Destiny 2: Forsaken came out six weeks ago at this point. Reports say that nearly 60% of active players purchased the DLC in the month of September. We don’t know how retention in October has been, but we do know that Bungie has been promising some sorely needed quality of life changes. Those changes have finally arrived today as part of the 2.0.5 patch Destiny 2 update.
Items and Economy
Exotic duplicate weighting has been enabled. Yes, that’s the sound of cheering from the Destiny subreddit.
Destiny 2 will “now take into account all Exotics the player has found and weight them against Exotics they have yet to acquire.” We don’t know exactly how much this increases the chances of getting a new Exotic but Bungie says they’re “individually weighted much higher.”
In addition, there’s now another weighting that makes it so that if you do get a duplicate Exotic, there’s a higher chance it’ll be an armor piece. Since these have random perks, the goal was likely to make duplicate exotics feel a bit more rewarding. Up until now they’ve admittedly been a little soul crushing since Forsaken made exotic drops much, much rarer.
To top it all off, Exotic quest weapons have been completely scrapped from the engram loot pool. No more duplicate Chaperones!
Masterwork Cores have been renamed to Enhancement Cores and can now be earned through Scrapper bounties and six of Spider’s weekly bounties.
There are also some really good quality of life changes:
- Banshee-44 now takes Gunsmith materials in batches of 25.
- You no longer have to hold to trade Spider for his material exchange.
- Ghost Fragment stack size has been doubled to 20.
- Shader Dismantle time reduced by 75% from 1 second to .25 seconds.
- Raid challenge bounties now rotate in a fixed fashion.
- Unique Nightfall rewards are now more likely to drop the longer you go without one. This chance resets once you get any unique Nightfall reward.
Multiplayer
Breakthrough, the special Crucible game type that launched with Forsaken, has been disabled for a few weeks while Bungie worked on addressing some fundamental flaws with player experience.
It’ll be re-enabled soon and when it does attackers will respawn more quickly which should help folks actually close out matches. The Breaker now has a mechanic that will award control of itself to whichever team has the most capture progress during the initial phase. This should help reduce the number of matches where teams force a stalemate. Speaking of, if a round ends in a draw twice, the match now ends in a tie. Neither team is awarded Glory points if this happens, but Bungie was kind enough to maintain win streaks.
In Gambit, Sleeper Simulant has finally been hit with the big ol’ nerf hammer. Heavy ammo crates will now only restore 2 shots (down from 4). Swords on the other hand will now restore 12 (up from 6). It won’t reduce the effectiveness of the Sleeper, but hopefully it’ll bring some more variety or at least make those of us without it cry a little less at night.
If you’ve been gunning for the Malfeasance hand cannon, it’s now a little easier to complete its exotic quest. The Ascendant Primeval Servitor will now spawn more frequently at the end of Gambit matches.
Quitting penalties have been disabled since shortly after launch due to matchmaking kicking players from Gambit matches and still triggering quit penalties. If you’ve been enjoying the laxness of that, it’s time to clean yourself up. Quitting penalties are back. You’ll now receive two warnings before being suspended for 30 minute blocks.
Weapons Balancing
To wrap things up, there are a few sandbox changes. Swords and Fusion Rifles have been buffed in PvE. Trace Rifles now beneift from Auto Rifle armor perks which should make them more viable.
Malfeasance now does more damage against Taken enemies and invaders in Gambit. The Explosive Shadow detonation damage has also been increased.
Wish-Ender had its base damage buffed on top of a bug fix which would cause the Broadhead perk not to activate.
One surprise, however, was a nerf to the blast radius of Proximity Grenades and the Full Choke perk. The latter no longer narrows projectile spread as much.
I hope you didn’t come here looking for specific numbers. We don’t know how much of a buff or nerf any of these items got.
Overall it looks like a really solid patch for everyone who somehow still has time to invest in Destiny 2. We’re once again entering the busiest time of the year for video game fans and time is at a premium for everyone.
All we really care about though, is when Xur will finally start forking over Forsaken exotics on a more regular basis. At the very least, it looks like we’re days (or weeks) away from getting Thunderlord.
