Bungie has released its latest This Week At Bungie blog post, and it looks like the developer has some big plans coming up for the next few seasons of Destiny 2. Most notably within the sneak peak ahead is the way that legendary gear infusion will work in order to better control the cycling of powerful gear and builds as new weapons and perks evolve with the game from season to season.
At the moment, any legendary gear can be infused with any higher level piece of equipment within the same classification, such as armor type, in order to keep gear that players want and still reach the highest available levels in Destiny 2. This has been a major part of the Destiny loot system since Year 2 of the original game, with tweaks here and there to fine tune the process into what players recognize today.
The latest changes that Bungie seems to be preparing to come with the launch of Destiny 2's Seasons 11 and 12, involves giving gear a max power limit, as well as a seasonal power limit. This means that when a new season starts, the seasonal power limit will increase, giving players a new top-level to work towards, but at a certain point, the gear won't be able to advance beyond the max power limit and all the way up to the current seasonal power limit. According to the announcement, this power drop off will happen three seasons after the original release of the gear, giving each piece of legendary equipment, like the newly released Felwinter's Lie, a runtime of about a year before it falls out of the top tier meta.
According to Bungie, this change is being pushed forward in an effort to make rotating the strongest weapons in Destiny 2 a more stable process as loot pools continue to evolve. The base idea is that if all the developers do is make stronger and better weapons, then eventually everything will start becoming too easy and there will be little reward left in overcoming Destiny 2's challenges. Of course, this does mean that some weapons that have become stable parts of the meta will be dropped in order to allow the best builds to continue to change over time.
To a degree, this whole venture with max power levels, seems to be a bit of a backtrack, going back to the early days of the original Destiny where each new expansion would leave every previous piece of loot behind in favor of the latest gear. Whether or not that's a good thing will be apparent after the update fully releases in Season 12, although the effects likely won't be noticed until further into Year 4. However, when it comes to balancing gameplay and difficulty, it does seem to always be an uphill battle for Bungie, between the meta and players finding and utilizing challenge disrupting exploits.
Destiny 2 is available now on PC, PS4, Stadia, and Xbox One.
Source: Bungie.net
