Because Destiny 2 is conceived to be a live service game where content drops are frequent, it means that there is always something new going on, be it annual expansions or seasons and their respective activities. Destiny 2 is also a looter shooter at its core, and it comes with a meta that often changes based on the seasonal additions or the state of the game in a specific moment. This means that what is more or less powerful in the game is often determined by perfect storms that make a given playstyle very popular, or maybe some guns are inherently more desirable to use than others because there are seasonal mods that benefit them, like Particle Deconstruction.
However, Destiny 2's meta is also very much relying on Bungie's sandbox, which often changes when new content comes to the game to favor some gameplay elements over others and tone down what's too hot at the moment or tweak what isn't to make it better. That is exactly what is happening when the 30th Anniversary Pack releases for Destiny 2, as the new content will be accompanied by a rather big sandbox update where many items and abilities will be given another pass in order to rebalance everything accordingly. Today's TWAB, the weekly post Bungie makes to discuss what's going on behind the scenes, highlighted the direction the developer is taking abilities and Supers into for the future of Destiny 2, and the idea is to have differentiated cooldowns for each of them.
Changes Coming to Destiny 2 with the 30th Anniversary Pack
When it comes to cooldowns, Destiny 2 has this thing going on where players know any Super will be fully replenished in a specific amount of time, across all classes and subclasses, and that value is only affected by things like Orbs of Power and Intellect. In fact, Destiny 2 has several stats or mechanics that provide energy to either one's Super or the player's abilities, meaning the class ability, the grenade, and the charged melee attack. These are powerful tools that shape what a Destiny 2 build is made of, especially when combined with the rest of the arsenal, which includes all sorts of mods, Exotics, weapons, and stats.
However, all this is going to change once the 30th Anniversary Pack drops on December 7, and that's because all abilities and all Supers will have different cooldowns from one another. Pulse Grenades won't be on the same cooldown as Firebolt Grenades, for example, and each of these abilities will be toned up or down and be given a new cooldown depending on the level of power Bungie wants to ship them with. The same goes for Supers, which will instead be divided into Tiers to determine which Super regenerates faster than the others and why.
Pros and Cons of Separate Cooldowns and Ability Differentiation in Destiny 2
This system is good for the game, and it will dramatically increase build diversity for all players, considering that with all the buffs and nerfs the meta will be a tabula rasa, and the differentiated cooldowns will mean that nothing is necessarily stronger than its counterparts. Build variety is something Destiny 2 has been struggling with for a while now, and that's often dictated by seasonal mods and power creep, as well as which weapons are better than others to stun Champions or burst down bosses. That's why there won't be a defined meta after this patch.
Another good thing about the change is that each ability and each Super will be given more identity, more flavor, making it unique and more suitable for the game depending on what players want to achieve. Destiny 2 players who want to be extremely good at taking down bosses will enjoy Supers like Thundercrash with Cuirass of the Falling Star, as they already do, but then they have to take into account that Thundercrash will be a Tier 3 Super and they will have to build their characters accordingly. Similarly, if players want their Hunter to be very good at one-shotting enemy players in the Crucible they can use the newly reworked Flux Grenade to do that, but they need to take into account that no amount of Discipline or mods will give them enough energy back to throw more in a row.
The new Destiny 2 system is good because it allows for more control over what characters can do without every aspect of a build being too strong. If a grenade is up very frequently due to it having a short cooldown, it means that players can work with that to further decrease it and have the ability up more often, but the damage it deals will always be balanced based on its cooldown and vice versa. However, differentiated cooldowns can also exacerbate a problem Destiny 2 has been having for a very long time.
Destiny 2 can be a rather convoluted game, and the experience for new players can be bad because the game makes it a point not to hold their hands at all. That also means that they are left thrown into Destiny 2 without knowing anything about mods or Champions, for example, let alone knowing about how to make builds and what abilities or Supers to go for. As such, differentiated cooldowns and Tiers can make everything even more complicated and hard to explain, to the point that switching abilities or subclasses on the fly is not even possible anymore because the entire loadout has to change accordingly.
It doesn't help that Masterworking armor in Destiny 2 means that it becomes extremely expensive to change armor affinity, and that can be a problem if players have to mix and match their armor pieces whenever they change their setup. Ultimately, there are pros and cons to having differentiated cooldowns in Destiny 2, and the hope is that this change won't be as tangled on paper as it is in theory.
Destiny 2 is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
