This week at Bungie, we seem to have written a short story about the upcoming changes to the weapon sandbox.
Hello dear readers. I would like to close this TWAB with a brief suggestion; never end your drafting phase with your introduction. I’ve been talking for about 15 minutes trying to figure out the best way to get you into another Mega-TWAB sandbox message. We have a lot of changes planned for next season, and we’re excited to start spreading the word.
Let’s keep the talk about live games short and sweet, okay? It’s been a fun week, to say the least! The Master difficulty of Oath of Disciple has begun, just a few short weeks before the Guardians start claiming their raid titles. Masters constantly push the limits of player skill, build craftsmanship and general game strategy. Iron Banner has come and gone, but Trials of Osiris returns this Friday with some slight changes to the post-Flawless experience. There’s still a lot to do, especially if you want to complete every new victory released with The Witch Queen and Season of Resurrection. All in all, we had a great time and we hope you do too.
Even as we set sail, the winds of change will always catch up with destiny. As mentioned, we’ll discuss how these winds move the sand in our weapon sandbox. Some of you know the Destiny sandbox inside out. In some cases, a 45-minute video can be posted to understand the intricacies of Shotguns. Well, do we have some changes for you…
I’ve been known to recommend water and snacks for larger TWABs, and this is no exception. Play at your own pace, have fun, and ask questions when you’re done. Our community and sandbox teams will be ready to issue clarifications and follow up in future posts, TWAB or other communication if necessary.
That’s a big sandbox…
In a few words, we’ll hand over the microphone Staff Designer Chris Proctor. Chris joins us today as a team representative with a hundreds of bullets Sandbox patch notes were developed by a bunch of tattered guardians at the studio.Each of them contributed many, many hours to prepare and prepare for these changes Season 17 (Starting May 24th), we expect some changes in Crucible strategy in just a few weeks.
This will be a big problem for those not comfortable with the complexity of Destiny’s sandbox. You may have to wait a while for community members to break down some of these changes to make them less daunting. At a high level, we’ll cover the following today:
- Some of the team’s goals.
- Glaives, a review of its design and some plans for future tweaks.
- Back off and airborne games, and how we’re pushing those into building craft.
- Adjusted one-hit kills in the Crucible.
- General adjustments to special ammo, exotic weapons, legendary archetypes and a range of weapon perks.
let’s start.
Invigilator: G’day G’dians.
In Season 17, the Sandbox team is making changes to various aspects of the Sandbox to improve the player experience in PvP. Below are the goals of the Arms team in support of this.
Introducing leverage to adjust how players build for airborne shootouts
Destiny has extremely fluid and expressive aerial movement, but this movement has to be balanced against ground players lest it become oppressive. We want players who like this style of play to fit in, but they have to make tough choices about what to leave behind. Getting into the air successfully will no longer be as simple as “install the Icarus Grip mod on it”, but the benefits of investing heavily in it will be higher.
Allows players to ease back off
Excessive flinching is a frequent complaint from players, especially when using the primary weapon and taking heavy damage from enemies. Players should be able to invest in backoff resistance, and base backoff should be low on primary weapons, but manually adjusted based on prototypes so that weapons that require backoff resistance have the easiest access to it.
Reduced the number of one-hit kills in PvP
The Sandbox in general wants to reduce the number of one-hit kills in PvP and shift combat more towards main gunfights. For weapons, this means tuning special weapons, including the effectiveness of specific weapons and the overall uptime of special weapons, as well as a key major outlier.
Addresses common feedback about weapons in all game modes
Each season, the weapons team looks at over- or under-performing Legendary and Exotic weapons and makes adjustments – Season 17 will be bigger than usual, with more focus on underused weapons and PvP balance.
With our goals in mind, let’s take a look at it all. First, Graves.
Radical
We’ve noticed several aspects of how Glaives interacts with weapon and armor perks that don’t match player expectations, and wanted to take some time to clarify the intent, the changes included in Season 17, and the logic changes we’ll be using in the future.
The Glaive Melee is a basic melee attack, not a weapon attack, that consumes no ammo and deals kinetic damage. So, it’s more of an unpowered punch than a sword swing.
Allowing buffs to weapon damage is too powerful for Glaive melee for something with no ammo limit, especially in PvP where even a small damage buff can make two kills extremely fast . Also, in general, we prefer to directly increase Glaive’s melee damage (in fact, we’re doing that!), rather than effectively enforcing Glaives’ weapon damage perks.
Glaives already have a long lunge distance, and increasing this causes unreliable behavior on the network, so no melee lunge distance buff applies to Glaive melee.
Our intention is to:
- Melee should Activate perks that trigger base melee damage or kills (eg, ammo refill from Grave Robber, weapon damage buff 5x stack from Swashbuckler, ammo refill from Sealed Ahamkara Grasps).
- Melee should not Activating perks that trigger powered melee damage or kills, or require subclass melee energy consumption (such as Combo Strike or Assassin’s Hood).
- Melee should Benefit from melee damage buffs (eg Winter’s Guile or Wormgod Caress).
- Melee should not Benefit from weapon damage buffs (eg Rampage, Killing Clip, Swashbuckler).
- Grave projectile should Benefit from weapon damage buffs.
With that expectation, there are some inconsistencies in how these are implemented in the game, some of which we’ve fixed and some we’ll be working on in the future.
Once we implement these guidelines consistently in the game, we may look at specific situations that don’t match player expectations and do some custom things, updating descriptions where clarification is needed, but our main goal is to enable players to predict Glaive Interaction will work.
Here are the changes we made during Season 16, mostly bug fixes and some quality of life changes:
- Warglaive projectile hit max energy reduced from 6 to 4.
- Melee Glaives can now be interrupted by Hunter Dodge.
- The Grave Robber perk now draws from Glaives’ reserves instead of generating ammo.
- Blades no longer get stuck clang recovery When using a melee attack on the opponent.
- The Sealed Grip of Ahamkara no longer reloads the Glaive on projectile hits (but does as expected on melee hits).
- Melee Glaives can no longer stun high health combatants.
- Warglaive melee kills can now be tracked in match history for bounties and more.
Here’s what’s changed in Season 17:
- We’re pushing Glaives deeper into its powerful melee damage and near-full protection from shields, as well as increasing projectile speed to make it more reliable at range.
- Note: The Glaive Shield provides 97.5% damage resistance in PvE and 75% in PvP.
- Increases melee damage against PvE enemies (excluding bosses and vehicles) by 25%.
- Energy consumption while shielded is reduced by 30%.
- Increase projectile speed based on range stats:
- 0 stat: increased from 30 to 60 m/s.
- 100 stat: increased from 80 to 100 m/s.
Pictured: The Guardian with the Exotic Glaive, about to be polished for Season 17.
- Exotic Glaives have all been buffed, except Global Glaives are easier to build energy (projectile speed makes landing shots easier, gaining energy per projectile hit).
- Titan Glaive, Edge of Action: Players now gain Void Shield inside the bubble, and the Saint-14 helmet now applies to this bubble, just like the Dawnguard.
- Warlock Glaive, Edge of Intent: Increases the speed and acceleration of Healing Turret projectiles.
- Hunter Glaive, Edge of Concurrence: Wave explosion damage has been tripled, and the number of enemies it can link to has been increased from 4 to 8.
global change
back off
Aim deflection when taking damage, commonly called flinch, is a common pain point, especially on primary ammo weapons.we rebuild Stablize Among other effects, weapon properties can also provide anti-recoil, with a maximum anti-falback of 10% to 25%, depending on the weapon archetype. With this change, it’s easier for players to build flinch resistance on weapons that are easier to flinch than others, and less so on special weapons, which we didn’t want to be easier to use when under attack.
From internal playtesting, you may not feel the difference when using just one source of pullback resistance, but when stacking two or more sources, the effect is noticeable.
- Note that higher zoom weapons are more susceptible to flinch, and we took that into account when adjusting these numbers.
- Here is a breakdown of the anti-recoil with a stability of 100:
- 25%: Automatic Rifle, SMG, Bow
- 20%: Pulse Rifle, Scout Rifle, Pistol, Machine Gun
- 15%: Hand Cannon, Tracking Rifle
- 10%: Fusion rifles, shotguns, sniper rifles, grenade launchers (breech and drum), linear fusion rifles (special and heavy versions), rocket launchers
- Note that stability stats below 20 will technically have a small flinch resistance penalty, but only about five weapons have stability stats in that range.
- Mentioned here because this is a related change, Elasticity Character stats now provide 0% cringe resistance at 0 stats and 10% at 100 stats.
- Example (note that the sources of backoff resistance are multiplicatively additive):
- A 100 Steady State Suros Pulse Rifle (with Suros Synergy activated), 10 Resilience, No Disruption, and two Steadfast Pulse Rifle Armor mods, all while being buffed by Rally Barricade:
- 0.8 * 0.8 * 0.9 * 0.65 * 0.7 * 0.5 = 0.1x, which is 90% stabilization.
- A 70 Stable Hand Cannon, 5 Toughness, A Stable Hand Cannon Armor Mod:
- 0.91 x 0.95 x 0.7 = 0.61, which is 39% resistance to retreat.
airborne shootout
Before arriving…
