Bungie has now unveiled the Destiny 2 Season 21 weapon changes, featuring a host of balance updates, quality-of-life reworks, and changes to certain screens to better display information. Season 21: Season of the Deep will bring reticle updates for several weapons and Exotics, a full auto melee setting, the ability to rotate weapons and preview VFX in the Gear Inspection screen, and many adjustments to weapon damage numbers.

• Related Reading: New Destiny 2 Weekly Reset May 16, 2023 and Eververse Inventory

Destiny 2 Season 21 Weapon Changes:

Hip-Fire Reticles and FOV:

Seeking to address the usability of reticles at high FOV settings, Bungie has rebuilt the hip-fire reticles for the following weapons:

• Fusion Rifle
• Hand Cannon
• Sidearm
• Trace Rifle

Hip-fire reticles for other weapons will also be updated in future releases. Shotgun reticles now also scale with FOV, such that the reticle will now closely match the pellet spread regardless of the FOV.

Charge Meters:

Fusion Rifle and Sword reticles now both display charge information within their respective reticles in order to make it easier to gauge the charge and guard energy (respectively) without relying on visual or audio cues.

Experimental Aim Down Sights Reticle:

Bungie is planning to replace the custom ADS reticles for each weapon with an approach that maintains the hand-built aesthetics of a weapon’s sight or scope while using a variation of the hip-fire reticle for the center crosshair or red dot. The first weapon to incorporate this change is Shayura’s Wrath, which now has an ADS reticle that reacts to its accuracy and autoaim state, and displays a red reticle when pointed at an enemy within range.

Custom Exotic Weapon Reticles:

Many Exotic weapons have perks with unique, important information specific to them, and as such, Bungie has added reticle elements to display this information more immediately.

The specific additions are as follows:

• Charge meter added to Exotic weapons whose base weapon type doesn’t typically have a charge meter.
  • Devil’s Ruin
  • Salvation’s Grip
  • Grand Overture

• Perk counter shows pips for perked shots
  • Quicksilver Storm grenade count.
  • Ace of Spades Memento Mori shot count.
  • Lumina Noble Rounds shot count.
  • Traveler’s Chosen Gathering Light stacks.

• Perk progress meter shows perk buildup
  • The Manticore

• Perk active shows when the Exotic perk is active
  • Hawkmoon
  • Ager’s Scepter
  • Tarrabah
  • Touch of Malice
  • Cryosthesia 77k
  • Trinity Ghoul

• Charge meter and perk counter
  • Vex Mythoclast
• The Charge Meter changes also apply to Exotic Swords and Fusion Rifles.

Such updates will be made to additional Exotic weapons as well in future releases.

Inspection Screen Improvements:

With Season 21, Bungie is adding a number of highly-requested features, the most prominent of which is the ability to rotate weapons in the Gear Inspection screen. The ambient VFX for weapons will now play inside the Inspection screen as well. The change applies to player inventories as well as within the Eververse store. Additionally, the depth-of-field effect has been removed from weapon, ship, and armor preview screens to allow a clearer look at these items from all angles.

Check out the feature in action below:

Full Auto Melee:

A “full auto melee” setting has been added that lets players continue melee attacking both unarmed and armed while holding down the appropriate input. The change is explained in full detail here.

Weapon Archetypes:

A host of adjustments have been made to the following Weapon Archetypes:

• Bows
  • Tyranny of Heaven’s stats were always weirdly low, and we were touching these weapons anyway so opted to update its stats while we were in there.
• Submachine Guns
  • Aggressive Submachine Guns have surged in PvP, they need to be brought back into band—we’re doing that in a way that keeps them viable by reducing both base and crit damage a little, requiring higher precision to reach their optimal time to kill (TTK).
  • Reduced base damage from 15 to 14.
    • Increased precision hit multiplier from 1.45 to 1.5 (crit damage goes from 21.8 to 21).
  • The Immortal is such a stat monster that no other Aggressive SMG can compete, we’ve brought its range in while allowing it to continue to excel in other areas.
    • Reduced base range value by 10.
• Sniper Rifles
  • Sniper Rifles are a very safe option, and we don’t want to also make them dominant, but there’s some room to bring their damage up to improve their feel in PvE. Note that rapid-fire Sniper Rifles also got a large reserves bump and reduced recoil in the Season 20 mid-Season balance update. We’ll keep an eye on this and may bring them up a little more in future if this doesn’t move the needle.
  • Increased PvE damage by 10%.
  • Note: Izanagi’s Burden’s Honed Edge perk shots don’t receive this buff, all other Exotic Sniper Rifles receive the buff as written.
• Scout Rifles
  • Long Arm was inadvertently receiving the damage bonus vs minors for Exotics, so we’ve addressed that (it still receives the Scout Rifle PvE damage buff from the Season 20 mid-Season balance update).

Exotic Weapons:

Balance changes and updates for numerous Exotic weapons are coming with Season 21:

• Eyes of Tomorrow’s multi-targeted missile volley and “Adaptive Ordnance” Exotic trait suggest it should be used to kill groups of enemies, but the Rocket Launcher ammo economy doesn’t really allow for that. But what if smart use of the weapon against groups refunded ammo?
  • Killing 4 targets with a missile volley will refund one ammo.
• Graviton Lance’s performance feels Exotic, but it was easy to miss out on the full damage of a burst because so much of it was back-loaded, and we felt the tuning of Revision Zero’s Heavy Rounds 2-burst would be a good fit.
  • Increased RPM from 257 to 300 (reduced burst delay by 20%, now matches Revision Zero’s Hakke Heavy Rounds rate of fire).
  • Rebalanced damage per shot.
    • Increased first shot damage from:
      • Body: 9.5 to 19.
      • Crit: 15.7 to 31.4.
    • Decreased second shot damage from:
      • Body: 35.6 to 25.6.
      • Crit: 58.7 to 42.3.

• Jade Rabbit is a strong PvP Scout Rifle, but it was difficult to keep track of the state of the Exotic perk, and refunding a single ammo just wasn’t impressive enough for an Exotic—these changes make the state clearer and provide more reward for precision.
  • Added buff text to show when Fate of All Fools increased body shot damage is active.
  • Quickly hitting 3 critical hits now refunds 3 shots instead of 1.
• Flying around with The Manticore is some silly fun, but we wanted it to be more rewarding, mobile, and sustainable. With this change you should be able to remain airborne for longer and be safer while doing so.
  • Increased the catalyst’s damage resistance from tier 3 to tier 4.
  • Increased movement speed during hang time.
  • Activating the catalyst perk (through an airborne kill or sustained damage following an airborne kill) now partially refills the magazine.
• Lumina’s cap on Noble Rounds was 5, while working on Exotic weapon reticles we opted to match Ace of Spades’ Memento Mori shot count to improve consistency between the two and give Lumina a little buff at the same time.
  • Increased Noble Rounds cap from 5 to 6.

• Heartshadow wasn’t quite hitting the fantasy we wanted it to, so we’ve made it easier to exploit the Exotic perks.
  • Damage increase now activates quicker while invisible, after 0.25s instead of 1s.
  • Heartshadow now weakens upon dealing any damage while the damage increase is active.
• We love Worldline Zero’s performance, and with all of the attention we’ve been giving Swords we wanted to spend some time really differentiating it from a certain perk on glowing Sword Dares.
  • The sprinting Heavy attack can now be chained into itself once.
    • Sword guard energy cost from each sprinting heavy attack reduced from 100% to 50%.
    • Increased damage from an individual sprinting heavy attack by 8.3%.
• Sweet Business’s performance is a lot of fun, but we felt we could really plus its fun factor and strength by adding some explosions.
  • Now fires explosive rounds every 20 shots (fewer shots while fully spun up).
• Legend of Acrius hits extremely hard already, dealing some of the highest damage per shot in the game, but its ammo reserves run out fairly quickly, and you have to be right on top of enemies to use it, we’ve relaxed both of those constraints.
  • Increased total ammo from 12 to 16.
  • Increased maximum projectile distance from 9m to 12m.

• Tommy’s Matchbook is all about burning yourself, we’ve updated it to let you burn others as well.
  • Catalyst updated: While overheated, sustained fire scorches your target. Every 5 shots applies 14+7 (with the Embers of Ashes Fragment) scorch stacks.
• No Time to Explain’s drone wouldn’t work against Barrier Champion shields when it had an anti-barrier effect, we’ve fixed that, and also made the drone work with the Feeding Frenzy perk.
  • Updated drone to work with anti-barrier (will break Barrier Champion shields and over penetrate combatant shields).
  • Updated drone to work with Feeding Frenzy (from the NTTE catalyst).
  • This also resolved an issue where the feedback for Feeding Frenzy would always play when the player spawned and then never again.
• Skyburner’s Oath’s Solar 3.0 pass turned out to be too conservative, so we’ve brought it up to be more competitive with other scorching options.
  • Increased scorch stacks from 3 to 5 and 5 to 10 with the Embers of Ashes Fragment.
• Salvation’s Grip’s performance and utility is entertaining and situationally useful, but as a Heavy weapon it really needs to do some damage, without compromising on its identity—we’ve rebuilt its functionality using bowling as inspiration.
  • Reworked to have two firing modes. Charged shot creates a pattern of Stasis crystals (where the number of crystals is no longer dependent on charge time). Uncharged shot is a normal Grenade Launcher shot, which does more damage to Stasis crystals and frozen targets.
  • Added a new perk that reloads the magazine from reserves when you quickly shatter at least 3 crystals with the uncharged shot.

• Bad Juju has always been hard to control, and it turns out that this is because it was originally set up to use Auto Rifle recoil.
  • Fixed an issue that was causing the weapon to recoil like an Auto Rifle, making it harder to control. The recoil pattern will now be similar to other Pulse Rifles.
• Fighting Lion’s damage against red bars spiked to massive levels due to a recent bug, we’ve addressed this—but note that it still receives the 40% damage bonus for Exotic Primary weapons.
  • Fixed an issue that was causing this weapon to do more damage than intended to red-bar combatants.
• Thunderlord has surged in popularity with the release of its catalyst and the Season 20 Machinegun buff, but it shipped with a bug that allowed lightning strikes at a higher frequency than intended against Divinity bubbles. We’ve addressed that—note that regular crits are not affected by the change.
  • Fixed an issue resulting in hits against a Divinity bubble counting as two crits instead of one.
• Winterbite’s initial version included an exploitable damage bug, which is fixed here.
  • The impact damage has been removed and redistributed to the detonation damage.
  • The self-damage scaling has been tuned to account for the increased damage of the detonation.

Perks:

Finally, certain Perks have also been updated:

• Fragile Focus is fairly potent, but the perk deactivator was very unforgiving.
  • Bonus lasts until shield pop, returns when shield regenerates to 100%.
• Thresh, Demolitionist, and Pugilist have always granted increased energy on Shotgun, Fusion Rifle and Sniper Rifle kills, but Glaives missed out on that bonus until now.
  • Grants increased energy to Glaive projectile kills (same as Shotguns, Fusion Rifles, and Sniper Rifles).
• Reconstruction has been simplified under-the-hood so that we can place the perk on more weapons without exceeding perk budgets.
  • This results in a slight change to the timing of the perk where the initial timer and the cooldown timer between reloads have been unified.
  • Base perk: 4 seconds.
  • Enhanced perk: 3.5 seconds.
• Shoot to Loot is already situationally useful, but we’ve been looking for a good way to allow players to interact with Orbs of Power at a distance, and this was an obvious option.
  • Updated to pick up Orbs of Power.
  • Currently this only works on direct hits. The ability for the orbs to be picked up with weapon detonations will be added in a future patch.

The Future:

The interaction between zoom and damage falloff is also in the process of being adjusted, such that weapons with lower than standard zoom values for their archetype will have their damage falloff buffed, and those with higher than standard zoom values will have their damage falloff reduced. Weapons with standard zoom values will be unaffected by the change. However, to avoid negatively affecting the weapon experience, aim assist bonuses as well as accuracy and recoil modifiers will still apply. The base damage falloff numbers for several weapon types will accordingly be adjusted to accommodate weapon types that rely on having above standard zoom.

A large Sword update is also planned with the goal of making guarding “substantially more valuable.” In the more distant future, Bungie is also planning an update for Sparrows that will allow players to use their favorites instead of Always on Time without affecting AoT itself.

Destiny 2’s Season 21: Season of the Deep will kick off with all these weapon changes and adjustments on May 23 on all platforms. Beginning with this new Season, the standard Season Pass price will be increased by 10%.

Source: Bungie