Destiny 2 – Next Season Brings Grandmaster Nightfalls, Izanagi’s Burden Nerf

With the Empyrean Foundation currently underway in Destiny 2 and possibly leading up to the return of Trials of Osiris, Bungie is preparing for the next season. In its latest weekly post, it revealed that Nightfalls would be receiving a new difficulty called “Grandmaster.” No other details were provided but the developer promises that this “will test even the most proficient Guardians.”

Other changes coming in the next Season include nerfs to Izanagi’s Burden, Lord of Wolves, sniper rifles in PvE and so on. Izanagi’s Burden will no longer see the speed of the Honed Edge perk affected by one’s reload stat. This will reduce the amount of overall DPS that the weapon can put out. The Outlaw perk is also being replaced with No Distractions to reduce flinch.

Sniper Rifles in general are seeing a 20 percent reduction in damage to Major enemies, which is in line with pre-Shadowkeep values. The precision damage multiplier on Adaptive Snipers is being reduced from 3.25x to 2.95x while the base impact of Rapid-Fire Snipers is going from 100 to 90 damage. Then there’s Lord of Wolves, which sees it signature perk Release the Wolves granting severely reduced accuracy when active.

You can check out some more changes below. Stay tuned for additional details in the coming weeks.

The Last Word

When reintroduced in Season of the Forge, The Last Word became quite dominant due to its extremely forgiving maximum time-to-kill (TTK). We’re adjusting the way the weapon works to focus it back as a hip-fire based weapon while also improving that side of the experience for both controller and mouse and keyboard inputs. We also made it a little less forgiving so that you still have to concentrate on your aim while wielding the weapon.

• Fan Fire now adjusts the precision scalar while hip-firing.
• Fan Fire impact values have been adjusted.
• Precision Hip/ADS adjusted from 67.95/67.95 to 68.27/52.2.
• Non-Precision Hip/ADS adjusted from 50.01/50.01 to 38/38.
• Aiming down sights no longer provides additional effective range (damage falloff).
• Reduced stability for Mouse and Keyboard input.
• Reduced the effective range.
• To improve the experience, adjusted the way target acquisition is handled while hip-firing.

Shotguns

One issue we’ve been waiting to fix before adjusting Shotguns again was an oddity in the way our aim assist system works with weapons that don’t care much about precision damage. As an example for Shotguns, at certain distances between players, the aim assist system would prioritize the head, causing the entire spread to deviate from center mass and make the player miss out on the kill. With that issue out of the way, we made more adjustments to Shotguns to give other weapons a little more time to react to them.

• Target acquisition for non-slug Shotguns has been adjusted to no longer account for precision locations.
• Previously, target acquisition could actually cause the player’s spread to deviate from the intended aim vector, causing most of the spread to miss.
• Cone angle is now adjusted on a per sub-archetype basis and is no longer adjusted by the range stat.
• Aiming down sights no longer adjusts effective range for this weapon archetype.

Fusion Rifles

Similar to the issue noted above with Shotguns, Fusion Rifles also suffered from some target acquisition related oddities that we’ve since fixed. Most of the changes here are adjustments focusing on the High Impact sub-archetype. Backup Plan was an Exotic perk in the original Destiny release, and it was placed on Legendary Fusion Rifles in Destiny 2 due to them being Heavy ammo weapons at the time rather than the Special ammo weapons they currently are. When weapons were shuffled around in Forsaken, the perk came along with them, and we’ve decided to adjust it alongside the archetype itself to have it fall back in line with other Legendary perks.

• Target acquisition for Fusion Rifles has been adjusted to no longer account for precision locations.
• Previously, target acquisition could actually cause the player’s volley to deviate from the intended aim vector, causing most of the volley to miss.
• Damage falloff for this weapon archetype can now floor at 0.5x (Previously 0.75x).
• Effective range and the impact of the optics stat for this weapon archetype has been reduced across the board.

Backup Plan

• Backup Plan now adjusts impact to match the Rapid-Fire sub-archetype while active.
• Charge time is now set to match the Rapid-Fire’s sub-archetype * 0.85 while active.