Destiny 2 is about to nerf your favourite armour, Hunters and Titans

Bungie is nerfing two fan-favourite armour Exotics that it thinks is “becoming hard to counter in PvP”.

From the Season 22 mid-season update onwards, Titans and Hunters will see changes to two of the game’s most popular Exotic armour items as both the Titan’s Antaeus Wards boots and Hunters’ Young Ahamkara’s Spine gauntlets get a mid-season overhaul.

“For the Season 22 mid-Season update, we wanted to adjust two Exotic armours that we felt were becoming hard to counter in PvP,” the team explained in its weekly update, This Week at Bungie.

From update 7.2.5 onwards, Antaeus Wards will require full class ability to deploy Reflective Vents, and if you deactivate them, your “class ability energy is drained proportional to the amount of damage reflected”. Oh, and they no longer improve your slide, either.

“Antaeus Wards was granting too large a benefit for too little a cost,” it added. “It also suffered from a lack of meaningful counterplay options. By tying the damage reflection to class ability, we hope to reduce the uptime of the effect and to prevent it from easily stacking with the Juggernaut Arc aspect. Anteaus Wards users will have to think about their engagements more carefully because opponents can exploit the times their class ability is on cooldown.”

And that’s not the only Exotic to have secured special attention from Bungie, either. The Hunter’s Young Ahamkara’s Spine will no longer boast the bonus 50 per cent damage resistance, and the Tripmine Grenade’s bonus health has dropped from 100 to 70. Furthermore, the grenade energy you used to get from damage with abilities will now only come from ability kills.

“These changes to Young Ahamkara’s Spine targeted two aspects of the Exotic that we felt were causing issues,” Bungie explained. “First, we want to bring its total bonus grenade energy more in line with other Solar ability-focused Exotics, like Athrys’s Embrace and Caliban’s Hand. This change keeps the amount of energy provided large but reduces how easily it can be gained.”

There’s more – much more; head on over to the official website for the full rundown – but I’ll leave you with the news that bummed me out the most, and that’s that the buff Auto Rifles enjoyed a little while back has now been deemed as “too much”. Consequently, a nerf is on the way.

“In general, we’re happy that Auto Rifles are seeing more play in PvP (even in higher level lobbies), but we believe the two-part buff to range they received in Season 22 may have been a bit too much,” the team explained. “This is especially true for the Rapid-Fire and Precision subfamilies, which were already strong.

“On the other hand, we’re still not happy with where Adaptive and High-Impact Auto Rifles shake out compared to other ARs, so we’ve made some tweaks to separate them a bit. For Rapid-Fire, Adaptive, and Precision ARs, we have reduced their aim down sight (ADS) damage falloff scalar stat back down to 1.6x, while we have left High-Impacts at 1.7x. This should sufficiently differentiate the maximum ranges they are able to achieve and give High-Impacts room to breathe over Precisions, which are currently able to achieve the same ranges without the downside of needing to be more accurate.

“For Adaptive ARs, we weren’t happy with how difficult they felt to use, so we have increased their base damage and decreased their critical hit multiplier to make them more forgiving, while retaining their current optimal time to kill.”

Destiny 2 is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. It’s next expansion, The Final Shape, launches on 27th February next year.

The Final Shape – described as “the last expedition of Destiny’s first saga” – will see players entering the Traveler via the portal opened at the end of this year’s Lightfall expansion for a showdown with current big bad, the Witness. It’s an adventure Bungie says will “answer questions on a grander scale” while also giving players the opportunity to connect with familiar companions on a more personal level.