Slowly but surely, Bungie are walking their game back from the brink. Positive sounding changes promised at the end of 2017 and earlier this month are finally starting to make themselves felt, with next week seeing some big improvements to how rewards are handled in the Iron Banner and Raid events.
Running from 30th January to 6th February and featuring the Control game type, the Iron Banner will now let you directly purchase the event specific armour, armour ornaments and three of the weapons available in Season Two. The rest will be available as usual from increasing reputation via tokens and completing challenges. Thankfully, there’s no limit to how many engrams you can earn.
Armor Masterworks are also being added to the game next week, letting you rework the stats on your armour with the following clearly explained benefits:
- Each armor piece grants 3% damage resistance while using a Super
- This stacks for a 15% damage reduction if you have a full set of Masterwork Armor
- Masterworks armor can be reworked to a different stat package (Heavy, Light, or Restorative) for one Masterwork core and 10 Legendary Shards
Look! Percentages! No more guesswork and community reverse engineering to understand what Bungie are trying to do!
Oh, and Bungie have even pre-acknowledged a bug: “There is a UI bug right now where if you try to quickly rework Armor sets it will appear to rework to the same stats. It doesn’t actually perform the rework function or use your materials, but can be quite scary, so we wanted to give you a heads up.”
One of the most disappointing aspects of Destiny 2 was how irrelevant it felt to be running the Raid and doing so on higher difficulties when you’re not directly earning Raid gear and they don’t fold back into the Raid as they did in the first game. From next week you can get Raid armour with Raid perks in the form of mods to armour drops. Those mods can even be reused, so if you want to take a boost to Solar ability damage while raiding and apply it to another piece of Raid armour, you can.
You’ll also get you weekly allowance of both normal and Prestige drops just from completing the raid on Prestige difficulty now, and Raid encounters will always drop a Raid piece and any exotics dropped will be the actual gear and not an engram. If you’ve not got the full set, you can save up your Shards and Calus Tokens to simply buy them from the Raid vendor. The one exception to all of this is the new Contender’s Shell for the Ghost, which can only drop from the final encounter.
Patch 1.1.2 will also fix the following issues:
- Prometheus Lens
- Flame Refraction perk now generates ammo instead of pulling from reserves
- Increased base damage
- Fixed an issue where new characters created after the release of Curse of Osiris were not receiving the Flashpoint milestone
- Players in social spaces, like the Tower, receive a notification when their Lost and Found at the Postmaster is full
- Heroic strike completions now have a greater chance of granting Exotic rewards
- Mercury challenges are now available during adventures
- Fixed an issue where Curse of Osiris strikes were not properly granting Clan Engrams when featured as a Nightfall activity
- Fixed an issue where Challenges were not appearing within Quickplay
- Increased the dismantle timer for Masterwork Cores
Finally, Bungie have addressed and acknowledged work that is ongoing with the shaders system in the game, where they’ve become almost impossible to manage in a sensible fashion. While the current single use system looks like it will remain, they’re going to try and restore the old Destiny system alongside it in some capacity.
So, a good looking update overall and one that’s long, long overdue. Sadly, it might be a case of being too little, too late for a lot of people.
Source: Bungie
