Destiny 2's new Exotic is mysteriously one-shotting bosses
Blighting Lion comes out swinging
The Season Of Arrivals started in Destiny 2 this week and while the whole season was kept a surprise up until launch, one arrival is a bigger surprise than the rest. Witherhoard, the new Exotic grenade launcher you can grab from the season pass track, will sometimes mysteriously spit enough damage to melt a boss. Most, if not all, of a raid boss's health bar can vanish in the blink of an eye. Witherhoard already seemed strong to me but this, damn.
Witherhoard is an Exotic breech-loaded grenade launcher for your kinetic shot, which uses Special ammo. It fires big gloops of Taken blight, dealing damage over time in a fairly big area if it hits the ground or if it hits an enemy it'll go inside, deal DoT, then spawn a blight when they die. Even when merely working as intended, Witherhoard (known affectionately as Blighting Lion to devotees of Destiny's best gun) is decent. It's great for any PvE with lots of enemies and you'll likely have noticed many people gumming up maps in Crucible this week. Plus it's available at rank 1 on the paid season pass track (rank 35 on the free) so loads of folks already have it. There is an issue.
Players have noticed that sometimes, just sometimes, Witherhoard will do so very much more damage than intended. No one knows why. It just happens. Here's Destiny 'Tuber Rick Kackis demonstrating the bug melting a few raid bosses:
Might we be witnessing the birth of a new Telesto, another gun which keeps sprouting random wild problems? I almost hope so. Nice to have a little chaos in the system, as long as it's not causing big problems in competitive modes. Wait. Hang on. That might be why some of my Gambit Prime matches went so horribly wrong last night? Maybe I'm not so up for this.
Bungie community manager "dmg04" replied to a video of Garden Of Salvation's boss getting melted with a strong three-point tweet:
Season Of Arrivals seems promising so far, certainly far better than Season Of The Worthy. It's leading up to the Beyond Light expansion in September, when Bungie will also remove some older, less-played parts of the game and bring back some bits of Destiny 1.