Bungie is nerfing Destiny 2's Recluse and One-Eyed Mask, buffing Xenophage
Bungie has outlined a couple of big balance changes coming to Destiny 2 with the start of next season.
Season of Dawn, Destiny 2's follow-up to Season of the Undying, arrives on December 10. Alongside the new content and season pass, Bungie is also going to roll out some tweaks to the game's meta.
In the weekly blog post, the developer highlighted two contentious items in particular: The Recluse SMG, and Titan's One-Eyed Mask helmet.
As it stands, all body shots with The Recluse confer a damage buff, and count as critical shots. This made the legendary SMG very strong, since you could just spray without worrying about hitting crit points. The Master of Arms perk, responsible for crit damage, will no longer do that.
You'll still receive a damage bonus from Master of Arms, but you'll need to actually land critical shots for them to get a precision bonus.
As for One-Eyed Mask, the update will take out the overshield that you'd get after defeating an enemy (PvP) who had just damaged you. Right now, One-Eyed Mask is overpowered in PvP, since players are guaranteed to get that overshield after most fights.
The Vengeance perk that does this will still regenerate your health when defeating said enemy, but the overshield is gone. The recently released Exotic machine gun Xenophage is also getting a buff at the start of the season.
Xenophage will deal 50% more damage to enemies in PvE, and Bungie is boosting its PvP capabilities by increasing the ammo resupplied from heavy ammo crates.
Bungie promised to reveal more about the big December patch in the weeks to come, including further balance tweaks as well as quality of life changes. Click the link above for the full blog post.