Destiny 2 finally reins in Beyond Light's broken Warlocks
Just in time for a weekend's raiding.
Sure, Destiny 2: Beyond Light might dare guardians to take down a malevolent bug queen, but the expansion's real villain is one of the players' own making. But now, Bungie have brought the hammer down on the game's troublesome Warlocks, slapping a hefty nerf on a stasis subclass that threatened to make the race for clearing this weekend's new raid a very short one indeed.
Since Beyond Light's release added new Stasis sub-classes to the game, crafty Warlocks have been figuring out how to completely bust the game using their newfound powers of darkness. While unnamed, they were likely behind the decision to postpone this season's Trials Of Osiris, but it's only in the last week than folks discovered that five Shadebinder Warlocks effectively one-shot bosses.
"Earlier this week, an issue was discovered where Stasis was doing large (and we mean insanely huge) amounts of damage to bosses," senior community manager Dylan Gafner wrote in today's This Week At Bungie post. "The team worked at lightning pace to develop a fix for Destiny 2 Hotfix 3.0.0.3, thus preventing impact to the upcoming raid!"
Hotfix 3.0.0.3, then, includes some pretty sizeable nerfs to Shadebinder abilities - lowering damage and durations across the board while fixing more general "exploits". Those patch notes also include a few more minor bugs, but this was really a quick turnaround on bashing out a problematic sub-class.
Just in time, too. The rest of the post goes into the upcoming Raid Race for Beyond Light's first raid, Deep Stone Crypt. The instance opens at 6pm on Saturday (10 am PST), but there'll be special "Contest Mode" rules for the first folks to take a shot at the raid. For the first 24 hours, power will be capped at 20 below each encounter, Artifact Power will be disabled, and no advantages will be granted for being above 1230 power in the final fight.
For folks who aren't raiding, Bungie have also promised to bump up the somewhat paltry loot pool out in the open world. There'll be another hotfix on November 24th to shake up the loot tables, "adding back in a selection of weapons" to help make world drops feel a bit less rubbish.
"We will also be watching to see how the landscape changes with the addition of weapons from Season 12 and this week’s Raid launch. We also agree that getting near-cap weapons from random world drops is frustrating. Thus, we are removing those from the pool, and are weighting drops more heavily towards newer weapons."