Dev Insights: Season 22 Abilities and Armor Changes Preview

Exotic Armor

In Season 22, we will be rolling out the second wave of changes to Exotic armor, following up the first wave of changes that went out at the start of Season 21.

We settled on one primary goal for this balance pass: bolster underused exotics. We took a look at several Exotics that weren’t seeing a lot of usage in any game mode and targeted those for buffs this time around. In the process of doing so, we identified a few previously changed Exotics that needed further tweaks. Across the board, these changes are largely positive and should make the Exotics more useful and more powerful.

With that goal in mind, here are the changes we’re making.

Please note that, unless otherwise specified, the following changes leave the rest of the Exotic’s benefits intact.

HUNTERS

• Knucklehead Radar: The functionality of the Foetracer Exotic helmet has been completely removed from that Exotic and added to Knucklehead Radar, on top of its existing benefits.
• Foetracer: We took some cues from the popular Monochromatic Maestro artifact perk for this one. When you deal damage with one of your abilities, you gain a damage bonus with weapons that have damage types matching your subclass damage type. Additionally, when you defeat an enemy you’ve damaged with one of your abilities (either with another ability or with a weapon with a damage type matching your subclass type), you will spawn one of the collectible objects associated with your subclass, such as Ionic Traces or Firesprites.
• Lucky Raspberry: This Exotic was a little too unreliable in its current form, so we’ve taken a crack at streamlining its energy gains, while leaving some of its benefits intact. The Exotic still expands the chaining capabilities of Arc Bolt grenades. But now instead of basing the grenade energy gains on those chains, each time you damage an enemy with the lightning strikes from the jolted condition—as well as each time you pick up an ionic trace—you gain additional grenade energy. We've also given this grenade the intrinsic ability to stun Overload Champions. Now you don’t have to jolt them and then trigger the jolt lightning strikes just to stun them, making these grenades a more reliable tool against Overload Champions.
• Renewal Grasps: We’ve undone the previous nerf to Duskfield grenade cooldowns when using this Exotic.

TITANS

• Icefall Mantle, Doom Fang Pauldrons, Path of the Burning Steps, and Eternal Warrior: Season 21 included some changes to Eternal Warrior and the Path of the Burning Steps. We added an escalating damage bonus to Arc and Solar weapons, respectively, when you get kills with those damage types. We liked that this gave players another way to get surge-like bonuses, but the Eternal Warrior seemed to to have the most reliable way to get up to the Tier 4 damage bonus. We’ve made some further changes to these perks to make them a little more reliable, while also expanding the functionality to two other Exotics.

  • Icefall Mantle: Grants an escalating bonus to Stasis weapon damage when getting rapid Stasis kills. When you activate your class ability, you immediately gain the highest tier bonus.

  • Doom Fang Pauldrons: Grants an escalating bonus to Void weapon damage when getting rapid Void kills. When you get a Void melee kill, you immediately gain the highest tier bonus.

  • Path of the Burning Steps: Getting a Solar Grenade kill now grants the highest tier Solar weapon damage bonus.

  • Eternal Warrior: Since the exotic only grants its highest tier damage bonus automatically when your Super ends (which is a rarer occurrence), the duration of the Arc weapon damage bonus when your Fist of Havoc Super ends has been extended to 30 seconds (up from 10 seconds in Season 21).

• ACD/0 Feedback Fence: This Exotic got a complete mechanical rework and now ties into the Armor Charge system, increasing its versatility and making it more useful in scenarios where you might not be taking a lot of melee damage. With the new perk (which completely replaces the old), when melee hits give you an Armor Charge, you take reduced melee damage while you have that Armor Charge. Taking melee damage causes you to emit a burst of damaging Arc energy that jolts targets, consuming your Armor Charge and dealing more damage based on the number of stacks consumed. (Note that the damage dealt by the burst of Arc energy should be comparable to its current damage for 0-3 stacks of Armor Charge.)
• Hallowfire Heart: This Exotic often stands in the shadow of the more ubiquitous Heart of Inmost Light. To remedy that, we’ve removed its base energy to Solar abilities and replaced it with a perk that will let you build more into Sunspots. We think you’ll be seeing many more Sunspots on the battlefield as a result. As for the perk that greatly increases your ability regen rate when your Super is fully charged, we left that as-is. 

WARLOCKS

• Astrocyte Verse: edited on 8/9/23 11:00 AM PT. We’ve added two more pieces of functionality to this Exotic. Enemies near you when you Blink become volatile. Additionally, when you’re using the Nova Warp Super, the Dark Blink ability no longer consumes Super energy.
• Geomag Stabilizers: While we’ve often heard calls to restore the perk that let you top off your Super energy by sprinting, the legacy of that incentive still creates some pretty silly play patterns. Instead, we wanted to give players a way to get more Super energy, no matter how charged their Super is. Now picking up an ionic trace while wearing this Exotic will grant Guardians additional Super energy.
• Wings of Sacred Dawn: Leaning into the “orbital weapons platform” fantasy, we wanted to help players have a way to stay aloft longer (especially in target-rich PvE environments). Typically, reloading was the main cause for a float to end. This Exotic now automatically reloads Solar weapons (including the weapon you are holding) from reserves each time you get a kill while aiming down sights. Try this one out with Xenophage!
• Winter’s Guile: Due to the nature of the Stasis warlock’s melee ability, this Exotic was previously a disappointing choice for that subclass. We’ve added a new perk to this one, specifically for when you are playing your Stasis subclass. Now combatants encased by your Penumbral Blast melee will automatically shatter after a short delay.

As with any changes we make, we’re going to be watching the data and your feedback carefully, and we may make additional tuning changes accordingly. We’re already working on the next round of Exotic armor tuning for future Seasons, so stay tuned!

Abilities Preview

Hey folks, Combat Gameplay team here to run through the abilities changes coming with Season 22 later this month. Before we get into the actual changes, let's go over our goals for this release:

• Reduce the uptime and potency of Barricade abilities, particularly in high-level PvP activities.
• Reduce the potency of Striker Titan in high-level PvP activities—both in neutral game and when Supers come up.
• Correct the one-size-fits-all nature of Suspend in the combat sandbox.
• Rebalance our Strand fragment suite to bring up some underperforming options and normalize the potency of overperformers.

Starting off with Barricade, this ability is a potent tool for closing off lanes, bunkering under fire, creating safe spaces to get a revive, and gathering information from relative safety. In PvP specifically, the prevalence of Barricades can slow down the pace of play in a manner that doesn’t have much in the way of meaningful counterplay.

We’ve been experimenting for a while with opt-in ways to play around Barricades, including anti-barrier rounds via the artifact or Exotic weapons, origin traits, subclass buffs, tuning the damage special weapons deal to Barricades, and more. These are all meant to increase an attackers’ ability to remove Barricades from the equation. However, it’s clear that in the heat of the moment, these kinds of out-of-combat decisions aren’t really coming into play. So, we’re making some base-level changes across different Barricade abilities, primarily targeting the strength of Towering Barricade. In Season 22, Towering Barricade’s base cooldown will be increasing significantly, and all Barricade objects will receive a reduction in their maximum health pool.

• Towering Barricade
  • Base cooldown increased from 48 seconds to 70 seconds.
• All Barricades
  • Maximum health reduced from 600 to 500.
  • Damage resistance vs. PVE combatants increased to compensate.

At this time, we’re not extending the Towering Barricade cooldown change to the Bastion variant, which already has a base cooldown time of 100 seconds. However, the maximum health reduction does apply, bringing its effective HP against players from 500 to 417. (Players deal an additional 20% damage to Bastion barricades, a change we introduced in Patch 4.0.0.4.)

Next up, Striker Titan. It probably won’t surprise you to hear that Striker has been significantly overperforming in high-level PvP activities like Trials of Osiris. While we believe that a small portion of this is due to a strong focus on Arc in the Seasonal artifact, we also believe that their base kit has a few elements that are too strong. We’ve made recent changes to both of these atoms, but neither their prevalence nor performance has meaningfully shifted, so we’re taking another swing at Thundercrash and Knockout.

Theoretically, Thundercrash is a one-off Super, but in practice its kill potential is closer to that of a roaming Super, so we’re updating its base cooldown to reflect that. As damage dealt and received is the primary factor in Super regeneration rates, particularly in PVE, we believe this change will be felt most strongly in low-player-count PvP like Trials and Competitive, without being too disruptive for our PvE Strikers. 

• Thundercrash
  • Increased base cooldown time from 500 seconds to 556 seconds, matching the majority of our roaming Super roster.

While we want Striker to live up to its fantasy of being a close-quarters powerhouse, Knockout is currently too forgiving in letting players clean up engagements with melee attacks early in a duel, especially when combined with other melee-enhancing atoms. For Season 22, we’re reducing its damage bonus against players, but we’ll be keeping a close eye on whether that should remain for future adjustments.

• Knockout
  • Reduced damage bonus vs. players from 50 to 30.

Last up is Strand. We’ve been monitoring Strand’s performance since Lightfall’s release. While we’re happy with the way it’s shaken up the sandbox across modes, there are a few outliers that we need to address.

First up, Suspend. We played with a variety of Suspend times during Strand development and landed on a long duration to differentiate Suspend from Stasis Freeze, offsetting the lack of a Shatter equivalent with additional disable time. Having seen the way it’s played out in the live game, we don’t believe this is the right place for Suspend to live. We want to shift both its uptime and potency for a few reasons:

• Suspend is currently a skeleton key that solves combat problems against all combatant types.
• Its current duration heavily steps on the toes of Stasis Freeze, which we want to keep as the highest potency disable in the sandbox.
• The uptime of Suspending atoms doesn’t allow for meaningful player decision-making when choosing when and where to place a hard disable.

To address these problems, we’re making a suite of changes across both Suspend and its supporting atoms to better carve out a healthier role for Suspend in the sandbox. The base duration of Suspend is being reduced significantly. We’ve further reduced it against Champion combatants to ensure that they remain a core focus in combat—a problem for the fireteam’s survivability that needs to be addressed with urgency. We’re also reducing the energy regeneration granted by Thread of Mind and Thread of Generation. We don’t believe the ability uptime these two fragments grant to Suspending atoms is healthy for the sandbox.

• Suspend
  • Reduced base Suspend duration vs. non-Champion PvE combatants from 8 seconds to 5 seconds.
  • Thread of Continuity now extends this duration to 7 seconds, down from 12 seconds.
  • Reduced base Suspend duration vs. Champion combatants from 8 seconds to 3 seconds (4 seconds with Thread of Continuity).
  • Increased snap damage dealt to Suspended boss combatants by 67%.
• Thread of Mind
  • Reduced class energy gain, based on the tier of the defeated target:
  • Minor combatants reduced from 15% to 10%.
  • Major combatants and players reduced from 25% to 15%.
  • Bosses, Champions, and minibosses reduced from 50% to 25%.
• Thread of Generation

  • Reduced the overall energy gain per damage event against PvE enemies by about 20%. 

  • Rebalanced the energy gain multiplier across primary weapon archetypes. We wanted to bring the energy gains for dealing damage with precision weapons and fully automatic weapons closer together.
  • Overall, we’ve reduced the efficiency of fully automatic primary weapons and increased the efficiency of precision primary weapons to compensate.

In combination with these changes to Suspend, we want to shift some of that potency to other Strand atoms, to allow for more diverse options for Strand users. In particular, we’re increasing the power of Threadlings and Sever in PvE and increasing the availability of Tangles across all modes.

• Threadlings
  • Increased Threadling damage vs. PvE combatants by 30%.
• Tangles
  • Reduced Tangle creation cooldown time from 15 seconds to 12 seconds.
• Sever
  • PvE combatants affected by Sever now have their outgoing damage reduced by 40% vs. 30%.

We’re also taking this opportunity to address feedback on a handful of Strand abilities and aspects: 

The Threadrunner’s Silkstrike Super is a bit unforgiving in the live game, particularly in PvP, so we’ve made some small changes to improve its usability. We’ll continue to monitor its performance and make changes as necessary.

• Silkstrike
  • Increased Silkstrike damage resistance from 40% to 45%.
  • Reduced suppression time between Silkstrike super air attacks.
  • Reduced vertical lift provided by Silkstrike heavy air attack to reduce instances of missing the primary target.

While the Threadrunner’s Threaded Specter Aspect is performing well in PvP, we felt it needed a little TLC in PvE. It should now be much more effective in PvE, as it will hold enemies’ attention longer, and the casting Hunter is now effectively invisible to enemies for a couple seconds after creating the clone.

• Threaded Specter
  • Increased Threaded Specter lifetime from 10 to 12 seconds.
  • Increased Threaded Specter health vs. PvE combatants.
  • Threaded Specter now takes longer to detect nearby PvE combatants at the beginning of its lifetime.
  • PvE combatants now more consistently focus on Threaded Specter instead of the Hunter.
  • Allied players no longer have reticle magnetism toward Threaded Specter.

The Broodweaver’s The Wanderer Aspect is strong when thrown, but it was somewhat hard to use in more difficult situations, making it dangerous to leave the safety of cover to grab a Tangle. While this Aspect is equipped, destroying a Tangle with your weapon will now weave the Wanderer, which surges upward and detonates, suspending any nearby enemies. We’ve also increased the Wanderer’s detonation range and damage.

• The Wanderer
  • Destroying a Tangle now creates a delayed Suspending detonation.
  • Increased Suspend detonation radius from 6 to 7 meters against PvE combatants.
  • Increased thrown Wanderer Tangle detonation damage to match standard Tangle detonations.

We heard consistent feedback that the Strand Grapple melee wasn’t working as players intended, particularly for Hunters and Warlocks with ranged melee abilities. Now, pressing your melee input consistently activates the Grapple melee lunge instead of activating your Charged melee.

• Grapple
  • Grapple melee always takes priority while active, regardless of whether or not a target is within range.

As mentioned above, while shifting some of the power of Suspend to other Strand atoms, we took the opportunity to make some of the Strand fragments that correspond to Threadlings and Sever more attractive picks. We also made a small change to increase the ease-of-use of Thread of Wisdom.

• Thread of Propagation
  • Now grants +10 Strength.
• Thread of Continuity
  • No longer grants +10 Strength.
• Thread of Wisdom
  • No longer requires a precision kill to activate.
• Thread of Isolation
  • Reduced the number of precision hits required to activate by an average of about 30% (varies by weapon archetype).
• Thread of Rebirth
  • The number of created Threadlings now increases based on the tier of the defeated target:
  • Minor combatants: 1.
  • Elite combatants or players: 2.
  • Boss, Champion, or miniboss combatants: 3.

All this is coming in Season 22 and some more changes, too. Tune in on launch day for a full list of changes and bug fixes (including a fix for Celestial Fire’s Scorch not activating melee perks like Sunbracers). 

While Season 22 is getting locked in, we’re working on a suite of Season 23 changes as well. We’ll have more to share about Season 23 at a later date, but in the meantime, we’ll be keeping an eye out for your feedback on all of these Season 22 changes.