Bungie has dropped heavy-hitting blog posts day after day in the leadup to the Lightfall expansion, talking about new content, massive updates to how classes work, detailing the world players will experience, and more. Most recently, we got a look at the new Strand subclass, and overhauls to abilities, build crafting, and Supers.
In the latest This Week at Bungie post, the team dropped another two bombs: an overhaul of the crafting system and a brief but substantive discussion of latency (lag). The crafting updates are a significant shift for the game. The current crafting currency, Resonant Elements, will be removed entirely. Crafting and upgrading weapons will use currencies “such as Glimmer, Enhancement Cores, etc. [that] replace the Element costs that exist today.”
In other words, the grind for Ascendant Shards, Enhancement Prisms, and other endgame materials is likely to get even hotter, with yet another system vying for what is, for most players, a very limited resource. Bungie says that Resonant and Harmonic Alloy, received from dismantling Legendary and Raid weapons, respectively, will still be used but will receive a rework during the Lightfall year.
On the latency front, Bungie is aware of the major lag spikes that would cause players to walk into walls, take half a dozen headshots, teleporting, not receive damage, and other annoyances. Bungie identified the issue as a Steam Datagram Relay (SDR) configuration problem. The SDR helps provide high-quality connections between players in Destiny 2 (apparently), and some of the newer relays weren’t properly configured, increasing latency spikes during peak hours. A fix has been deployed, and while it doesn’t solve everything, the team continues working to address any lag-related issues.
Also mentioned in the TWAB were coming updates to various cosmetics, including adding strand coloring to subclass-specific armor and Finisher glows, as well as a slew of weapon and armor perk updates, so they work with Strand.
We also learned about the winner of the Festival of the Lost bug armor contest, with Team Spider taking it by a significant margin. Bungie also issued a brief statement on their mistaken posting of a piece of AI art, saying that while they don’t plan on ever purposefully posting it, detecting it is difficult, and they will be more judicious in what they choose for Art of the Week winners.
