This Week at Bungie - 6/21/2018

This week at Bungie, we welcome back the Factions.

Everyone is back from E3, and we're heads down, working hard on Forsaken. Several thousand players already got to play Gambit, and we're extremely excited for more to play it, both at GuardianCon and when Forsaken releases on September 4.

Meanwhile, the Iron Banner rages on. You have the rest of the week to rank up with Lord Saladin and earn the Season 3 ornaments for your gear. Make sure you turn in everything before the reset on June 26 at 10 a.m., or you will have to wait until the next Iron Banner to claim your rewards. Your tokens and ornament progress will carry over.

What Is Dead Orbit May Never Die

As one event winds down, the next one ramps up. Faction Rallies is starting up again. Dead Orbit dominated the first event of Season 3. We will see if they defend their position at the top, or if New Monarchy or Future War Cult step up to take their spot. Faction Rallies will be available Tuesday, June 26, at 10 a.m. PDT through the following weekly reset.

In a previous TWAB, we told you that Winner's Offering weapons would be added to the event reward pool after the first event. That was incorrect for Season 3, which will operate differently than past seasons. During this season, the factions will continue to feature their original Winner's Offerings for all three events.

If you didn't make it to Rank 50 with your faction of choice during the first event, you can pick up where you left off by pledging to them again. Or you can opt to start up with new blood, but remember that your pledge is account wide. Choose carefully.

Wear It like Armor 

Last month, we did a tuning pass on Exotic armor in Update 1.2.1. We've been working on more changes to more gear and wanted to give you a peek at which armor pieces we have plans for next. Here is Sandbox Designer Victor Anderson with the details.

Victor: We're bringing another set of changes to Exotic armor with Update 1.2.3. As we continue to iterate on Exotic armor, we hope that you will also continue to provide feedback. You've heard the goals from the last TWAB, where we introduced the changes, so let's get right into them.

Like the Update 1.2.1 changes, anything written below is in addition to any existing benefits that the Exotic already provides, unless it's explicitly mentioned otherwise.

Hunter

• Lucky Raspberry
  • Increased chance to fully recharge your Arcbolt Grenade on Arcbolt Grenade hits.
    
  • Guarantees a recharge on getting a full chain that hits four targets.
    • While just about everybody could appreciate the theoretically infinite grenades Lucky Raspberry could generate, its purely random nature made many people shy away from it. With this change, your input will now affect the outcome, so plan your throws accordingly.
• St0mp-EE5
  • Increased benefits when using Strafe Jump and Triple Jump.
    • The usage rate of St0mp-EE5 in the Crucible was fairly good, but since it mostly affected High Jump, people were somewhat pigeonholed if they wanted to change up their air game, so the other double jump variants were tweaked to have more impact.
• Young Ahamkara's Spine
  • Removed marking functionality.
  • Improved the Tripmine Grenade's blast radius and throw speed, and made it so your Tripmine Grenades are harder to destroy.
  • Solar ability hits now grant some Tripmine Grenade energy.
    • The marking functionality, while useful in some circumstances such as in the Crucible, did not have much merit in PvE, so we removed it to head in a better direction. Now, your Tripmine Grenades are punchier, and you can get access to them faster.

Titan

• ACD/0 Feedback Fence
  • Now grants Fury Conductor stacks on melee hits instead of kills.
  • Fury Conductors now grants stacking melee damage resistance.
    • These changes were mostly aimed at making Fury Conductors better in PvE encounters. While the Feedback Fence could protect you from hordes of Thrall by keeping them staggered, it just wasn't that much use against something like a Hive Knight wielding a sword. The changes also make this Exotic better in the Crucible, but the solution of just shooting opponents still works.
• Doomfang Pauldrons
  • Void melee kills now grant more Super energy.
  • Shield Throw hits will now extend the duration of your Super.
    • Titans have a lot of Exotics that help with punching things. To differentiate this one from the rest of the herd, we've increased the impact this Exotic has on your Super and on how you use it.
• Dunemarchers
  • Reduced the time to activate Linear Actuators while you are sprinting to 1.5 seconds (down from 5 seconds).
  • Increased the damage of the chain lightning effect (+70% in PvP, 440% in PvE).
    • While the lightning effect of Dunemarchers was novel, the time needed to start it up and its fairly low impact led to many players simply seeing these as "the sprint pants." So, we've made the lightning much more deadly and frequent.

Warlock

• Crown of Tempests
  • Collapsed the total number of stacks of Conduction Tines to 3 (with the same total effect), and each stack of Conduction Tines lowers the upkeep cost of Stormtrance.
    • Nezarec's Sin and this Exotic were quite similar, so we pushed harder on this Exotic for Stormcallers who want to invest heavily in ability use. Warlocks also don't have many Exotics that modify their Supers, and not receiving the full benefit of Conduction Tines during Stormtrance was a little disheartening, so we added a benefit during the Super's duration to alleviate that.
• Karnstein Armlets
  • Removed melee hit effects (resilience/mobility/target highlighting).
  • Melee kills now instantly heal you, then grant continuous healing for 8 seconds.
    • In this iteration of Karnstein Armlets, we've simplified the Exotic to be about death and healing. Previously, the effect was split between hits and kills, providing inconsistent experiences. While the effect is much more basic now, it should be more reliable and more effective in most situations.
• Starfire Protocol
  • Empowering Rift weapon damage hits now grant Fusion Grenade energy (20%).
    • Much as with the Lunafaction Boots, we felt like giving a bonus to players who decide to go on the offense with Empowering Rift, rather than playing it safe with Healing Rift.

The Old Gods

There are some relics of a different time still being hosted on our servers. Next week, we're retiring a few legacy services from the Halo era and consolidating others. Resident Archivist Roger Wolfson will explain what's changing and how it may affect you.

Roger: We're doing some (once a decade) spring cleaning on the halo.bungie.net site. First off, it's time to retire those old, read-only forums. If you have some archived threads bookmarked that you like to revisit for nostalgia purposes, please take some screenshots before we say goodbye to those forums. 

Do you remember Bungie Pro Video? We said back in 2008 that we'd keep your renders available to download for a couple months. Ten years later, we're getting around to cleaning them up, so grab anything you want to keep around in the next week. Finally, the "details" views of old Halo matches will be trimmed down to just the line-item scores; your career pages will still have your overall medals chest, but individual games won't.

These changes go into effect on June 28 at 10 a.m. PDT. If you need to save anything, get it done before then.

Watchers on the Wall

The Destiny Player Support team keeps watch over the health of the live game. They were quick to respond to a few issues that rose up this week. The full details are in their report below.

Fighting Lion and the Iron Ornament Bundle
Destiny Player Support investigated an issue impacting players who purchased the Iron Ornament Bundle on Tuesday, June 19, in which the included ornament "Lupus Visage" did not properly unlock on Fighting Lion after it was activated. 

We have identified all impacted accounts, and this issue will be resolved for all affected players in an upcoming hotfix. To prevent further impact until a hotfix is deployed, this bundle has been pulled from the Eververse Trading Co. storefront. 

In the meantime, players who have successfully equipped this ornament will not be impacted as long as they do not unequip the ornament or dismantle the specific Fighting Lion that the ornament has been applied to.

For players who encounter this issue before the hotfix is released, here's what you should expect when this hotfix is available:

• The Lupus Visage ornament will already be unlocked, and you can find it by directly inspecting Fighting Lion from your vault, collection, or character inventory.
  
• For affected players who do not yet own Fighting Lion, the Lupus Visage ornament will not appear in your modifications inventory, postmaster, or vault. It will appear when previewing Fighting Lion once it has been obtained in game.
  
• As with all Exotic weapon ornaments, once owned, it can be applied and removed on the Fighting Lion freely without cost to materials or currency.
  

For information on when this hotfix will be available, players should follow @BungieHelp on Twitter, monitor our support feed on help.Bungie.net, and check our pinned thread in the #Help forums.

Battle.net Maintenance for European Players
On June 20, between 02:00 CEST and 07:00 CEST, our partners at Blizzard Europe conducted scheduled global authentication maintenance. During this maintenance, European players were unable to login to Destiny 2 on Battle.net.

For notices regarding scheduled maintenances before they occur, players should follow @BungieHelp on Twitter or monitor our support feed on help.Bungie.net. For issues related to Blizzard services, players should reach out to Blizzard Support.

Sweet Summer Child

It's summertime, which means big blockbuster movies. We've got our own movies to show off, pulled straight from the Creations page. So grab your drink and snack of choice, and find a seat. It's show time.

Movie of the Week: Foreshadowing

Honorable Mention: Unusual Reward

Before we go, here are the top scores for last week's Nightfall, Will of the Thousands.

I don't know about you, but I'm excited about the armor changes. I plan on running a lot of Lucky Raspberry in PvE. Let us know what you're looking forward to, and give us any feedback you have on the upcoming changes.

We'll be back next week with some more info on Update 1.2.3. See you in Iron Banner.

<3 Cozmo