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The latest This Week at Bungie (opens in a new tab) post struggles with one of the hottest topics in the Destiny 2 community: Weapon Crafting. Specifically, the balance of it. For an inveterate Destiny addict like myself, the addition of crafting has been an absolute positive, allowing me to build a perfect arsenal, carefully curated with improved versions of the exact perks I want. For less committed (some might say more sane) players, the process of tracking creating patterns and then leveling the weapons can be time consuming and tedious.
So much so that I think the recent emphasis on getting patterns—for which you have to find multiple rare “red box” drops from the same gun—has become Destiny 2’s core seasonal loop, and not in a positive way. Frustration with that process plays into the current complaints about the seasonal model becoming too samey. Even I’m willing to admit that throwing hours into the Shuro Chi raid encounter just because it’s the most efficient way to farm junk piles for weapon level advancement isn’t the sign of a healthy system.
Change is on the way, but we’ll have to wait until next year’s Lightfall expansion to enjoy the full benefits. In the post, Bungie identifies several pain points it aims to address and explains how it plans to do so. Here’s a truncated version:
- Depth weapons (ie “red boxes”) are all too common and clog up players’ vaults while they wait to extract the craft currency. To alleviate this, Bungie will be adding new ways to earn crafting coins, and weapons that don’t have crafting patterns will no longer drop like Deepsights (which is good because that was always confusing).
- Better protection against bad luck. The goal here is to prevent players from getting bludgeoned by RNG when it comes to unlocking the specific template they want. It’s not entirely clear what the new system will entail, but Bungie promises to “provide opportunities within the crafting system to deterministically choose which weapon to target.”
- Reduce load stress. Right now, players feel forced to play with “bad” Deepsight weapons just so their crafting coin can be extracted. Again, the path to how to prevent this isn’t clear, but Bungie promises to “reduce player incentives to equip a suboptimal Deepsight or crafted weapon” as part of the leveling process.
- Make Adept assault weapons matter again. Since the addition of crafting, the value of Adept weapons (which drop from Master content) has been reduced. Why bother sweating your balls off in the hardest raid offered for a drop that will be outdone by one you can build yourself? Here the answer seems to be giving an Adept weapon access to enhanced perks, though Bungie notes that it won’t be “full, free form.”
It all sounds like good stuff, and honestly not too much of a surprise. Adding crafting to a rogue shooter will always have a seismic impact on the perceived value of both the gear itself and the player time required to craft it. It would have been a miracle if the system was perfect right out of the gate, so a large amount of tweaking was always to be expected.
Before these systemic changes arrive in Lightfall, Bungie also announced that it is bringing crafting to the weapons of the Deep Stone Crypt raid next season, which begins on December 6. It will also refresh the virtues of those guns.
“Our goal is to keep the most beloved combinations and drop the rest to make room for new benefits,” said senior design manager Chris Proctor. “With Deep Stone Crypt specifically, we’ve been looking for new perks that synergize well with the perks that originated with Deep Stone Crypt: Reconstruction, Recombination, and Redirection. (Ie, new perks combinations could look like: Reconstruction + Focused Fury, or Fourth Time ). the Charm + Redirection).”
The Deep Stone Raid arsenal is already filled with absolute bangers like the Success sniper rifle and Heritage slug shotgun, so giving those access to new and powerful synergistic perks is pretty tasty. Proctor gave three examples of possible combinations, all of which look disgustingly good:
- Legacy (Slug Shotgun): Rebuild + Focused Rage
- Offspring (Hand Cannon): Voltshot + Fury
- Guardian (Scout Rifle): Quick Hit + Incandescent
Proctor added that the upgraded Deep Stone Crypt guns are also getting their own origin feature called “Bray Legacy”. He didn’t say what profit it would yield, though, so let the speculation begin.
Is all this enough to quell the grumpiness about the existing excesses of the Crafting system… the inevitable answer is probably not, but at least players can now see that a concrete change is coming. And anyway, I now know that I will be spending a large part of the next season high above Europe getting reacquainted with my good friend Tanix. (opens in a new tab). Who knew he would come back!
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