Destiny 2’s Season Of Opulence: Bungie Details Pinnacle Weapons, New Mechanics

The Season of Opulence is poised to kick off in Destiny 2 on June 4, bringing with it a new raid and a new six-player activity. As with all the content drops in the Year Two annual pass, this one is also full of new loot to chase and new secrets for players to unlock along the way.

Bungie outlined new details about the Season of Opulence in its latest blog post, which explains some key ins and outs of the Menagerie, the new six-player matchmade activity at the heart of the season. The thing that sets the activity apart from others in Destiny 2 is the new Chalice of Opulence, an item you’ll use to determine which gear you receive upon completing a Menagerie run. According to Bungie, as you play through the Menagerie, you’ll earn items called runes you can plug into your chalice. Which runes you use will determine the gear you get, and more crucially, what its stats are.

The thing about the runes is you won’t know what combinations do what until you experiment (or more likely, until the Destiny community experiments and posts it all on Reddit). Adding certain runes to your chalice can help you chase down specific versions of the new Opulence weapon set, including what boosts you get when you turn those weapons into Masterworks. That’s a significant change: usually, weapons’ stats are randomized, forcing players to fight through an activity over and over, hoping to get the best versions of certain guns. Masterworks offer bonus stats to guns as well, but again, which stat gets a boost is usually randomized.

You’ll also be able to upgrade the chalice itself, which will give you more control over the gear you get from the Menagerie, while also allowing you to earn more runes of specific types. Players will have to put in the work to upgrade the chalice for greater customization, though, and it doesn’t sound like it’ll be particularly easy.

Bungie also detailed the new Pinnacle weapons that come with the season. These are high-powered, specially designed guns you can only get by completing arduous tasks in specific activities, like the competitive Crucible, the cooperative Vanguard Strikes, or Gambit, which mixes the two play types.

The Crucible weapon is a sniper rifle called Revoker, which sounds a lot like the popular Icebreaker Exotic sniper rifle from Destiny 1. It encourages you to take every shot by returning missed shots to your magazine after a short time–which means you can’t go crazy unloading your sniper rifle, but you do get an incentive to open fire a little more often. Earning the Revoker will be easier than past Crucible Pinnacle guns, also; it requires racking up 3,500 points in the Glory playlist, but doesn’t penalize you if you lose. Past Pinnacles have required players to fight through Glory to the Fabled rank–but you only gain points when you win matches. Losing sets you back, making earning the guns very tough for many players.

The Vanguard Pinnacle is the Wendigo-GL3 grenade launcher, which gets more powerful when you pick up Orbs of Light generated by teammates. Orbs give the launcher’s grenades more damage and a bigger blast radius, so it’ll pay to stick close to teammates and work together when using the weapon. For Gambit players, there’s Hush, a combat bow that rewards you for shooting from the hip, rather than aiming down its sights. Landing hip fire precision kills with the bow speeds up its draw time significantly, allowing you to fire deadly arrows much more quickly.

Bungie also followed up an announcement that it would be weakening some fan-favorite guns with the new season by outlining a few weapons that are getting boosts. Fusion Rifles, in particular, should be more useful thanks to damage increases against AI-controlled enemies. Swords are also being amped up a bit, with damage increases and ammo rebalancing.

The announcements about the Season of Opulence also came with a teaser from Bungie that it’ll be outlining the “next chapter” for Destiny 2 on Thursday, June 6–two days after the launch of the season. Players are speculating the delay is because Bungie is waiting for the first teams of players to complete Crown of Sorrows, the Season of Opulence’s new raid, which will give away some new story information about where the game is headed. Whatever Bungie has planned for Destiny 2 going forward, it’ll be the first content the developer has created without former publishing partner Activision.

from GameSpot – Game News https://www.gamespot.com/articles/destiny-2s-season-of-opulence-bungie-details-pinna/1100-6467292/