After teasing it in some of the final blogs posted in 2022, the Destiny 2 team at Bungie has finally revealed the specifics of how it plans to address the community frustrations around the airborne effectiveness stat introduced in season 17.
In today’s This Week At Bungie blog, the sandbox team broke down where the airborne effectiveness system had succeeded and failed in its intended goals. According to them, the cost to player fun was simply “too high” to justify meeting those goals and Primary weapons will be getting updated to require zero investment in airborne effectiveness to feel just as strong in the air as they did prior to the system’s introduction.
Players will also be getting their hands on the changes sooner than expected. Instead of waiting until Lightfall, Bungie will be putting the changes out when the midseason patch goes live on Jan. 24.
“We introduced the airborne effectiveness (AE) system in Season 17 to give us levers to balance weapon effectiveness while airborne in a consistent and comprehensive way,” the sandbox team said. “We did this in preparation for a sandbox that’s introducing more airborne gameplay options, particularly with the Strand subclasses in Lightfall.”
According to Bungie, there were two primary reasons for this system to exist as it did: balancing increasing airborne movement options against their combat effectiveness and limiting how oppressive airborne players could be in a game with no skill-based matchmaking.
With skill-based matchmaking now a functioning part of the Crucible ecosystem in Destiny 2, the second point has become irrelevant. The first remains true for Bungie, but achieving its goal didn’t make up for the fact that “the cost in player fun was too high.”
The devs had been playtesting changes set to hit with the Lightfall expansion next month, but instead found themselves confident enough to release them ahead of schedule with the midseason balance patch on Tuesday, Jan. 24.
“With this update, you can expect a Primary weapon with no investment (i.e., at the default AE stat of the weapon) to be as accurate (i.e., shoot just as straight) as a Primary weapon with the Icarus Grip mod equipped did before the introduction of AE,” Bungie said. “The auto aim angle is also significantly improved, and the magnetism penalty has been eliminated.”
Hitting headshots on an opponent is still designed to be tougher than it is when grounded even with these changes, but Primary weapons will now behave almost identically in every other area when taking to the skies. It’s a major change to the system that hits at exactly what players were hoping for, eliminating the drastic penalties handed out to accuracy after even half a second of airtime.
“We still don’t want it to be too easy to build into AE with Special weapons,” the devs added, stressing that the majority of changes coming to the system would only impact one category of weapons. “But we believe we have space to reduce the penalties on Shotguns and Sniper Rifles.”
These are the specifics of how it all shakes out in the numbers:
Primary weapons
Aim assist
- Reduced all additional Primary weapon auto-aim (bullet bend) penalties by about 60 percent at zero AE for both mouse and keyboard and controller.
- Increased the precision angle (how far off a headshot you can be and still have auto-aim give you the headshot instead of a body shot) by 50 percent at 100 AE. Changed the curve to be exponential, so you’ll get more benefit at high AE for mouse and keyboard and controller.
- Removed all additional Primary weapon magnetism penalties, and at 60 to 100 AE you get a magnetism bonus compared to pre-AE for controller only.
Airborne accuracy penalties
- Hand cannon and sidearm airborne accuracy penalties have been reduced by 60 percent.
- Auto rifle, scout rifle, pulse rifle, and submachine gun penalties have been reduced by 20 percent.
- Bow airborne accuracy penalties have been reduced by 30 percent.
Special weapons
Sniper rifles and Slug shotguns
- The base airborne accuracy penalty has been reduced by 50 percent.
Pellet shotguns
- The airborne accuracy penalty has been fully removed.
As said previously, these are all balance changes that will hit Destiny 2 next week. How it will shake up the meta in PvP remains to be seen, but the pulse rifle dominance that has settled into the Crucible ever since airborne gunplay became unattainable for most players could be dethroned with a few adjustments needed to the pulse rifles themselves.
Bungie believes this as well, refraining from nerfing pulse rifles too heavily until it sees how the sandbox shakes out with the new airborne effectiveness changes, as well as the Crucible map rotation featured in Lightfall.
Destiny 2’s midseason balance patch for Season of the Seraph launches on Jan. 24, bringing these changes to the game alongside a nerf to ability cooldowns and multiple Exotic weapons currently sitting at the top of the food chain.
