Destiny

Doesn't really show anything new, but it sure looks cool

Lots of great stuff here. Tons of tuning, exotic adjustments, and more. They've included a video preview of the Monte Carlo catalyst, the most complex they've done, and yes, it's exactly what you think! And Touch of Malice, my beloved, is getting a nice buff. Anyway, too much for me to add here, so dive in and point out your highlights in the comments.

Highlights -- an Eververse armor next season is going to be moved to ritual armor, a dedicated team is going to bring free PvP map packs.

In short been struggling with medical stuff between me and my mother. I'm only to rank 64 and would like to reach rank 100 since I paid for the damn pass. Idk how much i can play this week but any tips to reach rank 100?

Are there any builds you've been enjoying a lot this season? Any surprises or new exotics that worked their way into your rotation?

I continue to enjoy Osmiomancy Gloves, and I also recently added Monte Carlo to the mix since it grants so much melee energy. The general consensus about Stasis still seems to be that it's falling behind the other subclasses, but Warlocks still seem like they're in great shape for now.

On Titan, I haven't found much that can beat Sunbreaker with Synthoceps. It always feels ridiculous making 100+ orbs at the end of a seasonal activity.

TL;DR:

Exotic Mission Rotator

Weapons entering the playlist will become craftable.
Normal and Legendary Difficulties.
Each mission has a pool of legacy season rewards (armor and craftable weapons) that match the theme of the mission.
Missions with progressive dialogue on repeating the mission will move forward with each run and reset after all dialogue has been played.
Legacy Triumphs cannot be progressed.

Missions:

Presage
    Exotic: Dead Man’s Tale (DMT) craftable w/ new perk pool
    Seasonal Weapons: Season of the Haunted and Opulent Weapons.
    Seasonal Armor: Eidolon Pursuant
    Requires Beyond Light or Season of the Chosen (not Haunted?)
Vox Obscura
    Exotic: Dead Messenger craftable w/ new perk pool
    Seasonal Weapons: Season of the Risen
    Seasonal Armor: Tusked Allegiance
    Requires Witch Queen or Season of the Risen
Operation Seraph’s Shield
    Exotic: Revision Zero (no changes)
    Seasonal Weapons: Seraph Weapons and IKELOS v3 weapons
    Seasonal Armor: Seraph
    Requires Witch Queen or Season of the Seraph

Exotic Crafting:

First completion grants the weapon that can extract the pattern.
Each further completion grants additional intrinsic upgrades (frames).
Each completion of Legendary will award a Catalyst upgrade.

Armor and Weapon Rewards:

Separate weekly rewards for Normal and Legendary.
    One guaranteed deepsight weapon that has not completed its pattern and one armor piece.
    Once all weapons are unlocked a random world drop weapon will drop.
    Additional seasonal weapons rewarded for each completion but no knockout or guaranteed deepsight.
Additional Weekly Challenge rewards:
    One guaranteed deepsight that has not had its pattern completed.
    Armor that you have not acquired for the class you complete it on.
    Once all weapons and armor are acquired then it will drop random drops for both.

Exotic Mission gives bonus progress for Xenology quest from Xur.

Age Gating

To comply with global legislation Bungie will require birth date and country of origin verification on the app, Bungie.net, and when signing in via 3rd party services on the API (light.gg, DIM, etc.)

That’s it for big info on this TWID

TL;DR, Lance Reddick is being replaced in the future by Keith David. This seems like one of the better possible outcomes after Lance's passing, and I'm pretty excited to see where we go from here!

Really like how the solstice armor fits with the OG Cuirass and the matching class ornament.

The 6,400 word 2023 Destiny 2 State of the Game post that was published by Game Director Joe Blackburn yesterday has seemingly united disparate fans and content creators all across the playerbase.

Kind of expected this response.

Addressing Feedback

• In Season 22, we’re updating those weekly ritual challenge requirements so players can complete their nine challenges in any ritual playlist they’d like, as opposed to having to complete three each across Vanguard, Crucible, and Gambit playlists. We’ll also be increasing the frequency of ritual engram drops after completing ritual activities, and we’re making the latest ritual loot pool weapons focusable at their respective vendors at the start of the Season for the first time, rather than needing to wait until the following Season to chase those god rolls.

PvP

• New PvP Map (Season 22): Multiplex

• New PvP Modifier - Checkmate: Checkmate is a modifier where rich Primary weapon fights can happen more often, and gun skill can be augmented by communication and strong positioning. Primary weapon damage has been tuned to feel different than the rest of the game without being jarring, reducing the gap between the faster killing weapons and the average time-to-kill, and in general pushing longer range Primaries into slower killing profiles. Player health has been increased, all ability cooldowns are lengthened, and Special ammunition must be earned via gameplay and is not dropped on death. This all results in slightly longer combat encounters that reward skill and consistency.

  • Checkmate will be available in Crucible Labs from Week 5 to Week 10. We will start off with two weeks of Checkmate Control, then switch it up with two weeks of Checkmate Survival, and finally, two weeks of Checkmate Rumble to finish off its trial run for Season 22.

• New PvP Mode - Relic: Relic is a 6v6 party mode where players wreak havoc and destruction on their foes with relic weapons. Relics include the Aegis from Vault of Glass, the Synaptic Spear from Season of the Risen, and the Scythe from Season of the Haunted. Each player charges their personal relic energy by defeating opponents with their normal loadout. Upon reaching full charge, players can acquire a relic from a relic depot. Defeating relic holders and using the relics to defeat opponents earns points for the team.

  • Whereas Checkmate is heavily focused on gunfights, Relic is intended to provide lighthearted gameplay that can be enjoyed by anyone, similar to Mayhem and Team Scorched. Relic will be available in Crucible Labs from Week 1 to Week 4, and again in Week 11 until the close of the Season. We look forward to hearing your feedback on both Checkmate and Relic when they roll out next Season.

• Matchmaking Updates: Our quest to constantly improve matchmaking is always ongoing, and in Season 22, we’re modifying our loose skill-based matchmaking settings for Control and Iron Banner. These new settings will look to improve matchmaking times and experiences for players who find themselves at the upper or lower ends of the skill spectrum, and for those playing in low-population regions or times.

  • The team is also adding loose Fireteam Matchmaking to the Crucible rotators, including Labs, to ensure players are being evenly matched against similar Fireteam sizes without the need for a Freelance node. Additionally, we’ll be tackling an issue with lobby balancing that can misallocate players over certain skill levels.

• Also coming in Season 23: Looking further ahead, we’re planning to deliver a new Iron Banner mode for Season 23, along with a brand-new Häkke Aggressive Frame Strand Pulse Rifle as our newest Competitive Division weapon reward. The Mercurial Overreach Adaptive Frame Arc Sniper Rifle will remain available for competitors throughout Season 22.

  • As a reminder, we’re also focusing our map reprisal efforts on porting The Citadel from 2018 to the Crucible in Season 23. We all have fond memories of dominating Control with our fireteams on this one and can’t wait to see what you do with the latest arsenal out there in The Dreaming City.

Vanguard

• Vanguard Medals: will be available in Vanguard Ops and Nightfalls starting in Season 22. After first being introduced in last year’s Guardian Games and their continued success in this year’s event, we have decided to bring them in full-time to spice things up in our Vanguard playlists.

  • Medals will contribute to scoring, allowing players to attain higher scores and reputation multipliers by performing unique actions and doing cool things. Our goal here is to reward players for playing well, and not require players to go out of their way to grind for score. In short: we don't want you to feel like you have to compromise your build in order to boost your score with additional medals.
  • Some medals from Guardian Games will be exclusive to Guardian Games, such as finishing champions/elites.

• We’ve also recently focused more of our teams’ resources into more varied and frequent Seasonal activities, such as Battlegrounds, that can later make their way into Vanguard playlists alongside our Strikes and eventually serve as new additions to Nightfall and Grandmaster playlists. While this can come at the cost of other content in a given year, we feel this exchange has been worth the extra investment for the overall health of our playlists. As a result, we’ll have additional Battlegrounds coming into the Nightfall and Grandmaster Nightfall rotations in Seasons 22 and 23 to keep players on their toes before The Final Shape launches.

Gambit

• While we don’t have plans to dedicate more resources to significantly transform Gambit, we do have a few updates planned for the year of The Final Shape. These include porting the Cathedral of Scars map and its beautiful Dreaming City setting into the latest version of Destiny 2, as well as adding the Shadow Legion and Lucent Hive enemy types.

• We’re also reducing the number of Gambit-specific Seasonal Challenges starting in Season 22, so players won’t need to bank motes to be able to earn that big purse of Bright Dust for completing nearly every challenge in the Season. Finally, we’re adding Fireteam Matchmaking to Gambit next Season, which will replace the Freelance node and should result in faster, better matchmaking by combining both Gambit playlists. We’ll keep an eye on reception and player engagement after these additions take place, and we hope you’ll visit ‘ol Drifter next Season to get your hands on his new Void Machine Gun.

Armor Set Updates

• A long time ago, we shared a plan to address concerns on reward balance. Players have pointed out that we didn’t release a new armor set for the ritual playlists (Vanguard, Crucible, Gambit) with Lightfall as previously called out in our yearly release schedule. Delivering ritual armor sets at the rates we have in the past has become increasingly challenging, especially considering these sets have historically had very low adoption by players as both base armor and cosmetic ornaments.

  • At this time, we are amending our delivery plans for how often we refresh these sets and will no longer be creating a new set for every expansion. However, we are prioritizing the delivery of a new ritual armor set alongside The Final Shape to infuse some new looks you’ll be able to show off from your time in the Vanguard, Crucible, and Gambit playlists. We also have a new armor set for Trials of Osiris releasing in just a few short weeks!

Game Security

• Over the course of the year, we have invested further in data science and machine learning, building confidence in the detections they produce. These tools allow us to observe and evaluate player behavior in new ways and issue an increasing number of actions in response.

• In addition, we have continued to adapt new policies to protect players, including the Abuse of External Accessibility Tools policy. The development of this policy has allowed us to catch cheaters that we may not have otherwise. This policy not only gives us an avenue to action this form of cheating, but it has also spurred us to investigate player behavior in new ways.

• Finally, we've worked with BattlEye to address network manipulation tools, improving our data collection, detection, and mitigation strategies. Competition is best when fair, so we will continue to issue bans or restrictions to those abusing these methods.

Stability Updates

• Moving toward 7.2.0 (Season 22 launch), we are beginning to do internal “chaos testing” using the new code we added and are already using that data to make more improvements in the 7.2.0 update, as well as verify current fixes we have planned for the Season. As we do this work, we aren’t just focusing on the Claims system outlined in our roadmap. Our efforts also cover stability across all 50+ services that help to make Destiny 2 run. These include taking a close look at our load balancing code, service-to-service communication code, internal message processing pipelines, and more.

• If 7.2.0 is focused on detecting and fixing current stability issues, the theme of 7.3.0 (Season 23 launch) will be helping to protect us against stability issues that might occur in the future. Work here will focus on systems like auto-recovery, making internal systems healthier, and further isolating systems from one another so that a problem in one area is less likely to cascade into issues in other areas. We want our players to have the best possible experience, and we view our work with Destiny Services as a long-term project that we will continue to invest in beyond Season 23 and into the future.

Seasonal Structure

• As we mentioned back in February, we’ve been working behind the scenes to shake up the Seasonal paradigm this year to subvert player expectations and make each Season feel unique. We know our players are looking for more variety in repeatable Seasonal activities, and more than anything, we want to constantly surprise everyone with what comes next in each Season.

Quality of Life Upgrades

• Cosmetic Favoriting: At long last, you’ll be able to pin up to 100 of your favorite shaders, ornaments, and emotes to the top of the list starting in Season 22.

• Stasis Aspects and Fragments moved to vendor system: Any character who has completed the Beyond Light campaign will be able to acquire all available Stasis Aspects and Fragments from Elsie Bray on Europa starting next Season.

• Transmats will now be unlocks: Like shaders before them, transmats will now be stored as unlocks on your account, rather than consumable items. Feel free to change transmats at will without needing to grab copies from Collections or find them in the wild.

• Wish-Ender pursuit improvements: The Wish-Ender quest has gone through a number of changes throughout the years, and in Season 22, it becomes a real quest. No more charged or uncharged discs sitting in your inventory – just a single quest strand in your quest log.

• Resources tab added to Collections: This is a change we are really excited about – we now have a Resources tab in the Collections, which shows you all of the currencies, upgrade materials, and engrams in the game, appropriately categorized, with information on how to acquire it, as well as what to do with it once you have it.

• Iron Banner Challenges split:

  • With Pinnacle rewards not being as big of a draw as they once were Season-over-Season since Season of the Deep began, we felt it was time to split the Pinnacle acquisition and reputation multipliers we added back in Season of the Haunted.

  • Starting in Season 22, Iron Banner will have two different stacking challenges each day: one for players who just want their reputation multiplier which does not require using specific Seasonal subclasses, and one for players who are going after their Pinnacle rewards, which does require using Seasonal subclasses.

• Ritual Rank Ups immediately: Dating all the way back to Season 3, ritual reputations (previously known as Valor, Glory, and Infamy) waited until you hit orbit to process any rank-ups, because the almost-full screen banner would overwrite the scoreboard if it showed up earlier. When we revamped and streamlined reputations over the past few years, we moved the rank-up banner to the bottom of the screen and made them less conspicuous, but we left the processing of the ranks until you hit orbit. Now we’ve finally taken the step and made the rank-up process immediately at the end of an activity. No more waiting for your rewards... now they’ll show up right away in your loot stream.

Sandbox Updates

• New Strand Aspects: At the start of Season 22, we’re adding three new Strand Aspects to enhance the Strand kit of each class by adding a unique dynamic gameplay element. These Aspects will be Whirling Maelstrom for Hunter, Banner of War for Titans, and Weavewalk for Warlocks. Stay tuned for more info as we get closer to the launch of the Season.

• Exotic Armor Reworks, Pt. 2: Similar to our first wave of Exotic revamps in Season of the Deep, the team is reworking another batch of underused Exotic armor pieces in Season 22 to shake things up and give players a new reason to dive into their Vaults. Watch for a new Developer Insights article going live next week to cover all the changes we’ve got coming.

• New Weapon Subfamilies Incoming: Looking further into the future, we’ll be introducing some entirely new weapon subfamilies with The Final Shape. Tune into the Showcase on August 22nd to get your first look at some of these in action, as well as some other unexpected additions to Destiny 2’s arsenal yet to come.

• Previously mentioned Weapon tuning updates

Highlights

Ritual Playlists:

• Ritual rewards are being combined. No need to do 3 strikes, 3 crucible games, and 3 gambit games each week.
• Newest ritual weapons can be target farmed the season they release instead of waiting a season.

PVP:

• Trials GL is Strand. Unclear if it's breach or Heavy.
• New Vex network map coming next Season. Asymmetrical map for multiple modes.
• New 6v6 Relic mode.
  • Party Mode
  • VoG Aegis, Synaptic Spear, and Haunted Scythe will be usable in this mode.
  • Players charge their relic energy with their normal loadout and grab one from a specific map point.
• Checkmate (gun focused PVP) is a modifier.
  • More focus on Primary weapon gunplay.
  • Guardian health is increased.
  • Longer range weapons are less effective.
  • Ability cooldowns lengthened
  • Special Ammo not dropped on death.
• Relic and Checkmate start in labs in Season 22.
• Matchmaking updates to Iron Banner and Control in Season 22
• New Iron Banner mode in Season 23
• New Aggressive Strand Pulse as comp reward in Season 23
• No new comp reward in Season 22. Mecurial Overreach Sniper will remain the reward.
• Citadel Dreaming City Map returning in Season 23.

Vanguard:

• Vanguard Medals available in Strikes and Nightfalls in Season 22
• Finishers will not grant medals.
• New medals in Season 22 and 23 we haven't seen yet.
• Selection of Medals is determined by the active surges to encourage diversity.
• Additional battlegrounds coming to the Ops playlist in Season 22 and 23.

Gambit (RIP):

• No plans to transform Gambit.
• Player engagement is too low and it would take resources from other parts of the game.
• Dreaming City Map is returning
• Shadow Legion & Lucent Hive are being added as enemy types.
• Reducing number of Gambit specific seasonal challenges.

Armor Set Rewards:

• Haven't gotten new ritual armor because it's challenging to make and players don't use it as armor or cosmetics.
• New Trials armor in Season 22. Titan looks like a Bear?
• New Ritual armor in TFS but will no longer get a new set with each expansion.

Security:

• Bungie is getting better at detecting cheaters.
• Legal team is aggressively going after cheat makers.

Stability:

• Logs and monitoring helped get updates in place quicker than previously thought.
• Issues with the Claims service has improved.
• Patch 7.2.0 is focused on fixing existing issues.
• Patch 7.3.0 is aiming to prevent future ones.

Quality of Life Updates (All Season 22):

• Favorite Shaders (thank god)
• Pin up to 100 shaders.
• Any character who completes the Beyond Light campaign can unlock all Stasis Aspects and Fragments from Elsie Bray. No more waiting for reset.
• Transmat effects are permanent unlocks.
• Wishender quest updated.
• Resources tab in collections. Shows you where to get them and what they're for.
• Changes to IB challenges. One challenge to get the multiplier that doesn't require specific subclasses. Pinnacle will require specific subclasses.

Sandbox Updates:

• New strand Aspects in Season 22
  • Whirling Malestrom for Hunter
  • Banner of War for Titan
  • Weavewalk for Warlock
• More exotic armor reworks in Season 22. No specifics.
• New weapon subfamilies coming. Will be shown during the showcase.

Weapon Tuning:

• Goes over the changes coming to range values and damage falloff. See the other post for more details.

Goals for the next 6 Months:

• Expand Player's Imaginations
  • New seasonal paradigm coming. To be revealed at the showcase.
  • Seasonal Storytelling is designed to be more connected than last year leading up to TFS.
  • The Final Shape and its Raid will provide a definitive conclusion to the Light and Dark Saga before they look ahead for Destiny 2.
• Bring Challenge Back to Destiny
  • No power cap raise in Season 22
• Enrich Our Content
  • Exotic Mission rotator available day one in season 22
  • Some bounties being replaced with a system tentatively called "Pathfinder" that will be implemented in TFS on its destination.
• Connect Our Guardians
  • New ways in Season 22 to experience key D2 Moments
  • In game LFG in Season 23
  • New ways to track player progress in TFS.

Destiny 2 Showcase is August 22nd

Available till 8pm EST Tonight:

• Lobrock: Hammer Forged/Ricochet - Perpetual/Target Lock

Available till tomorrow at 8pm EST:

• Battle Scars: Arrowhead/Accurized - Perpetual/Headseeker

Activities

Solstice:

• Fixed an issue where not all expected activities on Neomuna were counting towards the Solstice challenge In the Hot Seat.
• Enabled Sparrows in the Bonfire Bash activity.
  • Get your zoom-zoom on.
• Fixed an issue where players were unable to finish the quest A Guardian in Shining Armor.

UI/UX:

• Fixed an issue where the Lightfall tooltip wasn’t mentioning the current Season.
• Fixed an issue where some Solstice items were missing from the Collections tab.

Gameplay and Investment

Armor:

• Fixed an issue where the armor mods Bolstering Detonation, Focusing Strike, Impact Induction, and Momentum Transfer could provide more ability energy than intended.

Power and Progression:

• Fixed an issue where the Warlock Aspect Child of the Old Gods would not provide the right amount of health and ability energy.

Guardian Ranks:

• Moved the Guardian Rank requirement for the Armor Charge Mods from Guardian Rank 6 to Guardian Rank 7.

Cross did a TL;DR for a recent interview with Bungie devs about the state of the sandbox. Some Highlights:

• Double Special PVE meta is NOT intended and getting adjusted. Trace Rifles and guns that straddle primary/special like Forerunner seem okay in Bungie's eyes. Fusion Rifle + GLs is not.
• Snipers and Scouts in PVE are hard to balance because they make encounters too safe. Points to many instances in D1 where we would sit in the back with Icebreaker.
• Snipers are underperforming and will be getting adjusted again after Season 22.
• Ammo reserves stat not likely getting shown in the game for a while because of how it's calculated.
• Testing a 10-15% PVE buff for Pulse Rifles for Season 23
• "Hand cannons will never one-tap in GMs"
• The baseline for weapon power is Heroic strikes and Legendary Campaign.
• Adept weapons should be 5-10% more effective than the non-adept.
• Weapons that don't have great stats try to make up for it with powerful perk combos.
• 150 HCs likely not coming back.
• New lightweight sidearm in Season 22.

PVP TTK Values:

• TTK is low because of a number of factors:
  • Destiny is a fast game. Higher TTK would allow players to just run away if they were shot first.
  • Special weapon uptime means that primaries need to have a low TTK to compete.
  • There are a lot of abilities that increase or grant health. Fast TTK ensures they don't get too oppressive.
• Primary TTK likely won't go up by much without adjustments to Special Weapon ammo economy.
• The sweet spot for TTK that the devs aim for is around .8 seconds and they try not to go lower than .67 seconds.
• Damage buffs that lower TTK are determined by how easy it is to get the buff.
• The Resistance value they try to aim for when optimizing TTKs for a weapon is 60 (Tier 6).
• New PVP gametype or modifier coming called "Checkmate" that increases the TTK value and modifies ability cooldowns.

PVP Weapon Use and Balance:

• Weapons are not balanced solely on usage. Usage is considered but it is lower on the pole than other things like community feedback and playtesting data.
• Bungie consideres 140 HCs as the baseline when balancing weapons.
• Bungie tends to look at high skill lobbies first when balancing weapons that are out of band. If they see the same stats reflected across all skill levels then it's an indicator that the weapon is overperforming.
• HCs seem to be used less now because of SBMM. Higher skill players are matching against each other and therefore playing more conservatively with PRs.
• 5 of the the top 10 most effective weapons are HCs in the current meta.
• The Immortal is 7th most effective but is the most used.
• The Immortal is not in the top 10 most OP weapons.
• Hard Light once had 30% of all weapon kills.
• HCs used to have more primary weapon kills than all other primaries combined.
• Felwinter's+HCs once had more kills than all other weapons combined in PVP.
• Only 3 SMGs in top 25 used weapons. 2 of them are Immortal and it's Adept.
• Immortal should be affected by the upcoming range changes and has had other direct nerfs to bring it in line.
• Mercules thinks that Shayura's is a more effective SMG than Immortal.
• Top 50 Primaries:
  • 17 HCs
  • 12 PRs
  • 7 SMGs
  • 5 AR
  • 6 Scouts
  • 3 sidearms
  • 1 Bow
  • (These numbers add up to 51. Not sure where the error is)
• High Rate of Fire weapons are hard to balance. Small changes have huge impacts. 360 ARs and 180 HCs mentioned specifically.
• These guns should benefit from the range changes.
• Bungie does not want a 360 AR meta.
• Glaive tuning coming for PVP. Looking at letting the shield auto recharge when the weapon is out but have the shield grant less DR.
• Bungie does not want Glaives to be the close range meta.
• Fusion rifles at the high end are overperforming.
• Nerfs coming to Under Pressure in Season 22. Kickstart might get a nerf later.
• Cloudstrike explosion radius getting reduced by 2m (5m down to 3m),
• Some bugs on Bows are getting adjusted. Reload speed and projectile velocity are getting adjusted.

Finally, some updates on material caps! They're as follows:

• Ascendant Shards: 10 => 30
• Ascendant Alloy: 10 => 30
• Enhancement Prism: 50 => 100

They also announced some incoming weapons to the various ritual playlists, along with the fact that focusing for new ritual weapons will be available right away, rather than having to wait for the next season to come around to focus weapons that have newly entered.

A good read all around.

True Vanguard updates his community about his next steps for his relationship with Destiny 2 and plans for commiting to Starfield

I finally got the Cenotaph to drop for me yesterday, and I gotta tell you - it’s a blast in PVE with coldheart and an ionic trace build. Double arc reserves and arc siphon with blinding explosions on my arc subclass is nuts! strong single target damage as well as crazy ad control, you’ve gotta try it if you happen to have the helmet.

I really wanted to talk about this video. I'm surprised by the support I've seen on this video over in the /r/destinythegame subreddit because I think it's overly dismissive of real issues and the communities feelings towards it.

One of his points that really stuck with me was when he said that the FOMO doesn't matter when it comes to seasonal stories because I can look up videos or other resources online to try to catch up.

Is that really a good enough solution to deflect criticism from Bungie?

What about triumphs or titles?

This video really left a bad taste in my mouth, but I recognize that I'm in the minority on this.