destiny 2 Exotic Trace Rifle Divinity has been the backbone of many players’ endgame content arsenals since its inception back in Shadow Fortress Expansion in 2019. Yesterday Bungie finally announced a long-awaited nerf to how powerful it is, and while many are welcoming the change, it’s also reignited a months-long controversy originally sparked by one of the game’s top players.
There are two things that make Divinity a ridiculously useful tool to the destiny 2The most challenging content of like raids. First, it weakens enemies by 30 percent and lets players deal a ton of extra damage over a longer period of time. Second, it expands the critical hit target area, making it easy for an entire team to land higher-damage shots even when their aim isn’t exactly right. As a result, Divinity is Exotic’s top choice for most activities, and even players who haven’t yet obtained the rare weapon have likely benefited from someone else on the team using it.
So it’s not surprising that Bungie decided that a Divinity recall was overdue. “We’ve been involved with Divinity for a while now, and over the past few months have been testing a variety of changes in Season 19 that have landed us in the process of reducing Divinity’s debuff from 30% to 15%.” destiny 2‘s weapons team wrote previewed a number of upcoming balance changes in a blog post yesterday. Here is the developer’s expanded rationale for the decision:
We do not believe that the divine in its current form is actually a balance issue, ie it is not necessarily too strong in isolation. However, Divinity is incredibly dominant in endgame PvE because it trivializes precision weapon aiming and has an extremely high uptime to weaken. The main issue is that Divinity, which grants 30% debuff, sucks the air out of all other debuff sources (like Tether and Tractor Cannon) and we don’t want to sneak past Divinity to make it interesting.
TL;DR: Bungie wants players to take advantage of this destiny 2‘s full suite of weapons and abilities. Divinity crowded out other support abilities and gear that do similar things, so Bungie reduced its effectiveness to bring those other tools – like the Hunter’s Tether and the Tractor Cannon Exotic – back into play. Like every big decision in determination 2, however, causes no small outrage in certain parts of the community.
The controversy stems from a now infamous Twitter thread by a player named Saltagreppo, whose raid team is a three-time world champion (i.e. even among the destiny 2‘s top player he is in a class of his own). “The weapon is basically mandatory for most boss encounters and makes aiming a side factor, which is very unhealthy for the game for a number of reasons,” he said wrote on September 8th. Saltagreppo went on to say that the weapon undermined the ability gap in endgame content, then offered potential solutions, e.g. B. the ability to let players choose between higher damage or easier critical hits. “The whole point is that div shouldn’t be both the best and the easiest option,” he wrote.
The thread did not sit well with some players who felt it focused too much on the unique concerns of a very small percentage of elite players. You are not “bored” with Divinity. In fact, they really like how it quickly takes care of certain raid bosses that might otherwise end a night’s work in frustration. An eternal inner tension destiny 2 is that some players like to feel super powerful, take advantage of broken builds and bang on the latest loot exploit. Others don’t. Especially those who enjoy participating in raid races and PVP modes like Trials of Osiris. A longstanding suspicion in the former group is that Bungie spends too much time catering destiny 2‘s top players and content creators who play dozens of hours a week.
So as soon as Bungie has announced the nerf, that’s clear a pretty mild oneit seemed to be proof to some players that Saltagreppo had ruined the party for everyone else. However, the studio clarified that this change was planned well ahead of the debate on Twitter. “The div change was planned before lively debates began on social media,” destiny 2Community lead by tweeted yesterday. “It’s okay to give Bungie your constructive feedback, but don’t harass anyone in the community for having a different opinion.”
On Reddit, player shared clips from previous podcasts where the developers mentioned that the issues with Divinity were already on their radar, although they weren’t ready to announce any concrete changes. But that didn’t stop some from still trying to blame Saltagreppo for the nerf or just being a signifier of destiny 2is 1 percent in what is arguably a ongoing restrained class struggle between different parts of the community. Of course, if you even have Divinity, let alone post about it on a message board, you’re already a part of it destiny 2‘s Elite. The weapon remains one of the more complicated Exotics to acquire, with multiple quest steps including finding hidden rooms in the Raid Garden of Salvation itself. And even if that buff comes later this year in Season 19, it’s still going to be worth getting. It just won’t be as overwhelming as it has been for the past three years.
