In Destiny 2, few moments are more infuriating than seeing a Titan charging you in the Crucible and hitting the melee button, expecting your character to whip out a deadly throwing knife–and instead watching as your Guardian commits to a much less effectual stab attack, putting you in perfect position to get erased by a shotgun blast. Thankfully, starting next season, it’s possible no Destiny 2 player will ever experience such disappointment again.
Staring in Season 15, Bungie is instituting a change that will allow players to separate their “charged” melee abilities–those that exist on a cooldown, like the Hunter’s throwing knife–and their standard, uncharged melee attack (essentially just punching an enemy for a middling amount of damage) onto different inputs. It’s one of a long list of changes coming to player abilities Bungie detailed in its This Week At Bungie blog post, most of which will see buffs and nerfs applied to grenades, melee attacks, and Super abilities next season.
While the melee change is a nice tweak, it’s the many adjustments to the speed and damage of abilities that’s going to have a major effect on Destiny 2 in Season 15. Bungie is adding penalties to sliding around the battlefield, for instance, which is a major tactic in PvP matches in particular. A lot of players use the short-range slide ability to close gaps, get to cover, and wallop unsuspecting opponents, and you’ll often see players who do nothing but slide throughout a match. Bungie’s looking to lessen sliding’s advantage, and in Season 15, you’ll incur a penalty to weapon stability and an increase in shotgun pellet spread when you slide, making it more of a tactical tradeoff to hit the dirt.
Bungie recently made tweaks to a host of Stasis abilities, the new powers introduced in the Beyond Light expansion, to balance them in the PvP arena known as the Crucible. Some of those tweaks are being, uh, tweaked again in Season 15. Hunters’ Silence and Squall Supers are being made slightly more effective–they generate a freezing whirlwind that tracks players, but currently, that whirlwind moves so slowly that most players largely ignore it. The squall’s speed is getting boosted to make it a bit more threatening, and Bungie is increasing the speed and tracking of Hunters’ Stasis melee ability, Withering Blade, which previously saw a nerf that Bungie now says was a bit too much.
For Titans, the speed of the Shiver Strike melee attack that’s part of the Glacial Quake Super is getting buffed, bringing it up 25%. That’s in response to slowing the move down in a previous patch. When Stasis first came on the scene, Titans were able to use Shiver Strike to dart around PvP maps. The previous nerf lessened that capability, but Bungie says it went too far, and the increase in speed should make the attack more viable and feel better.
Finally, Warlocks’ Stasis Super is being toned down a bit. Currently, the Winter’s Wrath Super is strong enough that Warlocks are able to easily take out other players, even if they’re also using their Super–Winter’s Wrath allows the Warlock to freeze the opponent and then shatter them in one hit, usually at a pretty significant distance. Bungie is making Winter’s Wrath less effective against close-range melee Supers that force players to close the gap on an opponent in order to do any damage, which should give other players more of a fighting chance against Shadebinder Warlocks. In Season 15, if you’re using a melee Super, a Warlock using Winter’s Wrath will need to freeze and shatter you twice to kill you, instead of just once.
There are a whole host of other changes coming as well, beyond just the tweaks to Stasis. Standing out on the list are adjustments and nerfs coming to Warlocks’ Dawnblade class, which is currently dominant in the PvP arena. The “top-tree” Dawnblade loadout favors players who fight while in the air, conveying a dodge ability that lets players zip around while airborne to avoid incoming fire and become seriously difficult to deal with. Bungie is nerfing some of those top-tree Dawnblade abilities somewhat, while increasing the subclass’s reliance on aerial combat, which should require Warlocks to develop a little more skill to use the class to its fullest potential. The tweaks are increasing air dash cooldown so players can’t use them quite so often, reducing the tracking and explosion radius on Warlocks’ Celestial Fire melee ability, and causing players to show up on enemy radar whenever they use their airborne “Heat Rises” buff.
You can check out the rest of Bungie’s changes in its blog post. Season 15 starts in Destiny 2 on August 24, which is also the date of Bungie’s next Destiny 2 showcase. That should provide a whole lot of new information about future seasons and the game’s next upcoming expansion, The Witch Queen, which is set to launch in early 2022.
Source: Gamespot
