Just about every week brings something new to Destiny 2, whether it’s story beats, new activities, or interesting new combinations of elements that let players devastate each other in the Crucible. Iron Banter is our weekly look at what’s going on in the world of Destiny and a rundown of what’s drawing our attention across the solar system.
The latest This Week at Bungie blog post was a monster. Bungie’s Thursday update on the state of the game and community, as well as a periodic preview for upcoming content, rolled in at nearly 9,000 words running down tweaks to Exotics, info on Gambit, adjustments to Glaives, and alterations to weapon archetypes. There’s a whole lot of interesting info in there, and you should definitely take a look at it–just makes sure to clear a couple of hours to make sense of incremental changes to weapon scalar stats. Turns out that video games are actually mostly about math.
The changes that are most interesting and most likely to have a major impact are those to airborne combat in the Crucible, however. It really seems like, in order to address Hunter players using the excellent and ridiculous ST0MP-EE5 Exotic boots and just catapulting over everyone’s head, Bungie is just completely changing how fighting while airborne works. Talk about the long way around for a nerf.
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The quick and dirty explanation of the changes is that Bungie is adjusting the stats of gun effectiveness while you’re airborne. Right now, guns get an accuracy penalty if you shoot them while airborne, but not a ding to aim assist, and you can mitigate the penalty with specializations like the Icarus Grip mod or Warlocks’ Heat Rises perk. Starting next season, airborne combat gets reworked to be an element of buildcraft you can specialize in, and the weapon penalties will be adjusted–accuracy penalties will be reduced overall, but aim assist will get dropped instead. Spec your character for “Airborne Effectiveness,” however, and your guns will work better and be more accurate while you’re off the ground.
YouTuber Fallout Plays has a good explanation of what the changes actually mean, but they boil down to the idea that airborne gunplay is going to be more viable overall, provided you’ve got good aim. In a way, what Bungie is doing is making airborne combat a little more reflective of reality; your aim is already affected by the fact that you’re flying through the air, so the game will have less of an artificial, behind-the-scenes penalty for that airborne shooting.
The more you build your character around airborne combat, the better the numbers get for both accuracy while airborne and aim assist while airborne. Without getting too deep in the weeds, your airborne accuracy improves pretty quickly as you invest in Airborne Effectiveness, while your aim assist sees a smaller penalty. When you’re hitting the top of Airborne Effectiveness, you’ll have the same accuracy and aim assist as you do on the ground. The upshot, of course, is that flying around makes you a lot harder to deal with and can often allow you to kill other players before they even realize you’re shooting at them.
What’s cool about this generally is that Bungie is elevating an element of Destiny 2 PvP combat to higher status, by making it more reliant on real customization. The continued push toward build-crafting and loadout specialization has made Destiny 2 better and better as Bungie continues to expand options. Now tweaking yourself to fight well in the air is a whole possible specialization, something you can make deliberate choices about that goes beyond whether you equipped an Icarus Grip mod or picked the top tree for the Dawnblade subclass.
Forcing players to really think about their airborne combat build also means that Bungie is reducing the people who can casually throw around airborne fighting in a way that’s annoying–in other words, ST0MP-EE5 players. According to Bungie’s data, some 40% of Hunter players were using ST0MP-EE5 in the Crucible, and since there are more Hunters than any other class, that means a lot of people were bouncing around with shotguns.
Destiny players aren’t always excited about Bungie making changes in the background to nerf certain elements of the game, especially when people are having fun with them, but I can at least see the logic in it when such a plurality of people are all playing the same way. It’s just not especially fun for anyone involved when a particular weapon or piece of armor becomes so dominant that it’s tough to use anything else. This many Hunters using the same set of boots in the Crucible really flattens out how much fun it is to actually play with or against these people.
ST0MP-EE5 will seriously detract from your Airborne Effectiveness score, but there are a lot of other use cases for the boots than just shooting while airborne.
So I do think it’s accurate that ST0MP-EE5 needed a nerf, although I don’t necessarily think the airborne changes are going to wreck the boots nearly as much as some others do. Yes, shooting people while in the air is a key element of that ST0MP-EE5 life, but it’s often a lot of shooting straight down at someone freaking out as you fly over their head, or dropping into a spot no one expected you to be thanks to your ludicrous jumps. Warlocks do the floating and fighting in the air thing, not Hunters. What’s more, with ST0MP-EE5, you’re often just flinging yourself at your opponent in ways that confuse and overwhelm them, or trying to come in close with a shotgun for a sort of Goomba-stomp maneuver. Those things are still viable (although shotguns are getting a fairly significant airborne nerf too), and so I have a feeling ST0MP-EE5 use cases aren’t getting diminished nearly as much as it sounds at first blush.
Really, though, anything that provides more choices in Destiny 2 is a good idea, and the Airborne Effectiveness adjustments sound like they add meaningful choices for some players,w without overly burdening those of us who don’t really care about flying. Generally, I like changes like this that make you spend more time thinking about your character and their stats. Bungie is doing the same thing, to a smaller degree, with “flinch” stats–values that detail how much your view shifts when you take a shot. Flinch is bad, because it means that taking fire screws up your aim, making it tough to shoot back at the person or alien who’s killing you. Alongside its aerial combat changes, Bungie is also bringing in new ways to adjust against flinch: the Stability stat on weapons will now affect how much you flinch under fire, making that stat feel significantly more important than it used to be, and Resilience will also determine your flinch, making that feel more important to many builds as well.
I remember a time in Destiny when a lot of these numbers didn’t matter at all, before you could reasonably craft loadouts, and back when what armor you were wearing in the game didn’t much matter because nothing was difficult enough to put you to tough choices. Airborne Effectiveness sounds like a cool change that opens doors rather than closing them, as does the ability to spec to reduce flinch. I like when Bungie makes it possible to specialize in things, to have a specific role on a team, and to be rewarded for playing in a particular way that you enjoy. (See also my recent column about Gambit and what we lost with the removal of Gambit Prime.) If we end up losing the viability of ST0MP-EE5 to make more of that customization possible, that’s cool.
I just hope Bungie doesn’t wind up making Warlocks even more annoying in the Crucible. As a primary Hunter player, it feels like anytime we get something cool, we get our legs kicked out from under us. Meanwhile, Warlocks fly to victory on farts made of fire. You can nerf those guys once in a while too, Bungie.
Source: Gamespot
