This Is How Destiny 2’s ‘Dead Weeks’ Will Work Now, It Seems
In the wake of Destiny 2’s profitable Solstice event, so profitable I’m not sure Bungie entirely thought it through, it seemed like going back to the normal grind was going to be a slog. And while that still may be true, at reset, Bungie announced something that was at the very least eyebrow-raising.
At Tuesday reset, Bungie revealed that this week, special weapon damage and ammo drops have been increased in Portal activities. Cool, great, we’ve seen things like 25% surges before and such for various specials, so whatever.
Not whatever, not whatever at all.
As the in-game pop-up says, the damage increase here for all special weapons is double. They will do twice as much damage, and if you build into ammo even a little bit, with that extra boost my guess is you’ll practically be using these as a primary. That was sort of viable for some weapons before, but it may be true for most of them now.
This shines a specific spotlight on a weapon like Mint Retrograde, the brand-new rocket pulse rifle that is already like a heavy weapon that uses special ammo. It’s hard to take off at all and now it’s flat-out twice as good. Also in the same breath you can cite Choir of One, the hugely powerful special auto rifle that even with recent ammo reserve nerfs, is still more or less a primary. Now, double damage and more ammo. Ridiculous.
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Ironically, it’s not all that common of a problem that the activities players are running into are “too hard.” There are weird ebbs and flows with deltas where 260 is easy, then 280 is hard, then 300 is easy again. Now, in Grandmaster, I’m not finding anything’s that difficult at all, so this is just icing. The exception here would be Mythic Kepler missions which have enemies that are so overly obnoxiously stuffed with health that this double damage may make things actually feel vaguely normal.
The main Portal issue here remains rewards versus time, where it’s not worth running nearly anything but Solo Ops the majority of the time for max rewards. And now that Solstice is gone, getting lots of quality loot has been cut by probably 90% instantly, given how rewarding that event was. So, double damage specials will be fun, but the main issues with The Portal are still in place.
This does give us a glimpse of what it seems Destiny 2 has in store for future “dead” weeks, in this case a spell after a big event ends and another starts. And it also shows they’re willing to go much further than we’ve seen in the past, and I really cannot remember a damage surge to this degree that wasn’t an actual bug.
So, what else do they got? Obviously, you could run the same modifier for primary or heavy weapons. Double drops seems like an extremely easy one which they have done before plenty of times, but it’s even more relevant for the Portal now. I’d love one that gave us 80% shorter ability cooldowns or something like that. But the point is, they appear to be willing to finally take some very big swings when it comes to mixing things up, even if there isn’t all that much content to mix up in the first place.
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