‘Destiny 2’ Boss Health And Player Damage Is Bugged Or Bad In ‘Edge Of Fate’

After a wild weekend of punishment in the Contest Mode of Desert Perpetual, Destiny 2’s new Edge of Fate raid, players have now begun to suspect that something is wrong in this new era of the game. It may be on purpose, it may be a bug, but either way, it raises questions about what’s going on.

The bosses in the contest mode of the raid had easily the most health we’ve seen in a Destiny 2 run like this, even with content tuned to be its hardest. While many top players enjoyed the experience, even they admitted that doing perfect damage to these bosses required an absurd amount of “loadout swapping” between different gear sets to stack damage, something Bungie has previously said they don’t like. Here? It was almost mandatory.

This sparked a theory that boss health is simply broken in Edge of Fate, and it’s not that far-fetched of an idea. Bungie overhauled more or less every system in Destiny 2 for the Edge of Fate launch, including damage scaling and a “crunch” of damage numbers, which is why you’re hitting for dozens and hundreds of damage instead of millions now.

But this doesn’t just appear to be Desert Perpetual. Players are reporting that other raid and dungeon bosses, even on normal modes, are now taking far more damage phases to kill than before, as in, double or triple or sometimes quadruple. The same content just…absurd amounts of health.

Things may also be broken on the player damage side. Damage numbers are sometimes not reflecting actual values. Crit scalars sometimes appear not active. One of the strangest bugs, seemingly uncovered during the raid, was the “reinstancing” an encounter could actually increase your damage if it was feeling too low in a previous attempt. It’s all over the place.

This may be a combination of things. Bungie did want to increase boss health so one-phases were far less common. But too much is happening here that it feels outright bugged, and it seems silly to go back and beef up a ton of old dungeon bosses in mostly irrelevant content with 3x the health as before.

This doesn’t feel great. I’ve never seen so many people frustrated with a contest mode run, but even though that’s now over, these issues are extending into the rest of the game, and players are going to need some clarity from Bungie. If things were in fact bugged during the Contest Mode run, a limited-time offering, that’s going to be something if a disaster to admit. But the main question is what it means for the game going forward and if things are actually feeling like they’re supposed to. And if they are, if that’s actually a good idea (I’m not even getting into what also appear to be bugged ability cooldowns).

Yes, it’s not shocking that giant overhauls of systems result in bugs and things breaking, but this one seems very, very important, and if it didn’t damage Contest Mode, it still might be pervasive in the rest of the game. Either way, we need to know, and I’ve asked Bungie for clarification.

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