It's a doozy.
https://www.bungie.net/en/News/Article/48188

Enemy level scaling changes:

• Combatants that are 10–40 levels higher take less time to kill and deal less damage
  
• Higher-level combatants continue to increase in difficulty up to 100 Power levels above the player
  
• When enemies are 100 Power levels or higher above the player, they are immune to damage
  
• These changes affect only higher-level combatants; the at-level or over-level experience remains unchanged

Leveling changes:

All non-powerful rewards now drop 3 to 0 points below your highest equippable Power level, up from 15 to 20 below

Soft cap is 900, Powerful Cap is 950, Pinnacle Cap is 960, Artifact can level you above that.

Prime engrams drop more frequently, but are now +3 instead of +4-7

(Important note for leveling--Crucible, Gambit, and Vanguard Bounties that are completed but not turned in will reset on 9/30 during maintenance. No saving those bounties for Ikora's engram on day one. Other bounties are unaffected.)

Economy Changes:

Bright Dust now comes from Vanguard, Crucible, and Gambit weekly bounties which are repeatable.

No more Eververse Engrams on level up--the new Nostalgic Engram is sprinkled into the seasonal reward track, and every 5 levels after hitting 100.

Glimmer cap is 250,000. Glimmer from killing enemies is reduced, glimmer from other sources (chests, public events, etc.) significantly increased.

Spider's exchange rates have been adjusted.

Patch Notes Preview:

Shattered Throne is always available now.

Rally Flags added to old Leviathan raids.

Black Armory Forges now launched from a playlist in the EDZ section of the Director. Failing to complete a Forge no longer awards planetary materials. ):

Borealis and Hard Light element change now follows the Prism rotation.

Pinnacle Weapons are now Ritual Weapons (and some perk changes)

Pinnacle Weapons are gone. The new ones are called Ritual Weapons and will no longer have one-off perks, but will instead just be curated rolls.

It's worth reading the whole thing, but it boils down to the Pinnacle Weapons are too powerful (looking at you Recluse!). They also didn't like the way it affected how folks had to engage with PvP to get amazing PvE weapons.

They also reduced the effectiveness of Rampage, Kill Clip, Swashbuckler, Multikill Clip, Desperado, Surrounded, Master of Arms, and Onslaught in PvE.

Legendary weapons have become too powerful overall. In many cases, they even outclass Exotic Primary weapons, so we’re walking them all back a bit. All the way back in original Destiny, we had a perk named Crowd Control, which was Rampage’s predecessor. Crowd Control capped out at a bonus of +15% extra damage. At this point in Destiny 2, Rampage caps out at about +67%. That’s a 447% increase from the original iteration. Legendary damage perks have become so powerful, they simply invalidate non-damage related perks.

And updated calendar for the season:

- No text -

Black Armory Forges now launched from a playlist in the EDZ section of the Director. Failing to complete a Forge no longer awards planetary materials. ):

For the best. The flat increase of player power and gear to 750 already signaled the end of the viability of the forge exploit. But it was now possible if you weren’t in a three person fire team to troll other players who were trying to play seriously. This puts a stake through the heart of the problem.

Black Armory Forges now launched from a playlist in the EDZ section of the Director. Failing to complete a Forge no longer awards planetary materials. ):

For the best. The flat increase of player power and gear to 750 already signaled the end of the viability of the forge exploit. But it was now possible if you weren’t in a three person fire team to troll other players who were trying to play seriously. This puts a stake through the heart of the problem.

But... but... it means I'm not gonna see Bluerunner in a forge all night every night on the Clan page of Braytech! A touchstone, gone!

I’m out of town this weekend. I’m definitely starting up a Forge before I leave. (:

I turned in about 8000 planetary materials yesterday. Turned into about 2,000 Legendary Shards, almost 20 Masterwork cores, and around 15 mod components. I’ve been hitting up the Spider turning shards into other planetary materials. Currently sitting at about 1500 of each with about that amount of legendary shards still.

Some might hate it, but it was a great way for me to catch up on materials.

I’m out of town this weekend. I’m definitely starting up a Forge before I leave. (:

Same. I was hoping to finish up Borderlands 3 and REALLY wanted to spend some time trying push my CPU overclock a bit more to squeeze a few more frames out of D2 on Tuesday, but I guess I'll take a few thousand more dusklight shards as a consolation prize :p

-Disciple

I'm heading off to hike this weekend, but keep an eye on my guy. He's working hard in the forge.

A ton of quality of life changes that have been asked for a long time but
they just totally killed Breakneck and Redrix in PvE.

Redrix now changes from a high impact pulse into a low impact pulse when desperado is active.

Breakneck not only gets hit by the damage nerfs to rampage and onslaught, but now the way onslaught works is it changes the archetype with each damage stack from a 450 rpm to 600 to 720..... so wouldn't any 720 auto rifle with rampage be just as good.

Also real skeptical about the new Ritual weapons considering Bungie's track record with some of the past curated roll weapons.

A ton of quality of life changes that have been asked for a long time but
they just totally killed Breakneck and Redrix in PvE.

Desperado WAS pretty crazy in PvE. But was it the best? No… and the whole point of the perk was that you got max firing speed without sacrificing impact…

The first was that the band in which “pinnacle” perk can exist is actually quite small, and most of them far exceeded the efficacy they should have been at. Another issue is that they cause problems in the player ecosystem, particularly in the case of the Crucible pinnacle weapons. Due to the nature of PvP and PvE, anything that works well in PvP is likely going be extremely effective in PvE as well. This forces players into the Crucible if they want the “best” loadouts. Even the title of “pinnacle” set a variety of unrealistic expectations. Rather than being the absolute height of Legendary power, they were supposed to be interesting novelties to chase.

DUHHHHHHH :-p

I felt like Desperado was actually okay though, since in PvP it was kind of checked for the most part, and in PvE the monsters aren't going to get frustrated at you.

Legendary damage perks have become so powerful, they simply invalidate non-damage related perks.

Because damage increasing perks are always going to be the most valuable given the nature of the game. Maybe they could try boosting the effects of the non damage perks?

I'm heading off to hike this weekend, but keep an eye on my guy. He's working hard in the forge.

I'm in there with him, right now.

You can’t just boost the effectiveness of non-damage perks to get actual viability when the damage increasing perks are basically wholeheartedly broken. It was a mistake in the first place to buff them any time they did rather than improving overall weapon performance. But since the changes are PvE only it just means that a large part of the user base will still not care about perks other than damage boosters.

Has anywhere actually confirmed that the impact change is as described for Desperado/Onslaught, or is the actual impact change conjecture?

You can’t just boost the effectiveness of non-damage perks to get actual viability when the damage increasing perks are basically wholeheartedly broken. It was a mistake in the first place to buff them any time they did rather than improving overall weapon performance. But since the changes are PvE only it just means that a large part of the user base will still not care about perks other than damage boosters.

Oh I agree. But when you nerf the damage perks enough they basically don’t do anything. I think perks that straight up improve any aspect of a weapons stats are bad perks.

It's a doozy.
https://www.bungie.net/en/News/Article/48188

In Season of the Undying, pinnacle weapons will become ritual weapons. They will no longer have special perks and will instead be curated rolls. A previous article incorrectly showed two new pinnacle weapons. The good news is you will be getting three ritual weapons for each of the ritual activities: Crucible, Vanguard, and Gambit. Here’s the Destiny Dev Team on why we made this difficult decision and some information on upcoming perk changes.

Destiny Dev Team: The decision to stop creating extremely powerful pinnacle weapons was made for a variety of reasons. The first was that the band in which “pinnacle” perk can exist is actually quite small, and most of them far exceeded the efficacy they should have been at. Another issue is that they cause problems in the player ecosystem, particularly in the case of the Crucible pinnacle weapons. Due to the nature of PvP and PvE, anything that works well in PvP is likely going be extremely effective in PvE as well. This forces players into the Crucible if they want the “best” loadouts. Even the title of “pinnacle” set a variety of unrealistic expectations. Rather than being the absolute height of Legendary power, they were supposed to be interesting novelties to chase.

These problems became more pronounced the more of them we produced. In the end, we decided to move away from pinnacle weapons.

Could this be the decision that saw multiple long-time Crucible Lead(s) leave the company?

It makes me so sad each and every time a long-time employee leaves the company. On the one hand I'm happy for them personally to move on and expand their horizons, try something new. On the other hand it is devastating to lose their talent/creativity/voice, as part of the ever changing thing that makes up what Bungie was/is/will become.

I would highly, highly doubt that the choice to not further break the game with weapons that did not follow design objectives would be the sort of choice to have them leaving. The more mundane explanations are more believable.