Destiny 2's August showcase included the reveal of the Lightfall expansion, which continues the story of the Light and Darkness saga that will culminate with the events of The Final Shape in 2024. With the Black Fleet pushing towards the inner Solar System and to the Last City, Guardians need new powers to stave off the forces of The Witness, and in Lightfall, they will find an unlikely ally on Neptune in the form of a never-before-seen alien race. The Cloudstriders are Destiny 2's first new race since Forsaken in 2018, which introduced the brand-new Scorn, years after The Taken King introduced the Taken in Destiny.
This new alien race is one of allies, and they will seemingly teach mankind a new power derived from the Darkness itself -- Strand, the movement-themed subclass that Destiny 2 players will be able to wield come Lightfall. Because this is the first entirely new addition to the game's existing subclasses after Beyond Light's Stasis, Bungie should be particularly careful when balancing the power that Strand bestows upon Guardians, especially after the controversies stirred by its predecessor. Lightfall's Strand should be introduced in a state that doesn't alter the meta in unhealthy ways, making other classes too powerful or obsolete in comparison, without also coming off as a subpar addition.
Why Destiny 2's Strand Subclass Needs to be Balanced
Stasis was largely controversial when Beyond Light came out, and the reason for it was that the subclass' many ways of applying crowd control to enemy players disrupted the balance the game had achieved with the 2.0 subclass system. With Lightfall's Strand, Bungie has the hard task of balancing an all-new damage element and the corresponding three subclasses, having to deal with possible rippling effects caused by too many crowd control sources. This is an important aspect of both the Destiny 2 PvE and PvP sandboxes, but for different reasons.
With Bungie's renewed focus on build-crafting, having a new element and set of subclasses that offer a lot more than other elements do could discourage build diversity altogether, leading to the PvE sandbox being mainly populated by Strand. Strand will already be an exciting addition to Destiny 2 per se, and using it could be pushed on Bungie's side by adding one or more seasonal artifact mods to launch alongside Season 20 and Lightfall itself. As such, having a kit that is too powerful in terms of damage and survivability would break the meta more than it can possibly make.
PvP is in an even tougher spot due to how hard it is to balance a sandbox where the same tools of destruction that Destiny 2 players can use in PvE can then be used to take out fellow Guardians in the Crucible. On launch, Stasis broke this equilibrium by adding new ways of controlling the battlefield and the actions of other players heavily by slowing and freezing them continuously. The problem was that allowing new abilities to completely negate the opponents' actions meant that anyone in the Crucible could wield Stasis and be a huge threat, no matter the skill level, which further incentivized players to use Stasis.
Lightfall's Strand subclasses are about weaving matter into reality and creating new forms, interacting in unique ways with the environment, which is done via grappling hooks, ethereal energy blades, and more. While this doesn't necessarily mean that Strand will be equally problematic as Stasis once was, this is something Bungie will have to keep an eye on following player feedback. Regardless, Lightfall introducing an all-new element that uses the same 3.0 system as the four existing ones is a huge opportunity for Destiny 2 players to truly play the game as they want, and it shows how much the franchise has truly grown over the past eight years.
Destiny 2 is now available on PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.