In Destiny 2‘s next season, launching in less than a week, a plethora of weapon perks are seeing tweaks and adjustments to shake up the meta. As outlined in today’s This Week At Bungie blog, this includes buffs to perks such as Gutshot Straight and a nerf to outliers like One-Two Punch.
Most peculiar of all, however, is a rework announced for a mainstay perk in both PvE and PvP in the form of Kill Clip. While it will be getting the ability to be refreshed while it is active by reloading after another kill, its buff to weapon damage is receiving a sizeable nerf to balance things out.
According to Bungie, the perk becoming refreshable next season “makes Kill Clip too strong compared to other damage perks” and thus it had to be tuned to match its new functionality. The 33-percent damage boost it previously granted will now be a 25-percent damage boost instead. Twenty-five percent still puts it in the upper echelons of the available damage perks on most weapons, but it does shift the balance between Kill Clip and its sibling perk Multikill Clip.
Multikill Clip has always been capable of refreshing itself, with the drawbacks being that it requires multiple kills to award the maximum potential damage buff and that each refresh overwrites the current amount of stacks. A single stack of Multikill Clip offers a 17-percent damage boost, while two stacks offer 33 percent and three stacks equal a 50-percent increase. This previously meant that two stacks were required just to match Kill Clip, but Kill Clip’s upcoming change means that Multikill Clip will be a more powerful option in most instances.
In PvP, the power balance between the two perks will mostly remain the same, seeing as getting two rapid kills against other players is a harder goal than against AI combatants. It will be interesting to see how Kill Clip now stacks up against the likes of Harmony, Golden Tricorn, and Rampage with a damage boost that is now more comparable in value to these other perks, though. It’s a valuable quality-of-life update that it can now be refreshed consistently, but time will tell if the reduction in its effect is a worthy tradeoff.
Destiny 2‘s next season launches in less than a week on Dec. 6, with its name and theme still yet to be revealed in the days leading up to it.
