Destiny 2 Tweaking Stasis Abilities, Adding Grandmaster Night Falls With Next Update

Bungie is making a number of adjustments to Stasis’ abilities in Destiny 2 with its March 16 update to the game, which should make PvP-focused Crucible players very happy (or very angry). A number of Stasis powers are becoming nerfed, including Shatterdive’s ubiquitous ability and the strength of the Duskfield grenade.

An overview of the changes is featured in Destiny 2’s This Week at Bungie blog post, which describes how Bungie adjusts each of Stasis’ three subclasses. The Hunter Shatterdive ability loses its damage resistance, which should help players combat the extremely deadly move. Projectiles from the Warlock Stasis Super will now have better tracking, but the explosive power used to shatter Stasis crystals will not deal as much damage. And Titans will no longer freeze nearby PvP opponents when they activate their super abilities. There are a number of other changes in the blog post – they’re all listed below – but they usually only take effect in PvP mode; Stasis abilities remain mostly the same in PvE activities.

Stasis abilities have been dominant in the Crucible since the release of the Beyond Light expansion, much to the chagrin of many Destiny 2 players. There have been a lot of complaints about the new abilities, especially Shatterdive, which allows Hunters to jump through the air and snap, shattering nearby Stasis Crystals. These crystals are extremely deadly when they explode, and Shatterdive provided hunters with resistance to damage while performing the move, making them nearly impossible to kill – and causing players to center their entire game around the ability.

Other complaints are also handled, such as the Duskfield Grenade, which has a magnetic property that draws players towards it. The magnetism is so powerful that Duskfield Grenades are often used to pull players out of cover, leaving them defenseless, so Bungie reduces the distance at which this magnetism is effective.

The March 16 update will also see a bunch of other tweaks and fixes as well as the release of Grandmaster-level Nightfall: The Ordeal activities. These high-level Night Strikes are some of the hardest players to face, and this season they offer new loot rewards. Grandmaster Nightfalls, will now have the chance to drop Adept versions of the three Nightfall-only weapons introduced in Season of the Ascended. These weapons have very high stats – Adept weapons have so far only been available to players who are perfect in Osiris Trials.

Grandmaster Nightfalls will require players to have a minimum power level of 1325 – which is 15 above the power cap for gear, requiring a bit of grinding for players to increase the potency of their Seasonal Artifact. But players will also be locked out at 1:25 p.m. for the activity; getting higher than that won’t help in Grandmaster Nightfalls, which will have enemies with 1350 potency.

Finally, Bungie said in the blog that the Osiris trials will return with the daily reset at 9 a.m. on Friday, March 12. Top-tier PvP mode was turned off for the last two weekends, thanks to an issue that allowed players to win flawless races without really fighting.

Check out the full preview of patch notes below:

Destiny 2 update preview for the March 16 patch

Strikes

• Fallen SABER:
  • Fixed an issue where the Strike Boss would not appear until all players were alive and present.
  • Improvement of the objective behavior of waypoints.
  • Fixed some grammatical errors in the text of the player guidelines.
  • Fixed a bug where a member of the fire team entering the area late could cause Warsat’s visual effects to drop again.
  • Fixed an issue where Zavala’s dialogue in the first area could be read multiple times.
  • Fixed a bug where a fallen energy shield could be seen coming out of a wall.
• Devil’s Lair:
  • Sepiks Prime now has a Boss health bar.
  • Fixed some floating environment objects.
  • Fixed an issue where some monster spawns looked like doors accessible to players.
  • Fixed an issue where an Overload Captain could appear with the wrong name.
  • Fixed an issue where Fallen Walker and Fallen Brigs could respawn after being defeated.
  • Fixed an issue where physics was missing from a wall at the start of the strike, allowing players to get lost out of the environment.

Armor

• Fixed an issue with the Exotic Linear Actuator Perk for Titan Exotic Dunemarchers not triggering properly. Perk now behaves as intended, triggering with each subsequent melee hit after an appropriate sprint time.
• Font of Might no longer displays a generic “Damage Boost” string when its perk is active.
• Fixed a bug where the Mantle of Battle Harmony and Omnioculus Exotics would not display their flavor text.
• Omioculus no longer grants melee energy when only making you invisible under certain circumstances.
• The Shooting Star Breastplate no longer grants Overhield when used with Supers other than Thundercrash.

Weapons

• Fixed an issue where flavor text would not appear for several Seasonal weapons.
• Added a rumble at the end of Dead Man’s Tale reload.
• Adjusted the visual effects to Riskrunner perks that caused epilepsy issues.
• Reduced Arbalest’s aim assist, making headshots more difficult in Crucible.
• Set the Frenzy and Cranial Spike perks to use the correct buff icons.
• Fixed the missing Thread of Destruction icon from Ticuu’s Divination.
• After a few weeks of game development and testing, we also have a Stasis balancing round slated for March 23.

Stasis Tuning preview for March 16 patch

hunter

• Shatterdive
  • Removed damage resistance from Shatterdive.
  • Added a 4s cooldown between activations of Shatterdive.
• Withering blade
  • Decreased Withering Blade damage against players from 90 to 65 damage. PvE damage remains unchanged.
  • Decreased the slow charges of Withering Blade applied to players from 60 stacks to 40. Slow PvE stacks are unchanged.
  • Decreased the acquisition range of Withering Blade’s target after hitting a player from 12 to 8m. The range after hitting PvE enemies is unchanged.

Titan

• Glacial tremor
  • Removed AoE freeze against players in super distribution. Will still freeze PvE enemies when casting.
  • Reduced damage resistance in Super from 60% to 50%.
  • Increased the Energy cost of using Shiver Strike during Ice Quake from 3% to 7% Super Energy.
  • Using the combo of a Shiver Strike in a Heavy Slam attack will now cost all of the Super Energy of the Shiver Strike and Slam (previously only energy for Slam).
• Thrill Strike
  • Downward speed increase applied to Shiver Striking players when slowed down to take them out of the air more strongly.

warlock

• Wrath of winter
  • Improved Winter’s Wrath projectile tracking, which now tracks force decay from its max value over 10s, down from 2.2s.
  • Increased the proximity detonation radius size of the Warlock Super Projectile from 1.5m to 1.65m
  • Proximity detonation now starts at its highest level and decreases by up to 40% over time.
• Penumbra explosion
  • Decreased the damage of the Twilight Blast against players from 80 damage to 30 damage. PvE damage remains unchanged.
• Ice flash
  • Fixed a bug where Iceflare Bolts would continuously try to change targets.
  • Increased the acquisition range of Ice Shard targets by 33%.
  • Increased the rotation speed of Ice Shards so they can hit nearby targets more effectively.
• Chaos Reach
  • Decreased the amount of Super Energy refunded when canceling Chaos Reach early.

GENERAL

• Grenada Duskfield
  • Reduced the force with which the Duskfield Grenade pulls players inward, effectively reducing the pull range from 9.5m to ~ 6m. The PvE traction impulse is unchanged.
  • Reduced the slow charges applied to players by grenade detonation from 20 charges to 10 charges. Slow detonation charges are unchanged from PvE.
  • Reduced the slow charges applied to players per grenade tick from 10 charges to 5 charges. Slow stacks per tick are unchanged from PvE.
  • Adjusted UI layout from ‘Slow’ state to show slow stacks as X / 100 instead of X / 10, to improve readability when adding slow stack amounts less than 10.
• Stasis crystals
  • Reduced Crystal Shard damage against players from (85 max, 55 min) to (55 max, 25 min). PvE damage remains unchanged.
• Whisper of chains
  • Reduced Whisper of Chains damage resistance bonus on Super from 25% to 5%. Damage resistance when not in Super is unchanged. This only affects damage from other Guardians.
• Whisper of Torment
  • Fixed a bug where players could continuously trigger Whisper of Torment while standing inside an opponent’s barricade.
• Stasis Fragment Quests
  • Objective completion values ​​have been significantly reduced for all Crucible Shard quests.