The release of weapon crafting in Destiny 2 for The Witch Queen expansion has been a pretty successful endeavor for Bungie, but it’s imperfect in its current state. Pattern acquisition can be a hassle for some players and randomly rolled world drop weapons intrinsically have less value to them than a crafted equivalent that can use enhanced perks.
Bungie wants to address these inequalities and issues in the Lightfall expansion. Destiny 2 game director Joe Blackburn released a long state of the game post today, revealing that crafting will be getting a major overhaul this year. That overhaul includes bringing value back to the random weapons you loot and pulling back the reins on how many new weapons are craftable in the future.
“While we love having some sources of deterministic perks, we’ve found that the route to getting the weapons you want to craft can be too random,” Blackburn said. “At the same time, we also believe that weapon crafting being a part of so many of our weapon chases has diminished the joy of simply getting a great perk roll as a drop.”
The balance between crafting and the classic looter shooter experience Destiny provides has been a little out of whack since the collection of craftable weapons started to take shape throughout The Witch Queen’s seasonal releases. Bungie wants to adjust the dial to bring that balance into a healthier place, and doing so means lessening the focus on that system.
“To create independent chases for both crafted and non-crafted weapons starting with Lightfall, fewer of our total weapons will be craftable and more of our weapons with long term sources will get value from random perk rolls,” Blackburn said.
In a big update to those non-crafted weapons, more and more of the weapons in this category are being given the ability to be enhanced. This is with the goal of making them able to stand toe-to-toe with crafted guns, and it will allow them to be leveled up, use mementos, and even access enhanced versions of its perks.
Unlike crafted weapons, even enhanced versions of these guns won’t have access to reshaping. But if you already have the god roll thanks to the luck of a random drop, you will no longer be at a permanent disadvantage compared to someone who crafts the god roll with enhanced versions of the same perks.
This change is scheduled to start rolling out with Season of the Deep and will be initially available only on Adept versions of the Lightfall raid weapons for a test run. But as the year continues, Bungie plans to bring the system to more and more non-crafted weapons available in the system. Blackburn cites “technical hurdles” that currently exist which need to be solved first as preventing a faster rollout.
Crafted weapons themselves will be getting some quality-of-life updates, too. These updates are mainly focused on streamlining the process of acquiring a craftable weapon’s pattern—something that can be inconsistent with the current system of random Deepsight drops and limited Deepsight availability at seasonal vendors.
One of these planned changes is making it so that players will only see Deepsight on a weapon they need to make pattern progress on. “When you see a red border in-game, you will know it’s valuable,” Blackburn said, referencing how often Deepsight Resonance currently appears on non-craftable weapons or weapons players already have the pattern for.
The other change is scheduled to hit with Season of the Deep and involves “adding a mechanism to activate Deepsight on any craftable weapon” that players don’t have the pattern for. What exactly this mechanism could be is left omitted, but we can expect far more details to emerge as Season of the Deep approaches.
The year of Lightfall is a time of foundational change for Destiny 2, and these updates to crafting are set to allow Destiny 2’s classic random loot systems to live in harmony with The Enclave’s crafting tools far more than it does currently.
