This Week At Bungie - 12/06/2018

This week at Bungie, the Black Armory opened its doors.  

A new mysterious section of the tower revealed itself and a new vendor by the name of Ada-1 sent you out to reclaim the Lost Forges. Your reward: The ability to craft the most powerful weapons of the golden age. 

Many of you are still increasing your power to attempt this new challenge. Yesterday, we lowered the Power requirement of the Lost Forge encounters by five. This wasn't a huge change. These Forges are meant to be aspirational extensions of the endgame. But we did want to make them more accessible to Guardians around 600 Power. You can read the full details of the change and our goals here.

For some of you the enemies guarding the Lost Forges are immune to your weapons. We promised more details for players who are still working their way up to 600 and beyond. Here is what we have planned to help you move more quickly up to 600.

• Prime engrams will now drop more frequently and with larger power bumps for players under 600 Power
  

This change is planned to land in the 2.1.2 update on December 11. We are also considering additional changes to assist with the Power climb in a future update. We will continue to monitor your feedback on Season of the Forge as it continues.  

Scourge of the Past

Tomorrow, the Scourge of the Past raid opens up to all of Guardians who have the Annual Pass and are brave enough to venture into the Last City to confront a new threat to its safety. 

Design Lead Brian Frank is here to brief you one last time before the race for World First begins tomorrow.

Brian: The team could not be more excited for the Scourge of the Past Raid to unlock tomorrow and accept challengers to be the first to fight their way through the Last City and recover a forgotten secret of the Black Armory. As always, we will be cheering you on from the theater. Dust off your sparrow collections. You're going to want the right perk, and the right look, for crossing the finish line.

Make sure you grab the final chest to complete the activity before returning to orbit. Good luck Guardians!

The first fireteam to defeat the raid will be crowned as World First and awarded with a raid belt. As always, they will be awarded to six teammates. Please note that, if you swap players out during the mission, the spoils will only go to the final six.

Anyone who beats all of the encounters of Scourge of the Past in the first 24 hours will be awarded the "Scourge of Nothing" emblem. If you don't think you can take down the final boss that fast, you will still have some extra time to qualify for the exclusive raid jacket through Bungie Rewards. You have until 9AM Pacific on 12/12 to beat the raid and claim your code to purchase the jacket on the Bungie Store. Here is a look at all of these rewards.

As Brian mentioned above, if you think you have finished first, have someone in your fireteam grab the final chest and return to orbit immediately. Completing the activity is crossing the finish line. You can read the full rules here. Good luck!

I am the Crucible

Today, we'd like to address the feedback we've received about the Crucible. The top issue reported by the community is associated with Matchmaking in the Competitive playlist. Many of you are expressing feedback around matching solos against fireteams, matching high Glory teams against lower Glory teams, and have many other suggestions regarding how progressing through the ranks should be changed. The appropriate teams are investigating possible changes to be included in a future update. We will have details for you as soon as we can.

We do have some information on changes to address another top trending issue in the Crucible: Power ammo spawns. There have been numerous requests to lower the amount of Power ammo spawning in Competitive games. Based on this feedback, we will be lowering the amount of Power ammo available during matches by increasing the time between Power ammo spawns. Here are the details:

Competitive:

• Control
  • Initial timers stay the same
  • Increased respawn timer for heavy ammo (was 45 seconds, now 120 seconds)
• Clash
  • Initial timers stay the same
  • Increased respawn timer for heavy ammo (was 45 seconds, now 120 seconds)
• Survival
  • Initial timers stay the same
  • Increased respawn timer for heavy ammo (was 45 seconds, now 60 seconds)

Rotators:

• Showdown
  • Initial timers stay the same
  • Increased respawn timer for heavy ammo (was 30 seconds, now 60 seconds)

Rumble:

• Initial timers stay the same
  
• Increased respawn timer for heavy ammo (was 60 seconds, now 120 seconds)

It Gets Everywhere

Power ammo and Matchmaking are not the only top-trending pieces of community feedback that we have been tracking. Many of you have Sandbox-related questions that apply to PVP and PVE. There are vocal camps on both sides for a lot of these issues and our Sandbox team is considering a combination of player feedback and data on the effectiveness of certain gear and abilities. Design Lead John Sandwich with notes on their process.

Joe: Hello again, my friends! Hamrick here to answer some hot community questions we have seen and give you a quick glimpse into what Sandbox is working on for the rest of the year and on into 2019.  

While we have those hot questions coming right up, I just wanted to take a second to call out something you may have noticed. Instead of building up to one or two massive patches a year, we have transitioned to shipping smaller batches of changes much more frequently. We hope that this new approach will allow us to remain more agile than we have been in the past and allow us to shake up the meta a bit on more frequent intervals. We hope that a year from now we can all look back on this new way of working and agree that it was very successful. Alright, enough of my rambling, onward, to the questions!

Can you buff snipers? We would really like flinch to be reduced and to have more lower zoom scopes.
Snipers are definitely one of the archetypes we are actively looking at and making changes to.  For example, later in January, Rapid-fire snipers will be moving to a two-shot body kill. Additionally, we are considering allowing more snipers to be able to one-shot supers on headshots in a future patch.

Lower zoom scopes do exist in the game, but have not been particularly prevalent with post-Forsaken weapons and have been largely limited to a few weapons (ie., The Supremacy), but we'll be increasing the number of them in the game as we move forward.

We don't currently have plans to alter sniper flinch any more at this time, but we will continue to keep an eye on your feedback.

Nova Warp??????????????????????????????
Yup, the Nova Warp super is too dominant right now and we are planning to tweak it. It's currently slated to land with a patch coming in late January.

Spectral Blades hit detection feels much more consistent. Can sentinel and other melees get the same treatment?
We definitely want all melee supers to feel as good and reliable as possible. This is something we are still looking into.

A lot of the pre-forsaken subclasses feel underpowered now. Can they get buffed?
Yes! We have some planned buffs coming to older subclass paths in the patch currently slated for late January, but we are already looking ahead to what we'd like to do in patches further down the line. We will be regularly looking into tuning subclass content to ensure that there's a healthy balance of viable choices in all activities.  We use a combination of data and community feedback to track the right things to fix, so please continue to surface which choices feel the least viable to help guide us.

Any changes to the top exotics being used in the Crucible like One Eyed Mask, Shards of Galanor, etc.?
These exotics get talked about quite a bit and while I don't have any immediate incoming changes to share, I expect that they will be getting looked at in the future.

Telesto is currently besto. Can you tone it down or move it to the Power slot?
Late in January you will find that Telesto's bolts-to-kill will now match its charge rate, where it was previously doing more damage than other fusion rifles of its type. That said, due to it being affected less by damage falloff due to its explosive nature, it will still be more consistent than fusion rifles of the same charge rate. Worth noting, PvE damage will be increased to keep parity there.  Once we see how these changes land, we can decide if and what to do next.  The goal still being to buff where we can, but when we have to nerf, you're going to find us trying to inch down instead of going nuclear... at least as much as we can.

Scouts Rifles still feel weak in both PVP and PVE. Can they come up?
This is another archetype we are looking at and I would currently expect to see changes show up in future patches.

Could SMGs get a non-precision damage buff?
We just recently buffed the range on SMG's to make them more competitive. We'll be monitoring the data and feedback for a bit to help us decided where to take them next.  If we find that they still aren't good enough, we will be happy to buff them further.

Can Fusion Rifles get buffed? Maybe longer range or higher damage to combat shotguns?
This is another archetype we are looking at and I would currently expect to see changes show up in future patches. We did bring up the damage of Rapid Fire Fusion Rifles in 2.1.0 last week.

Any plans to adjust Wavesplitter?
It's not at the top of our list but we do intend to take a look at it. First we want to look at the global ammo economy for trace rifles in PvP, and then we can take a look at Wavesplitter's effectiveness.

Titan skating is rampant on PC. Do you plan to remove it?
We'd like to fix this, however, we're being careful about how we do so because it's so closely tied to the core feel of the Lift ability. In other words, we don't want a Titan skating fix to change the way the Lift ability feels for all players.  We'd love to have a simple fix to this issue we could roll out immediately, but this one is going to take us a while to land on something solid.

To recap, we want to roll out smaller batches of patches more frequently.  We want to bring things up whenever possible, but when we do need to bring something down, we are going to try and inch it down and into the correct location.  And finally, there is a patch coming, currently slated for late January, where we expect you to see some changes coming to things like Rapid-fire snipers, Telesto, Nova Warp and pre-Forsaken subclasses...  And we have much more planned for the months ahead.

Love you, always,
Hamrick

That's the Way the Cookie Crumbles

This morning, details about The Dawning hit the Bungie Blog. Our next seasonal event is starting up next week on December 11. We are excited to see you driving around on your new Sparrow, delivering your baked goods across the solar system.

You can read the full details on what to expect in this year's event in our Dawning 2018 article.

Eva's Little Helpers

Player support is tracking known issues and keeping you up to date when we deploy updates to address them.

This is their report.

Destiny 2 Update 2.1.1.1

This week we deployed Destiny 2 Update 2.1.1.1 to players. This update resolved issues causing crashes at the Morgeth encounter of the Last Wish raid, and reintroduced The Inverted Spire strike activity after it was disabled in Update 2.1.0 due to rather large bug.

For the full Update 2.1.1.1 patch notes, please click here.

Destiny 2 Update 2.1.2

Next Tuesday, December 11, Destiny 2 Update 2.1.2 is scheduled to go live.

While the timeline for this deployment has yet to be finalized, players should follow us at @BungieHelp on Twitter or monitor our support feed on help.bungie.net for the latest information as soon as it is available.

Upcoming Challenges

On Tuesday, the Black Armory officially opened its doors and the Volundr Forge was discovered in the EDZ. Tomorrow, the Gofannon Forge will become available, and the race for world's first will kick off in the Scourge of the Past raid.

For those among you who accept the challenge of becoming the world's first Fireteam to conquer the Scourge of the Past, set your alarms and prep your fireteams. Scourge of the Past will unlock in the EDZ map tomorrow (12/7) at 9 AM PST. Players waiting in Orbit who do not see this activity become available in their Director may need to log out and back in after 9 AM.

As always, players who encounter issues in newly-launched activities should report them to our #Help forums. Providing imagery or video footage which outlines a reported issue will assist the Destiny Player Support team in escalating investigations with the dev team.

Holiday Cheer

Next Tuesday the Dawning returns in Destiny 2. All players are invited to experience the Dawning who have completed the Red War campaign and unlocked access to the Tower.

The Dawning will conclude at the weekly reset on January 1, 2019. For the full support copy, players should visit: Destiny 2: The Dawning Guide

Destiny 2: Forsaken and Season of the Forge Known Issues

In addition to the items listed above, Destiny Player Support is tracking the latest issues reported by players on the #Help forum. Provided below is a brief overview of the latest known issues in Destiny 2: Forsaken and Season of the Forge.

• Blind Well Matchmaking: We are investigating reports regarding players entering empty instances of the Blind Well in the Dreaming City. While we are working on a fix, affected players should try entering the Blind Well slowly, hugging the right side staircase and hallway walls.
  
• Mars Flashpoint: We are investigating reports describing sometimes not receiving powerful gear from the Mars Flashpoint.
  
• Harbinger's Echo: We are investigating ongoing reports regarding the Harbinger's Echo exotic sparrow not being awarded as expected to players who have earned it after the deployment of Update 2.1.1.1.
  

For the latest known issues as soon as they are available, players should visit our Destiny 2 Known Issues and Vital Information knowledgebase article.

Hello There

You all continue to create great content every week. Movie of the Week is our chance to show off a few of our favorites. Here is what caught our eye this week. 

Movie of the Week: Paint it Black (Armory)

Honorable Mention: Royalty

Honorable Mention: Thundercrushed

The creators of both of these videos will be rewarded with the Lens of Fate emblem. If you are one of the winners, make sure you have the player names of who worked on the video in its description. 

Thanks for continuing to provide valuable feedback as we transition from a box product to a world that evolves and changes over time. We will continue to consider avenues to help you keep up with the evolutions. But also continue rolling out difficult activities to challenge the mettle of the bravest among you. 

We're all excited about raid day tomorrow. Be careful as you adventure into the Last City. May the best fireteam win.

<3 Cozmo