Bungie fixing Destiny 2’s most obnoxious perks with creative solutions

Destiny 2’s Bottomless Grief and Celerity perks will see a big rework next season, Bungie said Thursday in its weekly blog post. The studio also revealed significant overhauls for two Tower vendors, giving players separate locations to shop for weapons or armor. Both the perk and vendor changes will appear in Destiny 2 season 14, which starts May 11 and will see the return of the Vault of Glass raid and the addition of a Transmog system.

With the return of Trials of Osiris last year, Bungie added a new perk that can roll only on Trials weapons: Celerity. Celerity is a unique perk that drastically improves player stats if they’re the only living member of their Fireteam in PvP. The studio added a similar perk for Strike-specific weapons earlier this year, Bottomless Grief. Guns with Bottomless Grief will automatically reload their magazine when players get kills. But like Celerity, Bottomless Grief only works when a player is the last living Fireteam member.

These perks sound good, but rarely feel useful in the moment. As weapons feature lead Chris Proctor noted, “Players never like betting against themselves or their teams.” Without that fail state, the perks do nothing, making them undesirable for most players.

But starting next season, both perks will see some improvement. Bottomless Grief will automatically grant players +30 to the Magazine stat (which is a percentage increase to ammo, based on the weapon type) in addition to its usual perk. Celerity will offer players +20 to the Reload and Handling stat in addition to the “last player standing” base effect.

Even better, both perks will automatically appear on Adept weapons — Bottomless Grief for Grandmaster weapons, and Celerity for Trials guns. The perk will appear as a separate node under the left-most perk, giving players the choice to select one of these new perks or something like Outlaw that rolled in the other slot. It’s not entirely clear if these perks will now be reserved for Adept weapons and that special slot, or if they can still randomly roll on non-Adept versions (we’re inclined to believe the latter),

Bungie noted that other game-mode-specific perks — what Bungie is now calling “origin perks” — worked well with the new perks added via the Deep Stone Crypt raid. The studio said it plans to add more origin perks in the future, although it seems it’ll avoid “failure state” perks like the original Celerity and Bottomless Grief going forward. It’s worth noting that players will need to get new Adept weapons if they want the guaranteed Bottomless Grief or Celerity nodes.

Image: Bungie

In addition to these perk changes, Bungie also revealed some vendor improvements coming in season 14. The studio previously announced that Ada-1 will return to the Tower to serve as the Transmog vendor — what Bungie says it will now call “Armor Synthesis,” or the process of making one piece of armor look like another. But the new blog detailed another role for her: armor vendor.

Ada-1 will sell two random armor mods each day, giving new players a chance to diversify their arsenal of mods. Ada-1 will also sell an entire armor set randomly pulled from the world loot pool (only armor that drops from general activities or enemies, so no raid armor). This weekly armor set works similarly to Xur in that it changes weekly and has fixed stats for all players for the given week.

With Ada-1 taking over weapon duties, Banshee-44 — the Gunsmith — will expand his weapon offering. Starting next season, Banshee-44 will randomly sell six different weapons a week (two Kinetic, two Energy, and two Power). Each weapon comes with a static perk roll, giving players the chance to spread the word to friends if Banshee-44 has a particularly good weapon for sale. This is a great new addition for players who can’t seem to pick up a good roll for False Promises or some other weapon in the general world drop pool.

Both Ada-1 and Banshee-44 will sell upgrade materials like Ascendant Shards and Prisms. All of these changes should appear in game on May 11, at the start of Destiny 2’s as-yet-unnamed 14th season.