A Bunch Of Destiny 2 Exotic Armors Are Changing Next Season

Bungie is making a host of balancing changes to Destiny 2 when Season 15 starts on August 24, and those alterations are going to include a number of pieces of Exotic armor that have come to dominate in the game. Exotics that give players Super energy are getting reworked in a big way, with several major ones getting nerfed and a few that have fallen away being adjusted to bring them back into circulation. There are enough changes, it seems, that we’re likely to see Destiny 2’s meta shake up pretty significantly in a couple of weeks, especially in the PvP arena known as the Crucible.

The details about Exotic changes were part of a This Week At Bungie post, where the developer also showed off new Iron Banner armor and weapons coming next season, and discussed changes to several armor mods and their perks. Most of the Exotic changes center on items that help you recharge your Super more quickly in-game, but a few other pieces, such as Hunters’ Graviton Forfeit, Titans’ Precious Scars, and Warlocks’ The Stag, have also been tuned to adjust their benefits in some notable ways.

For the Super-granting Exotics, all have been tweaked to cap just how much Super energy you can get back when using them. All of these Exotics allow you to recharge your Super while using your Super, depending on how effectively you do so. The Hunter class’s Shards of Galanor, for instance, gives you Super energy back for landing hits with the Blade Barrage Super; Titans’ Ursa Furiosa gauntlets charge up your Banner Shield Super, giving you energy back as you use it to block incoming damage.

Don’t expect to get nearly full Supers back using Ursa Furiosa in Grandmaster Nightfalls next season.

Shards of Galanor, Ursa Furiosa, Phoenix Protocol, and Skull of Dire Ahamkara have all been tweaked with a cap of 50% of Super energy gained when using them. That means that, unlike in the past, you won’t be able to fully charge or nearly fully charge your Super again with any of these Exotics while using them. Several from the list have been adjusted so that you’ll gain more Super energy from each hit or kill when using them, but all of them will now only give you half of a full Super energy bar in all circumstances.

In addition to those changes, Bungie buffed one Warlock Exotic and nerfed another. The buff is to the Stormdancer’s Brace chest armor, which will now refund up to 50% of Super energy when you use it with the Stormtrance Super, based on how many kills you rack up; previously, the Exotic only increased the damage of Stormtrance with each kill you earned. But the Geomag Stabilizer boots are receiving the nerf, losing their “Topping Up” perk. It allowed players to recharge the last portion of their Super bar when using Chaos Reach by sprinting around the battlefield, which helped make the Super extremely prevalent in PvP play.

Here’s a list of other Exotics getting alterations:

Hunters

• The Bombardiers
  • The bomb now has a secondary effect based on your subclass type:
    • Blind for Arc.
    • Burn for Solar.
    • Slow for Stasis.
    • Suppress for Void.
      • Note: The suppression will not affect a Guardian in Super.
• Graviton Forfeit
  • Increased the bonus invisibility duration.
  • The melee regeneration speed now increases based on the number of enemies near you.
  • While you are invisible, your Recovery is greatly increased, and your weapons reload more quickly.
• Lucky Pants
  • Added intrinsic Hand Cannon Holster mod, replaced previous functionality with the following:
  • “When you ready a fully-loaded Hand Cannon that deals Kinetic damage or damage matching your subclass energy type, for a short time each hit against a combatant from that Hand Cannon increases the damage of the next shot.” (Bungie clarified on Twitter that damage boost would only apply to PvE situations; Lucky Pants’ previous boosts to accuracy and ready speed remain in PvP.)

Hunters in the Crucible are likely to be invisible more of the time thanks to a buff to Graviton Forfeit in Season 15.

Warlocks

• Verity’s Brow
  • Changed to trigger when you get a weapon kill that matches your subclass energy type.
  • Increased grenade damage bonus to 20% per stack (up from 10%).
• The Stag
  • Grants damage reduction to allied Guardians standing in your Rifts.
    • 25% against combatants, 15% against players.
• Promethium Spur
  • Has additional functionality:
  • While standing in a Rift, Solar weapon kills give you class ability energy.
  • When your class ability energy is full, Solar weapon kills consume that energy and spawn a combination healing/empowering Rift at the target’s location.

Titans

• Precious Scars
  • Will now also create a burst of healing and bonus Recovery around you whenever you kill an enemy with a weapon whose damage type matches your subclass type.
• Icefall Mantle
  • Removed the slower class ability recharge scalar.

That’s a whole lot of changes overall, but they generally sound like good tweaks. Warlocks will surely be sad to see the reduction in functionality from Geomag Stabilizers, but the Exotic and the Chaos Reach Super have recently become pretty ridiculous in the Crucible, so this will hopefully encourage additional variety in builds.

In fact, all of these adjustments seem like they should go a long way to making Exotics more interesting and more useful in a variety of situations. Destiny 2 players tend to gravitate to a specific “meta” as these changes get made, and Bungie is always trying to make adjustments that encourage players to creatively mix their weapons and armor together for different effects. We’ll have to see how these specific changes actually play out in practice, but the general feeling is that these are mostly changes for the better that could help players find cool new ways to take down their foes and confound one another.

Source: Gamespot