Interview with the Developer ft Bungie Associate Weapons Designer Mercules
The Show Notes below are intended to provide a companion and reference guide to the full interview, and as much context as is possible has been provided. Bear in mind, however, that any changes not formally announced on Bungie.net are still subject to change.
Clarification on Recent TWABs
High Impact Auto Rifle Stability scale moved from 15-25 up to 25-35. “Super noticeable” in PVP.
Herod-C goes from 27 to 33
False Promises from 17-29
Age Old Bond from 18-30
Chrysura Melo from 13-25
Come to Pass from 14-26
Lightweight Bows are targeted toward two-tapping and finishing kills in a more aggressive playstyle than Precision bows.
More Exotic Armors are being looked at for integration with Glaive Melees.
When re-releasing Legendary weapons, they aim to keep iconic and popular combinations while adding 3-4 newer or more interesting perks per Trait column. This was not always the philosophy, but is their current view.
Gun and Run (replacement for Invader Tracker) will require multiple kills depending on enemy type; it will require two Guardian Kills.
The updated Skulking Wolf will trigger at 63hp regardless of Shield state and lasts for 10 seconds.
Zen Moment reduces maximum recoil angle, and its description now says that. Particle Repeater’s description now says it increases Stability, which is all that it has ever done.
Reminder that Overload cancels Restoration x2 (Lorely Splendor, Warlock healing burst and improved Healing grenades), and is now on Thunderlord and Le Monarque.
Malfeasance has 63 Airborne Effectiveness by default which means that it has no in-air Accuracy penalty.
Legend of Acrius with Trench Barrel does a LOT of damage in PVE.
They have a list of underperforming exotics that they will continue to revisit over time.
They aim to keep stat profiles the same when reprising weapons unless it’s wildly out-of-band.
Fighting Lion’s usage is low enough that they don’t think this damage buff is going to cause issues in Crucible.
Lord of Wolves
Remember that this is Part 1, intended to nerf it in PVP without really affecting PVE.
They are aiming to make it good in PVE but not super strong in PVP.
In Part 2, they are aiming for Release the Wolves to fire full auto, and reduce the current accuracy penalties, as well adding more bonus damage when the alternate fire is activated.
Bungie is attempting to increase their transparency in sharing future facing changes that they are confident in. You don’t have to like everyone, but please remain respectful to devs when giving feedback.
Dead Man’s Tale is intended to be having a lateral move rather than a buff or nerf. Stacks of Cranial Spike will grant 8 points of Range, 4 points of Aim Assist, and a 3% Reload Speed scalar. At max stacks, the damage penalty is intended to prevent it from reliably 3 tapping, meaning the 180RPM TtK against high resilience should be around 1 second. We will have to see how it plays and they may touch it again in the near future.
The developer for Collective Obligation has been out of office, so we were unable to get more details, but the goal was to provide very high uptime in PVE. It should feel much stronger now.
Damage Reduction Changes - Whisper of Chains will be 5% in PVP (we incorrectly said 7.5% during the show). Omnioculus will be 10%. Omni should no longer be able to take special ammo and less effect on Primary TtK.
They are aiming to give pellet Shotguns fixed spreads. This change is very complicated and still in testing, but will go live if it doesn’t break anything. If it causes other issues, they will give them just less random spreads instead.
For Bow blinting, they are looking at a small nerf to Stow speed (.1s slower at base). This would not affect Handling as a whole. Because of the way this strategy shortcuts normal TtK and primary fights, it is considered to be too strong.
The Full Auto accessibility setting will launch in Season 19. It will be a toggle setting that applies to all weapons. There are future iterations with more finetuning and granularity options, but they can’t provide details or timelines on that right now. In previous commentary, Bungie has indicated they will be giving a tuning pass to Exotics that might be adversely affected by this change.
Out of band effectiveness for Pulse Rifles, Scout Rifles, and Precision Fusion rifles will be looked at. Any changes will be small for now, and they will re-evaluate after other planned changes are in place. Currently they are testing different changes on a weekly to daily basis.
Bungie developers playtest 1.5 to 4 hours a day. However, the community plays more in 15 minutes than all Bungie employees combined playing 4 hours a day all year.
They view High Impact Scouts as being a bit too strong right now because the 2c1b kill is easier for people to hit than expected. However, they want them to keep their increased body damage and non-optimal forgiveness.
Glaive hit registration issues are essentially due to networking issues. There is a fix worked out and they should be fixed by Season 19. Generally they do non-risky and simple changes during the mid-Season patches, and more complicated or risky changes at the beginning of a Season.
The game tries to prioritize the shooter’s game state when determining where the target is, which is why you sometimes get hit when you thought you were behind cover.
No info on Enhanced Perk reworks at this time.
The Spec Mod changes are rolling the Rampage, Dragonfly, and Surrounded Specs into the perks (a flat buff to these perks). Rampage will last 4.5s, Dragonfly will deal 50% more damage in a 50% bigger radius, and Surrounded will deal 10% more damage and linger for 1.5s.
Feeling on Solstice Weapon buffs: It’s still fairly early and they are continuing to assess the effects of these changes. They feel confident that 180 Hand Cannons and Scouts are close to where they want them; if anything, slightly under. They do not want them to be meta choices, but do want them to feel good. ARs across the board are a little under where they would like them to be - more on that later. High Impact Scouts are probably a bit too hot right now. They are looking at requiring 3c for kills again. Freelance Trials on Eternity highlighted their strength significantly, although they obviously have limited use cases.
Lorentz Driver did NOT receive a Flinch buff in PVP. There was some confusion over the wording in the patch notes, but they have verified that flinch is working as intended with no decrease to it on Lorentz Driver. The issues with flinch in Linear Fusion Rifles are universal to the class of weapon, not LD, although LD being a Special Weapon gives it more uptime. Arbalest shares the same issues.
They are currently working on a change to increase the effect of Flinch on Sniper Rifles. If it works out, they may expand this change to other weapon types that share the same characteristics, such as Linear Fusion Rifles. However, there is a lot of work to be done there, and they are making no promises.
Linking an identifiable sound to a frustrating weapon is something they are wary of as it can trigger very negative emotional responses.
COMMUNITY QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Airborne Effectiveness
The main complaints they see now are “that would have been a headshot on the ground, but it wasn’t”. Accuracy in-air is higher now than ever in Destiny’s history. Not perfect at 0AE because they don’t want to give perfect in-air accuracy with no investment, but it’s easy to get better than S16 Icarus accuracy on many primaries. See below.
Example:
All info below is based on a Hand Cannon with 100 Range and 100 Aim Assist; these numbers vary by weapon type, but the scale of effects is similar for all Primaries.
Accuracy Cone is .3 degrees
Aim Assist Cone is 3 degrees
The AA cone starts 10x bigger than the accuracy cone, which makes shots very forgiving on the ground. When you are airborne, the AA cone shrinks massively. Previously, the penalty was so large that it bottomed out the aim assist cone until 70+ AE. They made the penalty smaller, so Aim Assist now kicks in much sooner, around 30-40AE.
Accuracy penalties are added to the Accuracy cone to make it bigger, making your shots more random. (Aim Assist retargets the accuracy cone toward enemies within it before you shoot, then your shot happens inside the accuracy cone, essentially randomly).
In Season 16, the in-air accuracy penalty was .67 degrees. Now, it is .3 degrees, meaning the Accuracy penalty is less than half what it used to be even at 0AE.
In Season 16, Icarus on a Hand Cannon have an in-air Accuracy penalty of .17 degrees.
At 20AE, your Accuracy penalty is .24 degrees.
At 40AE, the Accuracy penalty is .12 degrees.
At 60AE, the Accuracy penalty is 0.
In summation, in-air Accuracy is now higher than ever before with fairly low investment. As a trade-off, Aim Assist in-air is much reduced to avoid a situation where everyone is airborne all the time as they feel the game plays badly in that state.
Differences between Mouse and Keyboard and Controller inputs in Destiny 2:
They feel both inputs have different strengths and weaknesses and are fairly well balanced.
Controllers have Magnetism / Reticle Friction, which slows the reticle when near or on an enemy and causes it to “stick” to them, or follow them slightly when they move across it or out of it. Without this, shooters are extremely difficult to play on Controller.
MnK has 3 scalars, all approximations: +20% Accuracy, +20% Stability (affecting Recoil and Aim Assist Decay specifically), and +10-20% Aim Assist (Auto Aim only) depending on the weapon type.
These differences have been in the game from the beginning and are considered inherent to its feel.
When will we see more Perks and Mods for AE? Season 19 most likely. The trade-off is generally considered to be that you are choosing it instead of something else. They are considering giving Air Assault another look, especially because the activator is super unpopular.
600rpm SMGs are not being looked at for changes in the live sandbox. In internal playtests for future seasons, other SMGs (Lightweights and Aggressives) are pretty strong due to the slight decrease in strength of longer range weapons, and they would be more likely to rein them in rather than bring 600rpms up; a small reduction in range is possible in the future. Additionally, any changes to Precision SMGs would require them specifically addressing Shayura’s Wrath. At this time there are no immediate plans to make any changes to SMGs.
Sweet Business doesn’t have any changes planned at this time, but it could potentially get some kind of fun buff in a future Catalyst balance pass.
Will Auto Rifles get a niche in competitive PVP where they are not overshadowed by Hand Cannons, Pulse Rifles, or Submachine Guns? No, probably not. They have a lot of inherent downsides compared to all of those weapon types, and they are already one of the most popular weapons for new and lower-skilled players due to their ease of use. That said, they are looking at a pass on making Auto Rifles even easier to use or improving the general gun-feel. Additionally, there are other small changes being looked at on Scout Rifles and Pulse Rifles, and maybe even SMGs (in a season or two if they start looking too strong) which may make Auto Rifles feel a bit stronger than they do currently.
Can Lumina’s catalyst let you remote-rez an ally? They probably don’t even have the tech to make that happen, and even if they did it would be a very large amount of work, and possibly game-breaking.
No buffs or nerfs are currently planned for any Hand Cannon families.
Bungie sees Sidearms as being pretty close to the right place, especially on Controller. They are looking at extending Auto Aim dropoff, which would be helpful especially on MnK. They are hesitant to increase Sidearm lethality as it could easily make them much too strong. Drang is considered to be a very strong choice; any overarching changes to the weapon class would involve bringing all other Sidearms closer to Drang (but not to its level), and possibly bringing Drang slightly down closer to the rest.
Divinity is on the Weapons Team’s radar, but they have no current concrete plans to change it.
Did Bungie go too far on Rapid Fire Fusions? They don’t think so - they don’t want them to be the optimal meta choice, and this is what they felt they had to do to keep them from being too strong. They may get another look after more Special Weapon changes are in place, such as fixed spread patterns for Shotguns. If you find Precision Fusion Rifles annoying, imagine a meta dominated by Rapid-Fires.
They are probably going to kill the Aggressive Frame Fusion Rifle family. It was a neat experiment, but didn’t really work - however, they may have something new coming in the future that learns from its lessons.
Snipers are very strong in PVP at high levels, and not so good at low levels, how does Bungie feel about them? They will always be mediocre at low skill levels because they are precision weapons. They will never do descoping because it would destroy them in PVE. The team does not feel body damage on Snipers is an issue at present, nor are they concerned about Blinting with them. Blinting on a bow massively accelerates the TtK, but doing the same with a Sniper is actually slower than what it could have accomplished with a crit. They don’t plan on any other changes to them until they are able to go live with increased Flinch penalties.
Snipers in PVE aren’t particularly strong right now, will they get a buff there? They prefer to shy away from high damage / infinite range weapons in PVE because it makes the optimal solution to many encounters hiding in the back and sniping, which makes encounter design unnecessarily difficult. They would rather prioritize closer range / higher risk weapons, and let snipers be a safe but suboptimal choice. A buff over the long term is not out of the cards though.
Arbalest is a default choice for Shield breaking and Barrior champions in endgame PVE - will it get nerfed? At present, they would rather give us more choices than bring it down, which they have already started doing with the Exotic buffs.
Queenbreakers Bow is very weak; can it be buffed, overhauled, or made Special? Bungie: Do we really want another Special Linear Fusion Rifle? No. However, it is on the list of underperforming exotics and may get a pass in the coming seasons (nothing concrete).
Gjallarhorn is very strong in PVE - will Bungie do anything about it? At present, they have no plans to nerf it. Enjoy its strength!
We will definitely see more 3.0 verb interactions in the future, but they’re not going to tell us what is coming yet. Exotics that really feel like their element are the ones most likely to get these verb interactions.
What about Riskrunner? It will be a problem child in the next season. They have an eye on it and an itchy trigger finger.
Will more perks be updated to reference Airborne Effectiveness? More changes to this system are coming in Season 19. While they are always looking at old perks that may not be up to snuff, they prefer to focus on making new perks instead.
Moving Target does NOT affect Aim Assist when you’re not aiming down sights (ADS).
Kinetic Weapons currently deal 5% extra damage to unshielded combatants in PVE, but Bungie does agree that they currently feel that they are falling behind energy weapons, including Stasis weapons. They are thinking about how to make them feel exciting again, but cannot share anything.
Various Development Process Insights:
They do consider energy type balance when releasing new weapons, and try to fill holes when a specific weapon type and damage type combo doesn’t exist.
When reissuing weapons, the current philosophy is to keep the best perks or combos and bring in 3-4 new perks per Trait column that add something fun or weren’t available before.
The general consensus is that the old Sandbox philosophy was to make things cyclical, intentionally over buffing and over nerfing things. The current philosophy is to keep things more static and make smaller, more numerous changes that are easier for players to digest and less likely to completely obliterate something, or make something suddenly very strong.
Bungie’s approach to balancing weapons: They hand-tune each Exotic as an individual item. For new individual weapons, they start by determining the overall niche they want to target, and then look at how any pain points for the weapon type can be adjusted to make it fit that fantasy more specifically. For archetypes, they tend to look for the specific root cause of what is making it too strong or weak, and try to target those stats or mechanics specifically. In general, they prioritize bringing down overpowered weapons before buffing underpowered weapons.
They consider usage, a variety of internal data metrics player feedback, playtest feedback, their own experiences, and “net fun”, which is essentially a measure of how much subjective fun a player using a weapon has versus how subjectively unfun it is to play against. For example, people hate fighting Lord of Wolves and don’t really enjoy using it that much either, which is why it’s getting a rework. That said, usage is a valuable factor and often a good reason to look more closely at whether something needs a change.
How is Range balanced against Time-to-Kill in Destiny 2? For example, High Impact Pulse Rifles can optimally kill faster than SMGs, and also have much more range and zoom. Bungie is looking at possibly reducing the effects of zoom on recoil; however, higher zoom also makes guns feel unwieldy in close up fights. Also, while SMGs require movement and positioning to get up close, long range weapons also require good positioning to exert map control. HI Pulses have a fast TtK because it’s supposed to be hard to hit. They can’t kill in less than 2 bursts because it would make them really bad, and changing base RoF to slow them down is actually a massive undertaking which the team sees as a last resort. All of that being said, they are looking at high impact pulses because they do seem to be a bit easier to use than intended.
They don’t reissue “themed” weapon models without narrative approval. For generic weapons, anything older than Shadowkeep is much more difficult to work with than newer models, so they would rather rebuild a model from scratch than use a very old one.
Will Monte Carlo get a Glaive melee? No comment (wink wink).
Why are precision damage modifiers not round numbers? They actually are, but some weird display issues in the game cause them to appear otherwise. For example, 40.000 displays as 41 damage. It’s frustrating for them, too.
The Weapons team works 2 seasons in advance, and they are the least far ahead of almost any team in the company. Balance changes can be made up until the last minute, though only small changes are put in close to the deadline. Narrative and other teams are working much further ahead.
Old Raids and Dungeons still drop old perk pools and have no origin traits. Bungie is going to be updating perk pools and adding Origin traits, a la Dares of Eternity. They cannot share the Dares of Eternity Origin Trait at this time.
Will Crafted weapons ever get selectable / multiple perks in their columns? They are investigating this, but it is MUCH more difficult to do than they would like, and they have no firm plans at this time.
Warmind Cells and Charged With Light are both a bit on the backburner, and Elemental Wells are now the new PVE hotness (again). Will they get a change, or are they sunset? This isn’t Weapon’s area, but there are changes coming to the Combat Style systems in Lightfall.
Mercules has a favorite weapon that he directly worked on, but cannot tell us about it. That said, he thinks we’ll be able to guess what he did when it goes live.
Mercules worked on the Lord of Wolves and Omnioculus changes, but was very excited to share the future looking items and hopes that people see this as Bungie being transparent and realize that many of these changes are still in flux. Again, please be respectful when providing feedback.
On first joining Bungie, Mercules built himself a new, perfectly accurate weapon stats spreadsheet with the exact damage numbers. He also did a deepdive on aim assist, networking, hit detection and hit registration to get as much understanding as he could. The biggest change to his views has been that development is much harder than he thought (and he already knew it wasn’t easy). The reason that “just do this” suggestions often aren’t helpful is that while they’re probably already thought of it, it’s probably more complicated than you think, or they’ve tested it and it actually doesn’t play as well as you think it would.