Category: Bungie News

RUST

LUCUS PLANUM EXPANSE

MARS

Tectonic groans shake the surface. Apollinaris Mons had been bellowing pyroclastic clouds for two days before the quakes doused its ambition. They shattered the volcano’s southern slope, sending the landmass shelves that supported Apollinaris’ caldera into freefall. Volcanic lightning forked illumination through plumes of soot over the cascading landslide. The face of Mars shed, and with it the glint of a treasured age was laid bare; grit-polished bone that hung among the alloy-flaked basalt cliffs like trophies in an iron case. 

Fresh Martian storms cut red into the sky.

Oxidized sandscape stretches for miles around the broken mountain, bent into multiple sloped creases that had cupped Apollinaris’ base before the fall. Their fracturing borne spillways down the volcano’s banks, as if loosed from between the fingers of fallen Ares, lost to time and waiting to be exhumed. 

Dunes migrate outward from the ruin, carried forward on strong zephyrs—each ever distant from the last. Under the windblown sands knuckled patches of basalt are revealed like fossils carefully brushed into sunlight by the breath of Aeolus. Wind, now unfettered by stony resistance, roars across open wastes, unfurls through the salt-encrusted yardangs that sparsely pock the surrounding desert, and rejoins the currents. Dust and ash follow. Thirteen salt-form opalescent spires encage the approach. They had ribbed inward against the caldera’s deluge; soot-ash frenzy staining them of burnt bones. 

Within the storm, a glow refracts.

A red-sea pyre. 

Coals still warm.

A sojourner’s welcome.

Ana Bray traverses the newly sunken expanse, wrapped in mixed layered garb that forms a pseudo-duster and trails her frame in scruffy shawls of loose thread. Jinju glides in front of her and spins a thin Light barrier to buffet away the scouring winds. She halts at the shore of the caldera, Apollinaris Mons’ wide crest vies for dominance over the horizon as it presses the borders of her vision. Resonators embedded across her custom SN0MASK hum and disperse dirt from her visor. 

“You were right about the storm, Jinju. It’s not going anywhere.” Her voice crackles through her respirator.

Jinju chirps sassily and rocks side to side. 

Ana scoffs. “Where’s your sense of adventure?”

Jinju pointedly focuses her iris on the lengthy distance they’ve already traveled, then on the remaining distance, and back to Ana.

“Yeah. It didn’t look this far from the air.” She shifts a bandolier of pouches over her head. 18 Kelvins tight to her hip. 

Her augmented eyes twist and focus to the cliff-face installation across the caldera. Braytech. Solid and unyielding in its form; a cenotaph to the progeny of her line. Ana’s hand finds the snap-lock on a bandolier pouch, pulls a locational tracker from it, and switches it to life. The screen pops dull-resolution green, and a rhythmic ping pulsates some distance ahead. 

Warsat Spike Integrated

Distance: 31,739 meters

Output: 51 GWh 

Geiger Reading: (!) 67 µSv/y (!)

Biometric Activity: Negative

Network Uplink: Negative

Broadcast Signal: Negative

Time: 12:04

“No Hive, no Cabal. Either they’re stretched thin or we got here faster than I thought.” Ana cycles her sulfur-stained respirator filter with a new one. 

Jinju cheeps excitedly at the lack of hostiles, “About time.”

“Right?” Ana looks back to the tracker. “That’s a lot of power, whatever you are.”

Jinju slowly emerges over Ana’s shoulder and emits a duo of low hums.

“Geothermal makes sense.” She nods towards the center of the caldera.

Ana commits the information to memory before stowing the tracker. “Good readings. Nice shot, Red.”

A synesthetic tone ripples marmalade hue through her helmet in response.

“You’re welcome.”

*** *** *** *** ***

Their descent to the roof of the exposed facility entrance had been the cleanest route. The trio’s position atop the tunneled arch oversaw the caldera, with the installation’s entrance causeway far below them. 

Jinju scans a cylinder protruding from the corroded roof, years caked around its metal frame. Ana kneels beside her. She scrapes oxidization from the cylinder’s riveted label with her boot knife.

Cranial Node S-0319

Ana runs her glove down the cylindrical node, brushing dust and oil grime from its metallic shell in search of a seam. “Hello Cranial Node S-0319. Nice to meet you, you sneaky bastard.”

She guides the edge of her knife to chip away rust and expose the discolored metal underneath. How long did it take for rust to bleed tarnish into the steel’s luster? She wipes her palm across the enclosure circularly, smearing ash progressively thinner until it blends like cloudy wax polish. Ana exhales, rolls her shoulders and continues chipping away. The knife’s blade finds purchase in the crease of the node’s access panel seam. Ana pushes an impulse of Light through the blade, busting the access panel cover free from its rusted locks.

AUX ACCESS

REDLINE-1-OPERATIVE

SUBSET —PILLORY #9

BRAYTECH™

SERIAL – 1012058112-CLVS-9

“Auxiliary panels. Why would they put these on a closed system… outside?”

Jinju cocks her shell to the side as if to shrug. “Hard to say.”

“Nothing in the archives?”

Jinju shakes her shell left to right: No.

Ana shifts. “You know what this is, Red?” 

Discordant tone ripples indistinct expressions that fade against her visor. 

“We’ll see if you remember anything after we hook you into the mainframe.”  Ana kneels and looks over the exposed node panel before replacing the cover. “Maybe even something on Atlas.” Words sent forth to die in the storm. Atlas. Clovis Br— her grandfather’s mythic journal. Its obscurity had proven far more challenging to overcome than anticipated. Ana’s determination, however, was a resilient creature. Here, she would find answers.

Jinju chirps and bobs toward the setting sun breaking through the edge of the storm. Thunder booms.

Ana rocks back on her heels, letting her momentum tip her into a seated position in the dirt. Her eyes follow rusty drifts across the conquered spillway. A red front swims from the clouds overhead outward, kilometers away, nearly cinching off Sol’s pale light. The star is a frail bulb. The delicate few petals of warmth that escape settle on Ana’s face: pollen sunk to surface. She lets it soak—a momentary basking. 

Night creeps from the horizon, and with it the cold of darkness. 

She wouldn’t stay long enough to be exposed.

Ana eyes the causeway beneath. A reinforced blast door, rough with erosion, was blown agape at some point. Jinju peers over the hundred-meter drop and descends steadily without hesitation. Ana pulls a dual-line cord from her bandolier and embeds it into the stone face. She lets her center of gravity teeter and fall, catching herself on cushions of Light to slow her.

Her feet find ground, Ghost beside her. She anchors the other end of her dual-line in the causeway steel and clamps an auto-lift to it. Ana revs the auto-lift and runs slack out of the line.

Jinju turns to Ana. Iris meets eyes.

“Think anybody’s home?” Ana dips her head toward the entrance.

Flavored tone ripples cinnamon, and the scent washes across her visor into a dull whine.

Jinju chirps and nods towards something behind her.

Some distance from the opening, a detached sign lay exposed:

CLOVIS — 9

Ana’s eyes sharpen, adventurous and keen. 

“Nine? Here I thought we’d found all the sites on Mars.”

End

Patina

CLOVIS – 9

APOLLINARIS’ CALDERA

The splintered blast door wheezes. Licks of wind spill over the caldera and whistle through ragged gaps between metal-shed fragments. The blast door had been peeled away; curlicues of high-density Plasteel gnarled into dead spider legs.

Ana focuses her eyes on the damage. “This door. It’s built like a vault. Something punched right through it.”

Jinju draws a scan over the door, frame to frame. “They’d need a lot of power to penetrate that much Plasteel.”

Heat discoloration, frictional wear, and vigorous application are printed throughout the vault-style door. Channels like neon paint-spatter radiation scar the metal’s face, gilded in veins of copper-teal patina. Tarnish concentrates along the strips that once formed the center of the door, while the surrounding shore-like edges, still largely intact, remain swollen and fused to the archway framing it. 

Ana steps closer to the blast door and runs her hand along the steel. She swats to silence the resonators on her visor. “I didn’t see this from up there. I thought it was just pitted but look at these markings.”

Jinju floats squarely above Ana’s head. Her iris traces the spiraling patterns within small indented pits in the metal. Together, they follow interlinking connections that flow from the door’s center, outward, carving symmetrical grooves only micrometers in depth.

“So… not punched. More like pushed.” Jinju zeroes in on stress fractures in the metal. The damage was applied delicately, as if someone had split, bent, and smoothed each individual protrusion with meticulous intention. 

Ana scrapes corrosion into a sterile receptacle with fingertips clawed in pointed Light and stows it in her bandolier.

Jinju chirps. “Damage pre-dates the eruption—by a lot. It’s a miracle it wasn’t flooded.”

Ana nods. “These patterns look like… wavelengths? What do you think, Red?”

Aurelian honey-dripped tones wash through Ana’s helmet in luxurious fashion.

“Something Golden Age. Sure.” Ana massages her palm contemplatively. “Biometric scan still says it’s empty. Whatever did it, they’re gone now.”

Jinju flicks a light on and shines it into the door-hole puncture. “Guardians first.”

Ana scrunches her face at her Ghost. “You know, normally it’s the lackey that goes in first.”

“Yes,” chirps Jinju.

Rasputin hums a resplendent and authoritative purplish rhythm through Ana’s helmet. It persists, orchestral vibrato trailing in her ears.

“Ha. Ha.” Ana responds, devoid of amusement.

They enter together. 

Ana leads. 

Jinju’s light speckles through ash flittering in from the punctured doorway, but all elsewhere there is only stillness.  A small utilitarian atrium encircles them with a freight lift directly ahead, saddled by two large windows. Smudges and clouded filth belie a grander facility beyond them. A sectioned-off reception desk fills the space on their right, while lockers line the opposing left wall or lay fallen in impact craters of collecting ash. Above them a large gyro arm, split away from the vault door, is ensconced into the ceiling. Cracks in the surrounding superstructure tell of a violent snap. 

The room isn’t particularly tall, only enough to accommodate the entryway frame behind them. From the arm, the ceiling slopes down swiftly to the top of the lift mechanism, lines of florescent bulbs popped or burnt out ages ago litter the floor in a field of glass shards that transform Jinju’s light-beam into prismatic skitters across the walls.

Ana looks around and crunches through the glass, making her way to the windows. Her visor ripples infrared as a scan sweeps the room. Heat signatures, nil.

“I’m not seeing any access points to plug Red in.” Her voice trails with abject confusion.

Jinju whirs and floats passed Ana, decompiling herself into data-points of Light that sift into the walls around the lift. Jinju’s flashlight goes with her. Darkness rushes in on Ana to fill the space left by Jinju’s absence. It halts against a Light epimysium, clinging to her like a second skin.

She waits in depth. A pause.

Time: malleable in the dark.

Ana puts her fingers to the glass and leans. It feels firm, cold, resistant to pressure. She draws in her fingers, leaving trenches in the caked soot. Her fist closes and polishes a clean hole through the smears.

A pop sounds overhead and glass plinks off her helmet. Ana ducks her head reflexively.

The few remaining intact fluorescent bulbs surge with electricity. Some burst into flashes of ash and sparks, but enough remain to dimly light the room. Through the newly cleaned window porthole, lights twinkle within a dark expanse of liquid before swelling into waves of psychedelic surf across endless towering fields of circuitry. Ana inches her face closer to the glass.

The lift chugs.

A thin overlay interface pulses to life on top of the basalt separation between lift and window, pulling away 

Ana’s attention. 

Jinju recompiles herself into being, a smug lilt to her wafting motions through the air. Her light-beam carves existence out of the dark. “Rasputin can’t do everything you know.”

A crimson-hue lash spits venom across Ana’s visor.

“Good job Jinju. Red, cool it.”

The trio board the lift.

The lift descends.

MAXIMUM CAPACITY—14515kg

They drift diagonally deeper. On either side, paint-stamped signage bears familiarity.

>>> CLOVIS — 9 >>>

The Bray name, in origin—at least as far back as anyone would care to look—was seated inseparably from Clovis. Preservations on the shaft walls, though dulled under waning ash coat, solidify his legacy in stenciled prints visible through the split-weave chicken wire wrap that surrounds the lift. 

Ana lets loose a whistle. “Raasssputin. This has your name written all over it.”

Senseless quiet sounds back in recognition of a daunting unfamiliarity.

>>> PILLORY CONTAINMENT / MAINTENANCE >>>

Hydraulic pipes groan as the freight lift transitions from the stony shaft enclosure into a glass-walled overlook.

Ana steps forward, Jinju close behind. Both peer through the rusted links into monolithic mangroves of circuitry and data cores, drown in an oceanic tank. Coolant ebbs and flows through bundles of sapphire wiring in shallow breaths. Psychotropic-surge washes over motley arcs of electricity as they zip between the towers like synaptic impulses.

Tint spills through the glass and flows over eye and iris alike, dripping color into faint emergency lighting. Ana slips between the feverish half-breath beats of pigment that roll over the lift cabin. She could stare forever. If time would wait, it might be enough.

Rhythmic. Fleeting. Frenetic. Beauty.

In arrest.

Something blinks in her visor:

(!) HYPOXEMIA: b/o 77% (!)

She shakes it. Comes to. Breathes. Sharp.

Ana turns her head towards Jinju, her eyes still affixed to the glass.

“Are those servers? An archive?” An undercurrent of excitement pitches through Ana’s voice. Atlas had always materialized in her mind as a journal or hidden subset of file directories… but this, if it was what she thought it was… After all these years buried gems still hold the capacity to surprise her.

Jinju sends scans out into the drink. “They’re shielded.” She sinks a bit under the weight of her disappointment. “It’s odd that they’d run the servers off backup power, if that’s what they are. I was only able to trip the auxiliary breaker from the atrium.”

>>> MAINFRAME ACCESS >>>

“At least we’re going the right direction.”

Clatters and whines echo through the shaft as the lift comes to a stop.

Gates glide through pristine tracks and slip into alcove slots in the walls, giving way to a maintenance nexus fed by dozens of service hatch, fiber-line cluster, and access tunnel nervous systems that sprawl the facility.

Directly ahead, a door:

PILLORY MAINFRAME

PARAGON

Ana’s visor sweeps and hi-lights a dead network aperture embedded in a web of tunnels below them. 

“Jinju, think you can get us in through that?

Crinkle-thrum laughter purrs from Jinju’s shell. “Power will be restored momentarily.”

Ana approaches the mainframe door; Jinju’s Light-fetters dissipate behind her. It’s no blast door, but still far denser than any of the surrounding maintenance hatches. Ana turns away from the door and looks back to survey the room.

Brass-hue citrus prickles surge from temple to temple across her visor. Discrepancies in the floor’s smoothness trim with ballistics pings. Impact-gouge divots had whisked chunks of melted stone into shallow swept peaks all along the floor. A peppering of gloss-ridden flakes around each of Rasputin’s contact pings designate three main concentrations of fire.

“Someone had a gunfight down here. Looks like everything was flying one direction. Nice catch, Red.”

Satin satisfaction weaves over Ana’s skin and dissolves like perfume.

Jinju reforms, prideful.

“Auxiliary power spooling down. Main power stations, of which there are twenty-two, are coming online presently. Expect full operational system functionality to be restored within a minute or two.”

“What would I do without you?”

“Well you’d only die once, and that would be it.”

Ana shakes her head and attempts to bite down a smile.

Rasputin remains silent.

The trio position themselves at the door as breaker activations roll thunderous current through the facility.

Ana unclasps the holster strap on 18 Kelvins.

Light-strips sputter and strain to illumination along corners and grooves outlining the floor and ceiling. Glimmers catch in the gunfire ruts behind them.

 She extends her fist to Jinju.

Jinju bumps it with her shell. 

Ana taps her knuckles against her helmet to a bass-beat response.

She nods. “Stay behind me.”

A lens blinks at center-top position above the mainframe door. It sweeps red light over them, focuses in on Ana Bray’s badge, and shuts off. Moments pass before a decrepit speaker garbles a synthetic wail of acknowledgement. Piston locks slink into silicon-grease sheaths and the access door retracts into the ceiling.

Bodies. 

Flickering shadows strobe three forms—sunken and ragged. They lay motionless in pools of iridescent slick; tacky globs grip tattered textile strands like thread-bare posts driven into oil. Powerless. Unlit. 

“Exos,” Jinju’s somberness bleeds into the cadence of her movement as she sweeps the scene. “Repairs might be—

“And wipe them again? No.” Ana follows her in and hovers over one of them, carefully avoiding the pool of oil. “Let them be… besides it’s not like they’re going anywhere.”

Between the bodies lay a sleek instrument, sized for crew deployment and dressed in precious filigree tendrils rimmed in calligraphic etching. The instrument’s core links to multiple platinum discus drums implanted into its frame, resembling the smaller resonators on Ana’s helmet, and ends with a hopper-crown of artificial diamond bearings.

“Here’s what they used to crack the entrance door.” Jinju assesses structural damage to the device. Twists of broken machinations do nothing to diminish its Golden Age beauty. “Took a lot of hits. Inoperable. Not beyond saving though.”

Jinju tilts to the machine while Ana approaches an Exo body. “Should I transmat this back home?”

“Yeah…” Her answer full of distraction.

Ana kneels, a visor sweep hi-lights bullet holes, ruptures, and mechanical failures—her eyes, however, see only the BrayTech emblem emblazoned on the Exo’s uniform. Ana pulls a rusty-clasp badge from the Exo’s belt. 

0220-17

ECHO PROJECT

PARAGON CLEARANCE

“This is how they accessed the lift… and got through the door scan. How long ago was this?”

Power kicks on. Strip-lights drone as charge flows through the room. A thick glass enclosure dug out of the far wall brightens. Beyond the glass divider: a step-way and a series of consoles undergoing automated boot procedures.

Jinju analyzes an Exo. “They’re well preserved down here, hard to tell exactly. I’ll take some samples.”

A synthetic voice, wracked with static and age, seethes into the room.

“Security Verification…”

Jinju and Ana turn to each other. 

Ana lifts her hands into a shrug and mouths: I don’t know!?

Jinju’s look intensifies into a glare, her thoughts almost transmitting telepathically: Try something?

“Bray, Anastasia. Verification—”

Scans run over them.

“Anomalous Entity Detected…

Rogue Mind Detected…”

A duo of gauss repeaters drop and align firing solutions. Ana grips Jinju with her gun-hand and flings her back, condensing a swarm grenade into her left. She tumbles sideways as the coilguns open fire and flings the grenade in the opposite direction. It erupts into firefly explosives that flutter toward the turrets. The repeaters snap to the solar-heat signatures and unload at the distraction.

18 Kelvins lines up with the leftmost repeater, chunking round after electrified round into the sparking turret. Her gun burns, super-heated, discharging arc-rounds with cores of solar Light. Metal drips molten from the turret’s fluxing frame. It rattles. A final round ruptures the magnetic barrel and splits the rotary breach, sending splinters of shrapnel across the room. 

With the swarm grenade’s fireflies depleting, the remaining gauss repeater swivels and locks onto Ana. She ducks under a leading shot and spins—using the centrifugal force to whip a solar knife through the turret, splitting it. Flame-licked fluid spills onto the ground as the knife detonates.

Fire fills the role of the stuttering lighting fixtures. 

“Of course, THOSE still work.” Ana pivots on her heel. “Jinju?”

Extinguishment protocols sputter into action, dousing the oily blaze with directed bicarbonate foam. 

“Alive!” Jinju slinks into view from behind a fallen Exo and examines the bullet-laden turret. “You’ve never tripped a security system before.”

Ana thumbs the ECHO badge in her hand before stowing it. “I don’t think I did.” She walks to the far wall.

“What did it mean by ‘rogue mind’?” Jinju glides close to Ana’s shoulders, remaining partially covered and taps her helmet with a plink of Light. “Does someone in THERE know?

Jade-scale hue tremors ripple over Ana’s visor like caffeinated tea before they fade into deep blood-red knots in her chest.

“Let’s get some answers.”

Ana swipes the ECHO card through a glowing slit in the glass. Recognition beeps and clinks sound as magnetic locks unlatch from the thick ballistic plate door. She pushes her way into the room, Jinju peers over her shoulder as she passes and watches Ana’s login clear on the console before following.

CLOVIS — 9

>PILLORY ACCESS

>ECHO LINK (!): PENDING REQUEST

>WARMIND NETWORK BYPASS

Ana stares into the console’s interface. “What are you?”

“Not Atlas.” Jinju’s dejection reverberates in the glass cell.

Ana flicks a sideward glance over her shoulder at her Ghost before selecting ‘Warmind Network Bypass’. “No, but it looks like this system has backdoors all over.”

She toggles through a list of shadow-networks, production facilities, and connected Pillory stations.

“It’s not Atlas, but it’s a start. There are eleven other stations like this—there’s a whole subnet defense network completely disconnected from the Warmind initiative.” Ana steps back.

“Why?” Jinju circles the screen.

“Why’s right.” Ana dives back into the terminal.

The facilities listed span the system. Earth and Luna, Europa, Asteroids adrift now belonging to the Shore. Mars— naturally. Even so far as Uranus. That station, an orbital, caught her eye. ECHO. She flicks back to the previous menu.

“Echo link. One of these stations has a pending request.”

Thin-tap tones of pale tin reek metallic inside Ana’s helmet, frenetic and uneven.

“Pillory does sound bad.” A few swift motions navigate the trio into the Pillory Access menu:

>REDLINE PROTOCOL – Test Pillory 

Status: [Ready]

>REDLINE PROTOCOL – Initiate Pillory 

Clearance: [P-7s]

>REDLINE PROTOCOL – Purge Pillory 

Status: [No Target]

>REDLINE PROTOCOL — PROCEDURAL OUTLINE

Select: [Ver. 1.072]

“Never hurts to read the instructions.” Ana selects the procedural outline. Her gaze chisels into the loading screen. 

______________________________________________________________________________________

In the event of a REDLINE PROTOCOL incident:

[PARAGON-level members] Pillory system network: CLOVIS — 1 – 12. 

ACCESS POINT: CLOVIS — 9

• In the event of a catastrophic failure, neural degeneration, or loss of containment, herein collectively referred to as a [ROGUE MIND] incident, initiates [WARMIND CEREBRAL PARTITIONING] and [QUARANTINE INTEGRATION] into twelve CLOVIS station(s) within [NEURAL WEB-WAY]. 
• REDLINE PROTOCOL:
• Check [PURGE] for [No Target].
• System reads [Locked] when in use
• System reads [No Target] when in standby
• Fire: Test Pillory
• Must read [Ready]
• Fire: Initiate Pillory
• WARNING: Initiate only during [ROGUE MIND] incident.
• Automated Link: [ECHO CONTINGENCY]
• Fire: [ECHO] Project, automated
• Sever connection to [ECHO LINK] for [REDLINE PROTOCOL QUARANTINE] in the event of a [ROGUE MIND] incident.
• Internal Failure Resolution Directives:
• Troubleshooting…
• Network schematic…
• Neural Web-way…
• Containment Failure…
• Station Maintenance…
• Clovis 1-12

______________________________________________________________________________________

Jinju rolls her shell end over end along the top of the console display. “Want me to get in there?”

“Yeah. Download everything. Figure out where we can stitch Rasputin in and give him station control.”

“Oh?”

Lavender-aroma relaxation subsides sour worry-knot tensions building throughout the atmosphere in Ana’s suit. 

“Red. If anyone can pull your brain apart, it should be you.”

“That… sounds fair,” Jinju agrees.

Ana leans into the console. “All these connections are one-way network integrations from closed systems. We’ll have to do it manually at each site.”

“Oh…” Jinju’s voice digitizes as she trails off into a snowdrift of Light and enters the console.

“But first…” Ana jumps back to the main menu and selects the pending ‘Echo Link’ request.

ECHO LINK

CAELUS STATION ACTUAL, URANUS

(!) MANUAL DISTRESS TRIGGER (!)

LAUNCH-1 INITIATED, MANUAL — FAILURE

BAY 1: COMPROMISED | BAY 2: INERT

(!) COUNTERBALANCE FAILURE (!)

(!) ORBITAL DECLINE — 42d12m07s (!)

The orbital decline timer ticks down.

“No time to waste. Once you get Red access, we have a station to save.”

End

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Frontline – General Bug Fixes / Quality of Life

(Frontline is a team dedicated to fixing an assortment of issues, no matter their area. Say hello!)

Crucible

Performance

Drew: Hey all, I’m Drew. I started playing FPS games back during some of the early Halo titles, and since then been in love with Bungie FPS games. I’ve attended a few MLG events and made some great friends through competitive Halo, and that trend continued into Destiny where I’ve had the pleasure of attending some great community gatherings and made some lifelong friends. In my personal life, I’m a musician, and enjoy other hobbies like playing soccer and the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG.

I suppose that I’m best known in the Destiny community for making opinion and review videos where I try and include a high degree of depth and analysis. Second to that, I guess most people would identify me for being a controller player, sniping, and having 42,069 kills on my Twilight Oath kill counter—oh, also jamming to Taylor Swift while sniping.

Drew: My favorite Subclass is definitely Spectral Blades, I think both the neutral game and Super are incredibly powerful and rewarding. Second to that, I really love the new changes to the Attunement of Sky Dawnblade. The dodge handles momentum much better now and allows for some incredible movement and plays. Both Supers remind me of some characters I like in my favorite anime, Sword Art Online, so I love the fantasy behind them.

I’m not sure I could name my absolute favorite weapons in the game, there are too many I love because of either aesthetics, functionality, or memories I have associated with them—and occasionally for all of the above. If I had to include some names that would probably find themselves in my top-ten list, they would be (in no particular order):

Izanagi’s Burden

Suros Regime

The Chaperone

Not Forgotten

Twilight Oath

Mida Multi-Tool 

Redrix’s Claymore

Outbreak Perfected

Drew: My YouTube Channel is home to many hot takes, thoughts, and opinion videos. These are my best attempts to break down different elements of the sandbox and show how they work, for the purpose of better understanding the game and creating the most effective and fun loadouts possible. I do reviews on specific weapons and armor pieces (as well as comparisons between them), and sometimes show off synergistic loadouts including different weapons and armor that I find to be very effective, fun, or both. My Twitch channel is where I like to relax and be a bit more candid—usually sniping, trying out different weapons, going for cool clips, and talking with chat.

Drew: I’ve most certainly picked out my Trials dream team, and of course it includes CammyCakes and Sidezz. We’ve played together since the beginning of Destiny 2, and I can confidently say that they are incredibly talented players and two of my best friends. We may not be the best in the game, but I feel we have great synergy together—we complement each other’s gameplay and are also very like-minded so we’re able to discuss our mishaps/losses to focus on improving.

Drew: Only last thing I’d like to add is that I think the Destiny community is fantastic, and I’m so thankful for meeting some great individuals (many I can call friends) and creating lifelong memories with them. I hope we—as players, content creators, and developers—continue to lift each other up and spread kindness to keep making great memories and grow the community.

This Week at Bungie, we prepare for the worthy.

Now, we have some housekeeping to do before we arm an ancient Warmind. Let’s get to it.

#TrialsReturns

Moments after the announcement that Trials of Osiris would return with Season of the Worthy, we witnessed numerous Guardians sharing their favorite memories from this beloved corner of the PvP endgame. Moments of spectacle, joy, heartbreak, insanity, and everything in between. Trials of Osiris was the source of some awesome community highlights—a thing that some of our newer Guardians may have yet to experience. We’d love to see more of your stories and bring them into the scene.

If your video is selected, you and your fireteam will take home a Movie of the Week emblem. Make sure to include links to the Bungie.net profiles of every team member.

Power Gains

With each new Season, you’re faced with new challenges that require a bit of Power acquisition to take on. In Season of Worthy, you’ll be challenged in not only Trials of Osiris, but in Legendary Lost Sectors and Grandmaster Nightfalls. Here’s a quick update from the Dev team on what’s changing on day-one, and what our plans are for a mid-season update:

Dev team: We’re raising the ‘cap’ for gear drops 40 points—powerful gear will now drop up to 1000, with pinnacle drops going up to 1010. The soft cap has also been effectively raised 50 points. Gear drops from nearly all sources will continue to be upgrades until 950 Power, and powerful reward sources will not be required to progress to 950. We’re looking to present an element of gear progression available each Season, as well as prepare underlying systems for future updates like the forthcoming one for Legendary weapons mentioned by Luke Smith in the Director’s Cut ‘Weapons Forever’ section.

We’re also looking to make some quality of life updates in the pinnacle band. Starting in 2.8.1. (coming mid-Season), we’ll be upgrading some existing powerful rewards to pinnacle rewards. These are the weekly Crucible, Strike, and Gambit challenges, as well as the weekly clan engram. With this change, we want to increase the total number of pinnacle power sources in the game, broaden pinnacle drop access, as well as increase the pools of items that can drop in the pinnacle band.

Slot imbalances can also affect pinnacle progression. When we say slot imbalance, this could be explained as those times you have a chest piece drop from pinnacle sources a few times in a row. We’ve been looking at player feedback for some time, and are investigating a few approaches to the problem space. We’re looking to have an update on that at a later date. Until then, we hope the additional sources will help you on your climb.

While we have the Dev team here, they also wanted to give an update on Artifact Power for Trials of Osiris.

Dev team: With Trials just around the corner, we wanted to address the “Artifact Power problem” as quickly as we could. As Luke said last week, our short-term fix is to disable the Artifact’s Power bonus while in Trials and Iron Banner. Unfortunately, Season of the Worthy has already been released for certification, so we won’t be able to disable the Artifact’s Power for the first Trials weekend. We have the fix in-house to disable it and are testing it this week, and hope to deploy it on Tuesday, March 17. We really wish we could have gotten it in for the launch weekend, but we also expect the first Trials weekend to be the one impacted by the Artifact the least. Players will have much less time to increase their Artifact Power, so the majority will be close to each other outside of Pinnacle drops.

Our long-term plan is to enable a Power cap for Trials and Iron Banner and we’re investigating the work required for this. This will roll out no earlier than midway through Season of the Worthy, but we don’t have a firm date yet—we’ll make sure to communicate it when we do! We also plan to look at the damage curves for Power-enabled PvP modes to determine what, if any, adjustments should be made. Assuming we discover it’s necessary, the timeline for a change is still TBD. With both changes, we plan to provide more detailed write-ups before they go live, explaining the details of the change and the design philosophy behind why we are making those decisions.

Just for clarity, I’ll echo Luke’s statement from last week: we’re going to disable the Artifact Power bonus in Trials and Iron Banner until we can implement a new Power cap system for those playlists. I hope you all enjoy Season of the Worthy, and may your run to the Lighthouse be swift and merciless.

Season of the Worthy: Eververse Update

With the turn of each Season, we hope to keep players up to date on how the Eververse Store is evolving. This Season, we have a few changes concerning Bright Engrams, and a new path to directly purchasing some previously featured Eververse items.

Bright Engrams

“We want players to know what something costs before they buy it. Bright Engrams don’t live up to that principle so we will no longer be selling them on the Eververse Store, though they will still appear on the Free Track of the Season Pass.”

This Season, we are continuing to focusing our efforts on direct purchasing through the Eververse Store.

Daily Rotation of Returning Items

In the place of Bright Engrams, a new module will become available on the Eververse Store starting in Season of the Worthy. This daily-rotating module will feature one item from a small selection of ships, Sparrows, Ghosts, and finishers that were offered in previous Seasons. These items will be available to purchase directly for Silver at a discount from the original price.

Aside from these changes, there aren’t any other major shifts coming for Eververse. We’ll be monitoring the conversation through launch and beyond, and will be sure to update you before any large changes come. Here’s a quick preview of some upcoming items coming with Season of the Worthy:

Hunter Finisher

Titan Finisher

 Warlock Finisher

The Final Preview (of Patch Notes)

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been giving some previews how your sandbox will be evolving in Season of the Worthy. Not just weapon tuning, but the ability to change the Elemental Affinity on your armor pieces. This week, we’ll be taking a wider look at Destiny 2 Update 2.8.0. Exotic armor tuning for PvE and PvP, UI updates, bug fixes, and more…

Exotic Armor

While this list is pretty lengthy, we’ll have more patch notes to share with you next Tuesday around 9 AM PDT, an hour before Season of the Worthy begins.

Some of you may be asking, “Wait, 10 AM? Don’t patches usually ship at 9 AM?” Daylight Saving Time begins on Sunday, March 8. If your region takes part in jumping forward, your weekly reset time will be an hour later than you’re used to. More information from the Player Support team below.

Systems Check

Before we dive headfirst into Season of the Worthy, we have a patch to ship. Destiny Player Support has your itinerary in hand, and a quick list of some resolved issues. 

A NEW SEASON

Next week, Season of Dawn ends and Season of the Worthy kicks off with the release of Destiny 2 Update 2.8.0. Please see below for the rollout timeline.

• 8 AM PDT (1500 UTC): Destiny service maintenance begins.
• 8:45 AM PDT (1545 UTC): Destiny 2 is taken offline on all platforms.
• 9 AM PDT (1600 UTC): Destiny 2 Update 2.8.0 begins rolling out across all platforms and regions. Players will be able to log back into Destiny 2 at 10:01 AM PDT.
• 10:01 AM PDT (1701 UTC): Destiny 2 is back online on all platforms; Season of The Worthy begins.
• 12 PM PDT (1900 UTC): Destiny service maintenance concludes.

UPCOMING RESOLVED ISSUES, PT. 2

Below is a continuation of a list of issues that will be resolved when Season of the Worthy and Update 2.8.0 become available on March 10:

• Hunter’s Tempest Strike melee ability can now be performed when using PC controls where Sprint is set to “Hold.”
• Character subclasses with ranged melee abilities will now count towards Melee Kill bounties and Triumphs. These include Titan Hammer Throw, Hunter Throwing Knives and Corrosive Smoke Bomb, and Warlock Celestial Fire and Ball Lightning.
• The Fastidious Miser Triumph will now correctly progress and complete for players who’ve found all 30 Ascendant Chests across the three Curse Weeks in the Dreaming City, and have claimed those corresponding Triumphs.
• Weekly Strike bounties for Hive and Vex boss kills will now award progress to players for killing Savathûn’s Song, Xol, and Dendron the Root Mind.

While Update 2.8.0 is released to the world, Destiny Player Support will be on standby in the #Help forum, ready to assist anyone who is experiencing issues. 

Dawn Comes to an End

Movie of the Week: Creatures of Destiny: A Nature Documentary

Honorable Mention: This player should be banned for such an unsatisfying montage

Honorable Mention: Riven’s Heart Theme Keyboard Cover

It’s crazy to think that next week a new Season begins. It feels like just yesterday we were watching you all explore the Corridors of Time. It’s no secret that I’m pretty excited for Trials to return, and I’m also looking forward to see you share your memories with the #TrialsReturns hashtag.

See you next week. Maybe we’ll bump into each other on our way to the Lighthouse. No hard feelings when you lose, okay?

Cheers,

Dmg04

Since news of the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak appeared a few months back, Bungie leadership has been keeping a close eye on updates to follow the progress of the global containment effort. With the recent spread of the virus into the U.S., and with a particular density of cases found in the greater Seattle area (near Bungie HQ), we have been actively working on plans over the last few weeks to ensure the health and safety of our employees and partners, both locally and globally.

While health and safety are our top priority, we also recognize the importance of maintaining the continuity of our regular Bungie business operations and have rapidly built a remote work infrastructure to best support this. This includes delivering on our current content plans, the maintenance and upkeep of Destiny 2, as well as continuing development of the game.

Today, we have activated this fully remote work infrastructure and policy for all Bungie employees across the globe, with the goals of prioritizing the safety of our employees and continuing to develop and deliver on a game we love for our community.

To accompany this policy we have rolled out technical solutions for all employees to be able to maintain communication with one another, as well as to continue working on development and maintaining game-critical functions while working remotely. Our goal is to continue crafting the ever-evolving Destiny universe, while making those behind-the-scenes efforts to keep everything running smoothly invisible to our fans. While there is a possibility that this change could affect our patching cadence in the short term, we will be sure to keep players informed about those schedules as much as possible. Most immediately, we will still be launching Season of the Worthy on March 10, followed by the start of Trials of Osiris on March 13.

Bungie’s approach to the COVID-19 outbreak is designed to react to rapid changes as news dictates, including how we will eventually re-integrate employees back into our local offices once the threat of the virus has lowered. While this is a big change for Bungie, we look at the challenge as an opportunity to stretch our ability to create and deliver the same kind of quality gaming experiences we always have in a new way. 

Be well, take care of yourself, and see you online.

In previous TWABs we have shined a spotlight on the artwork in Destiny 2 and our talented Bungie artists that create it. Everything in Destiny—the weapons, the characters, the environments, even the sky—is all hand-crafted by our team to bring the visuals of the solar system to life in your home. Today, we wanted to highlight some of the spectacular art from Season of Dawn and help you find more art to use as your desktop wallpaper. Each artist’s name links to their website where you can browse more of their work. Now, on to the gallery. 

Big thanks to all the artists for uploading their work so we could share it out with you. We will look to continue doing more of these in the future, so stay tuned. 

MARS

“I’m willing to overlook your past.”

Crimson light quivers, exhales, and surges in waves across bedrock walls at quickening tempo. Deified machination ripples in judgement.

“Trust doesn’t come easily with you.” Osiris’s eyes wash in Warmind light. He remembers Saladin’s words. Remembers the names that were. He feels small again, against the wash. Alone.

Osiris feels the weight of Rasputin’s assessment. Rhythmic cipher crashes over him as displays sling projections into maddening motion. Osiris’s face splits into golden multitudes to consume the information. Eyes in all directions, searching for the path. Rasputin constructs a model of the system, highlighting an anomalous signal near the edge of Sol’s influence. Osiris’s mind sieves the data into manufactured purpose. 

He is led.

Never one to follow.

With nothing left to chase.

Oxidized dust scours the landing pad. Sagira greets Osiris as he exits the bunker and slumps into his jumpship.

“How did it go?”

“Better than expected.”

“Did you say hi to Ana?”

“She is busy. We have a lead.”

Osiris grips the flight stick. His gaze slips betwixt and between points of focus.

“Do we have to leave right now?” Sagira floats into his sightline. “I’m sure Saint woul—“

Their eyes don’t meet.

“We have a long flight.”

Sagira relents. Her tone sharpens. “How long?”

KUIPER-OORT EXPANSE

||KUIPER SLINGSHOT ACHIEVED: COURSE CORRECTION; NEGATIVE; BREAK LINE TRAJECTORY FAILURE||

||ALERT: GRAVITATIONAL ANOMALY: BOW|| 

Solar warmth peels away into guideless vacuum as Osiris skims across the Heliopause. A hollow serenity bathes his face.  

“What is it?”

Osiris breathes a sigh of relief at the sight of the anomaly.

“An answer.”

“I… feel strange.” Sagira settles from her orbit about Osiris’s shoulders, her voice crackling with interference.

“It might be best if you stay with the ship.”

“It might be best if you had better ideas.”

Osiris grunts under his breath and cuts the engines. “I won’t be long.”

|COURSE CORRECTION;NEGATIVE;BREAK LINE TRAJECTORY FAILURE||

“That’s never true.” Sagira scans the warping stillness. “There’s nothing in there, Osiris.”

“No reason to worry then.”

Sagira narrows her iris at him. “I can’t even find a point to transmat you to.”

“No matter.”

“What?” Sagira faces the anomaly. “What are you trying to prove?”

Osiris affixes a visor to his helmet and clips a localizing beacon to his belt. With a hiss, his head swims in pressurizing atmosphere.

“It has to lead somewhere.” His helmet radio vies with interference.

Sagira droops in disappointment. “Does it?”

He looks through her, eyes sullen and heavy. He nods.

A great Maw yawns before them, wicked and soft. Brilliant unfurling layers of opaque invitation. They drift. The Deep comfort hums through his skin, breeding a resilient calm. A silent static stasis boiling away at the brim of consciousness.

||COLLISION ALERT: BOW | COURSE CORRECTION;NEGATIVE;COLLISION IMMINENT||

The Anomalous Maw welcomes. It is a gullet, endless in hunger and depth that splits reality like petals opening to consume the Sun. The depth warps. Sweet flavor spins through the senses. It cradles him, locks in motionless descent, rocks away fear with warm recognition. Stretches, and wraps, and cribs.

||COLLISION ALERT: STARBOARD;BOW;ABEAM;RADIAL;AFT;BOW;ABEAM;PORT:AFT;RADIAL;PORT:BOW | COURSE CORRECTION: NEGATIVE;TRAJECTORY FAILURE;COLLISION: FAILURE|| 

It threads through space set adrift beyond and before, until there is only within. Within: a point. Lone and stark amid the undulating expanse. Distant, at the edges, and forward, only deeper.

Osiris a wayfaring witness. A reluctant heir. A broken promise made true. A husk to fill a throne of sustenance. A shear to prune the vine. A warden to vacancy. A mind elated and crestfallen. A sojourner of meaning ever seeking.

He turns back. Sagira’s light blinks from shaded canopy within his vessel. Starless bends weave and break through pools of luminescent memory. They flow to the point beyond.

The point grows gaunt, and if he were to reach out, he would brush the walls with his fingertips. Osiris stands in dark quiet comfort. He treads placid trim. He swims in depth lined by pale rivers of white gnashing, far below and above. 

He sends forth his Echoes. Their sight finds no purchase in the gullet. They push the walls beyond his fingers and let stand only the path of want. They drift until no longer felt. The skeins neither snap nor remain.

Before him, the gnarled point softens and splits into a blooming cathedra. A metal seed laid barren in the bosom of the throne in a pool of light. A nexus. He plucks it from the pool. From its drippings spawn a rapturous light, spreading through the enormity and ravenously washing over the gullet at increasing pace.

Dark gives way to cold reflective alloy. 

To logic and formless calculous. 

The cathedra, overwhelmed by prediction, rings with the dull mimicked tone of congruence. They scream to Osiris. His mind. They crave, never to tire, his unique causality. They would grow, unceasing. Death to death, forever.

The path of want falls to assimilation. 

Osiris flees to the safety of Sagira’s blinking light. The gullet quivers reverberation that trails his every step in sentient chromic glisten. He calls for her. To open the ship. To break the false-light wave that besets his every step. To—

“I’m glad you changed your mind.” 

Sagira’s shell shines a reflection across the cockpit as Osiris’s jumpship rolls to face the Sun. “Ready to go?”

||KUIPER SLINGSHOT JUMP-LOCK: TRAJECTORY CLEAR; GREEN LINE||

“Sagira…” He grips a cold metal seed. “Yes.”

The Sun hangs dim and distant in a sea of ink. Its waning glare burns the focus out of Osiris’s eyes. Blind to all other points, they drift; engines humming in anticipation; vessel drenched in an angular shadow.

This week at Bungie, Trials is back on the menu. 

It’s been an exciting week. You all came together and donated your stockpiles of Fractaline to the ongoing effort to build the new Lighthouse and usher in the return of Trials of Osiris next Season. As soon as the final stage was complete, you were invited to survey the completion of the project and light the beacon. We saw your signal as our cue to release this developer insight video confirming what many have been speculating for a while now.

Subclass Changes

With the return of Trials and a new Season on the way, we’re planning to shake things up with some changes to your Guardian abilities. The Dev team has the details, so I’ll let them do the talking. 

Dev Team: Hey, Guardians. Trials is coming back, and the Combat Systems team has been hard at work preparing Destiny 2 for its arrival. We’ve made a number of big changes to the abilities sandbox, and instead of simply dropping them all in the patch notes, we wanted to take this opportunity to offer some transparency for our decision-making process.

Before we begin, we want to give a big shout out to the data scientists here at Bungie. They provide us with mountains of valuable data to sift through—from the win rates of each subclass in each Crucible game mode to the kills-per-minute of each weapon on each platform in each PvE activity. This data allows us to make sure we’re making informed decisions when balancing the game. It allows us to separate the perceived power of abilities, weapons, and armor, from their true, objective power. But The data doesn’t always tell the whole story, and we believe strongly that perceived power and community sentiment are just as important as cold, hard data. Even as Trials returns, we’re committed to maintaining a fun and fair sandbox for both PvP and PvE, and we considered data for all game modes when making adjustments. 

Warlock Melee

Warlocks have long been at a disadvantage in melee fights because it takes them slightly longer than Titans and Hunters to recover from making a melee attack. So, next Season, we’re extending the Warlock’s basic melee range by one meter to a total of 5.5 meters. Warlocks will still melee slightly slower than the other classes, but they’ll now have a one-meter advantage. If you can use this window to land the first melee attack in a slap fight, you’ll likely emerge victorious. We feel this is a more interesting solution to melee disparity than homogenizing all of the melee attacks, and we’ll be studying the data as it rolls in to make sure it’s balanced.

Titan Barricades

A Titan’s barricade is incredibly powerful in Trials because you can use it to safely resurrect your fallen teammates. Next Season, we’re creating counters to the barricade while also raising its health from 500hp to 600hp. Barricades will now take extra damage from Special-ammo weapons, anti-barrier weapons, and certain Heavy weapons. This change makes barricades sturdier while giving opposing players the option to use their Special ammo to bring down the barricade more quickly.

The following weapons now do 30% extra damage to Barricades:

• Sniper Rifles
• Grenade Launchers
• Linear Fusion Rifles
• Machine Guns
• Trace Rifles
• Anti-Barrier Weapons

The following weapons now do 60% extra damage to Barricades:

• Shotguns
• Fusion Rifles

You’ll see yellow damage numbers when hitting a barricade with a counter weapon, which always feels good.

One-Shot Abilities

With the introduction of the Hunter’s Weighted Knife in Season of Dawn, each class now has a neutral-game ability that can kill PvP opponents in one hit. We’ve taken a pass at all of the one-shot abilities to tune their risk/reward factor. We’ll warn you that some these changes look extreme on paper, but we made a point to make sure these abilities retained their overall feel. 

For the Titan’s three Shoulder Charge abilities, we reduced the auto-targeting angle by 50%. That might sound like a lot, but acrobatic Titans could previously auto-target to make an instant 90-degree turn. We also adjusted the lunge distance to 5.5m for both targeted and untargeted lunges. Targeted lunges were previously 6m, while untargeted lunges were previously 4.5m. These changes make for a more consistent experience while lunging.

For the Hunter’s Weighted Knife, we’ve reduced its tracking significantly and created new tracking tech that will make the knife more faithful to its initial throw trajectory.

As for the Warlock’s Handheld Supernova, we’ve made a number of changes to bring this ability in line with the other one-shot abilities. While part of HHSN’s strength lies in its pairing with the Contraverse Hold Exotic gauntlets (which are also being tuned this Season), our data indicated that even without Contraverse Hold, Handheld Supernova needed to be adjusted. Here are the changes:

• Increased activation time by 0.6 seconds
• Reduced hold time from 3.5 seconds to 2.5 seconds
• Reduced range by 20%
• Tightened horizontal spread of bolts by 25%
• Bolt explosion now does self-damage
• Reduced bolt explosion radius from 3m to 2.5m

In our playtesting, we’ve found that the product of these changes is an ability that is still incredibly strong but now has a risk/reward ratio commensurate with its power. (After all, this thing can vaporize multiple PvP opponents instantly.) There’s even a bit of silver lining here —the tightening of the bolts leads to more concentrated damage at range, improving its viability against Supers. To compensate for this change, other elements of the middle Voidwalker path are being buffed, including the Nova Warp Super, which now has increased damage resistance, a longer duration, and a reduced blink cost.

General Subclass Tuning

We’ve made changes to a number of subclass paths in an effort to tighten the gameplay balance. For example, Stormcaller top, Striker bottom, and Arcstrider bottom have remained dominant in PvP for multiple Seasons now, consistently beating out all other paths in both win-rate and average efficiency. These paths have also ranked among the top PvE paths in terms of kills-per-minute. We’ve adjusted these paths (and others) to bring them closer to the middle of the pack. On the other end of the spectrum, paths such as Voidwalker bottom, Nightstalker bottom, and Striker middle needed some love, so we’ve taken steps to lift them up.

In the spirit of transparency, we take no joy in nerfing the abilities, weapons, and armor that we all love to use. We wish the answer to keeping the game balanced and fresh was always to buff the underperforming elements. But such an approach leads to power creep—the slow and steady increase of the average power of everything in the game—which trivializes the incredible game modes and encounters that the other teams at Bungie work hard to create. After all, as Destiny players ourselves, we go home and play the game too, and we want the game to be as fun and as healthy as possible.

That’s it from us today. You’ll find more details about these changes and more when the patch notes drop in early March. 

Oh yeah . . . and Hunter Tripmines are sticky again. Stay sharp, Guardians.

As promised, in addition to these explanations, there will be patch notes when the new Season begins. Those should give you the full illustration of how the game is changing. Until they arrive, we hope you enjoyed this preview.

Twitch Prime Rewards

Pick up a hot ride or the ability to pet a fine feathered friend. Don’t forget, there will be a new set of Twitch Prime Rewards coming up next month too!

---

STONKS ARE UP

END OF THE SEASON

With the Empyrean Foundation restored, the last Triumph to acquire the Savior Seal has been unlocked. Players completing this Seal should claim and equip it to ensure it isn’t removed when Season of Dawn ends on March 10.

Finally, the Player Support team is working on an End of Season article highlighting quests, items, and Triumphs leaving with the transition to Season of the Worthy.

STONK MARKET CLOSING SOON

The community has been questioning if they can continue donating to the Empyrean Foundation. Players will be able to donate their Polarized Fractaline until the Season ends on March 10.

UPCOMING RESOLVED ISSUES

Below is a list of issues that will be resolved when Season of the Worthy and Update 2.8.0 becomes available on March 10:

Put Your Phone Away

It’s about time for another Movie of the Week. The community is always creating cool stuff, and this is the place we highlight the coolest stuff made in video form. Everyone who earns Movie of the Week or an Honorable Mention is taking home a snazzy emblem to show off to all their friends. Let’s get to it. 

Movie of the Week: Kitsune!

Honorable Mention: Star Crossed Players

Next week, we’ll share more on what to expect in Season of the Worthy. Only one more TWAB left to go before the new Season!

<3 Cozmo

Hey everyone,

Setting aside the tricks our memories play on us, things are often clearer in hindsight than when we’re looking ahead. The recent past is clear, loaded with learnings from the mistakes we make, and the future is fuzzy, hopeful, and unknown. As we readied last year’s Director’s Cut, we had made a number of changes to the game and wanted to give you all some insight as to why we made those changes. 

Each Director’s Cut is a chance to acknowledge and own the learnings from the past (when the wounds are fresh) and give a glimpse at tomorrow. 

This edition is arriving a little earlier in the development process for how we’re thinking about Year 4 (and beyond) and, while some of the changes the game needs are clear to us, there are others we’re still thinking about. Last summer’s payload covered a wide-range of topics that ended up touching on almost the whole game. Today’s DC is going to look in depth at just a couple of topics: how our philosophy on Seasons is evolving and the problems with weapons that last forever, with some additional quick-hit topics at the end. 

This isn’t exhaustive, we know there’s more going on in the game than below. And there will be more to talk about later in the year.

Before we look ahead, let’s look back one more time. 2019 was about a few things for Bungie and Destiny: 

Asserting our vision for Destiny. It’s an action MMO, in a single evolving world, that you can play anytime, anywhere with your friends. It’s a game we want to keep building on, and to do so with creative and work/life sustainability. Without our team’s talents, there isn’t a Destiny. And while that seems OBVIOUS to say, I think it’s pretty easy to lose sight of amidst the “This was awesome”/“This was not so awesome” reactions to entertainment. As I covered at length last year, the way we built the Annual Pass wouldn’t work for us over the long haul. We had a lot of help and person-power from our awesome (and now former) partners. We needed to find a better way forward, while preserving the player experience and our business, because we are now self-publishing Destiny. That was a big lift for Bungie in 2019. 

When I think about the total scope of that work and the sheer force of will the team demonstrated to deliver in 2019, I feel pretty good about what we achieved (usually, this is where we’d list all of the positives but, instead, let’s use the word count to improve on the past and look ahead to the future). 

As we began 2020, much of the existential dread of “Will we make it out of this transition?” is gone. We’ve clarified our vision for Destiny and are working toward the future with that vision in mind. For me personally, the drive home each night isn’t focused on “Will Bungie survive?” like before. Now it’s “Where can Destiny go?” and “How can we get there?” 

When I came back from the holiday this year, something about Destiny felt off to me. Season 9 is – to me – the best winter season we’ve done in Destiny 2. But something felt missing. And that missing element is what I think we need to focus on throughout 2020 and into 2021. 

Aspiration: 1. A hope or ambition of achieving something. 2. The action or process of drawing breath. 

In Destiny 2, aspiration is what keeps our game alive. It is the air that fills its lungs, it is the breath that gives the game meaning. Aspiration can be about entering Destiny 2 for the first time and feeling the potential of what you could become. It can be about the pursuits in front of you. Or it can also be PVP players looking over the horizon and seeing the Lighthouse and its treasures awaiting them – if they pass The Trials. 

Aspiration isn’t something reserved for the elite or the engaged; it’s for everyone (although when I listen to players express the feeling that, “There’s so much to do and none of it matters,” I feel that pain). It’s about the potential of a game to be more than something that just fills your time. It’s about having goals and working toward something that matters to you. I’m not so naïve as to think we can make something that matters to everyone – we all have different values, goals, and time. But I do think Destiny 2 can do a better job of enabling players to set short-, medium-, and long-term goals to work toward. 

As a player, aspiration is something I feel so strongly about. It’s the difference between a game I fall in love with and a game I consume like junk food. 

Last year, we started thinking about aspiration and what is missing from Destiny. The gaping, burning-eye-shaped hole is something I’d felt since we set Trials aside early in D2. Its return is part of a bigger goal for Destiny moving into 2020 and beyond: 

We need to refuel aspiration in Destiny 2. 

And a bunch of what we’re going to cover in this edition of the Director’s Cut is going to orbit this. 

Seasons of Change

With a few Seasons under our belt since Shadowkeep, we’re well underway on internal discussions around how we feel about them. We look at these iterations through a bunch of lenses. First, there’s the soft, smushy, “How do we feel about Seasons?” These feelings are mined from our own experiences and from ongoing roll-ups of information from our Community. We also look at how well Seasons are engaging our players. Are people coming back each week? How long are they playing? What do we look like month-over-month and how does it perform against our historical data? Then we start to talk about where to take Seasons in Year 4. Looking back, there is some good stuff and things we need to work on.

 Let’s start with what’s been working well. 

Speaking strictly about my own play patterns, I feel the need each Season to get all of the Pass’ Universal Ornaments and the title. I like knowing those cosmetics are unique and won’t be offered again. However, I find myself personally less motivated to try and get awesome rolls for the new weapons, which is especially strange considering I like having a “nice version” of each gun in Destiny.

Wanna do some weapon stuff now? There’s gonna be more weapon stuff later on, but let’s just chum the waters a little bit:

[INTERLUDE]

I still really like playing this game. I’ve acquired almost every weapon in the game (whyyyyyyy Anarchyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy). I have some pretty slick rolls on a few of them and near-miss “internet-approved god rolls” on others (Spare Rations Rapid/Kill Clip and then Full Bore and a quick visit to Disappointown with Alloy Magazine). Like many of you, I end up gravitating to a few weapons and just using them instead of everything else. Sure, the Outlaw Multikill Clip Breachlight I farmed from Season of Dawn is nice to have (and I love the art for the Dawn weapon set) but is it really going to displace my go-to PVE kinetic weapons? Probably not. I know that. 

I recently sat with a couple of external folks who really love Breakneck. It’s the only thing they use. They aren’t ever going to use another primary weapon in Destiny 2. Why? Because they don’t need to. 

Part of aspiration is the pursuit that comes with it and, right now, the way we are (and have been) treating weapons in Destiny 2 isn’t actually fueling the aspiration engine. 

Back to Seasons.

[END INTERLUDE]

On the other hand:

We aren’t delivering the feeling of an evolving world. Instead we are delivering the feeling of ephemeral private activities and rewards that go away. The Forsaken Annual Pass had its share of challenges (see last year’s DC), but it also had this awesome property: If I stopped playing for a Season, when I came back, there were a bunch of rewards and activities that I could catch up on.  

What we’re discussing now – and which is early enough that things might still change – is how we focus our efforts around Seasons from a development standpoint, while also trying to create the moments that make memories, WHILE ALSO balancing the amount of “fear of missing out.” This is a tricky balance, because these elements don’t connect neatly and, in many cases, they work against one another. 

The wall of text below is how we’re thinking about things at the moment. We’re going to be continuing to take in the feedback our guts and data provides (your reactions and feedback are a part of that data, so do continue to let us know your thoughts) on our Seasonal model. Before we get into some more thoughts and details, I want to be extremely clear: 

This year’s version of Seasons has too much FOMO in them. We want to fix this, and next year’s Seasons will have less.

Because we aren’t spending our development resources and time as well as we could, we’re talking about moving away from creating Season-bespoke private activities and instead using that time and effort to build themes that aren’t just represented by a marquee event that will fade away, but rather to inject these Seasonal themes into more of the game. Like we continue to evolve the world’s narrative, we could invest more in the evolving world of our public spaces and take further efforts to evolve Destiny 2’s core activities. 

Core activities? What are those? 

Core activities are a way we think about a player’s options and motivations in a given evening of Destiny. They are meant to be more evergreen (quest/campaign content, for instance, is not generally evergreen). It’s usually something matchmade and designed with replayability in mind, either from the properties of the activity itself or the rewards. For example Crucible is fundamentally replayable because the opponents can be different and other players are the ultimate A.I., where The Ordeal is fundamentally replayable because of its reward structure, rather than random encounter generation. (In fact, we hope The Ordeal is consistent within a given week to create mastery and efficiency in defeating it). 

Ideally, core activities are convergence points for player motivations (e.g., “I want to maximize XP, chase awesome items, and generate economy that I can use to further my goals” [Yes, I know no one talks this way]). 

Right now, our Seasonal Activities (like Sundial) compete with the core activities. They have new rewards and award players powerful gear, but they don’t provide a bunch of XP. Core activities provide a bunch of XP, but we all feel the pain of, “How many more Seasons will I get the Titan Rain-Catching shoulder pads from the Drifter?” What this competition means is that it can be really hard to line up a “night of optimizing” in Destiny because you’re being pulled in different directions by our design!

So what could investing more in core activities look like? It could mean more rewards being distributed into these activities or it could mean taking a theme for a Season and using it to galvanize Strikes. If we’re going to ask players to engage with these activities, we have an opportunity to leverage rewards throughout the Season. Imagine the armor sets or Sundial weapons being woven into core activity reward pools. Or imagine experiences like pursuing rolls for sweet weapons that could only be found in a given playlist as an end-of-match reward, like a Crucible Eyasluna. 

We also think we could invest more of our development time on our questlines. Right now, things like Sundial consume team resources and then fade away. Imagine instead that Seasonal questlines like “Save a Legend” didn’t go away in the following Season, but instead existed until the next Expansion releases. That way, as players drift in an out of the game, there’s a bunch of content building up for them to play when they return. 

Just as we continue to evolve the narrative of our world, we can continue to invest in evolving the world of open world public spaces (in case you’re unfamiliar, these are the spaces where you seamlessly see other players appear). We’ve built a world where players can encounter others, but we haven’t made a world with fights challenging enough where you feel like other players matter. 

Weapons Forever: The Problem 

OK. Let’s talk more about weapons. And let’s begin with how weapons have worked in Destiny 2. All the way back to Destiny 2 vanilla, every weapon you get is a weapon you can keep and infuse to raise its Power level indefinitely. Remember the waters I talked about chumming earlier? It’s time to eat. 

In Destiny 2, with infusion, it’s like having every card you own in Magic available and playable in all formats forever. It passively creates power creep (an ongoing Destiny problem), which also means our teams need to spend more and more of their time re-testing and supporting old stuff instead of making new stuff, it reduces player desire for new items (which dismantles aspiration like the shard-the-blues post-Crucible match ritual), and it means we ultimately create a ton of gear that doesn’t have any value beyond ticking the box on the “I Got It” checklist.

That isn’t value. It’s actually the opposite of value, because it’s work that we could be putting into making new stuff, or improving old stuff. 

Our combat team works extremely hard to make weapons feel unique. Each Legendary (and many blues) get their own flavors of special sauce. Sometimes it’s the way a gun sounds, sometimes it’s the insanely over budget range stat (HAND IN HAND), sometimes it’s the recoil pattern, sometimes it’s the art, sometimes it’s something indescribable that just makes an item resonate with our players. 

In an action game like Destiny, our weapons are feel-based extensions to the character. I’ve played MMOs and ARPGs where I get amazing weapons, but rarely have those weapons felt like an extension of my avatar. Certainly in an action game like Dark Souls or Sekiro, the weapons become a feel-based extension of my character, rather than a stat stick like Fang of Korialstrasz.

Remember many, many words ago (in previous DCs) when I talked about the collision between the action game and the RPG? Couple with that with our theme of aspiration and I believe we are approaching an inflection point for weapons and infusion in Destiny 2. 

We’ve made a lot of Magic cards, and we want you to keep the ones you love in your collection (as opposed to taking them and throwing them all away and having the Tower get destroyed again). And a bunch of those Magic cards could be playable around the world while free-roaming or in PVP formats. But where Power matters or aspirational activities are involved, we’re going to make some changes to Legendary weapons. 

There was a lot of learning to do when Destiny launched in 2014. But there was also some real good stuff in that game. I think back on a bunch of it fondly – almost wistfully at times. The weapons from the Vault of Glass could be powerful, unique, and rare. If you had Fatebringer, you probably had a bunch of Ascendant Shards to commemorate all of the times you didn’t get it. I miss those days, when rewards were rarer and so special that you celebrated (or hated!) when your friends got one. That’s in part because the design of the game gave them space to be different, space to be awesome. 

It’s hard to cleave out that space in the current version of Destiny 2. Weapons that are supposed to come from pinnacle activities like Raids or Trials don’t really have space to breathe. The answer can’t be “Just make them better,” because that approach ends up with the Reckoning situation I described last year. Now we had Pinnacle weapons, which were largely just talents that had Exotic-esque capabilities in Legendary-clothing. These weapons were typically the result of long pursuits and when they arrived in your hands they were pretty strong (sometimes hilariously strong; looking at you RECLUSE). It also meant the team spent significant time developing each one. 

If you imagine the abstract weapon space as a pyramid, those pinnacle weapons largely sat at the top of the pyramid. Most other Legendary weapons are down in a clump of “They aren’t really that different.” Why? Because when every Legendary item the team builds is going to be around forever, outliers get weeded out. 

Back to 2014: The Vault of Glass weapons could be memorable because we knew they weren’t going to be in the ecosystem for things like Trials, Nightfalls, and Raids forever. They’d naturally fall by the wayside because Power (Attack/Light in those days) would make them obsolete. 

In the world we’re imagining, we’ll have space at the top end to create powerful Legendary weapons. Legendaries that are just better than other items in the classification. We’ll be able to do that, because the design space for weapons will expand and contract over time. Items will enter the ecosystem, be able to be infused for some number of Seasons and beyond that, their power won’t be able to be raised. Our hope is that instead of having to account for a weapon’s viability forever when we create one, it can be easier to let something powerful exist in the ecosystem. And those potent weapons entering the ecosystem mean there’s more fun items to pursue. 

Changes like this also mean Legendary weapons (or their talents) that would be “shelved” could be reissued at a future date. Or could be brought back in fun ways by involving our community. The more specific nitty gritty for this will come a little bit further down the road but we wanted to get some of thinking behind it to you sooner rather than later. The simplest version of how it is going to work is: Legendary weapons will have fixed values for how high they can be infused. Those values will project the weapon’s viable-in-end-game lifespan and we think that lifespan is somewhere between 9 and 15 months. 

One final note: We are not applying this to Exotic weapons at this time. We want to iterate on the Legendary ecosystem first.

Cosmic Gardeners

Last year, we said: 

We want playing Destiny to feel like you’re playing in a game world with true momentum, a universe that is going somewhere. A game where things are happening—not just in terms of new items and activities but also in terms of narrative. It’s frequently seemed like Destiny was treading water in terms of moving the world’s narrative forward. We want to tackle this in Destiny 2’s third year.

That statement is still true for us today, as we look into D2Y4 and beyond. We started this in Year 3, but the job isn’t done. By its very nature this is something that really doesn’t have “an end.” The idea of building a narrative that is moving the story of your Guardians (plural, all of you!) forward, creating a universe where permanent change is possible, and where players can have meaningful impact, is still a thing we’re chasing and experimenting with. 

To get there, change is going to be inevitable (see above where I talked about how we’re thinking about adjusting the Seasonal model). We’ve said before that Destiny 2 cannot keep growing indefinitely. There are lots of reasons why this is true, some technical, and some creative, because the story wants to push into new areas. 

Seasons can do some of the heavy lifting here, in the sense of giving players a sense of shared purpose and understanding of what they’re working for. But when we ready expansions, it’s a chance to make some more fundamental changes to the game world and its systems. We’ve done significant systems changes to all Destiny games every time we’ve shipped an expansion, and now we’re going to be making more changes to the game world as we go forward. 

We’re getting towards the end here but, before we wrap, here’s a few quick hits on some important topics.

SHORTCUT #1: Faction Rallies

Lots of folks have been wondering if Faction Rallies will return. We have no plans to bring back Faction Rallies. The reward gear hasn’t been used that much, our character cast is growing too large, and crucially, they didn’t drive a bunch of engagement with the game. That said, there’s some sweet looks in that gear and we’re moving the Faction Rally armor to the Legendary engram reward pools in Season 10, alongside a few popular faction weapons. 

SHORTCUT #2: Bright Engrams 

For Season 10, we’re doing away with Bright Engrams as purchasable items. We want players to know what something costs before they buy it. Bright Engrams don’t live up to that principle so we will no longer be selling them on the Eververse Store, though they will still appear on the Free Track of the Season Pass. 

SHORTCUT #3: New Light, New Intro

Our goals for New Light last year were about bringing new players into the universe and getting them to the core activities as quickly as we could. We dramatically underestimated how many new Guardians would wake up on the Cosmodrome. We’re going to improve the New Light entry this fall and flesh the starting experience in Destiny out.  

SHORTCUT #4: Questlog

There’s another round of changes coming out with Season 10 for the Quest tab. The number of Quests you have at any given time sure can feel daunting, especially for procrastinators, so we’re adding a new feature to the Quest tab – categorization. All Quests are automatically assigned a category, and this buckets them into a specific area within the Quest tab. 

For example, Exotic quests get their own category, as well as Seasonal quests. The Seasonal quest category is helpful in that it contains all of the quests that expire at the end of the Season. There are several categories, including one for older releases (e.g. Forsaken quests). This should help players focus on the quests that are new and most relevant vs. older content that maybe isn’t as high-priority as it used to be. 

Exit Music

Thanks for being here. I appreciate that you’re invested in the game enough (or excited enough about trolling) to sift through the text above. We’re early into 2020 and we’ve got some cool stuff planned. Shortly, Season 10 is entering orbit and there will be more to talk about as the calendar continues. A lot of work from a lot of folks goes into each time I, or anyone else from the dev team, talks about how we’re thinking about the game. Many thanks to them, and many thanks to you for being a part of this community. 

See you soon,

Luke Smith

This week at Bungie, all eyes are on Stage 7.

Time and time again, this community humbles us. A few weeks ago, you were challenged with the Empyrean Foundation, requiring billions upon billions of Fractaline donations to light a beacon of hope. You’ve strategized your investments, brought riches to our dear friend Spider, and smashed six goals faster than we could have imagined. Here’s an update on your shared progress:

Whether you’ve been donating or investing, this has been a community-wide effort from the get go. Your combined efforts are paving the way to success. Soon, the final Triumph for the Savior title and a fancy new shader will be available for everyone, and it’s all thanks to you.

Now, let’s shift gears. A few weeks back, we promised some Sandbox previews leading up to Season of [Redacted]. Let’s get to it.

Taking a Pass

This week, we’re putting the magnifying glass on weapons. While Swords were given a bit of an overhaul in functionality, other weapon archetypes are seeing some finer tuning. Damage values, ranges, and even reload canceling are on the table this time around. We know one of the first questions on your mind will be, “Is this a Crucible-centric update, or will PvE get changes this Season as well?”

While the following changes will be coming out at the beginning of Season of [Redacted], some are in preparation for a new PvE challenge coming later in the Season. A new Nightfall difficulty, officially dubbed “Grandmaster,” will test even the most proficient Guardians. We’ll have more details about this new ordeal in the coming weeks. But for now, we have information from the Dev team on changes being made to ensure that we strike the right balance between challenge and reward. 

Dev Team: For Season of [Redacted], we’ve adjusted quite a few weapon archetypes alongside the changes to Swords that were announced two weeks ago. While these are not all the changes in the release, we’re covering some important conversation pieces here.

Izanagi’s Burden

Since the removal of auto-reload effects from Rally Barricade and Lunafaction Boots, as well as the introduction of a catalyst for Izanagi’s Burden, it’s seen a significant uptick in use. Izanagi’s Burden solidified itself within the majority of endgame builds due to its excellent burst damage, sustained damage, ammo economy due to Special ammo, and safety due to being a Sniper Rifle. The Outlaw trait was swapped out for No Distractions to be more in-line with the fantasy of the weapon and to ensure the trait on the weapon would still work with Honed Edge.

• The animation speed of Honed Edge is no longer affected by the reload stat
• Outlaw has been replaced with No Distractions

Sniper Rifles

We gave Sniper Rifles an increase in PvE damage back in Shadowkeep. We’re removing that change for a few reasons. Sniper Rifles have a lot of utility and safety due to their range and the increased damage was giving them too much of a leg-up on their closer range counterparts. That gulf only widens as the difficulty of any given encounter goes up. The direct changes to Adaptive and Rapid-Fire Snipers were to make the differences in the sub-archetypes more impactful again as well as to give some amount of parity with the adjustments to Shotguns and Fusion Rifles.

• Damage to Major enemies and above have been reduced to pre Shadowkeep values (~-20%).
• Adaptive Snipers precision multiplier has been reduced from 3.25x to 2.95x.
• Rapid-Fire Snipers base impact has been reduced from 100 damage to 90 damage.

Grenade Launchers

Through a combination of archetype adjustments and new perks being introduced, Grenade Launchers have been quite powerful ever since Season of the Drifter. We’ve changed the Aggressive frame sub-archetype to the Rapid-Fire sub-archetype to be more in line with other weapon’s established conventions and slightly reduced their effectiveness on Powerful enemies to give other weapons some more breathing room.

• Aggressive Frame grenade launchers are now Rapid-Fire Frame Grenade Launchers.
• Rapid-Fire Frame Grenade Launchers have had their damage reduced to account for their Rate of Fire (0.8x), but now also have increased reserves.
• Previously, Aggressive Frame Grenade Launchers fired faster than Adaptive but had the same damage.
• Damage to Major enemies and above by Power weapon Grenade Launchers reduced by ~10%.

Lord of Wolves

The ease of use granted by changes to Release the Wolves made it very difficult to approach and made the margin of error extremely large. We’ve pushed the two states apart via accuracy to ensure that the default state is the norm, rather than the exception. With this change, Release the Wolves should be used at extremely close ranges against large targets instead of just being a better version of the default behavior.

• Release the Wolves now significantly reduces this weapon’s accuracy while active.

The Last Word

When reintroduced in Season of the Forge, The Last Word became quite dominant due to its extremely forgiving maximum time-to-kill (TTK). We’re adjusting the way the weapon works to focus it back as a hip-fire based weapon while also improving that side of the experience for both controller and mouse and keyboard inputs. We also made it a little less forgiving so that you still have to concentrate on your aim while wielding the weapon.

• Fan Fire now adjusts the precision scalar while hip-firing.
• Fan Fire impact values have been adjusted.
• Precision Hip/ADS adjusted from 67.95/67.95 to 68.27/52.2.
• Non-Precision Hip/ADS adjusted from 50.01/50.01 to 38/38.
• Aiming down sights no longer provides additional effective range (damage falloff).
• Reduced stability for Mouse and Keyboard input.
• Reduced the effective range.
• To improve the experience, adjusted the way target acquisition is handled while hip-firing.

Shotguns

One issue we’ve been waiting to fix before adjusting Shotguns again was an oddity in the way our aim assist system works with weapons that don’t care much about precision damage. As an example for Shotguns, at certain distances between players, the aim assist system would prioritize the head, causing the entire spread to deviate from center mass and make the player miss out on the kill. With that issue out of the way, we made more adjustments to Shotguns to give other weapons a little more time to react to them.

• Target acquisition for non-slug Shotguns has been adjusted to no longer account for precision locations.
• Previously, target acquisition could actually cause the player’s spread to deviate from the intended aim vector, causing most of the spread to miss.
• Cone angle is now adjusted on a per sub-archetype basis and is no longer adjusted by the range stat.
• Aiming down sights no longer adjusts effective range for this weapon archetype.

Fusion Rifles

Similar to the issue noted above with Shotguns, Fusion Rifles also suffered from some target acquisition related oddities that we’ve since fixed. Most of the changes here are adjustments focusing on the High Impact sub-archetype. Backup Plan was an Exotic perk in the original Destiny release, and it was placed on Legendary Fusion Rifles in Destiny 2 due to them being Heavy ammo weapons at the time rather than the Special ammo weapons they currently are. When weapons were shuffled around in Forsaken, the perk came along with them, and we’ve decided to adjust it alongside the archetype itself to have it fall back in line with other Legendary perks.

• Target acquisition for Fusion Rifles has been adjusted to no longer account for precision locations.
• Previously, target acquisition could actually cause the player’s volley to deviate from the intended aim vector, causing most of the volley to miss.
• Damage falloff for this weapon archetype can now floor at 0.5x (Previously 0.75x).
• Effective range and the impact of the optics stat for this weapon archetype has been reduced across the board.
• Backup Plan
• Backup Plan now adjusts impact to match the Rapid-Fire sub-archetype while active.
• Charge time is now set to match the Rapid-Fire’s sub-archetype * 0.85 while active.

Auto Rifles

Some small tweaks have been made to give Auto Rifles a small boost in efficacy for the Crucible—though they also influence PvE. The nature of the way Destiny is played tends to have Semi-Auto based weaponry be more effective in general and so we’re compensating for that with these tweaks. These are fairly modest changes intended to give Auto Rifles more of a chance in an open fight without attempting to drag the TTK of the entire game down.

The following impact values have changed:

• High-Impact Frame
• 22/35.2 Default/Precision (Previously 22/33)
• Precision Frame
• 17/27.2 Default/Precision (Previously 17/25.5)
• Adaptive Frame
• 15.75/25.2 Default/Precision (Previously 13.75/22)
• Rapid-Fire Frame
• 13.4/20.1 Default/Precision (Previously 12.5/18.75)

These are some of the biggest changes coming to weapons, but be sure to check out the official patch notes in early March for the full list. We’ll also have a preview of Exotic armor changes, along with tuning to your Supers and abilities in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.

Balancing Act

When processing the #Help forums, Destiny Player Support is tasked with distributing need to know information to players in need. Help articles, workarounds, and general troubleshooting are the keys to success. 

XBOX NEGATIVE SILVER BALANCE

Earlier this week, Destiny Player Support noticed an increase in reports about negative Silver balances on Xbox that we are continuing to investigate. Players who are still running into this issue on Xbox should reboot their console and log back into Destiny 2 to verify their Silver balance.

“IN THE VALLEY” CRIMSON DAYS EMBLEM

On Tuesday, Destiny Player Support received reports that code generation and redemption for the “In the Valley” Crimson Days emblem had ended approximately nine hours earlier than expected. To ensure players who had already generated a code had a chance to redeem their code or a friend’s code, the deadline to redeem was extended until Wednesday’s daily reset. 

CURRENT KNOWN ISSUES

While we continue investigating various known issues, here is a list of the latest issues that were reported to us in our #Help Forum:

• Full Hymn of Desecration stacks are being removed from player’s inventories upon earning the final one.
• World chests in the Dreaming City are not dropping Glimmer.
• The Aeon Safe Gauntlets list the incorrect requirement to activate the Aeon Energy perk in the armor inspection screen. Players need to get melee kills to activate the Aeon Energy perk.

For a full list of emergent issues in Destiny 2, players can review our Known Issues article. Players who observe other issues should report them to our #Help forum.

They Believed They Could Fly

Titans like to punch things, right? Sometimes, things aren’t within reach of their fists. This week’s winners bridge the gap with some killer editing that really drove it home.

Movie of the Week: Titans Just Want to Punch Things

Honorable Mention: An Perfectly Average PvP Montage

Honorable Mention: Wedding in the Dreaming City

I’m still having a bit of trouble processing the fact that you’ve all raised billions of Fractaline in the last few weeks. On top of that, you’ve completed countless Timelost weapon bounties in the process. Spider is swimming in shards. Your XP gains are overflowing.

I can only hope to one day own a successful business like our Fallen friend.

While all this has been happening, Osiris confronted an old ally(?) to provoke them to pick a side. Have you seen the new cinematic in the game? It’s out there. In the weeks to come, your victory over the Red Legion on Mercury will be complete. A new Season is on rapid approach and with it comes new mysteries, threats, and activities to plunder for rewards. If you’re enjoying those Obelisks, you still have time to farm their resonance levels and weapon bounties before the next Season begins. We’ll share more with you real soon…

Cheers,

Dmg04