Destiny 2 Season 17 is a month away from now, and already Bungie are already prepping for some huge changes to be made across the board for the game in the wake of The Witch Queen’s release. Check out a rundown of the upcoming changes detailed in Bungie’s latest post.
Destiny 2 Season 17 Changes:
Glaives
Here’s what’s changing in Season 17:
- We’re pushing Glaives deeper into their roles of hard-hitting melee damage and near-complete protection when shielded, as well as increasing projectile speed to make them more reliable at range.
- Note: the Glaive shield grants 97.5% damage resistance in PvE, 75% in PvP.
- Increased melee damage vs PvE enemies (except for bosses and vehicles) by 25%.
- Reduced energy drain speed while shielded by 30%.
- Increased projectile speed dependent on the range stat:
- At 0 stat: increased from 30 to 60 m/s.
- At 100 stat: increased from 80 to 100 m/s.
- Exotic Glaives have all been buffed, in addition to the global Glaive changes which make it easier to build energy (projectile speed making landing shots easier and energy granted per projectile hit).
- Titan Glaive, Edge of Action: players now gain a Void overshield while inside the bubble, Helm of Saint-14 now applies to this bubble as it does for Ward of Dawn.
- Warlock Glaive, Edge of Intent: increased speed and acceleration of the healing turret projectiles.
- Hunter Glaive, Edge of Concurrence: tripled the damage of the wave detonation, increased the number of enemies it can chain to from 4 to 8.
Global Changes
Flinch
Aim deflection on receiving damage, typically called flinch, is a common pain point, particularly on Primary ammo weapons. We’ve rebuilt the stability weapon stat to grant flinch resistance in addition to its other effects, with a maximum flinch resistance of 10% to 25% dependent on weapon archetype. With this change players can build for flinch resistance, more easily on weapons that feel flinch more than others, and less so on Special weapons, which we don’t want to be easier to use when under fire.
Airborne Gunplay
Before getting to buildcrafting, we’ve made a fundamental change to the modifiers applied while airborne. Your Primary weapons will have less randomness in projectile accuracy in most cases, you’ll have less aim assist instead, and will need precise aiming to land your shots without building heavily into airborne.
Playlist Weapons
The latest playlist weapons drop from Gambit, Crucible, and strike activity completions. Older weapons are available from vendor-rank packages or can be focused.
These weapons are intended to provide interesting drops even for players who spend a lot of time in an activity. And while we want to keep the large perk pools to address that goal, we want to provide a way to reduce the duration of the chase for players who want a specific weapon. Also, since the older playlist weapons are still available as vendor rank-up rewards we want them to feel more relevant in a post-Origin-Trait world.
Stat Display Update
Following the recent change to show numbers for all stats instead of just bars, we’ve opted to change the stat display on weapons to more clearly reflect their capabilities. All weapon stat bars now range 0 to 100, instead of being limited to some range in the middle of the bar.
One-hit Kills and Special Ammo
There are several damage buffs external to weapons that allow weapons to one-hit kill without much investment, such as an Aggressive Sniper Rifle with High Impact Reserves, Eriana’s Vow or Le Monarque, specifically when combined with an external 20% damage buff. As an example, Empowering Rift can give many Sniper Rifles one-hit body-shot capabilities in the Crucible.
Most of these use the same buff under the hood, so we’ve adjusted them all at once. With these changes it’s going to be much rarer to get an easy one-hit kill with a weapon that wouldn’t typically allow it.
-
-
- Reduced the damage bonus for Empowering Rift, High Energy Fire, and Inertia Override from 20% to 15% against players (no effect in PvE).
-
In addition, we want Special ammo to be less plentiful, making it more difficult to chain Special weapon kills.
-
-
- Disabled ammo scavenger armor mods in PvP.
-
- No matter how much ammo a player was carrying on death, if you pick up a Special brick you can only get one ammo for a Shotgun/Sniper Rifle (or “one kill’s worth of ammo” for weapons that require more than one shot to kill, e.g., Forerunner, Trace Rifles)
-
- Retuned several Special weapon archetypes and Exotic weapons (see below), with the general goal of reducing the effectiveness and uptime of Special weapons.
- Disabled ammo scavenger armor mods in PvP.
-
Archetypes
Special Weapons
- All Special weapons have had their in-air accuracy significantly reduced. While we are okay with encouraging players to build into using their Primary weapons more effectively in the air, we do not believe a prevalence of airborne one-hit kill options is good for PvP.
- Special Weapons have a slightly larger airborne accuracy penalty than Primary weapons at 0 Airborne Effectiveness stat, reduced to 0 at 100 stat.
- Special Weapons have a similar airborne aim assist cone penalty to other weapons (around 50% at 0 stat), and this penalty can be reduced but not entirely removed by investing in Airborne Effectiveness.
- Sniper Rifles are fairly slow to ready, stow and aim down sights, which has made Snapshot feel mandatory for many players.
- Reduced Stow, Ready and Aim Down Sights times by 10%, i.e., all snipers are now snappier (there’s a matching change to Snapshot below).
- Sniper Rifles have less access to ammo than Shotguns and Fusion Rifles (where kills drop ammo right in front of you), so we think ammo scarcity will prevent Sniper Rifles from spiking.
- Slug and pellet Shotguns are still overwhelmingly popular in PvP despite some recent changes, so we’ve touched them again with the goal of encouraging some diversity in Special weapon choice. We’re keeping an eye on this change, since we’ve touched Shotguns multiple times recently, and will adjust it if needed. With this change we expect Shotguns to have a shorter one-hit kill distance, but still be effective enough in that short-range kill role. This change reduces Shotgun one-hit kill distance by around 0.5m, because the importance of spread angle is just as high as damage falloff and this has not been touched.
- Reduced damage falloff start and end by 1m.
- Reduced aim assist and magnetism falloff start and end by 2m.
- Fusion Rifle usage is trending pretty high, particularly in Trials, and bringing Shotguns down a little more would make them too good an option, so we’ve made a global change. With these changes 20m+ Fusion Rifle one-hit kills should be very uncommon (through a combination of damage falloff and recoil changes).
- Reduced damage falloff near distance.
- 2m at 0 range (~2.7m when ADS with a 15-zoom stat)
- 1.3m at 100 range (~2.275m when ADS with a 15-zoom stat)
- Reduced damage falloff far distance.
- 1m at 0 range (~1.35m when ADS with a 15-zoom stat)
- 1.3m at 100 range (~1.75m when ADS with a 15-zoom stat)
- Reduced recoil scalar variance between 0 and 100 stability.
- 0 stability: unchanged at 0.750
- 100 stability: increased from 0.500 to 0.550 (i.e., increased the recoil penalty slightly)
- Reduced damage falloff near distance.
- When we rebuilt Fusion Rifles in Season 15, we wanted to differentiate the subfamilies dramatically from each other, which worked! Now that we’ve seen them in action for a couple of Seasons, we’re pulling back from the extremes a little. With these changes Fusion Rifle subfamilies are still very different from each other, but high impacts are stronger and rapid-fires and precisions should be a little less dominant.
- High Impact: reduced unmodified High Impact charge time from 1.000 to 0.960s, increased damage per burst by 10.
- Precision: increased unmodified charge time from 0.740 to 0.780s.
- Rapid Fire: increased unmodified charge time from 0.460 to 0.500, decreased damage per burst by 20.
- New charge time and damage per burst for all Fusion Rifle subfamilies:
- High Impact: 0.960s, 330 damage
- Precision: 0.780s, 280 damage
- Adaptive: 0.660s, 270 damage
- Rapid Fire: 0.500s, 245 damage
- Besides Divinity, Trace Rifles aren’t as popular in hard content as we want them to be (we particularly want damage type reworks of the oldest three Trace Rifles to have a chance to shine this Season), and they’re also more affected by disabling scavenger armor mods than other Special weapons. With this change they’re a better use of Special ammo against non-red bar targets.
-
- Increase Trace Rifle damage against non-red bar combatants by 20%.
- Increased ammo picked up per Special ammo brick from 18 to 30.
-
Primary Weapons
- Auto Rifles and Pulse Rifles aren’t as competitive as we’d like at mid-range, and Lightweight Pulse Rifles are too hard to use to hit their optimal time to kill – with these changes we expect Auto Rifles and Pulse Rifles to better compete with Hand Cannons in mid-long range and outrange standard zoom Submachine Guns.
- Auto Rifle
- Increased damage falloff near distance by 0.75m.
- Pulse Rifle
- Increased damage falloff near distance based on the range stat:
- 0 range: increased from 15 to 16m.
- 100 range: increased from 22.5 to 24m.
- (Note that this is the hip-fire falloff distance and is multiplied by the zoom value to get the aim down sights falloff distance).
- Damage falloff far distance remains 40m regardless of the range stat.
- Increased Lightweight (450RPM) Pulse Rifle damage per bullet from 15 to 16 (with a 1.65x precision scalar this will increase precision damage from 24.75 to 26.4).
- This won’t change the optimal time to kill in PvP but will reduce the number of crits required.
- Increased damage falloff near distance based on the range stat:
- Auto Rifle
- Zoom is too important a factor on Submachine Guns, and Submachine Guns with low zoom don’t feel competitive in PvP. We’ve reduced the variance in zoom, brought the base zoom up from 13 to 14 and extended the damage falloff distance. With this change, several standard zoom Submachine Guns will be more competitive, but this does make the inaccessible Submachine Gun with highest perk/trait RNG (Multimach) compete less with Auto Rifles and it will no longer straight-up outclass every other Submachine Gun in PvP.
- Increased damage falloff by 1.5m
- Adjusted zoom values on most viable Legendary Submachine Guns and one Exotic.
- Shayura’s Wrath: 17 to 16
- Multimach: With max zoom scope: 17 to 15 (second highest zoom will bring this to 14 instead)
- Stochastic Variable: 13 to 14
- Ikelos (just noting the change from The Witch Queen here): 13 to 14
- Seventh Seraph: 13 to 14
- Every Waking Moment: 13 to 14
- The Huckleberry: 13 to 15
- We like Adaptive Submachine Guns and are starting to make them again. But in their current form they kill a little too fast with body shots, so we’ve reduced body damage to increase their body shot time to kill by one bullet without impacting their optimal time to kill.
- Decreased body damage from 12 to 11.25
- Increased precision multiplier from 1.35 to 1.44
- Precision Frame Hand Cannons have always been good while airborne, effectively having built-in Icarus Grip, and with the changes to airborne functionality we wanted to preserve that feel while translating their advantage to the new system.
- Intrinsic switched from a 75% airborne accuracy penalty reduction to +25 Airborne Effectiveness stat (this means that if you had a Frontier’s Cry with an Icarus Grip mod in it, you would be at 19 + 25 + 15 = 59 before factoring in armor or subclass).
Heavy Weapons
- Machine Guns still aren’t where we want them to be in PvE, so we’re giving them an additional buff, but less so against bosses, where their extremely long range and deep ammo reserves would make them strong in too many roles. With this change they’ll shred most enemies without stepping on top tier boss damage options.
- Increased damage by 40% against PvE enemies (20% vs bosses).
- Xenophage and Grand Overture receive this buff, except for the bonus vs bosses.
- Increased damage by 40% against PvE enemies (20% vs bosses).
- Sword stats have been inconsistent for a while now, so we’ve tidied all of these up (mostly cosmetic)
- Fixed several inconsistencies in stat display between different Swords (this has no gameplay impact).
- Increased the charge rate stat of Sola’s Scar from 20 to 50 to match Temptation’s hook.
- Rocket Launcher subfamilies weren’t differentiated enough by the previous change, so we’ve made the differences more extreme. With this change we expect there to be a more marked tradeoff for the intrinsic tracking on precisions, and a greater benefit for the other subfamilies. Specified relative to the baseline, i.e. High Impact Rocket Launchers
- Precision: -10% damage (both impact and detonation)
- High Impact: no change (this subfamily has the highest blast radius)
- Adaptive and Aggressive: +10% damage
Exotics
- All Exotics that shipped before the Forsaken release now have their kill trackers visible by default
- Fighting Lion needed a bit more of a buff, so we improved its reload speed when Thin the Herd is active a couple of releases back, and now we’re increasing its blast radius and damage. With this change it should be easier to get the damage you need to trigger its perk.
- Reverted the Season 15 Breech Grenade Launcher blast radius reduction, but just for Fighting Lion, i.e., increased blast radius by 0.4m.
- Increased damage by 5%.
- Eyes of Tomorrow as a raid Exotic ought to be better against tough PvE enemies – with this change it’s a solid option in this role, particularly with the Adaptive Ordnance perk active.
- Increased damage vs bosses and Champions by 30%.
- Leviathan’s Breath always felt like it should absolutely wreck Champions, and using its first shot to stun an Unstoppable Champion without it doing much damage felt bad. Archer’s Tempo from its catalyst is significant on paper but in practice that draw speed buff isn’t as noticeable as we’d like. Overall, we hope these changes make it feel a bit better against all types of Champions and other tough enemies in hard content.
- The Archer’s Tempo perk from the catalyst now has increased effect (just on this weapon).
- The standard draw time scalar for Archer’s Tempo is 0.75x, it is now 0.5625x on Leviathan’s Breath.
- Added a small delay before detonation on Champions, minibosses, and bosses – this allows the impact to stun an Unstoppable Champion and the detonation to deal bonus damage against the stunned Champion.
- Damage changed to be more of an even split between impact and detonation, and increased damage across the board by ~50%.
- Overall damage vs Champions is roughly doubled (even more compared to shooting an un-stunned unstoppable Champion).
- The Archer’s Tempo perk from the catalyst now has increased effect (just on this weapon).
- The Huckleberry had an underwhelming engagement range, updated zoom based on the change to baseline Submachine Gun zoom.
- Increased zoom stat from 13 to 15.
- Our experiment with pushing Xenophage into harder-hitting but slower-firing didn’t pan out, so we’re increasing the rate of fire and adjusting damage back to what it was.
- Increased rate of fire from 100RPM to 120RPM.
- Reduced damage per bullet to match the previous.
- Doesn’t benefit from the Season 17 Machine Gun damage buff vs bosses.
- Le Monarque is too oppressive when combined with external damage buffs, but we felt that it could be stronger in PvE – with this change combined with the damage buff change above we’ve introduced a 60-resilience gate on killing a Guardian in PvP with a crit while in an Empowering Rift or similar.
- Reduced poison tick damage vs players by 25%.
- Changed poison damage type from burn to poison (this is largely housekeeping, not gameplay-significant).
- Increased poison tick damage vs AI by 50%.
- Lorentz Driver can be difficult to fight against in PvP, in part because it does very high body shot damage. With this change, getting left super weak by a body shot should be less common, though we’re keeping an eye on how this change lands and may revisit it later.
- Reduced body shot damage against players by 20% (this will also prevent it from being a one-hit kill with a body shot while in an Empowering Rift, combined with that change).
- Body damage reverts to old behavior when in the weapon’s damage mode.
- Precision damage in any mode unchanged.
- Skyburner’s Oath felt like it didn’t have a niche, except for airborne memes, so we’ve made a bunch of changes aiming to improve its ease of use, give it some more utility and really push it into that airborne role.
- Increased ADS projectile speed to 9999 (i.e., this projectile is now hitscan).
- Both ADS and hip-fire are now 150 RPM.
- Hip-fire projectile no longer tracks, but arcs similar to a Grenade Launcher and has a larger detonation size than ADS.
- The hip-fire detonation also applies a burn to targets.
- The bonus range from the Masterwork has been rolled into the base stats of the weapon. The Masterwork now grants bonus reload speed instead.
- Has the highest Airborne Effectiveness stat of any weapon in the game (35).
- The Last Word plays very differently on mouse and keyboard than it does on controller, but the disparity doesn’t need to be that large. We’re keeping an eye on this one too.
- Reduced mouse and keyboard recoil penalty from 33% to 22%.
- Arbalest is more dominant than intended in hard PvE content, able to fill the anti-barrier role as well as shield breaking and boss damage. We’ve made a fairly small adjustment here but may need to look at it again in a future Season.
- Reduced damage vs Champions by 25% (will still break barriers in one hit).
- Graviton Lance’s catalyst didn’t help the weapon enough, and we wanted to give it a bit of a boost. This change gives it some interesting utility in PvE and PvP, particularly with the buff to Exotic Primary weapons in The Witch Queen.
- Catalyst changed from granting Hidden Hand to granting Vorpal Weapon and Turnabout.
- Grand Overture’s most recent adjustment switched the missiles to fire in bursts of 5, which allows for more granularity in unloading that damage, but sometimes you just want them all to fly out at once.
- Reduced time between bursts when in missile mode. Holding the trigger will now fire all missiles in a continuous burst, tapping will fire 5-round bursts.
- Coldheart: Arc damage type update, and Coldheart’s Exotic trait more or less being “is a Trace Rifle” no longer fits in a world with Legendary Trace Rifles. The ease of use on sustained damage was also pretty low.
- Sustained damage creates an Ionic Trace and collecting an Ionic Trace grants energy to all your abilities.
- Increased grace time before the damage ramp clears from 0.113s to 1.0s.
- Prometheus Lens: Solar damage type update, and generally this needed some tweaks to be viable
- Sustained damage applies a more useful burn to targets.
- Wavesplitter: Void damage type update, and the power-cycling mechanic was interesting but ultimately hard to capitalize on.
- Power level no longer cycles randomly, the default damage output is the same as the old middle tier.
- Picking up an Orb of Power now grants 10s of maximum power and caps at 20s, up from 5 and 10.
- Now suppresses targets while granted this mode by picking up an Orb.
- Osteo Striga’s projectile somehow shipped rotated by 90 degrees, looks a bit weird.
- Corrected rotation on the projectile model.
- Lord of Wolves is kind of a Shotgun, but has its own custom tuning. It wasn’t impacted by the previous Shotgun change, and was much too strong with Shotguns and Fusion Rifles getting reduced range, this brings it more in line.
- Reduced damage falloff start and end by 25%.
Perks
Note: Where an enhanced perk exists and an adjustment is needed, it’s been adjusted in the same way.
- Snapshot Sights has felt mandatory on Sniper Rifles forever, with this change a Sniper Rifle with Snapshot will feel about the same, but one without Snapshot will feel a lot snappier.
- Increased ADS animation speed scalar from 0.5 to 0.75 for Special ammo weapons, Primary ammo weapons are unchanged.
- Opening Shot has felt mandatory on Shotguns forever, in large part because it gives part of its buff as a damage falloff scalar – this isn’t something we like on short-range weapons. You can still feel the range bump with this change unless range is already capped, but it won’t let weapons push completely outside their intended engagement ranges.
- Removed damage falloff scalar.
- Increased range stat bonus from +20 to +25.
- Other stats from this perk are unchanged (+20 aim assist stat, 5% reduced accuracy cone angle, 10% reduced accuracy cone growth).
- Full Choke has been the go-to magazine perk forever (justified or not) – with this change other magazine options should be competitive.
- Increased spread angle scale from 0.95 to 0.9625 (i.e., narrows the spread a little less).
- Smoothbore has always felt like an awkward magazine perk, so we’re buffing it a little.
- Reduced spread angle scale from 1.1 to 1.075 (i.e., widens the spread a little less).
- Desperado is a strong perk in its current form, but we’d like to be able to put it on more weapons without breaking PvP. With this adjustment it’s still strong, has more PvE utility, and can be applied to Pulse Rifle subfamilies aside from High Impact if desired.
- Increased fire recovery scalar from 0.415 to 0.7 (i.e., doesn’t fire as fast with the perk active).
- Reduced duration from 7s to 6s, added a timer to the buff text.
- Removed the PvE damage penalty.
- Air Assault was shelved a long time ago, but adding the Airborne Effectiveness stat gave us the opportunity to turn it into a perk that actually does what it says on the description. With this change, airborne gunplay while wounded will be much more effective.
- Rebuilt now grants up to +60 Airborne Effectiveness stat when wounded (same trigger conditions as Eye of the Storm).
- Mulligan was never quite strong enough to warrant a pick previously, but buffing it would have been risky on Special weapons. With this change, it’s useful on rapid-fire Primary weapons where you don’t expect every shot to hit, occupying a similar role to Triple Tap (but inverted).
- Increased chance to return ammo on a miss from 20% to 35% on Primary ammo weapons.
- Unchanged on Special and Heavy ammo weapons.
- Compulsive Reloader shipped a little weak, with this change you can really feel the reload speed bump.
- Increased reload stat buff from +40 to +50.
- Added a 0.95x reload animation scalar.
- Adagio was allowing for a one-hit body shot kill with slug Shotguns. While this is possible with other perks such as Swashbuckler, the investment required to trigger the perk is much too low for that power bump. With this change a slug Shotgun with Adagio will be less of a monster in PvP, but will still be able to get headshot kills at greater ranges with the perk active.
- Reduced the damage bonus for Shotguns from 30% to 20%.
Mods
- Icarus Grip will now grant the Airborne Effectiveness stat instead of its previous airborne accuracy penalty scalar.
- Removed airborne accuracy scalar, now grants +15 Airborne Effectiveness stat.
- Adept Icarus Grip now grants +15 Airborne Effectiveness stat and +5 Handling.
There you have it. This huge list of changes is not the end, though, as the post also detailed some weapons leaving the loot pool for Season 17 and 18:
Leaving loot pools at the beginning of Season 17:
- Iron Banner
-
- Occluded Finality Sniper Rifle
- Finite Impactor Hand Cannon
-
- Nightfalls
-
- The Comedian Shotgun
- Palindrome Hand Cannon
-
- Trials of Osiris
-
- Shayura’s Wrath Submachine Gun
- The Messenger Pulse Rifle
-
Leaving loot pools at the beginning of Season 18:
- Iron Banner
-
- Peacebond Sidearm
- Archon’s Thunder Machine Gun
-
- Nightfalls
-
- PLUG ONE.1 Fusion Rifle
- The Hothead Rocket Launcher
-
- Trials of Osiris
-
- Eye of Sol Sniper Rifle
- The Summoner Auto Rifle
-
Destiny 2 Season 17 is coming out on May 24 across platforms. Remember to stay tuned here at MP1st for the patch notes once the update comes out!
Source: Bungie