Destiny 2 legendary weapons will be more powerful soon - but there’s a pretty major catch. When the game released, legendaries were bland and lackluster. Every single drop of each weapon was the same. Eventually, random rolls were added back to legendaries. But now, Bungie says that Destiny 2 legendaries will become a little bit more exciting.
Everyone goes crazy over exotic weapons, but players are limited to two: one weapon and one piece of armor. So most of any given player’s arsenal is filled with purple weapons and armor. Legendaries can be quite powerful, with weapons like the Trust and Smuggler’s Word being many Guardians’ go-to tools with which to destroy their opponents. But Bungie feels that they need to be more unique.
Destiny 2 director Luke Smith says that some major changes are coming to Destiny 2 legendaries. Smith announced in a blog post on Bungie’s website that the current system doesn’t allow much room to create powerful legendaries. Despite extremely powerful Pinnacle legendaries (effectively purple exotics) like the Recluse existing, Smith says that simply making legendaries “better” won’t work and that most end up being too bland and similar. So Bungie wants to take an approach similar to what they did with Vault of Glass weapons, which naturally became useless because increasing Power levels rendered them obsolete eventually:
Smith details the new design approach in the blog post, explaining that the new system will rotate legendaries out over time and replace them with other, powerful legendary items:
“Most other Legendary weapons are down in a clump of ‘They aren’t really that different. Why? Because when every Legendary item the team builds is going to be around forever, outliers get weeded out.”
This allows Bungie to move legendaries in and out of the rotation at will, “shelving” them to be reintroduced later. Legendary values will have a fixed maximum power level. Past that, they can’t be infused. This means that in activities like the Crucible, they can still be employed by players. But raiders and people into more competitive PVP will have to consider more current options when deciding what to take into battle. Older legendaries simply won’t be good enough. Smith says the expected lifespan of legendaries is between 9 and 15 months. This system will not apply to exotics.
“In the world we’re imagining, we’ll have space at the top end to create powerful Legendary weapons. Legendaries that are just better than other items in the classification. We’ll be able to do that, because the design space for weapons will expand and contract over time. Items will enter the ecosystem, be able to be infused for some number of Seasons and beyond that, their power won’t be able to be raised. Our hope is that instead of having to account for a weapon’s viability forever when we create one, it can be easier to let something powerful exist in the ecosystem.”
Though Bungie says this system will shake things up, Destiny 2 has a pretty sordid history with extremely powerful items. The Sleeper Simulant, for instance, took a little bit of work to get but absolutely dominated Gambit. Players had to wait for a fix to the weapon. Now, with legendary power levels increasing, this issue may not be limited to just exotics that are overtuned - and if the effects are intentional unlike with the seemingly perpetually bugged Wish-Ender bow, players will need to wait nearly a year or longer for those weapons to disappear from the rotation. This idea has potential, but it could ultimately be detrimental to the game.
More: Destiny 2 Cutscene Teases Rasputin Betrayal For Next Season’s Story
Destiny 2 is available on PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4.
Source: Bungie
