Destiny 2: Season 19 Will See Dozens Of Exotic Weapons Buffs And Nerfs

With Season 19 around the corner, Bungie has shared more details on how several of its Exotic weapons will be tweaked for the next period of activity. Bungie identified a number of weapons to apply amplified traits to, with a specific subset of Exotic weapons receiving a buff to the Fundamentals perk. Borealis, Hard Light, and Dead Messenger, which feature the ability to cycle through different elements, will each receive increased handling, range, stability, and aim assist stats depending on which element is currently active.

Borealis, a sniper rifle that also falls into that category of Exotic weapons, will receive a more substantial buff that will make it even more powerful Breaking a matched enemy shield will refill the magazine from reserves and allows for your next five shots to deal bonus damage. Jade Rabbit, one of the more popular scout rifles, is also getting a big redesign. Bungie says that landing three critical hits will return a round to the magazine and increase the damage of the next body shot, and players will be able to stack up to three of these enhanced rounds.

While the Exotics above are getting some great buffs, a few other weapons are getting nerfs as well. The Divinity trace rifle is one controversial weapon that will see some of its power dialed back and will see its Weaken debuff effect reduced from 30% to 15%. Witherhoard has been one of the most popular grenade launchers due to its ability to deal high damage quickly, so for PvE, the Taken portal area of effect will have its time shortened from 7.5 seconds to 4.5 seconds.

Gjallarhorn, the most powerful rocket launcher in Destiny 2, is being tweaked to become more of a support power weapon as its impact and detonation damage from the primary rocket is being reduced by 25%. Forerunner, a hand cannon that uses special ammo, will have its damage output scaled back slightly from 40 to 37, and critical damage will be reduced from 72 to 67. Finally, Arbalest will do reduced body damage and will now be on equal footing with its primary linear fusion rifle rival, Lorentz Driver.

For the rest of the Exotic arsenal, Bungie outlined these changes based on the 20 or so of the least popular weapons according to its data:

• No Time to Explain: Full Auto Trigger System perk replaced with Feeding Frenzy
• Traveler’s Chosen: Catalyst perk replaced with Surplus (it still has Osmosis)
• Vigilance Wing: Catalyst perk replaced with Ensemble
• Dead Man’s Tale: Increased body shot damage from 46 to 54, reduced critical damage from 81 to 80
• DARCI: Now applies Jolt when damaging targets affected by Personal Assistant, increased Airborne Effectiveness stat
• Wish-Ender: Increased bonus vs. Witherhoard-blighted targets from 10% to 25%
• Whisper of the Worm: Increased base airborne effectiveness to 80.
• The Prospector: Added Chain Reaction to the intrinsic perk.
• The Fourth Horseman: Decreased recoil by 50%.
• Merciless: Decreased charge time on hits perk now has a five-second timer, timer resets with each hit
• Rat King: Radius required to activate its perk increased from 15m to 20m.
• Legend of Acrius: Removed movement penalties.
• Bastion: Reduced spread angle by 6%.
• Quicksilver Storm: Increased PvP maximum grenade damage from 80 to 120, increased explosion radius, switched rocket damage from Arc to Kinetic
• Coldheart: Reduced cooldown on Ionic Trace generation, stability and reload speed when at maximum damage will max out, picking up an Ionic Trace now reduces the time it takes to get to max damage
• Grand Overture: Increased missile damage by 50%.
• Xenophage: Now deals roughly half of its damage as impact damage, and the rest as detonation damage. Overall damage increased by 5%

In other Destiny 2 news, fans can look forward to some Assassin’s Creed Valhalla cosmetics entering the Eververse store inventory on December 6.