Talkin’ TWAB: 26 July 2018

Posted On

An updated Development Roadmap, incoming changes to power progression, sandbox changes, a new Crucible Labs test, and a bonus info drop from Game Informer—this week was pretty loaded with information.

The posts referenced in this update are:

Here’s what you need to know:

Bonus: The Development Roadmap

A small present dropped earlier this week in advance of today’s This Week post in the form of an updated roadmap detailing some tweaks on the path to Forsaken’s release:

(Click on the image to open the original, larger version.)

Let’s focus on the 2.0.0 update, which is now coming one week in advance of Forsaken, and according to this list, will give us the following updates:

  • Weapon Slot Changes
    • Short version: A good number of guns in the game are going to shift to other weapon slots, and the ammo economy of the game is going to change. This gives us one week to get used to the new system before we start earning new drops.
  • Milestones and Challenges Updates
  • Director Updates
    • This was partially clarified in the TWAB. More below.
  • Bulk Shader Deletion
    • You’ll be able to delete stacks of unwanted shaders, instead of having to delete them one at a time.
  • 200 Additional Vault Slots
    • This goes hand-in-hand with the weapon slot changes; if they didn’t add Vault space and had to move your weapons around from slot to slot in your inventory, guns that needed to move but had no space in either your inventory or the Postmaster would be lost. My assumption is that this is to prevent that from happening.

Changes to The Director and Milestones and Challenges

The TWAB provided more detail on the changes referenced above. There changes will arrive on 28 August with patch 2.0.0. Here’s what you need to know:

Sources of Powerful Gear

We know these currently as Milestones.

  • Challenges will replace Milestones, and the current system of Challenges you see in specific activities or while on specific planets is going away.
  • Specific quests and bounties will provide sources of powerful gear.
  • More quests like The Whisper will be coming.
  • Some will be on weekly or daily cadences, and some will be one-time-only.

The Director

  • The “slide-out” menu you use to look at Milestones now will change to show less information. It will only show campaign progress, important main quests, and legacy Milestones from Destiny 2 campaigns prior to Forsaken (such as weapon quests, I assume).

“Cabal, AGAIN‽” – The Whisper Quest and Cabal Drill Public Events

The Whisper quest on Io requires a specific Public Event to spawn. Last Sunday, it didn’t for something like six hours, and players wondered if it was a bug in the Public Event generation.

  • It wasn’t a bug.
  • It was just really unfortunate RNG.
  • No changes are being made at this time, which means it’s possible we’ll see another Cabal Drill Parade.

Happy hunting.

August Events Schedule

Notable dates over the next month:

  • 31 July—27 August: Solstice of Heroes
  • 7 August: Combat Reveal Stream
  • 14 August—20 August: Iron Banner
  • 28 August: Patch 2.0.0

The weekly Crucible playlist rotation is:

  • 31 July—6 August: Supremacy
  • 7 August—13 August: Mayhem
  • 14 August—20 August: Iron Banner
  • 21 August—27 August: Doubles

Decreased Time-to-Kill in PvP Confirmed

Above, I noted there’s a stream coming for a Combat Reveal. That’s coming on 7 August, but Jon Weisnewski gave a tease of the reveal, which included this quote:

I’m here to quickly confirm that, along with weapon slots and ammo availability, we have globally adjusted the “time to kill” in the Crucible.

The stream will be on 7 August at 10 AM Pacific time, on Bungie’s Twitch channel.

Crucible Labs: Lockdown

There’s a new game type appearing in the Crucible under the Labs playlist. It’ll be there until the next weekly reset on Tuesday.

It’s a Competitive mode, and here’s how it works:

  • It’s a Control mode, but there is no scoring for kills. Only holding zones provides you with progress.
  • The victory condition is the Progress meter. It only increases if your team holds two zones, and neither one of them is contested. If a zone is contested, the meter will change to indicate no scoring is occurring.
  • The first team to 100% wins. Alternatively, if your team can secure and hold all three zones uncontested, you win the round immediately.
  • Games are played to best of five.

I played a couple of games of it, and it’s pretty solid! It’s 4v4 and definitely a Competitive mode that depends heavily on playing the objectives in a sound, tactical manner. It piggybacks off the changes to Control that are being introduced in the next Iron Banner.

Losing a teammate to a drop was really punishing, but played with organized teams, this could lead to some exciting plays and finishes. I’d say it looks like a pretty good candidate for a new Trials mode.

Merchandising: Printed Grimoire!

If you know about this, you’re probably already buying it. This fall, Bungie is releasing a printed book that contains some of the text of the Grimoire lore that’s been part of the Destiny universe and bundled up within the game itself.

The book is priced at $24.99 for 128 hardbound pages. You can preorder at the Bungie Store now if you like, or wait to purchase it from a bookseller when it’s released.

Updates, Bugs, and Gotchas

  • Hotfix 1.2.3.1 is being released Friday, 31 July. No downtime is required. You’ll have to download it to connect after weekly reset.
  • Glory point bumps from playing the three-match minimum in Competitive are not functioning correctly and don’t award any points. This will likely not be fixed prior to Season 4.
  • When Moments of Triumph start, you might have to turn in some bounties on different characters, as certain Moments are tracked per-character. Pay close attention to retrieving and turning in the bounties for Moments of Triumph once the Solstice event starts.
  • Don’t delete any characters on your account between now and the end of Moments of Triumph.
  • The Forsaken pre-order bonuses will be made available to players who pre-order the expansion via console digital storefronts and Battle.net.

Postscript Bonus: Milestones, Challenges, and Mods

Game Informer published an article earlier today regarding changes that are coming to how you earn powerful gear via repeated activities, and some early data on how mods will be changing. For the full story, head over there and read the full text. Here’s the summary:

Milestones and Challenges

  • The current system of Challenges is being retired in favor of expanding the Bounty system that was added in patch 1.2.3.
  • The current Milestones tab will change to show only big-picture tasks, such as weapon quests, story progression, and DLC callouts.
  • Other sources of obtaining powerful gear drops will change to being beacons in the Director itself, like how vendors are indicated for you currently.
  • The current weekly Milestones will remain in the game, and will be joined by new ones for Gambit, Heroic Story missions, and the new Public Event exclusive to The Dreaming City.
  • Daily Challenges are being added that will drop powerful gear and be on a daily cadence. One new Challenge will be available every day and will rotate between activity types. These daily Challenges will stack in a backlog, up to four.
  • Some Bounties will add longer-investment quests that will drop powerful gear. Bounties will clearly display their reward level, so you know what to look for.
  • More hidden challenges—likely similar to the Whisper of the Worm quest—are coming post-Forsaken.

This all sounds great, assuming the new Challenges run a good gamut of activity types. If a player doesn’t like running PvP, they shouldn’t constantly be told they have to run PvP to get powerful gear drops. Shifting to bounties and dailies—if the rotations are well-done—have the potential to give more types of players more things to do that reward them for their time.

The change to the main Milestones tab was necessary, as it was getting fairly ridiculous some weeks when a special event was in progress. I’m concerned the Director itself will now be overly-busy with callouts, as it is right now when you have lots of tokens in your inventory, but we’ll see.

Mods

  • Mods will no longer grant +5 power to gear on which they are equipped.
  • Mods will no longer be able to change the elemental damage type of a weapon.
  • Rare-rarity Mods are being retired.
  • When Forsaken launches, players will be able to turn in their existing mods to the Gunsmith to obtain crafting materials used to create some of the new Mods.
  • Mods will now be harder to acquire.
  • Year 2 Raid gear will have Mods that grant benefits in the Year 2 Raid activities.
  • Mods will change to be less about global ability cooldown management/mitigation and more about granting perks to their socketed gear. Some examples given in the article:
    • Increased in-air accuracy.
    • Faster radar return when coming out of aiming.
    • Better aim assistance.

I love pretty much everything about these detailed changes. The +5 on Mods we have now is pretty useless, because it doesn’t really do anything and made gear drop power levels much harder to understand. Knowing we’ll be able to exchange what we have helps, and giving gear additional perks using Mods sounds closer to what I’d expected from the feature at launch. I hold out hope that raid weapons will also be made more desirable for non-Raid activities, but that remains to be seen.

This answers some, but not all questions I have seen floating around regarding these topics, specifically Mods. For more detail and quotes from one of Bungie’s game directors, read the full article at Game Informer.

Thanks!

Thanks for reading this week! If you want to stay updated when I create new guides, please consider following me on Twitter, or to see what I’ve been up to, visit my stream on Twitch. If you have comments or corrections for this post, please reply to me on Twitter and I’ll take a look and adjust if needed.