increased the duration of the buff, made it easier to activate, and given it a handling scalar as well so it is even more noticeable when it’s active.
At the time when Adept weapon mods were created, there was some concern that giving such large stat bonuses without a drawback would be problematic, both in terms of balance and in terms of other mods not being able to stack up. As the sandbox has progressed, however, we no longer feel these penalties are necessary, and in preparation for the larger weapon mod rework coming in the next Episode, we’ve decided to remove the stat penalties. In playtesting, we did find that Adept Targeting giving 10 Aim Assist for free was a bit much, so we have reduced that bonus to 7 Aim Assist.
As we mentioned, we’re working on some updates for Episode Revenant. We wanted to give a small preview of some things we’re excited to ship with that update:
The armor team has been largely heads down on work for Episode Revenant, where we will be updating several underperforming Exotic armor pieces. However, for this update we wanted to get some fixes and adjustments in for a few of the balance outliers that have cropped up since the launch of The Final Shape.
Last year, we made an adjustment to Radiant Dance Machines that prevented them from allowing repeated use of the Strand Ensnaring Slam Aspect. Our philosophy for these boots is that they should not allow repeated use of any Aspect that consumes your class ability energy or otherwise provide significant additional effects to your dodge. The fact that they allowed repeated use of the new Ascension Aspect was an oversight we want to correct.
Getaway Artist allows Prismatic Warlocks to get both an Arc Soul and a Stasis Turret for the price of a single grenade. This is a playstyle we loved seeing emerge in the community; however, when paired with Feed the Void, grenade uptime ended up being much greater than expected for minimal buildcrafting input. We want to reduce the potency of this build without removing it as a fun and effective playstyle.
Spirit of the Star Eater on Solipsism was boosting the damage of ignitions triggered by Song of Flame. Ignitions are never intended to benefit from bonus Super damage regardless of the source, and we are correcting this issue.
Spirit of Osmiomancy on Solipsism was a challenge to balance as each grenade on Prismatic Warlock differs drastically in the uptime and damage (or healing) it can dish out. We generally feel good about how this Exotic perk interacts with most of the grenade options; however, Vortex grenades thrown into large groups of enemies were granting back far more grenade energy than we intended.
The gameplay effects of an armor mod are designed to come at the cost of the armor mod energy and slot usage, and the ability to keep increased weapon reserves once the reserve mods were removed violated that. With the launch of this update, we are making a change so that you can no longer swap off reserve mods while retaining a higher ammo count. However, we understand that for a while now players have been relying on those increased reserves to overcome our most challenging encounters. Therefore, we are also increasing base reserves for all weapons as part of this same change. Additionally, we are reducing the energy cost of the Reserve Mods to make them easier to fit into your loadouts.
That’s everything we have for this update. There is plenty of things coming down the pipeline soon from the Armor Team, so get ready to dust off some items in your vaults in the next Episode:
Since the launch of The Final Shape, we’ve been monitoring how Guardians are interacting with the new Pathfinder system in Ritual playlists. We’ve seen some great feedback concerning Pathfinder in the Pale Heart destination, but we’re still in the process of finetuning the system for Crucible, Gambit, and Vanguard playlists.
We’ve made a few changes over Acts I and II to help address player feedback, such as ensuring there will always be a way to complete Pathfinder cards purely through PvE gameplay. We’ve also addressed some overly specific objectives, an example being the requirement of Cabal kills in strikes, which was generalized to progress on any enemy faction. We still have things to touch on, but those are some examples of changes made so far.
Looking into the near future, discoverability and general progression are among the top priorities – we want players to be able to find Pathfinder more easily (the node is a bit small, we agree), and we want objectives to better align with the activities they’re set for (getting 10 grenade kills in PvP without dying is a bit too much of a challenge). Some changes will be a bit quicker to ship while others will take time, so stay tuned for updates on our progress.
As we continue to absorb and address player feedback, we still wanted to make sure players were earning XP and Bright Dust at expected rates. We had no intentions of reducing either of these rewards when moving from bounties to the Pathfinder system. We’ve already started one form of a make good through increases to weekly Well Rested XP, but we have another that started this week with Destiny 2 Update 8.0.5 to address Bright Dust.
As of August 6, players can visit the Eververse store to claim 350 Bright Dust each week up through the start of maintenance for Episode 2 on October 8. Each deposit is only there for one week, so be sure to pick yours up each week before weekly reset.
We’ll have more news to share on Pathfinder changes in the coming weeks. Thank you to all who have been giving feedback. Stay tuned!
There’s only one way to start this – with an extremely heartfelt THANK YOU from the Bungie Foundation for your support during this year’s Bungie Day campaign. Together, we raised over 2 million that will positively impact the lives of countless people around the world. For every Guardian who donated, fundraised, tuned in to a livestream, shared a social media post, saluted us in the Tower, or posted a 💙 in chat, we can’t thank you enough for your continuous support and generosity.
Not only did our community come together to spark a ton of good during this year’s campaign, we also crowned the first ever Seventh Column Chaos Tournament champions. (Check out the Twitch VOD from our Bungie Day livestream in case you missed it!) Massive GGs to Team Passion (Difizzle, Pantho, Aiiy) for surviving all of the chaotic modifiers we threw their way to emerge victorious over a stacked tourney field! Give them a follow over on Twitch to see more of their insane PvP skills on display.
Quick housekeeping note: lifetime fundraising rewards are now live for those who continue to go above and beyond in support of our work and have reached fundraising milestones. Check out this post for instructions on how to claim your rewards.
It’s an amazing thing watching the Destiny community rally together and throw their support so wholeheartedly behind the Bungie Foundation’s mission. Thanks to Light Keepers like you, the world is a brighter place.❤️
View Original Post
