All Special Weapon balance changes coming in Destiny 2 Season 17

Special Weapons are going to receive some changes when it comes to the arrival of Destiny 2’s Season 17. It turns out, that plenty of players has been able to take out opponents with single-shot kills using these weapons, namely the Shotguns and Fusion Rifles. To reduce the constant stream of this happening in competitive gameplay, Bungie will be making some notable alterations to Special Weapons. In this guide, we’re going to cover all Special Weapon balance changes coming to Destiny 2’s Season 17.

All Special Weapon balance changes

These are all of the Special Weapon changes you can expect to see when Destiny 2’s Season 17 begins.

• All Special weapons have had their in-air accuracy significantly reduced. While we are okay with encouraging players to build into using their Primary weapons more effectively in the air, we do not believe a prevalence of airborne one-hit kill options is good for PvP. 
  • Special Weapons have a slightly larger airborne accuracy penalty than Primary weapons at 0 Airborne Effectiveness stat, reduced to 0 at 100 stat. 
  • Special Weapons have a similar airborne aim assist cone penalty to other weapons (around 50% at 0 stat), and this penalty can be reduced but not entirely removed by investing in Airborne Effectiveness. 
• Sniper Rifles are fairly slow to ready, stow and aim down sights, which has made Snapshot feel mandatory for many players. 
  • Reduced Stow, Ready and Aim Down Sights times by 10%, i.e., all snipers are now snappier (there’s a matching change to Snapshot below).
  • Sniper Rifles have less access to ammo than Shotguns and Fusion Rifles (where kills drop ammo right in front of you), so we think ammo scarcity will prevent Sniper Rifles from spiking

• Slug and pellet Shotguns are still overwhelmingly popular in PvP despite some recent changes, so we’ve touched them again with the goal of encouraging some diversity in Special weapon choice. We’re keeping an eye on this change, since we’ve touched Shotguns multiple times recently, and will adjust it if needed. With this change we expect Shotguns to have a shorter one-hit kill distance, but still be effective enough in that short-range kill role. This change reduces Shotgun one-hit kill distance by around 0.5m, because the importance of spread angle is just as high as damage falloff and this has not been touched. 
  • Reduced damage falloff start and end by 1m. 
  • Reduced aim assist and magnetism falloff start and end by 2m. 
• Fusion Rifle usage is trending pretty high, particularly in Trials, and bringing Shotguns down a little more would make them too good an option, so we’ve made a global change. With these changes 20m+ Fusion Rifle one-hit kills should be very uncommon (through a combination of damage falloff and recoil changes). 
  • Reduced damage falloff near distance. 
    • 2m at 0 range (~2.7m when ADS with a 15-zoom stat) 
    • 1.3m at 100 range (~2.275m when ADS with a 15-zoom stat) 
  • Reduced damage falloff far distance. 
    • 1m at 0 range (~1.35m when ADS with a 15-zoom stat) 
    • 1.3m at 100 range (~1.75m when ADS with a 15-zoom stat) 
  • Reduced recoil scalar variance between 0 and 100 stability. 
    • 0 stability: unchanged at 0.750 
    • 100 stability: increased from 0.500 to 0.550 (i.e., increased the recoil penalty slightly) 

• When we rebuilt Fusion Rifles in Season 15, we wanted to differentiate the subfamilies dramatically from each other, which worked! Now that we’ve seen them in action for a couple of Seasons, we’re pulling back from the extremes a little. With these changes Fusion Rifle subfamilies are still very different from each other, but high impacts are stronger and rapid-fires and precisions should be a little less dominant. 
  • High Impact: reduced unmodified High Impact charge time from 1.000 to 0.960s, increased damage per burst by 10. 
  • Precision: increased unmodified charge time from 0.740 to 0.780s. 
  • Rapid Fire: increased unmodified charge time from 0.460 to 0.500, decreased damage per burst by 20. 
  • New charge time and damage per burst for all Fusion Rifle subfamilies: 
    • High Impact: 0.960s, 330 damage 
    • Precision: 0.780s, 280 damage 
    • Adaptive: 0.660s, 270 damage 
    • Rapid Fire: 0.500s, 245 damage 
• Besides Divinity, Trace Rifles aren’t as popular in hard content as we want them to be (we particularly want damage type reworks of the oldest three Trace Rifles to have a chance to shine this Season), and they’re also more affected by disabling scavenger armor mods than other Special weapons. With this change they’re a better use of Special ammo against non-red bar targets. 
  • Increase Trace Rifle damage against non-red bar combatants by 20%. 
  • Increased ammo picked up per Special ammo brick from 18 to 30. 

Hopefully, these announced changes should provide players with some more flexibility in what they like to use in PvP and in PvE encounters. It seems like the problem frequently occurs between other players, so those who partake in Trials, Iron Banner, Crucible, and Gambit will notice many of these changes when Season 17 rolls out.