Bungie details how it’s going to fix XP issues and more in State of Destiny 2 address

Yesterday it was announced that Bungie was cancelling a Curse of Osiris livestream to give an update on the state of Destiny 2 as a whole to players, and now that address has been and gone and given us some new info on changes and updates coming to the game over the next few weeks.

It’s a very hefty list, so we’ll keep to the highlights here, but you can of course read the full address on the Bungie website. The first round of changes will be coming in on next week’s patch on December 5 with the second round following a week later on December 12.

First up is the addition of Armour Ornaments. Similar to the already existing weapon ones, these will offer unique visual customisation options to armour without losing shaders or mods. You’ll unlock them by completing objectives specific to each armour set and once unlocked will be available account wide, just like the ones for weapons.

Another big addition announced was that of a new tier of weapons known as Masterwork weapons, which will start showing up as a new even-better version of Legendary weapons. Weapons at this tier will be able to track and display kills, generate orbs for you and allies on multi-kills and add re-rollable weapon stats. In addition, they can be dismantled into materials so that you can upgrade any existing Legendary weapons to Masterwork ones. Other gear will also get Masterworks versions in the future.

For those of you who have an abundance of Shards at this point, Faction Leaders will begin offering faction-specific armour and weapons, with additional slots unlocked by collecting the reward engrams for each faction. Xur himself is also going to have more bounty on offer, with the addition of Fated Engrams; a new type that will guarantee to decrypt as Exotics that you don’t already own as well as the return of the Three of Coins, which increases drop rates from any source for four hours. 

The weapon vendor Banshee’s shop is also getting something of an overhaul wherein he’ll offer a selection of specific Legendary mods for direct purchase on a daily rotation. Zavala and Lord Shaxx will also begin selling gift consumables to be used in the Crucible and Master Rahool will be selling Legendary Engrams for Shards. 

Elsewhere, Bungie acknowledged that it had, rightfully, come under a lot of ‘tough criticism about our lack of communication’ of late from players, and promised to be more open in the future about its updates, and offered a minor update on the recent XP situation, acknowledging ‘We already see that the newly adjusted 160K XP per level value means that leveling is too slow for some activities, and we have begun the process of collecting data and recalibrating XP earn rates to improve them as quickly as possible.’

As we said, there’s a lot to digest and you can read the full address on the Bungie blog. It remains to be seen whether these changes will help to settle some of the unrest in the Destiny 2 community in recent weeks as Bungie gears up to release the Curse of Osiris expansion next week on December 5.