Today Bungie announced a bunch of small balance tweaks for Destiny, a video game about warping through the solar system trying (yet again) to remember the last time you played Destiny.
Next week’s big update will bring raise the light-level cap and bring some big changes to Destiny‘s PvE Prison of Elders, and will add a lot of cool new gear you can try to get. Today, in their last livestream before the update goes live on April 12, Bungie detailed some of the tweaks coming to PvP crucible matches.
There’ll be a wide range of small buffs and nerfs; few of them sound very dramatic on their own, but together they should shake things up. Obviously these changes will affect PvE as well, but they’re designed more for PvP balance and shouldn’t have too huge an impact on PvE.
Bungie will post a detailed breakdown of the numbers on their blog tomorrow, but here are some salient points I caught while watching their stream.
- Revives have gotten a significant nerf. They have tightened the range for a revive, slightly slowed down revive time, added a longer timer with subsequent deaths in a three-person match and slightly nerfed the overshield you get for reviving or being revived.
- Special ammo will work differently: You’ll spawn with special ammo at the start of a match again, but the first special ammo crates won’t spawn in for three minutes. The second round of special will hit two minutes after that.
- There’ll be more legendary drops in crucible in general.
- You’ll be able to repeat the “His Eye Upon You” Trials bounty every day Trials is active, which gets you a gold tier drop each time you turn it in.
- In Iron Banner, they have replaced legendary engram drops with iron banner gear drops, and artefacts and ghosts drop at 320 and are guaranteed at rank 3 and 5.
They’re nerfing and buffing a bunch of weapon types as follows:
- Auto Rifles: dropping base damage on high ROF, low ROF base damage coming up a tiny bit
- Pulse rifles: low ROF base damage coming up a tiny bit
- Hand Cannons: increasing ammo inventory
- Fusion Rifles: blanket stability increase
- Sniper Rifles: The popular short-zoom distance scopes have been pushed out a touch, they have added two frames of zoom time, snapshot now grants a 20 per cent increase to zoom time instead of 30 per cent, reduced stability a bit across the board
They’re also tweaking some exotics and a few legendaries:
- MIDA Multi-Tool: They say it’s by far the most popular gun compared with every other primary. To nerf it they’re removing high calibre rounds, the intrinsic property that staggers people you shoot. The gun should be the same, but getting shot by it won’t make your view jump as hard.
- SUROS Regime: Damage getting a slight buff, spinning up perk now kicks in about four shots later in the mag, focus fire gives you a good range boost.
- Hawkmoon: Increased the range, general accuracy of the gun is better. Man I hope this gun becomes good again.
- The Last Word: The Last Word perk does a tad less damage. Still a three-shot kill from the hip, no longer a two-shot kill.
- Thorn: Still a year one weapon. (Phew.) Minimised the DOT damage, each pulse does the minimum damage possible. Reduced duration of the pulse; it does four pulses instead of six, and poison visual is less intense on your screen.
- Ice Breaker: Still a year one weapon. When you switch away from Ice Breaker you lose the ammo you generated, so you can’t use it to fill your stocks and then switch to a better gun. Handling will come down, zoom distance goes out.
- Dreg’s Promise: Better tracking, mostly. Rounds will track enemies like a tracking rocket launcher. They showed this thing in action in crucible and it looks pretty nasty. Expect to get killed by this a lot after the update.
- Telesto: Telesto now recognises friendlies. You can attach Telesto rounds to a friendly teammate and they will explode, but the explosion will only damage enemies. So, you could attach rounds to your friend as they charge into battle, which would turn them into a human bomb. Sounds excellent.
- Heavy weapons, sniper rifles and shotgun ammo carrying capacity will be reduced across the board. In PvE, you’ll get more special ammo drops to make up for that.
This graph indicates how much people use the 1kYS. lol
- 100-Yard Stare: The most equipped special weapon in Destiny. They’re removing a couple of bullets from the inventory, but otherwise it’s actually staying about the same. (Well, it will also get hit by the broader sniper nerf.)
- Qullim’s Terminus: Reduced ammo inventory so it will allow for fewer ridiculous Crucible killing sprees. Aw. I loved camping a control point and killing like 12 dudes with a single heavy pickup.
- King’s Fall Guns: Global increase on reload speed. Anguish of Drystan gets a small stability increase.
Warlock subclasses got a few changes as well:
- Sunsinger: They have lowered the amount of shield provided by the melee overshield and reduced the frequency with which you can get the shield. Other melee types are getting buffed slightly to encourage people to use them instead. (That will never happen.) Fireborn radience doesn’t last as long, so you’ll get a couple more grenades in your super if you don’t run Fireborn.
- Stormcaller: Reined in the Landfall ability — it won’t take down a Titan bubble any more. They have also lowered some of the perks that extend the super, and using your lightning will drain your super faster than it did.
- Voidwalker: My stream cut out and I didn’t catch the particulars. Sorry! I gather they didn’t change much and actually buffed a few things.
- Firebolt grenades: Staying pretty much the same. Ha! Oh, well.
That was everything I caught, though some of the particulars could be slightly off. Bungie will post a full breakdown of the rebalancing changes tomorrow, and presumably we’ll get more detail then.
Nothing on this list leaps out at me as a massive buff or nerf, but it will be interesting to see how it all affects the meta come April 12. Guess it’s time to finally go get a Dreg’s Promise.
Also, guess it’s about time to actually start playing Destiny again. I can’t tell whether I’m excited or scared.
Comments
8 responses to “Destiny PVP Is Getting A Bunch Of Balance Tweaks”
Seems to me that a lot of the changes to “balance” the crucible are going to make many popular guns less useful in PvE. But hey, since they’re not adding new story content this year who gives a shit.
Have I misinterpreted all the things they have been saying? I thought there was going to be a new questline in April??
I think they might be adding a new strike and probably a questline to go with it but as far as I know (not that I’ve really been paying attention since I haven’t picked the game up since November) the strike is the only “new” content – the questline will probably be a matter of “do these things and we’ll give you a gun that’s 20 light below what you’re already using”. Granted, that’s one extra strike, free of charge, but it’s not going to get me to reinstall the game.
If that stability change to all fusions means my Vex Mythoclast is viable again I’ll be back with bells on.
And once again nerfing for crucible will f*ck over PvE players. Well played Bungo!
I still don’t understand why Bungie don’t balance guns separately for PvE to PvP more than they do. They’ve shown they’re clearly willing to (i.e. shotguns), but some of the massive PvP nerfs have made some guns utterly useless in PvE. I don’t think their argument of “consistency” holds that much weight. It’s not like you’d be changing how the gun “feels”, or it’s intrinsic perks. Just things like the damage. Guardians die in a different number of shots to PvE mobs anyway, so what’s the difference?
For the most part I do agree with a lot of these changes though, especially the ones to Warlocks. And that’s coming from someone who plays Hunter/Warlock equally.
I may actually get back into the game with this update, mostly because (a) it’s free and (b) they’re reworking Prison of Elders as end game.
I personally found PoE pretty fun because it was a chilled, relaxing way to shoot some shit while I…shoot the shit with my friends. Especially because it’s usually just the three or four of us in general, so the three-person limit was perfect.
Plus the new setup looks kind of intriguing – less focus on spongey bosses and more focus on speed runs and score modifiers,
As a warlock main, I’m hoping they rework Sunsinger to (a) more evenly split self-buffing and ally-buffing builds/perks, and (b) replace Ignite’s DoT with a weakening debuff (ie. target takes increased damage). Especially as I think I’ve seen Song of Flame used only three times in the past 12 months – two of which were in Datto’s grenade-only challenge videos for Skolas and Warpriest, and once in our team for reasons I can’t recall.
Hell, if King’s Fall taught me anything about Sunsinger, it’s that its support potential in endgame PvE sucks (aside: self-res isn’t support, it’s a failsafe). Song of Flame needs a buff (maybe a 10% or 15% damage boost, or increased recovery and reload speed, for nearby allies – fine with it still not applying to self if you can grenade-spam) and Ignite needs its DoT removed (maybe replaced with a small refreshable/non-stacking debuff, say increase incoming damage by 5-10% for affected targets).
I don’t want Sunsingers to be able to replace a nightstalker or a WoL bubble – the damage-buff numbers I’m suggesting make them at most about half as effective as shadowshot or WoL – but it’d be nice if I could actually complement my allies’ abilities instead of giving them melees and grenades, when those are rarely relied on in endgame PvE or boss fights.
man that 1000 yard stare use graph lol Would hate to imagine how many times i’ve died by that lately…it sort of forced you to use to try counter the other people using it as well.
The biggest issue with specials in PVP is there is too much special ammo, good to see they’re dropped the amount you can get a bit. Hopefully you only spawn with like 4 or special rounds…i’d personally make the special drop once only and around the time heavy does so you have to choose :p
Haven’t played in a few weeks, might play a bit tonight. None of my damn friends play it anymore which sucks, hardly use my ps4 now 🙁