Bungie Reveals What’s Wrong With Cooldowns And Damage In ‘Destiny 2’

Yesterday, in both written and video form, I talked about a number of issues within Destiny 2 that are currently plaguing the game that simply make it feel…worse. It’s a bit hard to quantify, but everything just feels off. Damage, cooldowns, and well, it turns out there’s a reason for that. Both are bugged to one extent or another.

Bungie just laid out what’s going on in a series of tweets yesterday, both what’s being looked at and what specific fixes are coming in some instances. There are many bugs, audio bugs on PS5, sprint bugs, but the main two have to do with damage and cooldowns currently in Destiny 2.

We’ll start with cooldowns, as these have felt the weirdest to me so far. As it turns out, you need to invest more stats in them than previously stated by Bungie to get them back to pre-Edge of Fate levels. Here’s Bungie:

“We had previously stated that hitting 70 in an ability stat in the Edge of Fate was equivalent to pre-Edge of Fate values (for Discipline, Strength, each class’s ability regen stat, and Intellect), and that going above 70 stat would result in faster recharging than before. This isn’t currently true for the 70 stat mark but the 85 stat mark, and we intend to make it true for 70 stat in an upcoming patch.”

“Our design goal for the Edge of Fate stats is to let players be able to reach higher heights than previously possible in the game by investing heavier into specific stats, but also have interesting tradeoffs when making build crafting choices. Making 70 stat one of the big tradeoff points is important for our design goals and for meeting player expectations for buildcrafting in the Edge of Fate.”

What this means is that the original plan was to make hitting 70 stats the equivalent of the cooldowns you’d have at 100 stats pre-Edge of Fate, making going over that a bonus as you hit 100 in this era. However, the actual stats required is 85, meaning you’d need an extra 60 stats across super, class ability, grenade and melee to hit this mark.

The reason this is being lowered is because now Bungie wants you to invest points into going well over 100, so getting up to good-feeling levels on some of those cooldowns is harder than you’d think, despite the drop to 70. Another issue that I don’t really see addressed here is that if you’re under these marks, scaling goes way down for some of these. So the point is, if things feel especially bad, this is why.

Then, damage. This was a big topic during the raid race where players ran into extremely tough enemies in contest mode of the raid, especially the bosses which seemed to have dramatically more health than any other version of a race like this, making infamous “loadout swaps” essentially mandatory for completion, something Bungie previously said they did not encourage. The “answer” for what happened here is a bit more confusing:

“Power Deltas for the Contest Raid difficulty. We’re seeing reports of enemies being at a higher delta than what the activity advertises – ex: enemies have a skull icon next to them instead of a sword. We will investigate.”

“Each Raid we’ve shipped has been unique, especially at Contest difficulty. This will continue – and for our players who desire challenge, do not worry. We will continue to offer it. That said, we will use feedback from this weekend to inform our future as we continue to develop these experiences.”

This explanation is weird because they’re admitting that enemies were too high at “skull” difficulty, apparently by accident. But they also seem to suggest that they made bosses this hard on purpose. But if rank and file enemies are scaled too high, why would their accompanying bosses not be accidentally scaled too high as well?

This also does not address similar issues going on in raid and dungeon content besides Desert Perpetual. Players are loading into these old activities and finding bosses they used to 1 or 2 phase now taking 4, 5, 6 phases to kill using the exact same builds as before. It doesn’t make any sense, cannot be on purpose, and it is not addressed here by Bungie.

It’s all messed up. Some fixes are coming soon, some are coming later, but if you want the game to feel closer to how it used to before this launch, you might want to just wait a bit until the dust settles. Things are in a strange place right now.

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