Star Wars fans among Destiny 2's audience were understandably thrilled by the news, but others (like my clanmate ) were concerned that Bu🐟ngie may be compromising the game's identity to make some unseen number go up with a licensing deal.

We've had Baldur's Gate and Star Wars and even sillier cosmetic collabs before, but has the Fortnite-ification of D🌟estiny 2 finally begun? This all notably follows the release of Darth Vader, General Grievous, and Kylo Ren armor sets in Destiny 2, included in the Year of Prophecy Ultima🌠te Edition, joining three previous cosmetics including a straight-up Storm Trooper.

assistant game director Robbie Stevens said:

"Rest assured, Guardians - everything in Renegades is in-ca💛non for the Destiny universe, but we're leaning into the aesthetic, tone and v♛ibe of Star Wars to tell a Destiny story with Destiny characters."

This repeats some of the verbiage from the Renegades reve🍌al: "A Destiny sꦗtory at heart, but with a Star Wars-inspired take that's been a dream for us to explore," Bungie said.

Stevens, however, is directly responding to worries like, "I don't mind inspiration/vibe but if Boba Fett shows up as an NPC I think I'd 💯eat my hat," as Twitter user Matthew Rehwoldt put it.

Thaไt said, for the that Destiny 2 risks leaning too hard on another IP's identity and undermining it♐s own at a time when it's said to be blazing a new trail 11 years in, I don't know if anything short of the full-fat Renegades reveal, currently set for September, will fully assuage concerns.

There's every chance this is just down to semantics and the September show will calm everyone down. That said, Darth Vader is walking around the Tower. I have to wonder if some of this shakiness could've been avoided if Renegades was less of a Star Wars-inspired expansion and more of an original space Western that can feel like Star Wars, but I suppose that loses the LucasFilm buzz.

When Destiny 2 "weekly active users dropped lower and faster than we'd seen since 2018," Bungie assembled an A-Team to put out some fires: "We needed to do something."

The Year of Prophecy begins the FPS MMO's next big a🎉rc, the "multiyear" Fate Saga, and it will see the release of two expansions: The Edge of Fate on July 15, and Renegades on December 2. These medium-sized ex🅘pansions will be a bit bigger than Rise of Iron from Destiny 1, Bungie reiterated, and supported by free major updates.

Looking further ahead, are coming in🍒 2026: Shattered Cycle in the summer, and The Alchemist in the winter.

The Edge of Fate is all about the Nine, a mysterious race of primordial beings who've acted more as fringe oddities in the Destiny universe until now. Renegades, meanwhile, proves that Destiny 2's recent Star Wars armor was actually foreshadowing: the whole expansion is "Star Wars-inspired," filled with "themes and eღlements drawn from the iconic sci-fi franchise."

"The Nine are individuals," Bungie explained during today's reveal stream, and not a collective. Some Nine have proven evil in the past, no doubt, but we may find surprising allies among their number as well. Even if "human🐭ity and the Guardians, to many of them, are ultimately just bugs."

The Fate Saga harkens back to a pivotal line in the Destiny universe: "Guardians make their own fate." In today's news, Bungie asks a new question: "Are we bound by fate?" (Feels like we already answered that, folks, but go off.)

The Edge of Fate begins to answer this question with the introduction of "a new threat that predates everything Guardians know about Sol," the sys⛄tem that's always been the Destiny series' core setting.

Starring Warlock Vanguard Ikora and new ally Lodi, the Edge of Fate takes place on new destination Kepler, which plays into the Metroidvania-adj🌊acent design Bungie teased previous🙈ly🎃. There's even an honest-to-goodness Metroid ball form, or at least a ⛄close-enough approximation.

Kepler was "inspired by the puzzle-solving and pathfinding challenges of Destiny 2’s dungeons and destination design🅰 which encourages deep exploration, mystery, and player-driven discovery," Bungie says.

The whole destination seems to revolve around a new mechanic called dark matter. You can use dark matter as fuel for a varie💫ty of abilities, including a way to "squeeze through tight spaces, jump and dash across terrain, and become a rolling force of de෴struction." There's also a Relocator Cannon that can teleport you farther distances. Mattermorph, meanwhile, combines dark matter with Strand to further manipulate your surroundings.

This is what 11 years of Destiny looks like, people.🅷 We can turn into a ball. Finally.

As its pre-order package reveals, The Edge of Fate will see a newꦉ campaign and raid,🐽 a fresh rewards pass, and a pre-order-exclusive Exotic Ghost and emblem. Buying the big Year of Prophecy edition gets you The Edge of Fate, Renegades, the next raid and dungeon, and all the upcoming rewards passes.

The pricier ultimate edition seems to bundle in some more cosmetics, but also a 'neꦐw' Exotic sniper rifle: No Land Beyond, which Destiny 1 players may remember fondly for its bolt-action, iron sighted beauty. No Land Beyond, with an ornament and catalyst, will be available at the Edge of Fate launch, or you can get the base gun today if you pre-order the ultimate edition.

"The Fate Sagꦛa is gonna play out over several years," assistant game director Robbie Stevens said during Bungie's reveal stream. "We know where we're driving this car, we know where we're going with it. The conclusion of The Edge of Fate ♒itself is gonna leave you with more questions than answers, and it's gonna be the catalyst into this new multiyear saga. We really want to return Destiny to being a game about big questions. The way we think about this is pouring jet fuel into the speculation engine."

This brings us to Renegades, which is a little more opaque for now. Renegades is the second expansion of the Year of Prophecy, and is billed as "a Destiny story at heart, but with a Star Wars-inspired take♈ that's been a dream for us to explore."

"Renegades w෴ill introduce new Destiny characters, innovative activities, and evolved me🍷chanics designed to surprise and delight players," Bungie adds.

Renegades will get its own dedicated reveal show in September. One big de🅺tail dropped today: LucasFilm Games 🧔is attached to Renegades, so expect it to go heavy on Star Wars.

Between and around these expansions, "core game updates" and distinct "major updates" will tune the game and aim to keep players invested. A batch of core updates will arrive on July 15, while th🧜e major updates, which are also free to all players, have names of 🍸their own.

Major update Ash & Iron is coming on September 9. Shadow & Order i♔s coming much later on March 3, 2026. These updates will be around the size of Into the Lig💜ht, Bungie teased.

Bungie's already announced a few big systemic changes. We're getting overhauled armor with more buildcrafting baked in – including "armor that starts with fullꦕ energy," praise be – along with Diablo-style world tiers with escalating loot and challenge. Guns are getting new tiers, too, seemingly with improved stats at higher tiers.💃 (All guns in "every major event" will feature shiny weapons, too, for you hoarders out there.)

Personally, I'm most excited b✨y the shooting range being ad🏅ded to the Tower as a new, proper way to DPS test guns and abilities. It only took 11 years!

That said, the crown jewel is probably 🦋the Portal, a new UI hub for♎ all Destiny activities.

"Players will be able to easily choose between Fireteam Ops, Pinnacle Ops, Crucible Ops, and the newly introduced Solo Ops," Bungie says of the Portal. "Fireteam Ops and Pinnacle Ops reinforce quick fireteam action and longer-form cooperative cont🐼ent, while the new Solo Ops activities are specifically designed for solo players who want short, self-contained gameplay sessions without the need for a fireteam.

"Additionally, players can tailor activities to match thei🐽r desired gameplay and the specific rewards they are chasing. Fifty all-new modifiers will allow deeper gameplay customization and offer greater challenges for players, while curated activity rotations will ensure there is always something new to chase."

The Year of Prophecy technically kicks off today, May 6, with the release of the Rite of the Nine, a new activity available to all players. This is basically a dungeon remix starring Prophecy, Spire of the Watcher, and Ghos𝓡t of the Deep.

Old encounters have gott📖en new twists, and dungeon weapons have updated perks and a Nine-esque look. Our ol♎d friend the Emissary is a focal point with the Rite of the Nine, setting up the Fate Saga.

"We don't expect Marathon to become Destiny 3": Bungie reckons "if you are a Destiny player who's not really interested in any PvP," Marathon is "probably not the game for you."

"Join us on May 6, 2025 as we reveal The Edge of Fate and the upcoming year of Destiny 2," th🎀e studio says in a . An accompanying image shows the symbols of The Nine, a mysterious group that's been🦹 lurking in the background of Destiny lore for years.

The reveal event is set to kick off at 9am PT / 12pm E🐎T / 5pm BST on May 6. Bungie hasn't yet provided details on how to watch, but it'll🍌 be a safe bet to keep an eye on the studio's and channels.

We don't have much concrete detail on what to expect from the next round of Destiny 2 content, but Bungie has already offered a few hints. We know the studio is abandoning annual expansions in 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:favor of "medium-sized" ex🎶pansions twice a year, roughly similar in scope to Rise of Iron from the original Destiny. And that first expansion is will see players "journey to a Metroidvania-inspired𒊎 dest𝐆ination."

A countdown hinting at ꧟the release date for the next expansion, p🎀reviously codenamed Apollo, was mysteriously scrubbed from the game a few months ago. Whether that July 15 launch date pans out remains to be seen, but we'll likely know for sure in just a few weeks' time.

After playing Marathon for 8 hours, I don't think Bungie's extraction shooter will be the next Helldivers 2 hit, but I don’t think it will be the next Concord bust either.

Weekly active users fall between expansion and season releases, "that's pretty standard for most live services, but starting in September 2022 and continuing through November, our weekly active users dropped lower and faster than we'd seen since 2018 with no known cause," Blaine said. "Similarly, player sentiment was also falling lower and faster than we'd seen." (The perennial boogeyman in Destiny 2 is seasonal fꦗatigue, and I don't think Blaine is putting his head in the sand here, but rather saying there was no smoking gun, hot button issue driving players away.)

"Leadership got worried. At the same time, likely due to this falling sentiment, pre-orders for our yearly expansion were ⛦well under expectations too," he added. "And strong expansion sales are the majority of our revenue." Needless to say, "we needed to do something really fast."

The response was to "spin up a PRT," or player retention team, a small and agile strike team of developers laser focused on ways to "improve player sentiment first, and then improve player retention." Devs from several other teams and disciplines came together to hash out comparatively quick ways to improve the game, asking forgiveness rather tha🌱n permission if necessary to get a few things done fast. "If you cannot explain the player impact in a sentence or two, it's going to be very hard for players to understand why they should care in the first place," Blaine said of the messaging at the time, stressing punchy, impactful changes with a fast turnaround.

Sometimes this literally came down to PRT members looking for "things that they could get into the game in the next week, like actually get into the live game in the next week, whic🃏h meant, in reality, the work had to be done in the next day or two to get it tested in time," Blaine said.

"Many were longstanding player requests that we'd had a hard time prioritizing over new expansion items, but the PRT was able to prioritize some of these really player-friend♏ly features," he explained. The list of target features formed with player ♛support and community teams proved to be valuable to "the entire Destiny 2 project over the next few years as they were planning new player-informed quality-of-life features."

Agility was the focus of development – "don't add any detail until you absolutely need to," with a team working with "just the right amount of structure, and no more" – and the goal was to improve player sentiment. And "if the goal is to improve player sentiment, sometimes telling players about an upcoming quality-of-life feature is as importౠant as the feature itself," Blaine said, which led to the uptick of communication on daily and weekly changes at 🤡the time.

That communication goes both ways. "If your players are grumpy and not playing your game, I can guarantee the morale inside your team is falling too," Blaine said. "Your devs are goiꦆng to be players of your game, as well as working on it, and they want it to do well. So to fight this, I put together weekly emails thꦓat went out to the stakeholders list that highlighted new and meaningful work along with any fun screenshots or videos of that, any new high impact [key performance indicators] that we'd discovered, and then a regularly updated shipping soon list of features." (Stakeholders, in this case, seems to refer to team leaders of various disciplines.)

Going into Lightfall – and for now, we're not going to talk about the mess that wa🍸s Lightfall – this coordinated strike was working. Using Bungie's "rate last week" player survey data to evaluate the changes – an end total of "17 unique items" shipped in the six weeks prior to Lightfall – Blaine said "the numbers for what they thought about them, and the numbers for popularity, were surprisingly high. We knew we were doiꦦng a good thing, but the response of players is exactly what we were aiming for."

"We've never seen a season like season 19 where we're basically just climbing gradual♊ly the entire t🐷ime in terms of sentiment, so we knew we were having the effect that we wanted, which was really great news," he noted.

This push for player sentiment and retention continued post-Lightfall. "Some were changes to systems that showed up in Lightfall that we only realized in final play testing needed something extra, but you don't have time to do that if it's in the final round of play testing," Blaine said. Elsewhere, "we had some things that we were requested that were essentially tech debt, which are great to clean up, but that's not this team. This was not our mandate, to solve tech 🍨debt."

There was one big o🐟opsie along the way: "We accidentally shipped a nasty character corruption bug that caused us to take the game down for 24 hours and issue only our second rollback of a character database in Destiny history." You know, in case you were wondering how that happened. But despite "one big mistake," it was "a really big success."

The postmortem playbook for this team was "designed to help future PRT efforts within Bungie as well as within the larger PlayStation family." Bungie more recently assembled a PvP strike team to juiceꦦ one of the game's weaker a꧃reas. Which begs the question: why not do this all the time?

A permanent PRT is an encumbered PRT, to sum it all up. Different teams have different needs and priorities – this team had no artists, while the PvP team needed artists for new maps – and Blaine reckons it's "better to actua🥂lly look at each situat🐠ion with fresh eyes and find the team that's right for it."

"Once a PRT becomes🌠 a permanent team, it'll naturally develop a backlog," an▨d then suddenly "you have a two-year process and you've lost all the agility you've ever had."

As for Lightfall's reception, with our own 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Destiny 2 Lightfall review skewering "too many well-worn mistakes," Blaine acknowledged that "it was intense"🃏 and there were "some rough m💝oments." But much of this wasn't the realm of the PRT.

"If players had a problem with the narrative, let's say at Lightfall, that was💃n't som🌺ething my team was equipped to deal with, but tuning numbers instantly, my team was perfect for that," he said in response to a question . "And so we did a bunch of work on Guardian Ranks to smooth out the objective progression, things like that, to help some of those issues."

It's an interesting look behind the curtain of live service triage, and a rare peek into Destiny 2's tougher moments. This troubled season came at the tail end of a year that began with The Witch Queen, then widely regarded as the best expansion the game's ever had, and tragically ran smack into Lightfall, widely regarded as the worst. The game was demonstrably struggling – just as the community is once again in doldrums today, seeking the next big thing after some waffly Episodes – but meaningful changes were still happening somewhere, somehow,💞 and it's fascinating to hear how a dedicated A-Team was assembled to push many of them through.

"A fun example of a bug becoming a feature": Destiny 2 accidentally made Exotic Glaives free to all classes, and Bungie says "we're going to let this ride."

With the launch of 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Destiny 2: Heresy, the first-person shooter's third Episode (which were brought in last year to replace seasons), players "discovered an interesting little bug" which sees class restrictions on Exotic Glaive weapons (and some Swords) lifted. For example, the lightning-firing Edge of Concurrence, once exclusive to the Hunter class, can now be🦂 used by Titans and Warlocks, too.

In a , Bungie explains how this happened in the first place. "On the backend, we shifted to a new way of creating weapons and rewa🐠rds to help streamline some of the development process. While moving into thiꦜs new paradigm, class lockouts for the Exotic Glaives and a handful of Swords were mistakenly removed."

Obviously, being a bug, this wasn't the devs' intention, but the team acknowledges that it's seen "some great celebrations with the removal of these constraints." However, Bungie wasn't immediately convinced it was a good idea – it admits that it initially "focused more towards fixing the issue" in order to "retain strong class-based fantasies," adding: "It's aꦫ bit weird to see a Warlock or a Hunter spawning a mini-bubble or seeing a Titan running like a ninja."

However, after discussing the matter, the team has clearly changed its mind. "We're going to let this ride," the post reads. "A fun example of a bug becoming a feature." It notes that certain animations tied to the class-based Swords "may look a bit weird" since they're older but acknowledges that with class-based Glaives offering "some interesting new build crafting opportunities," the devs "will be keeping a close eye on how these Glaives are performing across all three classes" g♐oing forward. "Our goal is to ensure that they feel most powerful on the class they were originally designed for," it adds.

Bungie clarifies that it "won't always look at weird bugs and decide to ﷽support them as a feature," but on this occasion, it "felt appropriate!" Considering the to the bug from players, who've been begging the devs not to revert the change, this is an enormo൲us win.

Be sure to check out our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Destiny 2 class guide to get yourself up to speed on all of the FPS game's classes.

helpfully flagged the original season pass calendar on Twitter. I was confused when I booted the game up myself and saw n🌊o date attached. It turns out this countdown really was deleted. There are several accounts and posts reporting the same end point – 161 days, 22 hours from now – but there's no trace left in-game.

This obviously raises a few questions. Has Bungie revised its plans? Is July 15 not set in stone? Was Bungie not ready to reveal the launch date for the next expansion, codename Apollo, which will kick off the game's next saga, codename Frontiers? I've reached out to Bungie for clarification.

It was previously announced that Apollo would launch in the summer, ringing in a new release cycle for Destiny 2 that will see two "medium-sized expansions" released each year, paired with two "major updates" in each half of the year. The second Frontiers expansion, codename Behemoth, would come in winter 2025. A July launch would fit Apollo's summer window, though mid-July is likely a bit 🥂later than players were hoping. (I say that, but I'd wager plenty of players are happy to wai𒅌t a bit longer if it means sticking the landing.)

The Heresy seaso༺n pass does notably still confirm that Act 2 will arrive in 34 days, while Act 3 is 55 days out. That would be M♌arch 11 for Act 2 and April 1 for Act 3, rounding up to the nearest weekly reset.

Assuming this July 15 Apollo launch date was more than a mistake or placeholder, this suggests we'll be living in Act 3 for several m𒆙onths, just as we did with previous expansions which ended up delayed. That's a few more questions for the pile: assuming this date was accurate, will Apollo stick to it or slip deeper into 2025? And will this mega-season see an Into the Light-style content drop to help refresh it? As Act 1 gets off the ground, it's unclear for now.

"Oryx is back": Destiny 2's final Episode takes the MMO to the site of the iconic Taken King expansion for a Coil-inspired roguelite mode, and also Star Wars armor.

At 2:20pm ET, the official confirmed that, "as part of the investigation into today's server and stability issue, we will be bringing Destiny 2 offline shortly for maintenance." The most recent update, at 3:13pm ET, confirms that "we are bringing Destiny 2 ba💮ck online. Players may be placed into a queue while we continue our investigation." I can smell🔴 the servers sizzling now.

This all started shortly after reset time rolled around earlier today. "We’re curr🐭ently investigating stability issues and a rise in various error codes, including PLUM," Bungie Help advised, understandably raising alarms after the litany of technical 🎃issues that Destiny 2 has faced in the past few months.

Shortly afterward, the account added that "we're investigating ꦓan issue where surౠges were mistakenly re-enabled in Raids. Note, today's server and stability issues are our top priority to fix. We appreciate your patience while we continue our investigation." It wouldn't be a Destiny 2 content launch without some unintended features coming back like a stain on the couch you thought you'd bleached out of existence.

Those stability issues have s🔜eemingly been resolved enough to let players in. Anecdotally, people do seem to be getting into Destiny 2 without a staggering queue time and staying in, though your mileage may vary as launch day continues.

"Oryx is back": Destiny 2's final Episode takes the MMO to the site of the iconic Taken King expansion for a Coil-inspired roguelite mode, and also Star Wars armor.

Oryx looms over the Heresy lead art, but the late Taken King's role in the Episode remains to be seen.🍸 The main cast is filled out by Hive expert Eris Morn, weird stuff enthusiast Drifter, and the slightly Taken-ified Sloane. The Dreadnaught itself has been warped by one of the Echoes that have defined the ongoing epilogue arcs, but some areas still feel just like home.

Alongside 🙈the Sundered Doctrine dungeon coming February 7 and a big Trials of Osiris overhaul, Heresy features a new core activity called The Nether. Bungie says it wanted to build on the rewards and roguelite elements of previous activities like the beloved Coil, turning The Nether into a still rogue-ier mode with no health regen or ammo drops, draftable boons that buff your stats and alter abilities, and randomized encounters and objectives. You have way more base health and your healing perks will still work, but they'll be severely nerfed. You're also limited by revive tokens, so I'm just hoping that this Nether health economy play actually works well and isn't super frustrating in high-end difficulties.

The rub is that you can play The Nether solo or in a group of three, either jumping into an easier patrol mode, the baseline matchmade version, or the harder advanced version. Harder versions will spit out more loot, and Bungie stresses that clearinꦗg the whole activity is the best way to get rewards, seemingly addressing feedback about it being loot-optimal to dip out of previous activities after a few rounds.

Destiny 2 community lead DMG also fielded feedback on Episode 2's fiddly tonic loot system and repetitive narrative delivery. Heresy, it seems, will make it easier to target and acquire specific guns, and Destiny 2 purportedly has some new narrative tech to break up the helm-holo-helm-holo routine that players are mighty familiar with by now. Heresy also seems to have a larger injection of new gu🦄ns, hopefully offsetting the underwhelming loot pools of recent Acts.

Heresy is rounded out by a big Arc subclass shakeup, some long-awaited Stars Wars collab armor, an assassin-themed Void Hunter aspect, and craftable weapons coming to the reprised Vault of Glass raid. Grind the Vault of Gla🔯ss for, I don't know, the millionth time? I told you it must be a day that ends in Y.

"If your cake is trash, nobody wants to eat it": At a tough time for Destiny 2, Bungie drops an Exotic mission promising vampire vibes, a cool shotgun, and a finale with bite.

How to link your Twitch and Bungie.net accounts🐈 to get T🍌witch Drops

To get Destiny 2 Twitch Drops, you 💮need to have your Bungie and Twitch accounts linked which you do by following these steps:

• Log into . This obviously needs to be account that you use to play 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Destiny 2.
• Click on your account icon in the top-right corner to open a sidebar menu, then click on Settings.
• Click on Account Linking in the menu list on the left then find the Twitch section and click on Link Account.
• Log into your Twitch account if you haven't already done so.
• Click Authorize when prompted to link your accounts.

How to unlock Twitch Drops in Destiny 2

Now that your 💟accounts are linked, here are the Twitch Drops you can get inꦅ Destiny 2 and how to unlock them:

• Golden Hour emblem: Subscribe to any channel broadcasting Destiny 2. Available from January 20, 2025, to January 31, 2025.

Once you've met the requirements for the above Twitch Drops emblems, you should be notified that the reward is ready to be claimed. Once you've claimed it, the relevant emblem should automatically unlock on your Destiny 2 account, and you'll be able to find it in-game under the Flair menu within your Collections. If a reward doesn't appear, try checking your under Code Redemption on Bungie.net as you may need to claim it from there instead.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

That developer is associate ꦫdesigner Danny Nanni, who normally handles abilities but jumped at the chance to work on his first Exotic weapon. Other members of Bungie contributed to its design and creation, of course, but Nanni was at the forefront.

"I definitely took a lot of the inspiration and sensibilities that we have on abilities," Nanni tells GamesRadar+, "and when there was an opportunity for me to work on the weapons team for this release, they were like, 'we need somebo꧑dy who wants to⛦ make a vampire shotgun.' And I'm like, yes please. I don't know anything else. Please let me make that."

The result was Slayer's Fang, an oddball, magazine-fed shotgun that specializes in precision damage but triggers scattershot, target-seeking Void crystals that can apply the Weaken debuff. It's also packing innate anti-Overload ♉Champion tech (which sadly can't stack with this season's anti-Barrier shotgun Artifact perk). Shotguns face i🔜nherent limitations in difficult Destiny 2 content because getting into shotgun range might get you killed, but especially after recent PvE buffs, the weapon type has found some places to shine. Slayer's Fang slots right in there, especially when paired with builds like Gyrfalcon Hunter and No Backup Plans Titan. For Warlocks, random Void nonsense is still working just fine for me.

"The vampire hunter fantasy is what sort of drove the whole design from the get-go," Nanni says. "The use case, I think, is to get a kill on a smaller guy and then go boss hunting, or beast hunting in a way, because once you get that first kill, the gun really powers up. And there'ꦓs some uniqueness here too – instead of firing a bullet, our play here was, what if it was firing a Void crystal, sort of like a stake through the heart?"

The strange firing pattern of Slayer's Fang brings a few tricks to the table. The ricochet shots bounce more when you ha♈ve the on-kill buff active, and it gets better in a group. "It's not written anywhere, ಌthis is a secret that players will discover probably, but if you get a kill, you spread the buff to everybody that is also using this gun," Nanni confirms.

As a cherry on top, Slayer's Fang got a special bit of flavor text calling back to a Destiny 1 Exotic💜 called Voidfang Vestments. Lore heads may remember that Exotic's entry: "You will dream of teeth and nothing else." It's no coincidence that Slayer's Fang reads: "Fear neither dreams n♐or teeth."

"As this is the vampire killer gun, I wanted the flavor text to be 💃a reference to that," Nanni confirms. "It's an homage back to D1 and we were able to tie that in. It was just an idea I had, and the narrative team, we were able💦 to make that swing.

I asked how Slayer's Fang w🍒ill compete w🔜ith Conditional Finality, a dual-element Exotic shotgun that's so good me and my friends just call it The Shotgun. It turns out it has more secrets up its sleeve. "It's tuned to be a little bit better against Fallen and Scorn," Nanni says. "There's a secret little bonus there for this gun that I'm sure players will discover in time.

"If you really want to lean into Weaken and Overshield and those kinds of survivability tools, this'll be the shotgun for you and it wil🎃l highly synergize inside of those kits," he argues. "And I think that synergy is very valid. But also, because of its range as a slug shotgun, there's boss DPS implications here that Conditional Finality can't compete with because it's not designed for that. ... There's definitely different use cases there. We don't want to ever invalidate someone's choice. Conditional Finality is your favorite weapon? That's awesome. We respect that. But I think there's some enticing opportunities elsewhere for you to apply to this gun."

Slayer's Fang also faced the immense challenge of following up Choir of One as a Void special Exotic. Choir has barely left my hands since it came out, and Nanni says it was his favorite weapon through the Final Shape dev cycle, so he knew his weapon had a lot to prove. ༺"I was like, I gotta live up to this, especially as my first gun," he recalls. "So I think it ꦇwill live comfortably next to it. They're so different ... and I love that there are different builds that they support."

All that being said, I also asked about Bungie's approach to power budget with new Exotics. When is it time to dr🅷op a meta-breaker?

"A lot of it depends on where we want to go with the meta at the ti💖me," Nanni begins. "You know, we like to have our seasonal themes and our seasonal meta. A lot of that's highlighted in the Artifa✅ct. For instance, this season, we had a huge Stasis push, right? And so, one of the things we did was, Salvation's Grip got a catalyst. It's time, Stasis season, let's get Salvation's Grip out there. So I think it depends a lot on what our direction is at the time.

"Sometimes if there are certain builds or play styles that we see other teams working on, like if I'm on abilities and they see my balance pass, they're like, maybe we want to do an Exotic that matches into what we're working on on abilities, or [vice-versa]. We may try and match that. A lot of synergy and teamwor🍰k goes into deciding, well, is the meta stale? Do we want a new king of the hill, or is it time for something like a pass on older stuff to see if there's a new synergy we can highlight, or a quirky one? It's really just a lot of collaboration, monitoring what's going on in the game. All of us in sandbox play the game a lot."

"If your cake is trash, nobody wants to eat it": At a tough time for Destiny 2, Bungie drops an Exotic mission promising vampire vibes, a cool shotgun, and a finale with bite.

Before the mission's release, I spoke to several developers at Bungie about the making of Kell's Fall, its headlining shotgun, the impact of the latest narrative beats, and th🐽e surprising intricacy of the playable Scorn organ – the Scorgan – a🃏t the core of this vampire keep. We also discussed community sentiment, player fatigue, live service challenges, and the catch-22 of time-gating content. Kell's Fall isn't the biggest Exotic mission ever, but it is a stylish and deceptively layered space with enough secrets to – hopefully – keep us invested for a little bit.

Destiny's vampire

Bungie's wanted to do something with vampires for a while. With Kell's Fall, that vision comes across with Castlevania and Splatterhouse flare, Forsaken's Fikrul acting as our Dracula and the Barons returning for, surely, one last act. Magic mirrors, hidden doors, and undead hordes complete the look, with a huge spiral staircase for good measure. Activity designer Willie Cheng says they wanted to integrate the illusion and deception baked into vampire tropes and legends, turning away from the "definitely well-explored" blood and stakes, and imagining things like the mission's alternate mirror world and a "rogue's gallery" of devious allies. One of Fikrul's trusty rogues, the Trickster, has a chance to𝄹 appear in other boss encounters – one of the ways Bungie wanted to add greater variance to Kell's Fall, alongside things like random braziers tied to puzzles.

"We're looking for ways to add variety with💜out just building a ton of content that is linear," Cheng says. "So we're looking for these different ways to build permutations into each run so that the second, third time that you go🅷 through the basement dungeon area, you're not always looking for the same stuff. That sort of stuff is more sustainable to build."

"I think it's doing more than what we've done in the past," Kisko continues. "Supporting those replays week over week. Episode 2 does not have the time-gating, like you mentioned, and so the player can really play it at their leisure." The val♕ue here, he reiterates, is the ability to take things as you want and dip into more acti😼vities in a session.

"When we're thinking about how we support this new paradigm, I think it's through that variety, and we've learned lessons from previous episodes and seasons as well. And I think we are applying that through the variety and surprises in the Exotic mission that w🤡e're doing now."

A world without time-gating

A recurring theme with this Episode and the rollout of Kell's Fall has been Bungie's decision to do away with time-gating to see how it feels. This was a later pivot in the Episode 2 plans, and we've seen the good and bad of it. We are free to eat the whole cake at once, but inevitably there's a chorus of "wait, that's it?" when we run out of cake in🅷 one sitting, sometimes quite abruptly.💟 This is true of the Episode model itself to some extent, too.

"The challenging thing with the new model is, players have clear expectations about what things were in the past in terms of how they interact with the vendors, or what the pacing of the story is, or the amount of content," says senior design lead Tom🅰 Farnsworth🌃. "And with the Episodic model, there's Act 1 and it's all focused around Onslaught. Act 2 is all focused around [Tomb of Elders], and Act 3 is focused around the Exotic. And I think some players are going to appreciate that, and others are going to feel like they have smaller chunks to focus on initially, versus having them all to play with later.

"Those are some things tha💎t we're gonna have to look at and be like, is this the right model? What are the tweaks we can make to that going forward? I think live service gameplay models are literally one of the hardest challenges. I think you can look out in the broader game industry right now, and it's rough out there, and I really feel for a lot of things going on in the game industry, and that's something that is going to be one of our♉ biggest challenges. What's the right way to give players what they want and let them have agency of experience, while also finding what you were saying about the sustainable path forward?"

"You can't have any one part of the game bear all th♏e weight of someone's engagement," Farnsworth continues. "If everyone's time is♍ only focused on the Episode and not on playing the core game or other aspects of the release, they're going to feel like they're going to eat everything and be done. So I know going forward, we're going to be investing in as many areas of the game as we can to make sure that players have something to do for each mood that they're in, whether they want to engage with the story, or they want to engage with an Exotic mission, or they want to play the core game, or they want to play PvP. And I think that's the challenge, making sure that if players feel like they've gobbled up everything somewhere they've got something else they can hop over to."

"I would also add that this is in some ways a good problem to have," narrative lead Jerome Virnich adds. "Because this is only a problem if your cake tastes g▨ood, right? If your cake is trash, nobody wants to eat it and it's not a discussion at all."

Bringing an end to things

For all the doom and gloom going around, not entirely undeservedly, I think the cake is very much not trash. I've become an even more hardcore-casual Destiny 2 player since The🔯 Final Shape: I log in when there's new stuff to do or collect, or when my friends want to do a dungeon or raid or GM, and I let the game chill otherwise. (Playing other games remains the ultimate Destiny 2 hack.) And the new stuff is generally fun when it's new. On the narrative side, with Kell's Fall putting a bow on this Episode, Virnich says "our only goal is to have an Act that is emotionally resonant, that does justice to the world and the characters, and does right by their character arcs." On that front, I look forward to reading the responses to the handling of Eramis, whose resolution, anticipated since Beyond Light in 2020, was more of a redemꦓption arc than I ever expected. Speaking of, there is a greater push for finality as Destiny 2 gears up for its next expansion, which is looking to be key.

"It was our desire to leave all of the characters pretty settled at the end of this Episode," Virnich says. "We had another hanging thread with Mithrax and the influence of Nezarec's curse on him, which plays big into this season, and then his relationship both with Eido, his daughter, and then also with Eramis, who has a different idea of Eliksni unity, of Eliksni nationalism, than Mithrax does. And so we really wanted to leave Mithrax, Fikrul, and Eramis in kin🌃d of a settled place so that we didn't have those threads flapping in the wind anymore as we turn our attention to some really exciting unnamed things in the future."

"There's always a tension between finding a satisfying button or bow to put on a storyline, and leaving oneself room to grow, leaving threads to pick up later on down the road," he adds. "Every time we do any si🧸ngle mission, every time we write any single script, we are always asking ourselves, where do we want to leave the player in relation to the characters? And sometimes we look back and I think we might wish that we had settled some things that we left open. And then other times we wish that we had left ourselves a little more roo🐼m to maneuver."

The Scorgan

As you replay Kell's Fall and finish these character arcs, you'll find Scorn music notes scrawled on the walls. These may end up being a bigger lure for some players than the Act finale. Technical designer and Scorgan mastermind Ashley Baker expla𓆏ins that the castle's central instrument, its size ﷺand majesty crystallized by a fateful piece of concept art, is slowly repaired run over run. Players discover new notes and pipes are restored by some mystery character scurrying around the castle. "So if you're able to blast through the entire Act 3 story day one, you will have a fully fixed organ," she says.

I love when games make me bust out some pen and paper, and I get the feeling the Scorgan will do that. "You're trying to find the notes in different locations, and where they are in those locations and the order that tꩵhey're in matches the order of a melody that can be played on the Scorgan," Baker adds. Some melodies may unlock secret passages while others might screw you over, and "then there's some extra, extra secret ones that, for our music-savvy players, if they can figure those out, they might find a couple extra reactions."

The Scorgan has a full octave for Guardians to play, with notes meticu🥃lously concocted from over a dozen sound layers. Senior music editor Adam Kallibjian tells me these sounds include a PVC trombone, a pipe organ from Sweden, light bulbs, sonar pings, and even some percussion from a Destiny 1 track dating back to the House of Wolves. The "broken" notes throw in an antique car horn and a busted cello. You'll hear Scorgan notes throughout the Episode 2 score if you listen for them – a little extra juice "that helps sell that vampire vibe," Kallibjian says. Baker expects and hopes to see players use the full-fledged instrument to write and play their own songs. Enabling that kind of user-generated content was central to the Scorgan's design, to the point that music theory and notation wa🌳s woven into the Scorn runes.

Making it replayable

We are, of course, going to be playing through Kell's Fall several times to fully max out Slayer's Fang and polish off the story beats. It's the cornerstone of Act 3. Yet before it was even released, I saw some players expressing exhaustion over another mission grind loop. (There's valid criticism to be made of this delivery, but some Destiny 2 players truly seem to hate having to play Destiny 2.) Varied hazards and puzzles can help, but since I hadn't yet played the mission, I wanted to learn more about how Bungie is building activities to suit multiple playthroughs, especially in the context of the un-time-gated era we're currently in. Kisko points to the addition of 🍌Exotic missions to the player journey and how this affected their view🐟 of what these missions look like.

"It's this delicate balance of creating something that's not too hard but still holds onto the coܫre essence of what players expect out of Exotic missions," he says. With Kell's Fall being the "tentpole" for this Act, Kisko says Bungie paid special attention to how follow-up ru𒉰ns feel while trying to balance hardcore and casual play patterns.

Kell's Fall has some depth, but for purꩲe combat it is markedly easier than the likes of the Whisper or Zero Hour missions, especially in the boss fights. But Kisko says they're open to making demanding missions like those again. "I wouldn't say anything is off the table," he affirms. "And I know that in a game like this, variety is amazing. We never would want to push something like the idea of a Whisper off the table for those players who enjoy it. We did Hawkmoon, and then it was like, alright, let's bring Presage in, and we brought the version with the timer back in. Some people really like it, some people don't, and🧸 that's okay.

"Sometimes we're gonna cater to certain audiences more than others, and if it's not your cup of tea, that's fine, be𒉰cause the next release will probably have something more aligned to them. So all that stuff's on the table and we have a lot of vehicles to deliver those. It's not just the Episodes or the different Acts within the Episodes. We also have our future stuff that we're really excited about in Frontiers."

From Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree to Destiny 2: The Final Shape, the best expansions of 2024 breathed new life into old favorites.

How to unlock the Doki Doki armor in Destiny 2 for free

The Destiny 2 Doki Doki ornament sets for each Class are available to buy in the Eververse store on the Seasonal Offerings page for 6,000 Bright Dust each. Thankfully, you can earn Bright Dust in-game for free, mainly via the levelling up the current Season Pass and through completing Seasonal Challenges that offer Bright Dust r🐟ewards.

Otherwise, if you’ve got massive reserves of the sparkly stuff saved up, you should easily be able to afford one of the Doki Doki sets, but you’ll need to spend 18,000 Bright Dust if you want the ornaments for all three 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Destiny 2 Classes. If you 💫can’t afford the ornament sets with Bright Dust, you can instead buy each Doki Doki bundle for 1,500 Silver each, though Silver is Destiny 2’s premium currency and therefore costs real money to buy, with no way to earn it in-game.

Each bundle contains the Doki Doki Destiny helmet, arms, chest, legs, and class item relevant to your chosen Class. Although, there’s no way to buy these armor ornaments individually, so you have to commit to buying the full set. Furthermore, it’s not clear when the Destiny 2 Doki Doki ornament sets will rotated out of the Eververse store, so I’d advise getting these before the end of Episode 2: Revenant, which will be in February 2025 – ideally, you should probably get them before Act III starts on January 7, 2025, in case a replacement set is introduced.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

This was an extreme but fitting way to finally piledrive this article, which in Discord conversations I have been threatening to write for weeks, so deep into my brain that I had no choice but to write it. Destiny 2 is a mess. It has been a teeny-tiny bit of a mess for a while – in some fashion, for 10 years, you could not-unreasonably argue – but post-Final Shape this MMO has been plunged into technical problems so f🌜requent and disruptive that playing it has g🐻otten materially harder.

I don't trust it  

Last night's raid dud came on the heels of the widely covered 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Weightgate perk controversy, which saw some hotly desired weapon perk combos unintentionally rendered harder to acquire.꧙ How many weapons were made rarer, and for how long, we don't yet know. But this was quite a big, bad problem for a loot-based game to h🐲ave, seemingly for months.

Something like this in Diablo 4, I imagine, would've been met with far greater♌ outrage. Destiny 2 players, however, adopted a fairly cordial and investigative tone, perhaps because we are accustomed to this. "Man that's wild! Isn't that wild?" everyone, including Bungie, seemed to say – Bungie with a slightly nervous laugh. Yet Weightgate somehow doesn't hold a candle to the backlog of bugs, crashes, and inconsistencies that have slowly but steadily consumed more and more of the Destiny 2 experience.

I﷽ am, very obviously, here to moan about this. But it's not just that, I promise. For a few weeks now, I've been keeping a running list of technical issues that me and my clanmates have personally encountered in Destiny 2. "Austin, put it on The List," has been an alarmingly frequent comment in our sessions. In just a few weeks, I've logged dozens of problems across all areas of the game, and that's with the courtesy to omit some minor hangups as well as most of the things already in Bungie's own weekly list of known issues.

Destiny 2's technical degradation has reached a point where I not only can't trust the game, I have to expect bugs around every corner. From activities to abilities, every single element has been injected with doubt. Our raid problem was seemingly caused by an update that Bungie pushed to allow raid chests to drop weapons, because we didn't have this boss issue just last week. And that's just one of many, many topical examples.

The List  

I'm not going to rat🎶tle off The List or Bun♊gie's known issues, but I do want to put into perspective just how broken Destiny 2 has been lately. Pretty much every piece of new content has seen serious bugs. These aren't "smash them with a tissue" bugs, here. We're dealing with a "get the flamethrower out" caliber of bug.

When the new Episode launched, the updated Onslaught activity was bugged so that only the first player to loot the coveted w🍌ave 50 chests – the entire purpose of the pinnacle version of the Episode's premier activity – would get extra loot. And that's if you can get to wave 50 at all; enemies in earlier waves can be totally invincible, soft locking the activity. This is the cornerstone of the Episode! And it was missing 66% of the loot finale at launch, and to this day it will sometimes throw its hands up and say, "Oops, gave that enemy god mode, back to orbit you go."

The wave 50 chests have been fixed, but the first secret chest in the new dungeon, Vesper's Host, still has this pro♕blem. At the time of writing, only one person can loot it. Several messages in the protracted questline which unlocks that chest are also bugged, with enemies or objects not spawning several times for my fireteam and requiring resets. We once saw a critical enemy spawn out of bounds and refuse to enter the playable space because it💜 was too busy shooting a panel on the wall which inexplicably registered as a target for the AI. 

On top of that, Hunter's Shadowshot Super is still disabled in the dungeon since it's prone to crashes or errors. This effectively bans Void since the other Hunter Void Super, Spectral Blades, is irredeemable garbage in PvE. Let's not forget this solid-gold known dungeon issue, either: "Some♏times the final boss doesn't spawn and players are forced to wipe for the encounter to start." Sometimes!

The Pale Heart, the main destination of The Final Shape expansion, is inordinately prone to Guitar errors kicking you to orbit. New Artifact perks like Kinetic Impacts are bugged and do almost nothing. I swear the old Radiant bug that causes anti-barrier properties to flicker is back. Bungie had to announce a fix to a bugged and unannounced change causing Solar Ignitions to deal basically no damage to bosses. New Exotics like the Hunter's Mask of Fealty just do not do the things they say they do. Health regeneration might not trigger in Vanguard Ops, the main PvE playlist. A Trials of Osiris PvP b☂ug is blocking many rank-up rewards entirely. 

Send help  

The smaller things compound, too. Destiny 2's UI has become a nightmare. Se🔯veral labels and tooltips don't appear when you mouse over things, and the whole system grinds to a halt if you have the gall to open the character menu in the Tower, the main social space of𝓀 this MMO. A new weapon in the Festival of the Lost event dropped with perks it isn't supposed to have. This Episode's Tonics regularly bug out during mixing or when you drink them, bombarding you with notifications saying that the 60-minute potion you just chugged has expired. Like a Helldiver in a Tier 10 operation, I am never far from bugs.

I'm not here to make the ridiculous argument that it would be easy, actually, to fix or prevent all of these bugs. The folks at Bungie could surely explain how these issues happened and why, in the bug triageꦬ process, they weren't or couldn't be caught or fixed in time. That explanation would probably come across as fair and reasonable, especi꧒ally at a time when the studio is under pressure and down staff (and, I can only speculate, down morale). I'd wager that these issues will be fixed eventually, but eventually can mean six months in Destiny 2.

It's hard to seriously engage with this game right now. Even when things do function on the surface, uncertainties nag me constantly. Is this build or gun working as intended? Is it bad, or just bugged? Will a future "bug fix" nerf it into the pavement? Will tonight's raid even freakin' work? Fundamental distrust has taken root, and the ratio of new problems to necessary fixes is so skewed that I can only assume it's going to get worse with every new update. It has gotten worse with🐭 every new update, if not through buggy content than through collateral damage caused by other patches.

I see the work being done to fight the bugs, but the bugs are quite frankly winning. It goes without saying that I don't have a silver bullet solution. Some players have floated the idea of Operation Fixit, a season that's deliberately light on new content but heavy on repairs. That sounds great but doesn't seem especially feasible when Bungie is already bet﷽ween a rock and a hard place trying to put out content to keep the game active and profitable under Sony's watchful eye. But I do think something needs to change. I have personally hit my tipping poin🌠t, and it feels like Destiny 2 is approaching its own.

Bungie has "identified a potential solution to the issue, and we are rapidly working to validate the fix." It's hoping to push this hotfix as soon as possible, but is s💖till working out timing.

The exact cause and scope of this issue remains unclear, nor do we know when it first reared its ugly head, but the fact♚ that players accurately sniffed ou🌃t compromised RNG after 10 years of almost universally groundless loot conspiracy theories (and one true count of XP bottlenecking) really is something. That said, it sounds like a big blog breakdown is coming.

"For right now, we're focusing on fixing up the issue and getting it outꦿ to you," Bungie adds. "After, we'll be sitting down with the team to discuss all the nitty-gritty details."

Original story:

A few days ago, a relatively small group of frustrated and unlucky Destiny 2 players began to speculate if the weapons dropping in the MMO's newest dungeon, Vesper's Host, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:were unfairly weighted against them. That's just how rare the god roll perks seemed 🉐to be. Bungie was quick to respond, stamping out familiar conspiracy theories about false RNG and confirming that there is no intentional perk weighting in any area of the game apart from Exotic class item attunement which operates on a different system.

In the days since, the Destiny 2 community's sleuths and statisticians have been hard at work investigating the proposed "Weightgate" theory. As has piled up, Bungie's confirmed that it's now investigating a potential unintentional problem that could be behind all of this. There is still space fo🌳r this to be a player misinterpretation born from limited data, but if players are right, and it certainly looks like they might be, this could be a serious loot problem that went unnoticed for m๊onths despite affecting multiple areas of the game.

The investigation has now evolved into Bungie working with players to either rule out this potential loot bug, or confirm its cause and effect to find a solution. "We are now investigating a potential issue within our code for how RNG perks are ไgenerated," the . "Many thanks to all players who have been contributing to data collection across the community. This data has been monumentally helpful with our investigation, and we are currently working on internal simulations to confirm your findings." Analysis from the creator of Destiny 2 loot archi🧜ve Light.gg also from the team.

Handily, Light.gg now , which is "not a tool to aid a witch hunt," to visualize this alleged loot bug. To explain Weightgate as succinctly as possible, players believe that certain weapon perk combinations are ino🌜rdinately🎀 unlikely to drop. This appears to be based on a snag in Destiny 2's weapon API and the way perks are assigned.

To put it less succinctly, this theory is based on the distance between perks in a weapon's perk columns. Every Legendary weapon has multiple potential perks in columns three and four, and these perks ar꧂e assigned to ordered slots behind the scenes. Weightgate posits that if a gun has six perks in each column and you roll🍨 the slot one perk in column three, it's much less likely for column four to roll the slot four perk than slot two because the former is 'further away' from slot one, so to speak. The tricky bit is that this distancing seems to 'wrap around,' which in this example means slot one perks are actually right next to slot six perks and are therefore pretty likely pairings.

To go back to VS Chill Inhibitor, Bait and Switch is a slot two perk in column three. Envious Arsenal is a slot five perk in column four. This gives this roll a perk distance of three, which the Weightgate theory calls unlikely. Some people have gotten this roꦓll to drop, along with the other god rolls under investigation, but it appears to be unusually uncommon according to the data we have.

This theory is probably better explained visually. As Light.gg illustrates, several weapons from recent Destiny 2 releases show a predictable gradient-like relationship between perks. This data is based on the rolls of the guns that players have in their inventory. I've also toggled off crafted weapons🦹, which can guarantee god rolls, to sharpen the data, though that doesn't matter with the new weapons which aren't craftable. Here's how VS Chill Inhibitor looks in that loot tool:

See what I mean? There are consistent dips in roll pairings that have a perk distance of three, and the most common combinations generally have a distance of one🦋 or zero. This rule is not absolute and there are plenty of outliers and exceptions, in part because players are most likely to delete the truly trash rolls from their inventories.

This is mainly what gives me pause – a lot of recent weapons still have more standard perk distributions, and weapons with many more possible perks seem to throw the perceived pattern out entirely. If Weightgate is real, I doubt it will be as all-encompassing as some believe. But this grenade launcher is far from the only gun, and particularly new gun, with this pattern, and if you go back t💛o pre-Final Shap🍬e content in that same tool, the pattern effectively vanishes. With that in mind, have a look at the new sniper Sovereignty, which has seven perks in each column:

Notice how rolls with a perk distance of four are rarer than, or comparable to, those with a perk distance of three? Destiny 2 math wiz makes a good case in a post highlighting Truthteller, which doesn't really have an undisputed🐽 god roll and is a good test case with less bias from player tastes, but still shows this gradient pattern. "This is th🧸e smoking gun for me," he says. "100k rolls of S24 Truthteller on Light.gg. Not a single good roll to go for, so the pattern shows really clearly. There's no reason that Moving Target + Threat Detector should be 17x more likely than MT + Repulsor Brace."

The reason VS Chill Inhibitor keeps coming up is that it's a non-craftable weapon with a hotly desired god roll that has a high perk distance and which is currently being farmed in huge quantities by hardcore players. If Weightgate is accurate and this bug has been present for months, it actually may have weighted drops in favor of players in some instances, assuming other god rolls had a low perk distance. This could have acted as a smokescreen. This is only being highlighted now because the potential bug finally pissedꦯ off the biggest grinders.

The key takeaway here is that loot was not maliciously or even intentionally rigged, if it is indeed rigged at all. Bungie wouldn't give players t🐽he tools and access to discover this if it wanted to hoodwink them, for starters, and frankly the people at the studio do deserve more trust than that. That being said, Destiny 2 is currently in an extremely rough state on a technical level, and we've seen plenty of systemic updates cause inexplicable collateral damage in the past. I don't know how it may have happened, but Destiny 2 spaghetti code has surprised me before.

Weighted loot would be quite a problem for a loot game to have, especially when the latest Destiny 2 Episode has explicitly encouraged players to spend less time crafting god rolls and more time chasing them the old-fashioned way. Bungie has been open about its investigation so far after ruling out intentional weighting, and you'd better believe Destiny 2 players will have their eyes glued to th🥃e studio's reports in the days and weeks ahead. This could all blow over, or it could make for a whopper of a developer blog post.

Bungie teases Diablo-style "treasure goblins" and "dynamic enemy spawning" for new Destiny 2 missions you can solo in 10 minutes if you don't want the MMO experience.

Seemingly reeling from weapon crafting withdrawal, some players quickly began to speculate – not for the first time in this MMO's life – that the odds of rolling top-tier perks are unfairly weighted against them, even and purported backend values to rationalize their bad luck. Across social media platf𓆉orms like Reddit and Twitter, these RNG rumblings got loud enough that Bungie decided to step in and bring the hammer down. 

"We had a conversation with ourꦇ Sandbox folks this morning abo🍬ut this," the Destiny 2 Team Twitter account . "There is no perk weighting active for any legendary weapon perks in Destiny 2. We have added perk attunement for Exotic Class Items in a recent update, but that's a different system." 

Community manager Dmg . "Folks on the team double checked before we issued comms," he said. "Same folks have checked in the past when similar threads spun up on weapons during previous ♐release windows.

"We’ll probably keep spot-checking from time to time, too. Would suck if a bug indeed happened. From what we’re seeing though - no bug. No tipping scales. No weighting to prevent players from getting the perks they want. Seems to just be RNG. Appreciate players talking about how things feel. Super happy to pass that along. Sometimes we just need to course correct when statements of feel start turning into statements of 'ಞfact.'

"Sucks that folks think we’re knowingly lying.ꦅ That ain’t what we’re about. Dunno if we’ll re-earn their trust over time, but appreciate folks willing to hear us out without immediately assuming malicious intent." 

In fairness, this has come alongside a headache-inducing mess over to Solar Ignition boss damage which was recently uncovered by players and won't be fixed until mid-November. I don't have total confidence in Destiny 2's creaky engine either, but this loot conspiracy has been stamped out many times befoಌre, and the word remains that perks are indeed equal. I don't know how to tell folks this, but sometimes you just get unlucky. 

Bungie teases Diablo-style "treasure goblins" and "dynamic enemy spawning" for new Destiny 2 missions you can solo in 10 minutes if you don't want the MMO experience.

💧In the basic goals and rewards for Solo Ops activities. Some may be disappointed to hear that these "aren’t intended to be intense tests of buildcrafting prowess or thumb skill." Instead, Bungie says, "we want them to focus on the joy of playing in Destiny’s action sandbox in a way that’s easy to jump into and play in just a few minutes" – 10 minutes or so, to be exact, with the option to play them with up to two friends in versions that scale based on fireteam size. "We never want to tell you that you can’t play with your friends," Bungie says. 

Solo Ops will be free to everyone, support the upcoming 🔜scoring and challenge customization options apparent𝓰ly designed to put more of the difficulty curve and loot grind in player's hands, and feature underused spaces in the Destiny 2 universe, like the EDZ Salzwerks area. Bungie's promising a few ways to inject variety into them run over run, and I already want to see some of these come to other areas of the game. 

"Solo Ops missions will some♚times come with optional goals that only present themselves once you’r🔜e in the activity, like the presence of treasure goblins, or passageways to secret rooms opening where they are normally closed," Bungie says. "We’re also scattering random treasure chests throughout the activity and finding them will get you a bonus to your final score." 

Additionally, Bungie's been cooking a "dynamic enemy spawning system" that "runs behind the scenes, monitoring how well you’re doing, how long it’s been since you’ve been in combat, and how close you’re getting to your objective, and then spawns squads of enemies when the system determines that you need to be challenged." This will🌞 give 𒁃Solo Missions the ability to "spawn enemies at unpredictable times from places where you may not expect them." 

Something about the phrase "you need to be challenged" triggers a few alarms, but I'm still too hung up on the honest-to-goodness treasure goblins to care. Treasure goblins! In my 10-year-old sci-fi FPS MMO? It's like you spilled your 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Diablo 4 in my Destiny 2. We can only hope. 

Bungie admits that clearing some Destiny 2 PvE activities, like Strikes and seasonal grinds, can feel like competing with other players to get kills or just rushing to finish the dang thing, positioning Solo Ops as your own little private garden. "Overall, we hope that the Solo Ops missions will be a good activity for players who only have a short amount of time to play, prefer to play by themselves, or are looking for a lower-intensity way to revel in the Destiny gameplay sandbox, as well as any combination of those three," the 🔯dev concludes.

Destiny 2 player locks himself in one of the MMO's hardest raids for over 400 hours until he finally solos it without dying: "I need to call my mom right now." 

Destiny 2 Vesper’s Host guide

If you’re yet to start Vesper’s Host at all, you need to make sure you’ve grabbed the “Rogue Network” quest from Spider, who’s lurking in the back room of the Eliksni bar in the Last City. Once yo🌟u’ve started that, you’ll find the Vesper’s Host Dungeon activity node on the Europa map.

Firstly, it’s important to familiarize yourself with the core mechanics of the Dungeon. As in the Deep Stone Crypt Raid, Vesper’s Host sees you collecting three augments used to perform different tasks within each encounter. Each player can hold only one augment at a time and augments can be deposited at the white terminals. A terminal can hold only one ওaugment, but it 🌌allows other players to collect the augment if necessary or just holds the augment safely if you need to grab a different one.

Ho🀅wever, when you collect any augment, a 60-second timer starts which will kill you if it reaches zero, though depositing an augment at a terminal and then immediately collecting it resets the timer. Here’s how each individual augment works:

• Scanner (yellow): Marks certain objects on your minimap with yellow hexagons. Approaching a marked object with this augment will cause the marker to either disappear or turn white. If it turns white, this indicates it is the “correct” object.
• Operator (red): Lets you shoot red control panels to activate them.
• Suppressor (blue): Highlights certain enemies in bright blue and replaces your grenade ability with a decoy bomb. Activate this new ability to create a hologram on your position, then shoot it to blow it up. Any highlighted enemies hit by the explosion are made vulnerable to damage.

With the basics out the way, here’s𝔍 how you com☂plete the three main encounters of the Vesper’s Host Dungeon in Destiny 2.

Destiny 2 Vesper’s Host Activation

When you start Vesper’s Host, you’ve got to get inside Vesper Station before you can begin reactivating it. After running along some gantries, you’ll enter a dark hangar with a blocked door at the far end. This mini “Embarkation” encounter just introduces you to the Scanner and Operator augments, and all you need to do is use Scanner to find five red control panels scattered around the hangar and identify which ones are correct, then shoot them while holding Operator. Once you’ve done that, the barrier blocking the airlock ahea꧟d will deact🧸ivate.

Carry on into the station and you’ll eventually reach the Activation encounter, which uses the same logic as above, just with a bit more danger and the added nuclear core mechanic. Your objective here is to dunk three nuclear cores into three white bins behind the white sphere robot in the middle of the room, but you need to use Scanner and Operator to release those cores. You’ll also notice this room has three doors, each with a different organ above them – heart, lungs, and brain – and you ca😼n find a nuclear core through each one. Approach the robot and follow the “Reboot System” prompt to start the encounter and then do the following:

1. Kill the Brig that spawns in, then kill the Viral Carrier and collect Scanner.
2. Run into any of the three open doors – heart, lungs, or brain – and kill any Machine Priest’s Assistants and other enemies you find along the way.
3. Proceed into the next area and kill more Machine Priest’s Assistants until another Viral Carrier spawns with Operator.
4. Using Scanner, follow the yellow hexagon markers to the various red control panels in this area. You should be left with four white hexagons on your minimap corresponding to different control panels.

5. Using Operator, shoot the four correct control panels. This will cause a nuclear core to appear.
6. Deposit Scanner and Operator into the white terminals. This will make them readily available in any of the other organ rooms too, saving you from having to collect them every time.
7. Pick up and carry the nuclear core back to the starting room, then quickly kill the Brig to remove the shields on the bins behind the white robot.
8. Deposit the nuclear core it into one of the three bins.

9. Repeat steps 2 to 8 for the other two rooms to complete the encounter.

How to beat Raneiks U🍷nified in Destiny 2 Vesper’s꧑ Host

After another mini encounter called “Infiltration”, which sees you coming face-to-face with Raneiks Unified and depositing five nuclear cores in a small maze, you’ll then have to fight this hideous Servitor boss. When you enter the boss fight room, you’ll notice 10 red control panels numbered zero to nine (zero represents 10 in this case) – these are important for later as you’ll be entering a code to begin the damage phase of this encounter. Here’s what you need to do to beat Raneiks Unified:

Code Phase: Uncover the four-digit code.

1. Kill the Viral Carrier and collect Operator, then place it in a terminal for later.
2. Continue killing enemies until a Machine Priest miniboss spawns. Kill them to get teleported to another area.
3. Kill all the Shanks including the Viral Carrier holding Suppressor.
4. Use the Suppressor decoy bomb ability while standing next to Raneiks Unified to cause it to split apart into 10 smaller Servitors.
5. Identify the two Servitors which have red lights surrounding their central eye and note the number in their names. For example, Raneiks-2 and Raneiks-7 would give 2 and 7.

6. Get back to the starting room by running through the red tunnel or side door.
7. Repeat steps 2 to 6 once, leaving you with four different numbers.
8. Collect Operator and shoot the red panels corresponding to the four numbers you identified on the Servitors in any order. This’ll trigger the damage phase, which has a little bit of setup first.

Damage Phase: Destroy Raneiks Unified.

1. Collect Suppressor from the Viral Carrier that spawns.
2. Use the decoy bomb on Raneiks Unified again to cause it to split apart into the smaller Servitors and make it vulnerable.
3. Damage the Servitors until they reform.

Once the damage phase ends, you’ve just got to repeat these two phases until Raneiks Unified’s health bar has only a sliver remaining. At this point, you need to destroy each individual Servitor to complete the boss fight, but there’s no time limit. Now you can collect your loot and begওin platforming your way around the Vesper Station exterior to reach the Anomaly area where you’ll have to defeat the Corrupted Puppeteer.

How to beat the Corrupted Puppཧeteer in Destiny 2 Vesper’s Host

The final boss of Vesper’s Host has a lot of setup before you even reach the damage phase, combining almost all the previous mechanics💦. Also, with so many ways to die, this is a marathon and not a sprint, requiring extreme care and constant awareness to avoid starting over.

The main addition here is that the boss can spawn “puppets” which are effectively smaller clones of itself that can only be killed once they’ve been hit by a Supp𒁃ressor decoy bomb. Additionally, whenever you’re close to a puppet, you’ll gain stacks of the Radiation effect at an alarming rate.

The fight is split into three distinct phases which cycle until the Corrupted Puppeteer dies. Here’s how each one works:

Entrance Phase: Use all three augments to reach the lower stacks.

1. Collect Suppressor from the first Viral Carrier.
2. Use the decoy bomb to kill all puppets until another carrier spawns with Scanner.

3. Using Scanner, approach the blue numbered monitors (1-4). Whichever one remains marked on your minimap is the number you need to remember.

4. Kill more puppets using Suppressor, then collect Operator from the next carrier.
5. Shoot the four red panels scattered throughout this room with the corresponding number from the blue panel. For example, if the blue panel that remained marked on your minimap was 2, you need to shoot the four red panels with 2 on them.
6. Place all three augments in the white terminals as this will save you having to collect them again in the next phase.

If you do all that correctly, the Corrupted Puppeteer will retreat to the lower levels of the station, and you can follow by jumping down either of the tubes with red, flashing lights in. You’ll drop into a maze-like area, which is actually just a big loop roughly halved into two sections distinguished by the blue or orange walls. Here you’ll begin the longest phase, which sees you bringing down the Puppeteer’s shield using nuclear cores.

Shield Phase: Destroy the Puppeteer’s shield.

1. Jump down one of the two pipes near the flashing red lights on the wall. The pipes on the blue wall will take you to the blue central room in the middle of the map while the pipes on the orange wall will take you to the orange central room.

2. Find the Puppeteer in either the large blue room or large orange room.

3. Collect Operator and shoot the four red panels scattered around the room the Puppeteer is in. This starts the “Sector Purge Countdown” and causes several puppets to appear around the room.

4. Using Scanner, follow the yellow hexagons on your minimap until you find the puppet marked with a white hexagon, then kill that puppet. It will drop a nuclear core.

5. Deposit Scanner back into a terminal, then grab the nuclear core.
6. Run into the central bunker area, deposit the core into the bin, then wait until you can exit.

7. Run to the other large room to find the Puppeteer again, then repeat steps 2 to 5.
8. After a nuclear core has been used in both large rooms, run back to either of the central rooms and go through the teleporter to get back to the entrance room, then run into the airlock you initially entered from to prepare for the damage phase.

Shield Phase: Defeat the Corrupted Puppeteer and avoid the Anomaly.

1. After standing in the airlock, you’ll get shot into the air and will see the Corrupted Puppeteer standing on a platform – damage them as much as possible at this point. Lightning will start striking the arena which can be lethal, so make sure you’re always moving.

2. The Puppeteer will soon spawn several puppets, which you should try and kill. Explosive weapons are ideal for damaging both the Puppeteer and their puppets at the same time.
3. The Puppeteer will eventually spawn a larger group of puppets, one of which will drop a nuclear core when destroyed.
4. When the Puppeteer “communes with the Anomaly”, grab the nuclear core, run into the bunker on the left, and deposit the core to survive the lethal pulse.

5. Leave the bunker and continue damaging the Puppeteer.
6. When the Anomaly pulses again, retreat into the airlock.

That’s one full cycle for this final boss fight, so now you must start the entrance phase again and repeat all the above steps until the Corrupted Puppeteer is dead. It’s an incredibly long process, with a lot that can kill you, particularly during the brutally difficult damage phase. However, if you’re successful, you have a chance of getting the reprised Destiny 2 Ice breaker Exotic Sniper Rifle, and there’s plenty more to do for the Rogue Network quest.

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Bygones PVE god rolls in Destiny 2

The overall power of Bygones means it’s an effective🉐, medium-range, kinetic weapon for any loadout, but with Firefly being the standout PVE perk, this god roll is going to almost entirely revolve around that perk:

• Barrel: Smallbore
• Magazine: Ricochet Rounds
• Perk 1: Demolitionist
• Perk 2: Firefly
• Masterwork: Stability or Handling
• Mod: Choose Backup Mag, Synergy, or either of the Ammo Finder Enhancement mods

With Firefly, every precision kill you get using Bygones causes the enemy to explode with Solar damage, helping you clear out groups of weaker enemies with ease. Since you can get bursts of kills in this way, Demolitionist is a natural pairing, letting you recharge your grenade very quickly. Overall, I think this roll will work nicely in a Solar or Prismatic build, paired with a good close-range special weapon, such as the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Destiny 2 Aberrant Action rocket sidearm or🥀 even a Shotgun or Fusion Rifle.

Bygones PVE god rolls in Destiny 2

With 12 perks in both trait columns, Bygones has many possible perk combinations that are effective in PVP. That makes getting your ideal roll difficult, but it means getting some🔜thing at least quite good won’t be that hard. Here are the perks I recomm♛end you look for on your own Bygones:

• Barrel: Smallbore
• Magazine: Ricochet Rounds or High-Caliber Rounds
• Perk 1: Under Pressure
• Perk 2: Closing Time
• Masterwork: Stability or Range
• Mod: Choose Ballistics or Anti-Flinch

I’ve picked Under Pressure and Closing Time as it’s a combination that offers nice benefits in any gunfight, but you might also want to consider To The Pain and Eye Of The Storm or Outlaw and Desperado as other synergistic perk combinations. Additionally, perks like Keep Away, Zen Moment, Rangefinder, Perpetual Motion, Kill Clip, and Headseeker are great picks for the Crucible, so it’s quite hard to go wrong here.

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How to get all pieces of the Destiny 2 Assassin’s Creed Armor for free

The Destiny 2 Assassin’s Creed armor ornament sets are being sold in the Eververse store for Bright Dust during Episode 2: Revenant, which means you don’t need to spend any real money on Silver to buy them. However, the armor sets are appearing in the storefront piece by piece, so you need to check in when the store’s stock changes after the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Destiny 2 weekly reset. Thanks to here’s when each Assa🅰ssin’s Creed armor piece will be available to buy in Destiny 2, though once they’re gone, they’re gone:

• October 8-15: Gauntlets (Misthios Grips, Wolf-Kissed Gauntlets, and Eagle’s Gloves)
• October 15-22: Legs (Misthios Stides, Wolf-Kissed Greaves, and Eagle’s Boots)
• October 22-29: Class items (Misthios Cloak, Wolf-Kissed Mark, and Eagle’s Bond)
• November 19-26: Chests (Misthios Vest, Wolf-Kissed Plate, and Eagle’s Robes)
• November 26-December 3: Helmets (Misthios Mask, Wolf-Kissed Helm, and Eagle’s Hood)

To unlock any piece of these Assassin’s Creed armor sets, log into Destiny 2 on whichever Class you want the armor for, open the Store menu, and you’ll see one armor ornament available to buy in the Bright Dust section of the Featured landing page. On the Seasonal Offerings tab, you can now get the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Destiny 2 Doki Doki armor for Bright Dust too.

Once you’ve spent your Bright Dust, navigate to your character’s inventory, open the modifications tab, and follow the “unlock” button prompt while hovering over the ornament to unlock it, letting you apply it to your armor like any other ornament. If you want the armor for one of your other 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Destiny 2 Classes, you need to switch cha✱racters and repeat this process again.

Every individual Destiny 2 Assassin's Creed armor ornament above costs 1,200 Bright Dust, so a full set for one Class will set you back 6,000 Bright Dust, while all three will cost you 18,000 Bright Dust. If you need to stock up for the final ornaments, Bright Dust can be collected by levelling up the current Season Pass and completing seasonal challenges, though it cannot be bought like Silver.

The previous Destiny 2 Assassin’s Creed armor bundles that cost Silver have also been removed from the Eververse store, which means you can’t buy the armor ornament sets for real money anymore – spending Bright Dust is currently the only way to get these sets!

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How to unlock the Exotic Catalyst for Alethonym in Destiny 2

The Altheonym catalyst in Destiny 2 is not currently obtainable as it’s locked behind level 145 on the Revenant Season Pass. For the remainder of Act 1, you won’t be able to increase your Revenant rank above 100, but when Act 2 starts with the Destiny 2 weekly reset on Tuesday, November 19th, you’ll be able to start levelling up your Season Pass all the way to level 150, letting you eventually get that cata𒀰lyst.

When you earn enough XP to get the Alethonym catalyst, you’ll be able to add the One for All perk, granting the weapon a significant 35% damage boost to the weapon for about 10 seconds if you get several kills with it in a short time. It’s not going to turn Alethonym into one of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best Destiny 2 exotics, but if you want to reach level 145 quick♈ly to get this catalyst, there are some things you can focus on to maximize your XP gains:

• Complete as many bounties as you can. Bounties from Eido and many other vendors across Destiny 2 will get you small amounts of XP, but these can really add up in the long run.
• Focus on completing seasonal challenges. All seasonal challenges reward you with large chunks of XP, but some are a lot more generous than others, increasing your rank by several levels in some cases. You should prioritize the ones that have “Challenger XP+++” listed as a reward, as these give the most XP.
• Play with friends. As you rank up the Revenant Season Pass, you’ll unlock XP boosts and Fireteam XP boosts which will increase your XP gains even more. Those Fireteam XP boosts apply to all fireteam members, so you can get a little more XP just from playing with others.

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Bungie announced that it was rebooting Marathon, the '90s series that predates even Halo, last summer, and it's been very tight-lipped about the extraction shooter ever since aside from 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:a secret trailer that confirmed we wouldn't hear anything else for a really long🤪 time. Prophecy fulfilled, I guess.

But Destiny 2's new update reportedly features clues about what to expect next. Dataminers began digging through Destiny 2's innards recently for hints about what's coming up in the evergreen looter shooter - though what they instead found was what's next for the studio. reports that a text st🅘ring called 'v820.offers.entitlement.d2.marathon.preorder' was datamined, obviously spurrin🙈g speculation. 

Bungie apparently names all Destiny 2 updates with versio𒀰n numbers. For example, The Final Shape's files are numbered v800, while the ongoing Episode Revenant event is v810. Episode Heresy, which also has the same v820 numbering, is next in line and will debut on February 4, 2025, so it's very possible that we'll hear more from Marathon around that same time. Who knows? Maybe we'll see some new footage as early as this year's The Game Awards show before pre-order open early next year. That's all pure guess work, however.

Adding more fuel to the theory is the fact that Bungie recently invited several stre🌊amers and coꦕntent creators to the studio - many of whom were in town for the Halo World Championship Series - specifically to play the new Marathon reboot. That isn't confirmation that any new news is incoming right now; more a sign that development is powering ahead, despite a reportedly 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:rough production cycle behind the scenes.

Bungie’s Marathon looks the part, but do we really need another extraction shooter? 

How to unlock Destiny 2 Tonic recipes

To discover Tonic recipes in Destiny 2, you’ve just got to brew other Tonics and hope that you randomly unlock a new recipe during the process. Essentially, whenever you hand over some 🌜reagents at the Table to🌺 brew, there’s a small chance that you’ll discover a new and similar recipe too.

With 45 Tonic recipes to discover in Destiny 2 and only seven to start with, that’s a lot of brewing to do. So, to help you unlock Tonic recipes, I highly recommend the Extraordinary Tonic upgrade as this increases the chances of you randomly discovering new recipes while brewing. More Tonic recipes also mean you’ll unlock more 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Destiny 2 Fieldwork quests, which’꧙ll help you get more reagents and even more Tonic upgrades. If you’re a bit confusedౠ as to how brewing Tonics in Destiny 2 works, and how best to use them, I’ve explained in detail below.

Destiny 2 Tonic brewing and gather🍨ing reagents explained

Brewing Tonics is a vital part of the activity and reward loop in Revenant, adding new ꧃ways to not only get more loot but also choose what you want to chase too. They come in two broad flavors with very different uses:

• Volatile Tonics: Consuming these temporarily grants you an extra power in combat – usually a new way to benefit from or apply one of the many Subclass keywords – and improves one or two Artifact Perks, effectively supercharging your build.
• Enriching Tonics: Drinking one of these temporarily increases the chances of you getting certain rewards from killing enemies or completing activities. They’re split into the following categories:
  • Onslaught: Tonics that increase the chances of you getting Onslaught Salvation or Vintage Onslaught weapons.
  • World Gear: Tonics that increase the chances of you getting weapons from the world loot pool.
  • Shadestalker: Tonics that increase the chances of you getting pieces from the Revenant Shadestalker armor set.
  • Resource: Tonics that increase the chances of you getting valuable upgrade materials such as Enhancement Prisms and even Ascendent Shards.

If you’ve got plenty of reagents, you can head to the Tonic Table next to Eido in her Last City lab and choose which Tonics you want to brew – you can choose as many as you want, so long as you have the reagents. Once you’ve chosen your tonics, head over to the Eliksni Apparatus near the repurposed walker tank to create the brews, give them a taste test, then deposit them into the wa🌳lker to imbue them with Light. After that, they’ll spew out and you can collect ꩵthem, ready to use.

To brew any Tonic recipes you’ve unlocked, you need various reagents, with each Tonic specifying the type and quantity of reagents needed. You can reagents from just killing enemies and completing Revenant activities, but 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Destiny 2 Tonic Upgrades will help learn additional ways of gathering these nec🔯essary ingredienꦆts.

How to use Destiny 2 Tonics

To use any Tonics you’ve brewed, you need to open your character inventory menu and then select the Tonic Capsule item under the Accessories section. This reveals a screen with two slots, one for all your Volatile Tonics and one for all your Enriching Tonics. Hover over these slots and pick a Tonic to activate it, immediately starting its timer and providing its effect. You can have one Volatile and one Enriching Tonic active at once but sipping another Tonic oඣf the same type entirely replac🐻es the one you just had, so don’t waste Tonics by doing this.

So, with a Tonic or two active, you should now try anﷺd complete as many activities as you can for the duration of the Tonic buffs, particularly with Enriching Tonics as this’ll help you get the most loot. Since Enriching Tonics have a chance to grant loot on kills as well as activity completions, it’s definitely worth just focusing on PVE activities with a high enemy density, such as Strikes and Onslaught, to maximize your loot.

Finally, when you’re Tonics have expired, you can apply more to keep the loot grind going or you can visit the Tonic Table again to craft more with the reagents you hopefully just collected. If you’ve got surplus Tonics, you can check Eido’s requests in to see if she’s asking for any Tonics you’ve got in exchange for a bit of reputation and a piece of Legendary gear!

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How to unlock new Exotics in Destiny 2

To be able to unlock any new Exotic armor piece in Destiny 2, you need to max out and reset your vendor rank with Master Rahool by decrypting Exotic and Prime Engrams. Once you’ve hit Legend (Rank 16), claim the Exotic Cipher reward to reset your rank and unlock Novel Focusing, which lets you get any Exotic armor piece, including brand-new gear that you don’t have. Be aware that, as of 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Destiny 2 The Final Shape, ꦏthis is the only way to get new Exotic armor pieces too.

Using Novel Focusing to acquire a new Exotic armor piece also makes it available to unlock via Precision Decryption too, so you have two options for getting additional rolls of any armor piece depending on the sorts of resources you have available to you. This is also how you can end up with some of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best Destiny 2 Exotic armor, as these focusing methods generally dish out high-stat armor. Remember, the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best Destiny 2 Exotic weapons are generally unlocked through quests and season passes rather t💧han engrams.

The difficulty here then is increasing your reputation with Master Rahool as quickly as possible to unlock any new Exotic armor in Destiny 2 – note that you’ll have to do this every season as your vendor ranks reset. As💦 mentioned, y𝄹ou do this by decrypting engrams but focusing Exotic Engrams increases the amount of reputation gained. 

Here’s how much reputation you get for decrypting one Exotic Engram with each of Rahool’s decryption methods, as well as the resources needed:

• Random decryption: 150 reputation, free
• Daily Decryption Deal: 75 reputation, free
• Advanced Decryption: 250 reputation, costs 30,000 Glimmer and 10 Enhancement Prisms
• Precision Decryption: 500 reputation, costs 60,000 Glimmer and 2 Ascendant Shards

Obviously, the fastest way to level up is to use Precision Decryption as this offers the most reputation for Master Rahool, but you’ll need a lot of Ascendant Shards to do that. And unless you had Exotic Engrams stockpiled in your engram inventory, getting the ne💎cessary Exotic Engrams in the ღfirst place is tricky too.

How to farm Exotic Engrams in Destiny 2

While there’s no obvious farming method for quickly am♑assing Exotic Engrams in Destiny 2 to help you unlock new Exotics, there are quite a few ways you can get these engrams, so bear these in mind when you’re playing to help you rank up your reputation with Rahool quickly:

• Random drops from enemies: Every so often, an enemy that you kill will drop an Exotic Engram for you to collect.
• Legend and Master Lost Sectors: Completing a solo run of the daily Lost Sector on Legend or Master difficulty has a chance to award an Exotic Engram. Master difficulty is harder but offers the best odds of getting an Exotic Engram. Lost Sectors at these difficulties can also be repeated as many times as you want.
• Vex Strike Force Public Event: This event, which is exclusive to Neomuna, is quite rare, but guarantees an Exotic Engram upon completion. You do not need 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Destiny 2 Lightfall to complete this Public Event either.
• Season Passes: Every Season Pass in Destiny 2 also contains lots of Exotic Engrams that you can grab and decrypt, though most are found at the higher levels. If you forgot to collect some rewards from the last season pass, you can log into your and claim anything you missed from that pass.

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Best Destiny 2 Tonic Upgrades

If you just want to know which Major 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Destiny 2 Fieldwork quests to comp🎀lete first to get the best Tonic Upgrades early, here’s the order I recommend:

1. Extraordinary Tonics: Hugely useful for discovering more tonic recipes which will help you unlock Minor and Major Fieldwork quests faster.
2. Blood Drive: Since Reclaimed Vitality is easy to get, you have a decent chance of getting useful amounts of Uncommon reagents too, quickly building up your ingredient supplies.
3. Bounty Harvester: Good for improving your reagent-collecting abilities outside of Revenant activities.
4. Performance Bonus: Also helps with getting more reagents but only in Onslaught Salvation.
5. Revenant Recycler: Useful but not essential and can be safely saved until last.

All Destiny 2 Tonic Upgrades

Each Major Fieldwork quest you complete rewards you with its own Destiny 2 tonic upgrade, helping you gather reagents more e🍌asily to brew more tonics and improve your brewing efficiency. In the long run, that’ll also help you get all sorts of Revenant weapons and armor as consuming tonics for timed buffs is one of the main ways you can extra loot drops.

Beca🎉use each Revenant Act will have its own Fieldwork tab, it’s likely that five new Tonic Upgrades will be added in each one. Here are all the upgrades available righ🦂t now and which Major Fieldwork quests to complete:

Act 1 Tonic Upgrades in Destiny 2

• Blood Drive: Collecting Reclaimed Vitality has a chance to also give you Uncommon reagents. Complete Major Fieldwork I: Europa to unlock.
• Extraordinary Tonics: Increased chance to discover recipes for higher-tier tonics when brewing in Eido’s lab. Complete Major Fieldwork II: Nessus to unlock.
• Performance Bonus: Completing bonus objectives in Onslaught Salvation provides extra reagents and Eido reputation. Complete Major Fieldwork III: Earth to unlock.
• Bounty Harvester: Handing in completed daily bounties has a chance to award reagents with a low chance of providing rarer reagents. Complete Major Fieldwork IV: Moon to unlock.
• Revenant Recycler: Dismantling Revenant weapons rewards reagents. Complete Major Fieldwork V: Neptune to unlock.

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How to get rid of the Destiny 2 Act 1 Fieldwork Tab message

If you’ve just brewed your first tonics and have spoken to Variks and then Eido, you’re probably stuck with a tutorial message at the bottom of your screen telling you to “navigate to the Act 1 Fieldwork Tab”. You can find this tab clearly on Eido’s vendor screen – it’s the dark green rectangle with a white potion icon under the “Fieldwork Items” header – and while clicking it takes you to the expanded Fieldwork menu for Act 1, it doesn’t clear the message or a💃dvance the t🐓utorial.

This is an issue that Bungie is aware of, so hopefully a fix arrives soon, though you can clear the annoying message by traveling to another destination. Conveniently, you’ll need to do as part of your first Fieldwork assignment anyway, and I’ve explaꦬined the whole Fieldwork system belo♛w.

Destiny 2 Fieldwork explained

Fieldwork in Destiny 2 is a new activity system specifically for Revenant which gets you reagents for brewing tonics and unlocks 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Destiny 2 tonic upgrades. Together, these will make brewing tonics for loot easier an🍷d will help you unlock ev🦄en more Fieldwork too. These little quests are split into Minor Fieldwork, Major Fieldwork, and Key Fieldwork categories:

• Minor Fieldwork: 10 short quests that send you to a particular location to collect a hidden item and complete some other simple objective, such as killing enemies. Once completed, head back to Eido’s tonic lab in the Last City, place your findings on the shelf, then collect your reward – a Small Tonic Reagent Sack – from the Fieldwork tab. You can complete Minor Fieldwork quests in any order, but you must discover more and more tonic recipes to begin each subsequent quest.
  • For example, you can choose any two Minor Fieldwork quests during the “Revenant Act 1: Eliksni Rescue” quest, but after that you must have discovered nine tonic recipes to unlock your third Minor Fieldwork quest, 12 recipes to pick your fourth, and so on, until you’ve completed all 10.
• Major Fieldwork: Five very short challenges that involve you heading to a location to find a little alchemy bench where you can test an experimental tonic. Doing so sends you into an arena where you must kill all enemies within the time limit. Once you’ve done that, head back to Eido and claim your Tonic Upgrade, Medium Tonic Reagent Sack, and lore page from the relevant Fieldwork tab. You can unlock one Major Fieldwork quest after completing any two Minor Fieldwork quests and you can complete them in any order.
• Key Fieldwork: One important quest to cap off your tonic research that rewards you with a Large Tonic Reagent Sack and a lore page. This quest unlocks once you’ve completed all five Major Fieldwork quests for the relevant Act. I’m yet to complete this myself, so I’m not sure what it entails, but the description says it “may unlock new possibilities in the Tonic Laboratory”.

Fieldwork quests are finite and can’t be repeated, so once you’ve done them all, that’s it. But it seems like each of the three Acts in Revenant will have their own Fieldwork ta𒅌bs, so there will be lots more to complete as the Episode continues.

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His mom, you'll surely be delighted to lꦫearn, "was so happy to hear t🤡hat I completed this," Snazzzy tells me. 

You may know Snazzzy as the first Destiny 2 player to solo raid bosses like Root of Nightmares' Nezarec or encounters like the Vault of Glass Gatekeepers, once thought to be undoable alone. The unshakable Guardian has been low-manning and outright soloಌing six-player encounters for ages, and this Deep Stone Crypt solo flawless could be his crowning achievement. 

"So many things in [DSC final boss fight] Taniks to deal with," he tells GamesRadar+. "Hands down the hardest solo encounter in this game, with solo flawless DSC being the hardest Destiny♕ solo challenge to EVER be done in all of Destiny history including Destiny 1🍃." 

Snazzzy said in his YouTube description that this grind took roughly 400 hours altogether – 290 hours for initial clears on all the encounters, and then another 110 hours going for the solo flawless. What makes DSC especially difficult? Apart from the obvious limitations of doing six-player encounters and bosses by yourself, Snazzzy says Taniks was a tremendous hurdle for a few reasons, and like maꦆny🌸 solo clears, this "god run" was possible partly due to luck. 

Taniks is the final encounter of DSC, which sucks extra hard because if you're going to lose a flawless run, you'd rather do it early rather than right at the gates of glory. "Taniks has so many annoying things that can go wrong and mess you up," Snazzzy says. "[Eager Edge sword] tracking can be really frustrating at the wrong times. The dunk canceling was hard for me to pull off as well (I actually mess up MULTIPLE times in my completion, even had to RNG a dunk spot by just dunking it si🙈nce I had no time left to waste)."

"The biggest 'oh shit' moment in this completion was when I had realized Taniks was moving to the orange side of the arena on the very last phase of the encounter," Snazzzy recalls. "Taniks going orange is the easiest spot to block him with [Verglas Curve] and also is the easiest dunk spot you can get. When I noticed Taniks was moving orange, I went from, 'Oh this is an INSANE run but will probably end soon' to, 💜'Wait a second this is actually a real moment where this could go down.'"

What keeps Snazzzy going after all this time? "Definitely my grind-set to be the best at what I do," he says. "I genuinely have a love for it so I r💮eally enjoy doing the 'impossible' as well as my Twitch chat being super kind and supportive of me even when I fail, [then of course] my mom keeps me going. And while I do these challenges I think about how proud my dad would be if he could sꦚee this stuff! I know he's looking down proud!" 

"My mom is super supportive of me and my goals and listens to everything I explain to her and actually takes it in," he adds. "The morning of t𝐆he completion I was actually talking with her about how hard it was and how I'm not gonna give up but it's really hard ไto deal with the runs and she told me to keep on going. She loves when I achieve my goals and supports them fully!!!"

Snazzzy's latest triumph over on Reddit, in a thread filled with players who are as gobsmacked as I was earlier today. I asked Snazzzy if he'd seen th🍬e reaction. 

"I actually did see DMG's response on Reddit," he says. "That actually𝓀 was so cool 🧸to see that DMG came across the completion. I love seeing the reaction to Bungie folks checking out my stuff. It truly is amazing and I'm glad to show them what I can do in the game they work on!" 

Bungie says Destiny 2's new "medium-sized expansions" are about as big as Rise of Iron from the original Destiny, and the first is a Metroidvania inside the MMO. 

In its latest blog post – which is mostly about the new Artifact, Exotic and weapon tuning, and some promising new weapons mods – the impending release of a new aggressive-type Stasis glaive called Rake Angle. It will drop as a Nightfall reward, which means two things. One, we can get an adept version of it. Two, I'm going to grind myself down to a fine powder the second we get a double loot week with Rake Angle as the featur▨ed weapon. We don't know the perk pool or stats on this thing, but its very existence will enable so many✃ fresh builds. 

Glaives were added to Destiny 2 in the Witch Queen expansion back in February 2022, and despite low usage rates among the MMO's community, they quickly became a favorite of mine. Glaives were reliably glued to my loadout for so long that I developed a bit of a reputation among my clanmates for hitting men with long sharpened sticks, and that's stuck with me even as m💃y glaive devotion has dropped off in recent seasons. 

A big part of the reason I've moved away from the weapon type is loadout friction. Glaives always suck up my energy weapon slot, and with the amount of elemental synergy you can pack into energy primary weapons nowadays, including some of the better Exotics and especially after The Final Shape and the addition of Prismatic, that's a big deal. Glaives are decent and their shields are still absurd, but they have steep💯 competition for that slot.  

The impending release of our first-ever kinetic glaive will solve this problem, 🌊which means glaives are back on the menu in a big way. And yes, I know we already had the Stasis glaive Winterbite, but it's a heavy weapon and an Exotic, and also not that good, which brings its own suite ꦗof problems.

There's more good news for my 11 fellow glaive enjoyers, too. Bungie is immediately fixing an issue with glaive magazine sizes displaying incorrectly – that's not the good news, please come back – and it's preparing "significan🌳t updates to glaives" that are scheduled for Episode 3: Heresy "and beyond." There's no telling what these changes might look like, but they're basically guaranteed to be vertical buffs (better numbers) and/or horizontal additions (new perks, archetypes, attacks, 🍸and so on), and that sounds good to me.  

Bungie says Destiny 2's new "medium-sized expansions" are about as big as Rise of Iron from the original Destiny, and the first is a Metroidvania inside the MMO.

Stevens discussed Destiny 2's future in earlier today, October 1. "The way we're kind of looking at the size of these is similar to Rise of Iron from Destiny 1, but this is happening twice a year," Stevens said. "The reason we're talking about this, the rough shape of the box here that we're filling, is that each expansion is going to have its own unique version of ♏a campaign and post-game experience that you can dive really deep into beyond the initial playthrough, similar to how the Dreaming City or the Pale Heart from Beyond Light have worked. Beyond those initial campaign experiences, there's further things to explore and secrets to uncover." 

The firs🎃t expansion of this new model, Codename: Apollo, will set up "our next saga," Stevens reiterates. It also repr🅰esents a big swing from Bungie on the shape of Destiny 2 content. 

"You're going to journey to a Metroidvania-inspired destination," Stevens says, building on a previous tease from game director Tyson Green regarding experiments with Metroidvania, survival, roguelike, and other gaming DNA. "That💞's our guiding🐬 light for how we're creating this new location." 

What does Bungie mean by a Destiny 2 Metroidvania? This all-new destination "is going to feature a nonlinear campaign that puts you in the driver&apos👍;s seat of exploring its world and its story, so this is very different from the past where you're following a very linear mission structure," as Stevens puts it.  

Narrative director Alison Luhrs reiterated the example of letting players explore paths A, B, C, or D in whatever order they choose, and tailoring the narrative to match this flow, with "between 25 and 30 different threads of stories that you can discover." On today's stream, she also dug more into the branching, search-action flow that defines the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best Metroidvania games. "Maybe you want to go check out B because that&apos🦩;s going to be where you get the ability that allows you to access region A so you can talk to that character you really like," she says. 

Just as ✤Bungie's hoping to release new content more quickly under this release model, Luhrs says the new expansions will "move the plot along at a much quicker pace than we used to." This newfound agility also lets Bungie stop worrying about "padding the size" of an expansion with "a bunch of extra sౠtuff to kind of fill in the space." Instead, "we're going to tell a more focused story and with pacing that keeps up with what fans want," she adds. 

Luhrs weighed in on the delivery of Destiny 2'sꦉ storytelling as well, namely the conga line of NPCs peppered around the solar system. "It drives us bonkers too," she concedes. "We believe that everything should be questioned, right? We should be questioning that structure, we should be reinvestigating it. Starting with [Act 2: Revenant], and especially when we get to Apollo, we're going to be deliberately shaking it up." 

This section of the stream concluded with two new snippets o𒉰f concept art for Apollo (above). Stevens echoed the Metroidvania theme: "Within this new destination in Apollo, you're going to be discovering powerful abilities 💦in order to uncover secrets in this location and in order to carve a path to the great mystery at the heart of the planet." 

Former Bungie lawyer says Sony "inflicting some discipline" may have forced the Destiny 2 studio to "get their heads out of their asses" as the MMO commits to a different kind of roadmap 

Back in February 2023, I asked design lead Kevin Yanes about pre-Lightfall feedback on Titan Supers being kind of similar. At the time, he argued that the Strand Super Berserker, still a key part of one of the best subclasses in the game, is really its own thing (I would generally agree) and commented on the Titan fantasy. "Titan mains, we love you," Yanes said. "We do. But remember that we try to reinforce your core fantasy. And at some point, your guy's hold🤡ing the fist on the cover of the game." 

This sentiment became a bit of a sticking point in the following months, and I struggle to read Bungie's newly published "Titan buff train" as anything other than a direct response to long-smoldering complaints that the Titan class is too simple, melee and close-range builds are often impractical in Destiny 2's sandbox, and punching stufܫf while wearing oven mitts woven from different colors of Space Dust can get old. 

"Titans are the bulwarks of their fireteam," Bungie asserts this week. "They live and die on the frontline of batt𝐆le, barking out orders while never backing down from an encounter. Titans wield defensive staples like Barricade and Stasis Crystals with practiced ease. They specialize in doling out lifesaving buffs like Void Overshield and Woven Mail to their grateful fireteams. And they throw a mean right hook, to boot. But Titans deserve a class identity that’s more than the sum of its fists." 

So, what are Titans getting? Hilariously, one buff is a blanket damage ꧟increase to their unpowered meleeꦉ attack – 5% in PvP and 20% in PvE, with increased stun on top. But that's a small part of the many and varied changes coming to Titans in Episode 2: Revenant. 

"Now, we don’t want to take away from or replace what the Titan already has," Bungie explains. "Instead, we want to find nondestructive ways to ad🔯d depth to the Titan’s kit. These kinds of shifts take time, but we’re starting down that road in Revenant." 

The Titan class ability barricade, for example, will now draw the aggro of enemies while someone is standing behind the barricade. They won't just shoot in your direction; they'll shoot directly at the barrier, making it easier for you to shoot out from behind cover. Titan's Unbreakable and Sentinel shields will also taunt, letting you move while drawing aggro, and Bungie hopes to add this to Ward of Dawn in the future if൲ the change plays well. This isn't a hard leash on all enemies, but it sounds like a pretty substantial change, and a rare way that Destiny 2 directly incorporates the classic MMO tank archetype. 

Barricades are also going to take 50% less damage from all non-boss combatants, which is definitely a substantial chan🤡ge. What's more, players behind a barricade will take 60% less splash damage (it was previously a 20% reduction), which may answer our prayers for a solution to Destiny 2's famously over-tuned Void splash damag📖e. 

Here are some other highlights coming to the Tꦫitan playbook:

• Blocking damage with the Unbreakable shield will regen grenade energy
• You can hold Unbreakable longer, but you move slower when the shield is hit
• Consecration will now shatter Stasis crystals 
• Diamond Lances will also shatter Stasis crystals when thrown or slammed, and slamming a lance will give you and nearby allies two stacks of Frost Armor damage reduction 
• Bungie is reverting a nerf to Knockout – melee kills now cancel health and shield stun, "allowing you to immediately start regenerating"
• Stasis melee Shiver Strike attaches a Stasis explosive on hits which freezes enemies and slows in PvP, refunds 80% of melee energy if you whiff, and regenerates energy faster
• Seemingly for all classes, Void overshields will have more damage resistance – increased from 50% to 70%
• For all classes, the Prismatic Facet of Command and Void Echo of Domineering cooldowns have been reduced to 4 seconds

Titans, like Warlocks and Hunters, are due for some Super buffs as well. Twilight Arsenal pickup axes will deal more damage, Thundercrash is getting a 33% bump, and Fist of Havok is one of many Supers getting a damage reduction boost. For Warlocks, Nova Warp is probably the biggest ♔winner with a 20% PvE damage boost, while Hunters are getting the same bonus for Spectral Blades (w💖hich, frankly, probably needs more than 20%). 

Some🍬 of the ability tweaks have potential, too🅷. Warlock's Lightning Surge will now grant Amplified and Hunter's Threaded Specter detonation will deal 33% more damage in PvE. But Hunter is also due for some nerfs, with Combination Blow health regen, "a little too hot" in Bungie's eyes, being reduced. 

This Destiny 2 fix is an all-timer: a gun designed to kill Barrier Champions was dealing 40% less damage to barriers and "not correctly" getting a 67% damage bonus.

"To be clear: I'm not talking about 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:the layoffs," he says (thanks, ). "I'm talking about forcing them to get their heads out of their asses and focus on things like: implementing a method of new player acquisitionܫ; not just doing fan service for the fans in the Bungie C-suite; and running the game like a business. Good. I still ꧒have friends in that environment and I'd like them to keep jobs."

McGowan continues by saying operating like a studio and not an independent company is how he thinks Bungie should embrace life after 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Sony's acquisition. Alas, "there were a lot of egos for whom it was im⛄portant to pretend that 'nothing would change,&✅apos;" and the rest is history.

"I remember sitting there during the deal saying 'do you think Sony describes this as them getting to pay $3.6 billion for the right to have no input into what Bungie does?'" he continues. "That was exওactly what a lot of people thought. 🍬I guess they've been given cause to understand that that’s not how things work. Good."

Last week, Bungie that The Final Shape would essentially end the MMO's content model of annual expansions and 'Episodes.' Now, the MMO will get two "medium-sized" expansions and four free updates a year. All of this will kick off good and proper next year, at which point we'll get a better of idea of what this all looks like. Though, as🐬 for the why, Bungie admits Destiny 2 has "become too rigid" – expansions are starting to feel "too formulaic"🌼 and offer "little replay value."

"We've loved creating annual Expansꦕions and are especially proud of The Final Shape," game director Tyson Green said. "But the truth is that they dominate almost all our development effort. We need to free ourselves up to explore and innovate with how we deliver Destiny 2 content so we can invest in areas of the game that will feel more impactful to players."

Destiny 2 is experimenting with Metroidvania and roguelike DNA as Bungie admits "Destiny is too complex" and "you practically need a PhD to decide what to play."

Eriana's Vow, it seems, had a "-40% scalar" specifically "for dealing damage against Barrier Champion shields." Note that Bungie did not specify an unintended -40% scalar. Not only that, Bungie has also "fixed an issue where Eriana's Vow was not correctly dealing 67% increased damage to Barrier Champions." So Bungie took off Eriana's shield-piercing training weights and bumped 💛up its damage to the Champions themselves♋. Great! 

Also: how and why and what in the blue hell? 

Reader, let's be clear on something. Eriana's Vow exists to kill Barrier Champions. It is Screw Barriers: The Gun. From the day it could walk, it has been training to break Champion shields. Eriana's Vow wa♒kes up at 6am every day, walks past a "Down With Barrier Champions" poster on its way to the bathroom, takes off its "Kill Barrier Champions" pajamas to take a shower, gets out, brushes its teeth, brushes its hair, eats a bowl of Barrier Champion hopes and dreams with a splash of Vex milk, puts on its hat, and just before it walks out the door it stops to look in the mirror and say to itself: "You're gonna kill some Barrier Champions today."

And Bungie had a -40% scalar on its ability to damage Barrier Champion shields. For who knows how long! I'm sure there was, at some point in time, a valid balance or technical argument for muzzling Eriana's Vow. I'm sure other scalars like this exist as a lightweight way to tweak guns. But this gun hasn't been great in years, and plenty 🥂of other Barrier killers have utterly lapped it. For this little detail to come out now alongside the news that its new damage buff was "not correctly" applied feels a bit like learning that your 10-2 pick in the horse race only placed third because somebody tied anvils to it𝓀s hooves. 

Destiny 2 is experimenting with Metroidvania and roguelike DNA as Bungie admits "Destiny is too complex" and "you practically need a PhD to decide what to play."

"Destiny is too com🔯plex," says game director Tyson Green in . "With literally hundreds of activities, you practically need a PhD to decide what to play and how to get rewards you're looಞking for."

To address this, Bungie's planning an overhaul for Destiny 2's activity UI "to mak𝔍e it easier for everyone to find and launch into great activities." We get a work-in-progress preview of this new UI, dubbed the Portal, in a separate post. The Portal seeks to group activities through quick-access categories ranging from solo (1-3 players) to fireteam (3 players) to flashpoint (6 players). 

"The Portal screen will also ꦬhost consolidated and streamlined side objectives, like bounties or Seasonal Challenges," Bungie says. "That aspect of the r෴edesign is still a work in progress, but the primary goal is to greatly reduce the “chores” that need to be done before diving into an activity." 

Crucible gets its own Portal category but Gambit is notably absent from this list. Bungie says no older activities are going away, though "it is our intention to clean up and retire some older activity offerings that are well served by the Portal," but Gambit alone "will remain available from the Destination map but will not be rolled into the Portal Categories at the start of next ye꧃ar." Raids will also continue to live in the Destinations page due "the long clear times combined with the widꦅe variation in experiences," but Bungie's working to "get this content into the Portal offering in the future." 

The rewa♚rd model for those activities is also being reworked to better reward greater challenges, which leads to Green's next point: "Gear 📖and challenge should matter." This is, indeed, a fair stance for a game about gear and challenge to take. 

"In past Destiny Seasons, only a ♔narrow range of activities received updated rewards, leading to a narrow selection of activities worth playing," Bungie says. "These reward pools tended to not be very deep either, with most chases bottoming out with weapon perk rolls (or crafting recipes), and armor not mattering much at all. T🍃hese problems have resulted in shallow, unsatisfying grinds in a tiny subset of the activities actually available to play, with their best rewards being a matter of luck rather than skill or mastery." 

With that in mind, Legendaಌry weapons and armor are getting a new tier system that will "layer on properties like stat bonuseꦬs, enhanced perks, and other benefits." You'll earn high-tier gear from more challenging versions of PvE activities (PvP will have its own rules), which are due for a new system of their own: Challenge Customization. 

By stacking difficulty modifiers ranging from new enemy abilities, combat challenges, buildcrafting incentives, and Power level, you can increase the overall difficulty of an activ🍨ity and, by also playing skillfully, boost your "reward rating." 

"Reward rating is used to determine things like the quality tier of the weap⛦ons and armor that drop, or the quantity of useful consumables like Enhancement Prisms or Ascendant Shards," Bungie says in one of the increasingly worrying explainers for these supposedly less complex systems. "In this way, you can select a🦋ny Core Game activity, use your skill and build to take on more and more challenging versions of it, and earn higher and higher tier rewards." 

Better loot from harder challenges presented in a clearer way sounds good, but so much of this stuff is unfinished that it's harꦬd to get excited about right now. What does excite me right now is Green's comment on how Bungie wants to "challenge your idea of what a Destiny experience can be." Green is focusing on the new annual expansions here, but the direction feels relevant in the context of new and diverse activities leveraging overhauled systems.  

"We are actively prototyping non-linear campaigns, exploration experiences similar to the Dreaming City or Metroidvanias, and even more unusual formats like roguelikes or survival shooters," Green says. "Each expansion will present a new opportunity to try something different. Departing from one-shot campaigns doesn’t mean we are turning away from great story telling. Going forward, we want to return the mystery and wonder that was woven into the fabric of early Destiny, when the story felt ripe with possibilities a💧nd ♔an epic sense of exploration and discovery." 

Bungie's integration of roguelike RNG and drafting has led to some of Destiny 2's best and most-loved activities, like the iconic Coil, and Metroidvania progression is an excellent fit for the game's universe and environments (when not hamstrung by time gating). The idea of a survival game mode, perhaps doubling down on the waves and resources seen in Into the Light's Onslaught mode, raises an eyebrow too. I'm not over the moon about the secoꦬnd coming of Nightfall cards, but cranking up the difficulty and "reward rating" on a survival roguelike gauntlet? We might be onto something there. 

10 years later, Bungie is actually doing it: famously game-breaking Exotic sniper Ice Breaker is coming to Destiny 2 in the next dungeon.

In a , Bungie teased that "as you may have already guessed thanks to our key art, a certain Exotic sniper rifle, one considered a myth by many at this poi�🐼�nt, is resurfacing in the upcoming dungeon." To hammer it home, Bungie adds, "we hope this helped... break the ice."

We don't have any details about how, if at all, Ice Breaker will be reworked to fit into Destiny 2. However, since Destiny's encounter design has significantly changed over the years with more complex mechanics, it m🅷ay not be as powerful as we all r💧emember. 

Gjallarhorn, another famously powerful Destiny 1 Exotic, was reworked conside✨rably for its Destiny 2 debut, but still carved out a spot near the top of the meta. But Whisper of the Worm, a heavy sniper which would previously generate infinite ammo as long as you nailed your headshots, had its generation nerfed into the pavement, so Ice Breaker is in a tricky spot. 

In the original Destiny, Ice Breaker was notorious for helping countless teams clear their first Nightfalls, and even some raid encounters, by giving them an easy way to find an out-of-reach spot and take pot shots at a boss without any real risk or fear. It became the go-to gun for those with lower gear scores but high patience. Ice Breaker was the peop🌟le's weapon. Many fans thought we'd never see the day it returned given its balance hurdles, but 10 years and change later, it's finally happening.

If you're hopping back in ahead of the new content drop, check out our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Destiny 2 The Final Shape guide. 

The game is also quickly dropping the three-Act Episode model which has become the epilogue to The Final Shape. Beginning in 2025, a pa🌞id Destiny 2 expansion will arrive every six months. Each expansion will start a new season, with the season itself being "available to all players," and free "Major U💫pdates" coming every three months will refresh these seasons and introduce new content of their own. 

Destiny 2's next expansion, Codename: Apollo, is set for summer 2025, after the end of the ongoing Episodes and Acts already teed up. It will launch with a major update codenamed Arsenal, and then fall 2025 will see another major update codenamed Surge. Looking further ahead, e🐎xpansion Codename: Behemoth is set for winter 2025, with its own two major updates to follow. 

Game director Tyson Green reckons Destiny 2 has "become too rigid," with expansions starting to feel "too formulaic" and "over too quickly with little replay value." Likewise, "seasons and Episodes keep getting bigger but can still feel like you are just going through the motions." Green adds that "it’s time for Destiny to change and evolve," and that startsౠ with the new ﷽expansion model breaking some norms.

"We’ve loved creating annual Expansions and are especially proud of The Final Shape," Green writes. "But the truth is that they dominate almost all our development effort. We need to free ourselves up to explore and innovate with how we deliver Destiny 2 content so we can invest in areas of the game that will feel more impactful to players." This notably follows word that, despite critical acclaim, The Final Shape reportedly continued the trend of Destiny 2 expansions selling worse and worse year over year. 

These new "medium-sized" expansions will "depart from the one-shot campaign structure we’ve been using essentially unchanged since Shadowkeep." It sounds ♋like Bungie is kicking around some pretty out-there ideas, including "exploration experiences similar to the Dreaming City or Metroidvanias" and "more unusual formats like roguelikes or survival shooters." 

Narratively, Bungie is shooꦗting for "the mystery and wonder that was woven into the fabric of early Destiny, when the story felt ripe with pos🎉sibilities and an epic sense of exploration and discovery." The game's updated roadmap says expansions will add new locations as well as the expected stories, activities, and gear, and we'll be going to "places Destiny has never seen before." 

Our first glance at Codename: Apollo comes from narrative director Alison Lührs. Described as "a nonlinear character-driven adventure" ಞthat "ends with the narrative gasoline that will propel us into the next few years with a clear theme, goal, and a destination that won’t come at you as a straight line but will be well-worth the trip," Apollo promises a branching and layered experience. You can explore points A, B, C, or D in any order, Lührs explains, and revisit branches as you see fit, all with "no time gating, no waiting for the next drop." Here are the first apparent snippets of Apollo concept art: 

"This shift to nonlinear stories isn’t something we’re locking ourselves into, but it is the structure that fits Codename: Apollo best," Lührs adds. "The narrative structure of the releases that follow will be✃ quite different, a structure to suit that game’s experience, and we want to continue to innovate with each expansion acr♕oss both gameplay and narrative."  

"Think of it as a constellation of stories united by a single theme," Lührs adds, stressi🅰ng the difference compared to previous expansion timelines. "We will show you what that theme is later but suffice to say; we believe in it. Think of this multiyear arc as a web, not a line. Each release fits into the larger saga."

It's another massive model shift for a game and franchise that's already seen multiple sizable overhauls, but for total clarity, Bungie is indeed promising another "multi-year journey" here, directly answering 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查🉐询:questions and𝔉 concerns about what comes next after the end of the Light and Darkness saga. "This next saga is also based a🔴round a core theme, much like Light and Darkness did," Lührs affirmౠs. 

Bungie owner Sony responds to the Destiny 2 studio's massive layoffs in the most corporate owner way possible: "We have to enhance the efficiency of the business."

The backdrop to this is a measurable – albeit not entirely unexpected or atypical – in Destiny 2's player count, with the new Episode model seemingly failing to keep some players on the hook long-term, not to mention unrest . There have also been rumors of a dramatic shift in business model for Destiny 2, with major expansions potentially getting the axe and 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:with new owner Sony reportedly poised to plunge its hands deeper into Bungie's operations. 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Inexplicable technical issues – my team ran into all-new rai🌺d bugs just last night – haven't helped either. 

Many had hoped that th🎃e upcoming 10th anniversary of the Destiny series, which launched way back on September 9, 2014, would serve up an event capable of giving Destiny 2 a shot in the arm. In it only has plans for "fun and light" 10-year fanfare. 

"We’ll have a▨ small in-game celebration for you all next week, along with some beautiful art the team has made throughout the years," the post re🎃ads. "There will be some Legendary armor freebies, a fun Title to earn, some Bungie Rewards, and more. Check back next Monday at 8am PT for our blog coverage." 

With this being a major milestone, the sort where virtually all other MMOs would roll out the red carpet with weeks of events and rewards, the cynic in me can't help but read this as a sign that post-layoff Bungie may not have the resources to spare for major celebrations. There is, however, unconditionally good news this week: Bungie is ready to properly talk about the future of Destiny 2, namely Codename: Frontiers, the next leg of the journey 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:which was teased earlier this year. 

On September 9, Bungie will✅ release "a short Dev Insight blog article discussing our goals for the future of Destiny. Destiny 2 Game Director Tyson Green and Destiny 2 Narrative Director Alison Lührs will be guiding the conversation. Where have we been, where are we now, and where do we want to go? Most importantly... how are we going to get there? 

"We want to be clear about our commitment to ongoing communication with you. This marks the beginning of regular updates from our development team about what's next for Destiny 2, including details about its syste💜ms and future plans. While the updates may be a bit rough around the edges as they are early in the development process, we're excited about sharing our goals and progress with you."

This first bite sounds unsurprisingly nonspecific, but as the Destiny 2 community struggles with the absence of the 'what comes next' anticipation that buoyed the game during previous dips, it'll be good to get any sense of what's on the horizon. "This will be the start of a conversation," Bungie 🌄says. "Our main goal is to provide bite-sized, direct to the point articles over the next few months rather than mega-blogs where it’s too easy to get mired in the details." 

Not for the first, second, or third time, Bungie reiterates that "the Light and Dark saga may have ended, but the future of Destiny is still unfolding before us." This section of the blog post ends with a broader tease that "this universe is big, bright, and full of wonder. We’re looking forward to exploring it and hope to see you join us starside as we approach new frontiers." On this, at least, I am not at all cynical; it smacks of what Destiny 2 game director Robbie Stevens told Edge magazine about the future of the game, and it does sound exciting. 

"A lot of that thinking about year 11, and how we start really getting into the next journey here after these Episodes, we're going to be leaning on that thinking as well," Stevens said. "Because we've been doing🍸 this linear thing for a while now, and we want to get back to expanding our worlds and world-building, expanding the universe of Destiny in general." 

Phil Spencer says he's made some of the "worst" decisions when it comes to Xbox exclusives, like not signing Destiny or Guitar Hero.

Speaking at a PAX West , Spencer reveals that Xbox considered signing Bungie's beloved sci-fi shooter but ultimately chose not to: "Getting the pitch 🌸for Destiny on 'do we want to sign this' - we ended up not signing Destꦿiny. It obviously went with Activision, and to see what it grew into, like from a business kind of Xbox standpoint, I can look at it … and it's just a really interesting journey in terms of what [Bungie] built."

After briefly comparing Destiny to 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Halo, fellow Bungie banger and arguably one of the most successful Xbox exclusives ever, Spencer explains that the online shooter initially "didn't really click" with him as he's not a "big PvP player." His mind gradually changed as the game&a𝐆pos;s second expansion dropped, though: "It turns out that's not what it was at all like, and when [House of] Wolves came out, it definitely landed me."

Despite his eventual love for Destiny, Spencer doesn't dwell on the decision to not sign the game - after all, it's one of many: "I&apo𝓀s;ve passed on some of the worst, like made some of the worst game choice decisions." Another such game that got away was Guitar Hero, a title that Spencer says he felt at first wasn't "going to work" for Xbox. The concept was too surreal, from the toy-esque instrument plugged diꦡrectly into a console to the gameplay itself.

"[Alex Rigopulos] pitches a game where they're actually ✨going𒆙 to make plastic guitars and they're going to plug into consoles and then they're going to sell tracks … "I'm like, 'really, do we really think that's going to work?'" The strange formula did indeed end up working. "A few people played Guitar Hero," Spencer jokes. "I hear that was turned into a pretty good game." He still doesn't regret not signing, though.

"I'm not a regrets type person. Maybe that's a fault of mine, but I passed on so many games." Instead of looking back with frustration, 💝Spencer tries to "look forward and be positive about the things we are doing." With smash-hit games like Destiny, that means celebrating studios such as Bungie and their monumental work: "I just like to celebrate what the team has done. I mean, it's incredible."

Phil Spencer never said Indiana Jones wouldn't come to PS5, he said it wouldn't be 1 of the first 4 Xbox exclusives to do so, like Grounded and Hi-Fi Rush

If you logged onto Destiny 2 recently and found that you'd been renamed to 'Guardian,' then you're not alone. While any name that violates the game's code of conduct – for example, by using offensive language or personal information like first and last names – can be changed by Bungie, there've been a lot of recent reports of players having their usernames taken from them when there&apo✃s;s seemingly nothing wrong with them in the first place. Bungie hasn't revealed exactly how many people have been affected, other than the fact that it's apparently a lot.

"We are tracking an issue where a high number of account names have been changed by our Bungie name moderation tool," a share⭕d on the Destiny 2 Team Twitter account today reads. "We are actively invest💖igating and expect to have more information tomorrow, including details on an additional name change token for all players."

While it's a pro🌱mising development, not everyone is happy. Some players who already had name change tokens have apparently attempted changing their generic 'Guardian' names back to their old identities and have reportedly been unsuccessful. 

"Apprecಌiate the fast communication on the issue, I have name change tokens still but my original name appears blacklisted now so I had to change my name to something else," one Twitter user . "I tried to change it back and it wouldn't work even though the site 🍎would say settings have changed. Just let me change it back to the name I've been using in Destiny since D1," another. 

With Bungie still "actively investigating" the issue, the situa🔴tion could change again yet – the developers have already promised "more information" on the matter, too. Here's hoping that it'll soon become clearer for everyone affected.

Bungie owner Sony responds to the Destiny 2 studio's massive layoffs in the most corporate owner way possible: "We have to enhance the efficiency of the business."

How to farm Fortunate Star rolls in Destiny 2

Fortunate Star is the latest Solstice event weapon, so to farm rolls for it, you need to complete the Bonfire Bash activity. An entire run can easily be completed in under 10 minutes and you'll receive multiple Solstice weapons at the end. That means it's likely you'll get at least one Fortunate Star roll, but you could also get rolls for the other Solstice weapons, such as the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Destiny 2 Compass Rose shotgun and 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Something New Hand Cannon. Solstice finishes with the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Destiny 2 weekly reset on August 27,𝕴ღ and then you won't be able to get Fortunate Star until next year.

Fortunate Star PVE god rolls in Destiny 2

As a Void-damage bow, Fortunate Star gets access to some great Void perks. It🌼 means the god roll I recommend for𓆉 it is a bit niche, but there are several alteratives for a more generalist PVE bow build. Here's the god roll for Fortunate Star I reckon you should look for:

• Bowstring: Elastic String
• Arrow: Compact Arrow Shaft or Fiberglass Arrow Shaft
• Perk 1: Repulsor Brace
• Perk 2: Destabilizing Rounds
• Origin: Choose Veist Stinger
• Masterwork: Draw Time
• Mod: Choose Targeting Adjuster or Freehand Grip

As mentioned, the Void perk combination of Repulsor Brace and Destabilizing rounds is difficult to ignore – killing a chaff enemy with a single arrow will cause a Void explosion, damaging and hopefully killing more enemies, and this will all contribute towards getting you a Void Overꩲshield from Repulsor Brace. It's worth noting you don't have to use a Void Subclass for this combination to work, but it ce♓rtainly helps as Void Fragments can add extra benefits.

However, consider looking for Successful Warm-Up and Kill Clip (or even Disruption Break if you've got a good primary ammo 🍬special weapon in your loadout) for a potent, fast-firing bow that can deal with all sorts of enemies if you don't want a Void-focused bow.

Compass Rose PVP god roll in Destiny 2

As for the Crucible, Fortunate Star has many top PVP perks available, particularly if you're able to make the most of the short draw time. Here's a simple god roll I recommend chasing, butܫ there are other suitable options too:

• Bowstring: Elastic String
• Arrow: Fiberglass Arrow Shaft
• Perk 1: Archer's Tempo
• Perk 2: Opening Shot
• Origin: Choose Veist Stinger
• Masterwork: Target Acquisition
• Mod: Choose Targeting Adjuster or Freehand Grip

Playing to the Lightweight Frame's strengths, this roll aims to speed up the bow's draw as much as possible, ensuring you can quickly loose two precise arrows to secure rapid kills. Archer's Tempo will help a lot with that if you're able to get headshots, and Opening Shot will generally help with landing that first arrow, though the damage bonus from Kill Clip can also nice.

Alternatively, if you're after a more advanced bow god roll that maintains agility by sacrificing some accuracy, consider looking for rolls with Hip-Fire Grip and Archer's Gambit – a lethal combo in the right hands.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

How to farm Compass Rose rolls in Destiny 2

As a Solstice event weapon, you can get random rolls for Compass Rose by completing runs of the Bonfire Bash activity. Each one should take you less than 10 minutes to complete, and you get multiple Solstice weapons as a final reward, which could mean you get a couple of Compass Rose rolls. You'll also be able to get rolls for the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Destiny 2 Fortunate Star bow too, though time is limited as Solstice ends with the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Destiny 2 weekly reset on August 27.

Compass Rose PVE god roll in Destiny 2

This is a Precision Frame shotgun, which basically means it's one of the most shotgun-y shotguns out there – quite slow-firing but punchy and with good range. That makes Compass Rose good for ripไping large chunks out of hef🔥tier enemies, especially with this god roll:

• Barrel: Smallbore
• Magazine: Assault Mag
• Perk 1: Threat Detector
• Perk 2: One-Two Punch
• Origin: Choose Dream Work
• Masterwork: Range
• Mod: Choose Backup Mag

You've got two main options for god rolls with Compass Rose, though Assault Mag and Threat Detector are key perks that really help the shotgun when you're facing down enemies at close range – Assault Mag ups the fire rate, increasing your potential damage-per-second, while Threat Detector improves handling, reload, and stability by a considerable amount when active. Finally, look for One-Two Punch to focus on pure damage to bigger targets, though Incandescent can fit into Solar builds but a primary weapon with Incandescent w✤ill usually be bette🐽r.

Compass Rose PVP god roll in Destiny 2

As for the Crucible, Compass Rose has a nice selection of perks that work pretty well against other Guardians, but there is a standout god roll that you should pursue that'll paid nicely with the PVP god roll for the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Destiny 2 Something New Hand Cannon: 

• Barrel: Rifled Barrel
• Magazine: Assault Mag or Accurized Rounds
• Perk 1: Slideshot
• Perk 2: Opening Shot
• Origin: Choose Nadir Focus
• Masterwork: Range
• Mod: Choose Freehand Grip

Slideshot and Opening Shot are essential for aggressive shotgun plays in the Crucible, so accept no substitu⛎te for your Compass Rose. It's a solid enough combination, and Compass Rose has some solid stats off the bat, but certain perks can really bolster its range which will help a lot against other Guardians. Notably, Rifled Barrel, Nadir Focus, and a Range Masterwork will help a lot, but you can opt for Accurized Rounds to boost range to pretty much as high as it goes or choose Assault Mag for faster follow-up shots if you don't secure a one-hit kill.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Bungie CEO Pete Parsons announced in a blog post last week that 220 of the studio's staff were being laid off, and that an extra 155 roles are being integrated into Sony Interactive Entertainment "over the next few quarters." Development of an upcoming new science-fantasy action game is also going to shift to a new studio created within PlayStation Studios. All in all, it's an enormous shakeup for the developer with hundreds affected, but this latest response from the studio's own💖er, Sony, is very corporate. 

The topic was raised dur𒁏ing Sony Group Corporation's Q1 FY2024 consolidated financial results briefing, which took place earlier today. Sony Group's president, chief financial officer and chief operating officer, Hiroki Totoki, who's also the chairman of Bungie owner Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE), : "For this restructuring the purpose is cost, the structure, and portfolio optimization. Those are the purposes. And simultaneously, we have to enhance the efficiency of the business."

Totoki mentions the transfer of some development to PlayStation Studios, saying that "there will be some reallocation of the reꦛsources." He continues: "So in any case, the organizati♉on of the structure will be changed, and so we'd like to optimize our overall studio structure."

Based on the reactions of some of the Destiny devs affected by the layoffs last week, it sounds like some were unaware of the changes until they were publicly announced, with sound designer Tzvi Sherm♛an saying: "This is how I’ve found out I'm laid off." The layoffs came after what's no doubt been a successful launch for Destiny 2: The Final Shape, which hasജ received very positive reviews from fans and critics alike. 

As catastrophic layoffs rattle the games industry, FPS legend John Romero says "I've never seen anything like we're seeing now."

Perhaps the most notable of these comments come from Dylan 'dmg04' Gafner, the 𒉰澳洲幸♏运5开奖号码历史查询:community manager who left Bungie back in 2022 only to be rehired as th🔴e global community lead for Destiny 2. "Inexcusable," Gafner writes on . "Industry leading 🦩talent being lost, yet again. Accountability falling upon the workers who have pushed the needle to deliver for our community time and time again."

Several Bungie developers have revealed on social media that they've been affected 🌺by these layoffs, and it seems at least some of them weren't aware of what was about to happen until the public post went live.

Some former Bungie devs have been very outspoken in pointing the blame squarely at Parsons. Griffin Bennett, a former memb🥀er of the Destiny 2 sales and marketing team, "C-Suite taking accountability for any of this or still just 'withholding bonuses' and it'll be 'settled in-house?' Poor leadership has crushed one of the greatest developers of all time. Retire, Pete." Liana Ruppert, another former member of that team, , "Step down, Pete."

The news comes in the wake of the launch of 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Destiny 2: The Final Shape, one of the most acclaimed expansions in the MMO-FPS&♑apos;s history. It also comes after another round of mass layoffs ✅in 2023. While the number of developers affected in the last round of layoffs wasn't publicly announced, sources estimated around 100 people were let go.

"I’m okay, but I’m angry and deeply fucking depressed about this," Collin MacGregor, associate world designer on Marathon, today's layoffs.🌳 "Please p🌌ut your energy and goodwill towards supporting those impacted because they’re some of the most talented people in the industry."

As catastrophic layoffs rattle the games industry, FPS legend John Romero says "I've never seen anything like we're seeing now."

Warden's Law PVE god rolls in Destiny 2

Warden's Law is a rare Heavy Burst archetype Hand Cannon, which means it fires two powerful shots in succession with each trigger pull. As I've said, it's not very easy as one of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Destiny 2 Nightfall weapons and the Adept version, which can use 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Destiny 2 Adept Mods, is locked behind the brutal𒉰ly tough Grandmaster d⛄ifficulty. However you get your Warden's Law, these are the god roll perks you'll want to keep an eye out for:

• Barrel: Smallbore
• Magazine: Tactical Mag
• Perk 1: Demolitionist
• Perk 2: Adrenaline Junkie
• Origin: Choose Vanguard's Vindication
• Masterwork: Stability
• Mod: Choose Backup Mag, Adept Mag, or Adept Reload

Demolitionist and Adrenaline Junkie are a match made in heaven for Warden's Law and it's definitely the best perk combination for PVE, helping you spam grenades and amp up the damage of Warden's Law by a third! Enlightened Action or Perpetual Motion are perhaps the only other worthy Demolitionist replac🌜ements, but neither can beat the gun-and-grenade synergy. Similarly, Rampage is a close second place to Adrenaline Junkie for me when it comes to the Perk 2 slot. It offers the same damage buff, but it lacks the grenade synergy.

Warden's Law PVP god rolls in Destiny 2

The Heavy Burst 🅠Hand Cannon archetype might not be to everyone's taste, but it's pretty punchy and can be great in the right hands. Luckily, Warden's Law can roll with a few perks that are perfectly suited to the Crucible too, so this roll will help you take down fellow Guardians, but you should decide whether you want to pursue range or stability – Adept Mods will really help with boosting one of these stats too. Here's what♛ I recommend for PVP:

• Barrel: Smallbore
• Magazine: Flared Magwell
• Perk 1: To The Pain
• Perk 2: Kill Clip or Zen Moment
• Origin: Choose Vanguard's Vindication
• Masterwork: Range or Stability
• Mod: Choose Backup Mag, Adept Range, or Adept Stability

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Perfect Paradox god roll in Destiny 2

With a large magazine and the ability to spew shots, Perfect Paradox 𓆏is a solid PVE shotgun and comes with some great perks that work well together. That means there are actually a few options for god rolls, depending on how you want to use the weapon, but this is the best roll I recommend trying to get:

• Barrel: Smallbore
• Magazine: Light Mag
• Perk 1: Pugilist
• Perk 2: One-Two Punch
• Masterwork: Handling
• Mod: Choose Backup Mag

It's a bit niche, working best for only a few Subclasses (mainly Titans and Liar's Handshake Hunters with the right 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Destiny 2 Prismatic Fragments), but this One-Two Punch Perfect Paradox roll is very potent. Blasting a larger foe with the shotgun before following up with a punch can let you deal massive damage in short bursts, and the combo also plays nicely with Pugilist an🍎d the intrinsic Cast No Shadows Origin Trait on the weapon.

Trench Barrel is a close alternative to One-Two Punch, improving Perfect Paradox itself rather than your melee attacks, but I like the sound of the simple Pugilist + Swashbuckler combo too, which will work well for all 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Destiny 2 Classes in most PVE situations. However, if you want to bring P🌃erfect Paradox into the Crucible, it's certainly a viable weapon 𓆉thanks to this range-focused PVP god roll:

• Barrel: Rifled Barrel
• Magazine: Accurized Rounds
• Perk 1: Slideshot
• Perk 2: Opening Shot
• Masterwork: Range
• Mod: Choose Quick Access Sling

How to unlock and farm Perfect Paradox in Destiny 2

Saint-14 will give you your first Perfect Paradox roll for completing the "Shell" mission as part of the "A Rising Chorus: Act 2, Week 3" quest. With the shotgun now in your collections, there are a few ways you can farm for random rolls but, like the other reprised Season of Dawn weapons, you cannot craft Perfect Paradox – you musꦏt get the🍒 roll you want through random luck:

• Failsafe's Echo Engram Focusing – Every reprised Dawn weapon you've unlocked, including Perfect Paradox, can be found under Reprisal Weapon Focusing. Spend Echo Engrams and Glimmer here to get rolls for whichever weapons you want.
• Reward chests at the end of Echoes activities – The 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Destiny 2 Enigma Protocol activity has a high chance to grant at least one reprised Dawn weapon, so it's the best activity for farming.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

How to start the Destiny 2 Specimen ID NES006 quest

The Destiny 2 NES006 research specimen quest must first be found by investigating a proximity sensor alert from Failsafe, just like the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Destiny 2 NES003 quest. After that, you can get on ෴with the simple but time-cons✅uming quest. Here's what you need to do to start NES006 and get the final specimen for Echoes Act 2:

1. Visit Failsafe in the HELM and collect the Proximity Sensor Alert in the Research Bays menu.
2. Play Breach Executable or Echoes Battlegrounds and follow the proximity sensor to find the specimen. You're looking for a Vex Minotaur gun – a Torch Hammer – though it can appear in several locations across these activities, so you need to explore and keep an eye on your Proximity Sensors for any hints. I found it just before dropping into the boss fight in Battleground: Core.

3. Go back to Failsafe in the HELM and collect the Specimen ID: NES006 quest and start it properly.
4. Kill enemies with Auto Rifles and Sidearms. You need to get quite a lot of kills, so I recommend blasting through Lost Sectors with the excellent 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Destiny 2 Aberrant Action rocket sidearm. The quest step also says bonus progress is awarded for killing Guardians, but this should be ignored for your own sanity.
5. Kill enemies with Arc and Solar damage. This includes Arc and Solar weapons and abilities, so make sure you've got an appropriate Subclass and weapons equipped. Again, Lost Sectors are good for getting this step completed and do not try to get Guardian kills instead.
6. Generate Orbs of Power. The quest doesn't say this but collecting Orbs of Power also contributes towards this. I advise hopping into the Vanguard Ops playlist as you'll be able to both generate plenty of Orbs and collect plenty from your fireteam. Make sure you've got some Orb-generating armor mods equipped too.
7. Return to Failsafe in the HELM to hear her report on Specimen NES006.
8. Place the Assimilated Torch Hammer in the display tank.

Now that Failsafe's analysis is complete and you've contained the Vex Minotaur weapon, you're done with the Specimen ID: NES006 quest and are done with Echoes Act 2 as well. The final available research upgrades (Data Format Cipher and Combat Protocol Override) are automatically unlocked for you, so you can enjoy extra rewards from Echo Chests and from killing Assimilated Demolishers, and don't forget to claim your rewards for the Research and Development VI seasonal challenge.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Earlier this week, Twitch streamer Leoparꦗd shared a short clip demonstrating the trick in question. It essentially relies on manipulating your connection using a VPN, in a similar way to net limiting (effectively slowing down your internet connection on purpose). While slow internet isn't usually a good thing when playing an online game, net limiting doesn't necessarily mean that the game will look laggy on the user's end – it can instead allow them to take advantage of certain exploits. 

In this case, Leopard was able to destroy three out ꧑of six Glyphs on The Final Shape expansion's main villain, The Witness, with just one Glyphbreaker buff, speeding up the mechanic needed to begin the DPS phase as part of an attempt to complete the raid solo. 

Needless to say, Bungie isn't thrilled. "Wanted to give fair warning. This breaks ou🎀r [Terms of Service]," the developer on Twitter, responding to the video clip. "We understand the desire to take on more challenging content solo, but manipulating network in an effort to gain any advantage in PvE or PvP can lead to restrictions or bans. We highly advise against doing this." 

Following up on this, the that issuing a warning isn't intended "to comeꦇ off as preferential treatment," but to "set the exa💮mple and warn viewers/players that this is against the rules." It adds: "Lep has not gotten large amounts of rewards or used this in a competition, so we feel a warning is appropriate."

Clearly, then, Bungie has caught onto this exploit, so it's definitely not advisable to try it at home unless you're looking for a ban. Players will just have to look for more 🔯new ways to cheese The Witness instead. 

How Destiny 2's narrative team wrangled 10 years of lore into a perfect finale with The Final Shape: "Magic has been so important to this franchise."

And yet, I think Bungie pulled it off. In my 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Destiny 2: The Final Shape review, I said that the developer delivered "a monumental expansion for its space magic FPS that somehow pays off a decade-long rollercoaster of endless war", and once I had finished the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Destiny 2 Excision mission and gazed into the mesmerizing aurora surrounding the Traveler for a 🍸good five minutes, I couldn't stop thinking about the challenges of bringing it together. So, to sate my curiosity, I asked Destiny 2 narrative director Alison Lührs and Destiny Universe narrative director Julia Nardin how they and their team created such a gripping finale to Destiny's first saga.

Major spoilers for Destiny 2: The Final Shape to follow

Getting into shape

To me, the first challenge seems to be knowing where to even start. Where do you focus your attention when you're trying to tie up so much while sowing story seeds for the future? "When you've got a story that's 10 years in the making, you end up with a lot of characters and interwoven plo💧t threads, and only so much narrative real estate to include everyone in a release like Final Shape," says Nardin. "We made the decision to focus on a handful of characters, like the Vanguard and the allies that the players have been fighting hard for for the last couple of ꦛyears."

Of course, getting to this starting point was a long road. Nardin says that since she joined Bungie in October 2019 to work on Season of Arrivals, there has been a targeted effort to tell a stronger story – largely through leveraging characters. "I remember very early conversations, as early as Arrivals, about us needing to put Uldren back on the board," Nardin explains. "We found a way to get Savathûn in front of players without immediately recognizing that it was Savathûn, knowing that she was going to be the antagonist of Witch Queen. We prioritized the formal introductions of Caiatl and Mithrax, who existed in the lo⛎re and that we wanted to be the representatives for these other factions that would be coming into this fight with us in The Final Shape."

Additionally, Lührs says💧 that bringing all these narrative ideas together required a central theme to act as the "storytelling glue". "'Purpose' was the theme that we identified early on, and we wanted to use that as kind of the through line for every characters' arc for our journey against the Witness," she says.It's a thing that wants to eliminate purpose by saying, "I have chosen it for you". And so being able to use that at a textual level, so that we could always come back to that through line, helped us from getting too far off in the weeds of ဣanyone's story."

While that narrow, character-driven and thematic focus was integral to the success of The Final Shape's story, it meant a lot of ideas had to be nixed. Even so, the narrative snippets left on the cutting room floor are never binned forever. I asked Nardin and Lührs about what didn't make it into the expansion, but they stayed tight-lipped, pointing out that sharing what was left out would spoil some surprises down the line. However, Lührs teasꦡes that the narrative team "made a whole Episode about it, so you're just going to have to find out".

Importantly, this focus also helped the narrative team avoid telling a "very broad and shallow story," according to Lührs. One of my own fears going into 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Destiny 2: The Final Shape was that it would be all style and set pieces ꧑with no substance. The Pale Heart destination and Prismatic subclasses looked fantastic, but it all had to be backed up by some serious narrative chops to stick the landing, and I'm very glad to have been proven wrong.

Nardin explains that The Final Shape had to be a resolution for the last 10 years, so decisively taking down the Witness was obviously a key story beat to hit🍌. But with the entire campaign taking place within the Traveler's Pale Heart, it was also a good opportunity to "provide some answers as to how the Light functions and the relationship between Ghosts, Guardians, and the Traveler," though Nardin points out that keeping things somewhat vague in this regard was intentional. " [...] We didn't want to be too explicit about it, because when you are too explicit about it, the magic vanishes, and I think magic has been so important to this franchise. We didn't want it to evaporate."

Although,⛦ with Commander Zavala, Ikora Rey, and Cayde-6 taking center stage together for the first time since Destiny 2's launch in 2017, Nardin points out that The Final Shape also offered a chance for some much-needed catharsis. "It meant restoring the Vanguard in a way that would feel impactful and earned for our players, and it also meant finding closure for Cayde in a way that we weren't able to do with Forsaken," she says.

Ace in the hole

The reveal of Cayde's return in The Final Shape's  teaser trailer back in May, 2023, was a welcome surprise. As Destiny's resident comic relief character, his absence was noticeable after Forsaken, particularly as we began veering into more serious, character-driven stories after 2019's Shadowkeep. But I also couldn't help but wonder why he was coming back. Obviously, the Destiny community went into a t🅠heory-crafting frenzy for a lore-accurate justification, but bringing back a fan-favorite character for one last hurrah seemed to me, at the time, like a nostalgia play to get players interested.

But, as Nardin explains, Cayde's comeback was a perfect fit fꦓor relaying some of those revelations about the Light and the Traveler. She says: "If everything that comes from the Light returns to the Light, we had a unique opportunity to show that with an existing character. Given the characters that we were working with – Zavala, Crow, Ikora, Mara – it made the most sense to use Cayde to do that."

"I also feel as though there's this darkness – there's an edge – to Cayde that we saw more of in Destiny 1 that🀅 we really wanted to bring back for The Final Shape, tonally, because that's actually the core of who he is and I think what Destiny is," adds Nardin. "He jokes because he's viscerally aware of how real the stakes are. He&ap🍌os;s incredibly dangerous, like a knife you think is safe to run your fingers on – it's not."

"He's also grieving the loss of his Ghost, Sundance, in this release, for which he feels personally responsible. It's why he's so protective over Glint and wꦺhy he ultimately chooses to sacrifice his second chance to give one to the player's Ghost. That was a story that we really wanted to tell. We needed there to be a loss in this release, and it felt right for it to be Cayde."

I, ꦰand I think many other players, certainly didn’t expect Cayde's time in the campaign to be so impactful through both the levity and gravity 𝄹he brings. Nardin describes The Final Shape as probably the "most human expansion in terms of motivation and framing", and, for me, Cayde's second chance is a huge part of that, which really caught me by surprise.

To create those surprises, Bungie aims to "absolutely nail" some player expectations – Nardin says learning about the Witness and paying off the relationship be𝔉tween Guardians, Ghosts, and the Traveler were priorities, for example – and completely subvert others. Lührs says that Cayde’s characterization falls into the latter. “[...] We were interested in givin🐻g him permission to explore the rest of his emotional range. Making him uncertain about his resurrection and grieving his separation from Sundance was a powerful choice, and it turned Cayde into a wise fool rather than just a comedic sidekick,” she says.

Cooperative Focus

As well as thinking about the players, Lührs and Nardin must also contend with Destiny 2's inherent complexity, both in terms of its expansive lore and live service model. When I ask about the sorts of limitations they face, Lührs and Nardin are quick to say theౠre are "so many!". Lührs elaborates: "It's everything from, 'how many lines do we get for this season or release to spread around?', [to] design limitations – 'what do we need to make sure that we're leaving room for so that we're not having a heavy conversation while also trying to blast some Vex?'

Lührs also points out that these restrictions can be useful as there are always creative solutions to find. Although, figuring out these paths, or even coming up with story ideas doesn't, just fall to the narrative team either. Nardin says that narrative design is a "cross-disciplinary process" that involves collaborating with everyone else at Bungie. "Some of the best ideas don't even come from narrative, they come from our partners in other disciplines," she says. "Everyone working on [Destiny 2] loves the game, and they can come at it from the lens of a storyt꧒eller, even if that's not their discipline."

Ultimately, these combined narrative design efforts helped create Bungie’s “love letter” to the Destiny community, which was the biggest priority according to Nardin. “They've been on this journey with us for as long as Bungie has, and they deserved anไ epic conclusion for the saga, so we can move forward together into the fran𒊎chise's future,” she says, later adding: “We made a conscious decision to go all in on narrative for this release. And when we saw the reaction of the community, that reaffirmed for us that it was the right choice.”

Lührs wishes that if she were able to give her past self working on The Final Shape some advice, it would be to "trust your gut". "The best practices of telling a story are trusting in the characters that you have and allowing them to go on the journey that they need to go on,” she says. “I love that this has taught all of us the value of storytelling and the value of narrative, and I'm excited to shar📖e where we're going next."

While the first post-Final Shape Episode, Echoes, has been off to a slow start, the peek behind the curtain from Lührs and Nardin has revealed so much about the challenges that the narrative team faces. It's a colossal effort that I certainly don't envy, and has made me respect the Destiny 2 team's efforts even more. Of course, change and improvements are always going to be slow with a game as massive as this, but, as Nardin says, "the future o🀅f the franchise is very bright, and Bungie cannot wait to share it with you."

The Final Shape has even allowed me to become an MMO healer in Destiny 2 thanks to a new Exotic helmet.

Destiny 2 The Slammer god rolls

The Slammer is a pretty versatile sword in Destiny 2, and it's one of the few Stasis-damage swords available. However, getting a god roll isn’t easy as you need to farm it like any of the other 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Destiny 2 Nightfall weapons by repeatedly running these tougher Strikes. While you're running Nightfalls, here's🍎 one god roll for the Slammer that ꧒I recommend you look for:

• Blade: Jagged Edge or Honed Edge
• Guard: Swordmaster's Guard
• Perk 1: Relentless Strikes
• Perk 2: Bait And Switch
• Origin: Vanguard's Vindication
• Mod: Backup Mag or Adept Impact (if you have the Adept version)

It's quite a basic Slammer god roll, focusing purely on substantially upping your damage through having the right Blade perk, Swordmaster's Guard for frequent heavy attacks, and Bait And Switch – even the right 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Destiny 2 Adept mod helps. Meanwhile, Relentless Strikes helps with The Slammer's ammo economy, helping you get as many cuts in as possible. It's a solid roll for most activities and encounters but can really shine during boss damage phases. If you fancy some slightly different bonuses, you should consider either Chain Reaction or Eager Edge instead of Relentless Strikes. That way you can keep the high damage of Bait And ไSwitch but can trade ammo recovery for some explosive powe🍸r or extra mobility respectively.

For a different Destiny 2 Slammer god roll that is still very effective in high-end PVE activities, you should consider Chain Reaction and Cold Steel. As mentioned earlier, Chain Reaction really helps with clearing out weaker enemies while Cold Steel applies stacks of Stasis Slow with each hit. That means it synergizes very well with Stasis Subclasses and even some Prismatic builds, but it also means The Slammer can stun Overload Champions with ease – even Unstoppables aren't safe if you're able to apply enough Slow stacks, though it might be best if you pack a different weapon with Chill Clip, such as the Riptide Fusion Rifle, along with your god roll Slammer.

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Destiny 2 Specimen ID NES004 quest walkthrough

You can collect the Destiny NES004 specimen quest from Failsafe right after collecting the Tuned Radiolite Sampler during the week 1 quest steps for 'A Rising Chorus: Act 2'. The specimen itself is a Vex Hydra tail that's transmitting a signal that Failsafe tasks you with investigating. Here's what you need to do to learn the secrets ofꦆ Specimen ID: NES004 and complete the quest:

1. Open Echoes loot chests at the end of Echoes activities. Breach Executable is undoubtedly the best for progressing this step quickly as it offers the most progress per chest – three or four runs will be enough. Strangely, the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Destiny 2 Enigma Protocol activity does not count towards this objective.
2. Visit Failsafe in the HELM and focus Echo Engrams into Echoes gear. To spend the minimum number of Echo Engrams, you should choose either the Echo Armor Engram or the Dawn Weapon Engram five times as these focusing methods cost just one Echo Engram.
3. Gather Extracted Data in Breach Executable and defeat powerful combatants. I was able to complete both objectives in a single run of Breach Executable. You and your teammates must collect the white data cubes and secure them at Failsafe's relay as soon as you're carrying the maximum amount – don't let any of the cubes disappear either! Powerful combatants are also common in Breach Executable.

4. Visit Failsafe again. She'll give you her report on Specimen NES004 and gives back the Mirror-Encrypted Hydra Tail specimen.
5. Place the specimen in the display tank.

And that's it! Collecting the Destiny 2 NES004 specimen also unlocks the Armor Reputation Booster upgrade, which doubles the bonus reputation gains from the Echoes armor perk, helping you climb through Failsafe's ranks rapidly. You can also tick off the 'Research and Development IV' seasonal challenge and bag an XP reward for your efforts.

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Wild Style god rolls in Destiny 2

As one of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Destiny 2 Nightfall weapons, Wild Style can only be obtained by completing Nightfall Strikes, but that also means you can get an improved Adept version, which can use 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Destiny 2 Adept Mods, if you're ready for Grandmast🍌er difficulty. Here's the Wild Style god roll I recommend:

• Barrel: Smart Drift Control or Quick Launch
• Magazine: Disorienting Grenades
• Perk 1: Envious Assassin
• Perk 2: Incandescent
• Origin: Choose Tex Balanced Stock or Vanguard’s Vindication
• Masterwork: Reload Speed or Handling
• Mod: Choose Tactical or Adept Reload

For a good, supportive special weapon, Disorienting Grenades is arguably the most important perk for this roll, giving Wild Style the ability to temporarily stun enemies. The fact that Wild Style is also a Double Fire Frame, firing two grenades simultaneously, means you can hit more enemies per trigger pull. To round it out this god roll, having Incandescent will let you apply scorch to enemies, which will help in some Solar and Prismatic builds, while E꧙nvious Assassin will allow you to launch several shots before♛ reloading instead of just one, letting you fire a whole volley of stunning explosives.

Other notable perk combinations that might be fun but perhaps not as objectively useful as having Disorienting Grenades include Danger Close and Surrounded, or even Stats For All and One For All. Both these combinations pair nicely with High-Velocity or Proximity Grenades.

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Aberrant Action god roll in Destiny 2

With a few options for supporting pe🌳rks to boost Abberant Action's stats, there's really only one golden combination of perks to pursue. Here's the Aberrant Action god roll that I recommend:

• Barrel: Smart Drift Control or Quick Launch
• Magazine: High-Velocity Rounds
• Perk 1: Heal Clip
• Perk 2: Incandescent
• Masterwork: Velocity or Blast Radius
• Mod: Choose Backup Mag

The stars of the show here are Heal Clip and Incandescent. Heal Clip grants Cure x2 to you and Cure x1 to nearby when you reload after a kill, which is a nice bonus to help you survive in 🦩frantic PvE situations. Incandescent is a just an all-round great perk, applyin🔯g good amounts of scorch and damage-over-time to enemies, which really ups the potency of this rocket-powered pistol. Be sure to use it in any Solar builds or even Prismatic builds where you can benefit from these Solar keywords.

How to get Abberant Action in Destiny 2

Abberant Action is one of the Episode Echoes weap🐻ons, which means you can get it from any Echoes weapon re♒ward source in Destiny 2. That includes:

• Reward chests at the end of Breach Executable and Echoes Battlegrounds
• Rewards from depositing Radiolite samples either in the HELM or at the end of activities
• Captain's Log weekly vendor challenge from Failsafe in the HELM
• Failsafe's Echo Engram Focusing - you need to complete the Specimen ID: NES004 quest to unlock the Act 2 Engram Focusing upgrade!

These also have a chance to give you an Aberrant Action with Deepsight Resonance which you can extract to gain pattern progress, eventually letting you craft an Aberrant Action with the perfect roll above.

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