As part of Destiny 2’s long road to redemption with its fans and players, Exotic weapon improvements are on the docket of changes coming soon to the game.
As part of Destiny 2’s long road to redemption with its fans and players, Exotic weapon improvements are on the docket of changes coming soon to the game.
Bungie’s weekly blog post featured some detailed examples on just how Exotics will be changing, and they sound pretty exciting.
Senior designer Jon Weisnewski used the Graviton Lance pulse rifle as an example of how the rarest guns in the game will be changing. That weapon fires two rounds of no recoil followed by a third round that does high damage with no falloff, and kills knock bodies back with force, making them explode.
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“Resounding player feedback has been along the lines of ‘looks great, sounds great, neat explosion. I can’t get kills in PVP because all the damage is at the end of the burst, kicks too hard for the follow up, and I can’t reliably damage targets with the death explosion in any activity because the body goes flying too far backwards,'” Weisnewski said. “All spectacle, not enough utility.”
To improve this specific gun, Bungie will reduce the recoil of the burst, add some aim assist, and change it from three rounds to two to give it “a slight mathematical edge against other pulse rifles.” The gun’s kickback-on-kill ability is also getting tuned, so the opponent will float backwards and up with a bigger explosion, increased damage, and Void projectiles that will seek out targets.
Weisnewski said that this is one of the more exaggerated examples of an Exotic getting buffed, and that not all Exotics will be changed. Untouched Exotics include Merciless, Telesto, Wardcliff Coil, MIDA Multi-Tool, The Colony, Legend of Acrius, and Vigilance Wing.
“We’ll be touching a lot of powerful gear with this update and to truly understand the impact for players requires a lot of design iteration and test time,” Weisnewski said. “It isn’t enough to crank up the damage and run one strike or Crucible match with a gun and helmet and move on. Dialing in the right amount of power, testing in all activities with all types of load outs, finding the bugs, fixing the bugs, updating the perk description text to reflect new behavior, and then handing that off to localization for translation—it’s a ton of work, but we’re up to it. We sincerely appreciate your patience. I believe it will be worth the wait.”
