Sorry, Lament
Destiny 2 is messing with weapons again, and of course, some things are on the chopping block.
Let’s get to the big stuff first. Exotics. You know, the most personality-driven items in the game, the stuff that’s usually overtuned and gets nerfed the quickest. Bungie is altering The Lament sword, which is dominating the sword meta at the moment. The heavy attack (revved up) is being reduced by 16% across the board, which is a functional and very easy to follow change.
Bastion will stagger unstoppable champions now, and the spread angle is being increased by 13 percent. However, both Bastion and The Lament are going to be a casualty of the removal of chip damage, which impacts the whole sword archetype as well. In short, both of them will not do any chip damage at all, which previously allowed bypassing shields and doing little packets of damage to things like stasis-encrusted foes.
Bungie is also nerfing hand cannons for PVP’s sake, as well as Vortex Frame Swords. The Quickdraw and Frenzy perks are getting nerfed too, with Reservoir Burst seeing a buff. You can find the full preliminary patch notes below.
This Week at Bungie [Bungie.net]
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 assist falloff distance 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 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 are making a small change here and will revisit Bastion later.
- Intrinsically staggers Unstoppable Champions.
- Increased spread angle by 13 percent.
