Destiny 2 Heavy Weapons Will Be Getting A Revamp In Season 20

Bungie has given players a sneak peek at the weapons tuning coming to Destiny 2 in Season 20, which is due to launch on February 28 alongside the Lightfall expansion. To get ready for Lightfall’s new campaign and raid, the changes are focused on tuning up heavy weapons to have more utility in PvE. The weapon update will also add new subclass verbs to a number of Exotic weapons.

As the blog post explains, Season 19’s mid-season weapons update had a heavy focus on PvP, while the next season’s tweaks will prioritise PvE to help players tackle the new campaign.

Bungie kicked off the list of changes by announcing that red reticule aiming will be enabled as an option for PC players, with a future update also planning to make the color of the aiming reticule customizable. Already enabled for console players, this option makes the aiming reticule turn red when turned on an enemy that’s inside your weapon’s effective range.

Moving on to specific heavy weapon groups, the only weapon type getting nerfed in Season 20 will be Linear Fusion Rifles, with a 15% reduction in damage against Champions, minibosses, bosses, and vehicles. Only Exotic Heavy Linear Fusion Rifles will be unaffected by this nerf.

Machine Guns will be getting a damage boost in both PvE and PvP, as well as higher ammo reserves. Heavy Grenade Launchers are also in for a buff, with a major damage increase for PvE content, and improvements to projectile collision and blast radius that will make it easier to land hits.

While Shotguns aren’t technically getting a buff, upcoming updates will make them easier to use by modifying the reticule to more accurately show the weapon’s spread pattern. Kinetic weapons will also see a change in the way damage multipliers are calculated, to bring Kinetic damage type weapons on par with Kinetic slot Stasis weapons.

A number of Exotics will also be receiving hefty buffs in the upcoming season, with many weapons receiving new subclass verbs to “grant these weapons additional functionality, and let them tie into subclass builds in a more meaningful way.”

The full list of changes can be found below:

SEASON 20 WEAPON TUNING PREVIEW

WEAPON ARCHETYPES

• Red reticle is now enabled on PC.

Linear Fusion Rifles

• Reduced damage vs. Champions, minibosses, bosses, and vehicles by 15%.
• Sleeper Simulant and Queenbreaker are unaffected – Sleeper fans, this is not a drill.

Machine Guns

• Increased damage by ~10%, with the following effects on time to kill (TTK) against a Guardian with Tier 6 resilience
  • High-Impact Frame:
    • TTK reduced from 0.67s to 0.50s.
  • Rapid-Fire Frame:
    • TTK reduced from 0.53s to 0.47s.
  • Adaptive Frame:
  • Increased reserve ammo by 50% at 0 inventory stat, and 20% at 100 inventory stat.
    • Note: Inventory stat is a 0-100 value behind the scenes. This is presented as the actual number of rounds in-game, but you can take this to mean that low reserves Machine Guns get a big boost, while large reserves Machine Guns get a smaller boost.

Heavy Grenade Launchers

• Increased damage vs. Champions, minibosses, bosses, and vehicles by 20%, minors by 40%.
• Improved projectile collision, making it slightly easier to land hits.
• Increased blast radius by 1m.
• Parasite is unaffected. It does huge damage already.

Shotguns

• Shotgun reticles now change in size proportional to spread angle.
• Related note: The Legend of Acrius hip-fire reticle is now a bit more representative of its (very large) spread angle.

Kinetic Weapons

• Kinetic Primary weapon damage multiplier increased from 1.05 to 1.1.
• Kinetic Special weapon damage multiplier increased from 1.05 to 1.15.
• Kinetic slot Stasis weapons no longer have the 5% damage bonus vs. unshielded targets in PvE.
• There’s also a Kinetic damage type perk coming in Lightfall.

EXOTICS

• The Queenbreaker’s blinding effect was underwhelming for a Heavy weapon, so we’ve changed how that’s deployed. Note that Queenbreaker was also not affected by the global damage reduction to Linear Fusion Rifles, making it substantially stronger by comparison.
  • Shot now chains to nearby enemies and uses Arc 3.0 blind
• Ruinous Effigy feels very Void-y, and slamming the transmutation sphere was an obvious place to put an additional effect.
  • Transmutation sphere slam attack now suppresses.
• The Leviathan’s Breath buff from a few Seasons back inadvertently reduced the PvP damage enough that it could no longer one-hit kill players in their Super with a headshot. We’ve fixed that, but also added volatile, and increased the damage vs. Champions substantially to highlight its anti-Champion role.
  • Now applies volatile on perfect draw impact.
  • Increased damage from 396 to 442. This allows it to once again one-hit kill all supers in PvP.
  • Increased damage vs. Champions by 30%.
• One Thousand Voices was briefly a top pick in Season 14 but has been eclipsed by other options since then. We wanted to lean even more into a chain of Solar explosions by adding scorch, and with the global Heavy weapon changes it’s also a strong option. If you have Ember of Ashes equipped, landing a full burst on a single target will trigger an ignition immediately (Exact results may vary depending on whether other players are also scorching a target).
  • Each explosion now applies 10 + 5 (with Ember of Ashes) scorch stacks
• Sunshot was a top candidate for applying Solar subclass verbs, and the explosions are the clear place to add to.
  • Explosion on kill now applies 10 + 5 scorch stacks.
• Polaris Lance always had a burn effect, so it was an obvious change to switch this to scorch.
  • Perfect Fifth shots now apply 40 + 20 scorch stacks instead of a custom burn.
• Two-Tailed Fox had tough competition as a Heavy Exotic weapon, but now it’s the only weapon that can apply subclass verbs from multiple damage types without extra steps.
  • Solar rocket now applies 60 + 30 scorch stacks instead of burn, the void rocket already applies suppress, and the catalyst completes the trifecta.
• Prometheus Lens has utility with its Solar 3.0 rework, but we wanted to give it something more spectacular on kills in addition.
  • Added the Incandescent perk to the catalyst.
• Grand Overture’s latest buff (increasing the missile’s damage by 50%) brought it up plenty, it just needed its blind updated to tie into Arc 3.0.
  • Switched the catalyst to use Arc Blind.

Hip-fire Reticles

• We’re starting to experiment with hip-fire weapon reticles conveying more information, and used The Manticore as a test bed for this. You can expect to see more weapon-type or Exotic weapon functionality showing up in hip-fire reticles in Season 21 and beyond.
  • Added a reticle element to The Manticore showing current stacks of Antigrav Repulsor.

PERKS

With Strand coming to the game, along with a new Strand weapon damage perk, we’ve updated a couple of older perks.

• Osmosis now works with Strand.
• Elemental Capacitor now has the following effect when using a Strand subclass:
  • +20 airborne effectiveness (+25 for the enhanced perk).

Rewind Rounds will be appearing on more weapons in Lightfall, but was custom built to only work with the Vault of Glass weapon set, we’ve tweaked it to be more general-purpose.

• Rebuilt to work on non-Vault of Glass weapons.

Eager Edge had some bugs that needed addressing in a previous release. We’ve now taken the time to do a more complete rework, which also let us reduce, or remove, most of the restrictions that were in place.

• No longer deactivates when moving faster than 35ms.

• Deactivates correctly after a single melee swing.
• Reduced the base lunge distance buff from 2 to 1.8.
• Reduced airborne lunge distance penalty from 25% to 20%.
• The enhanced perk now increases lunge distance slightly, back up to 2.

Blinding Grenades on Grenade Launchers don’t do Arc damage, so it’s not appropriate for them to trigger Arc 3.0 Blind effects. We didn’t feel the need to change their disorienting effect though, so we’ve updated the name to overlap less.

• Renamed “Blinding Grenades” to “Disorienting Grenades.”

Veist Stinger is one of the most desirable origin traits in the game — particularly (but not only) on Linear Fusion Rifles – to the point where it makes it hard for non-Veist weapons to compete. It needed some adjustment. With this change it’s still valuable, but more in line with other origin traits.

• This was typically a full reload when the perk activated, it now reloads 25% of the magazine.