Bungie Announces Huge Gambit Overhaul For Destiny 2's The Witch Queen Expansion

In their most recent This Week At Bungie post, Bungie celebrated the final week leading up to The Witch Queen. After highlighting their ViDoc, Season of the Lost, and their most recent Developer Insight, Bungie surprised us with a big update to one of their most innovative game modes, Gambit.

Principal Designer Alan Blaine laid out exactly what Bungie has planned for the Drifter’s Gambit for Season 16 and beyond and it is quite a bit. Blaine explained that Gambit is crucial to Destiny because it allows players to work together to not only take down big foes, but it forces them to do it efficiently so they can take down the other team. Moving forward Bungie wants Gambit to feel more balanced to the point where a game truly never feels out of your hands and is hoping to limit the blowouts that have become quite too common in Gambit.

The upcoming changes Bungie has planned will focus on five categories:

• Core Activity
• Ammo Economy
• Primeval Tuning
• Invasions
• Rewards
  

Freelance

After being announced last year, Bungie is finally adding the Freelance node to Gambit. This has been hit or miss depending on what the flavor of the week is in Trials and Iron Banner still hasn’t found a good stride in Freelance. Bungie is hoping however that Freelance will be beneficial for Gambit though their ultimate goal will be to improve their matchmaking system so there isn’t a need for a playlist split in the future.

Curated Encounters

I am interested to see how this next one plays out because Bungie is going to be making certain maps have specific encounters in Season 16. For the next three months, every time you load onto a specific map you will be faced with the same enemy type every time.

Bungie says that this will increase the competitive nature of Gambit because you can truly dedicate yourself to the craft and learn the spawns and important locations of each map and how the enemies flow.

Invaders

Bungie is also adding more respawn points which should combat getting picked off by an Invader that has dedicated a little too much to learning how each map works.

If you do happen to get slayed by an Invader, players will now drop half the motes they were carrying when they are killed. Bungie hopes this will allow for teams to recover after a Guardian has come over and cleaned house like Saint-14 walking into a Fallen camp.

Guardians will also be able to be revived two seconds earlier while the auto spawn timer has been delayed two seconds.

Bungie also revealed that level advantage has been disabled for Gambit PVP since “Beyond Light” and they plan to keep it that way as I assume it has been working well.

Invaders will have fewer opportunities to invade going forward as well as portals will only open at the 40 and 80 mote mark. This is crucial to note because Invasions can also no longer be saved up so if you don’t use the portal that you opened at 40 before you bank 80 motes, you will only have one chance to invade till your enemy summons their primeval.

And for some, you may want all the chances you can get because Bungie is making it to where Invaders can no longer see how many Motes each player is carrying and their nameplates will fade out when aiming down sights, making it harder to hold enemies down in corners.

The Basics

Bungie is also upping the stakes of Gambit and will be adding resistance shields to enemies making them similar to Nightfalls but not as significantly resistant.

There are also the following changes to what your motes will do when banked:

• 10 Mote Phalanx Blocker has its health boosted a bit.
• 15 Mote Knight Blocker gains a Stasis attack.
• Mote drain from multiple Blockers continues even if the opposing team is in the Primeval phase.
• Mote drain is paused if a player is near the bank and engaging Blockers.
  

Ammo Economy

Bungie will be adding chests containing small amounts of special and heavy ammo when teams complete a Front. These will time out after 20 seconds so make sure to hurry. If you are in the Primeval phase, the Front chests will spawn every 60 seconds.

High-Value Targets will also drop heavy bricks for every player when they are defeated while other enemies will only drop Special and Heavy ammo bricks if you have finder mods on.

Primeval

Because the Primeval fight is supposed to feel like the final boss of Gambit, Bungie has turned their attention to making the fight more involved than just a couple of sword swipes.

Here are the major changes highlighted in the TWAB:

• Primeval health and Slayer stack bonus retuned.
• Burning the boss after three rounds of Envoys should be just as easy as it is now, but burning him after just one or two rounds should be significantly more work.
• Envoys now spawn with friends out in the Fronts, rather than in the bank area.
• They have reduced health, are no longer affected by Slayer stacks, and have varied elemental shields.
• Killing the Envoys to get Slayer stacks will require movement, dealing with the Envoy’s protectors, and dealing with their elemental shield.
• Envoys put an invulnerability shield on Primeval.
• You must kill them both to remove it and damage the Primeval, forcing your team to go out and invade.
• Envoys respawn at 30% of the Primeval damage done.
• This increases by 10% every Envoy respawn, and Envoys stop spawning after the fifth spawn.
• The Primeval Servitor boss is removed since its custom shielding mechanics conflicted with the new mechanics.
• The Malfeasance quest starts on the first Primeval kill.
  

Bungie hopes these changes make the Primeval fight the true test of a Gambit match and hopes they will take up more time of a match without extending the total duration of one.

Rewards

All of these changes sound amazing, but none of it is worth it if the loot isn’t there right? Well luckily, Bungie is delivering on this front as well and upping the way you earn rewards in Gambit.

The biggest change is Focusing. Focusing became huge with Umbral Engrams and then translated very well to Trials of Osiris. Drifter will now allow you to focus Gambit Engrams into Armor or Weapons for 10,000 Glimmer and 50 Legendary shards. This will not include the new Gambit weapons coming with Season 16 as Bungie wants new weapons to be “drop only” for a season before they are added to this loot pool.

Gambit will also tie in with the new weapon crafting system as there will be a Gambit Momento that can drop after any match as well as the older Gambit shaders.

Look To The Future

In the future, Bungie has even more planned. Daily Bounties with extreme completion requirements will be removed or reworked while repeatable bounties will be made even easier to complete.

In Season 17, Bungie will be adding bounties based on Light 3.0 updates as well as three new styles of bounties.

Gambit Labs will also be coming soon and Bungie has revealed two new Game Modes they already have planned:

• Invasion Swap

• This Labs variation plays around with who gets to benefit from triggered invasions.
• During Motes phase, instead of opening your own invasion portal at 40 and 80 Motes, you instead open your opponent's invasion portal.
• We expect this to completely disrupt the accepted meta for how and when to deposit and invade. We're looking forward to seeing the clever strategies and counterstrategies you will develop.
  
• Mote Thief
  
• Fundamentally, the original concept of the invader was Guardian as Taken Terror, overpowered and dangerous — something new to have to fight. While that is very compelling, we don't believe it is the only compelling invader fantasy. We believe the sneaky Mote Thief is worth exploring, too. Maybe there are more?
• Normal Mote drain from having two blockers is disabled.
• Instead, every second the invader is invading, one Mote drains directly from your bank to the invader's bank.
  

There is so much in store for Gambit and as this was once one of my favorite activities in Destiny 2, I am looking forward to its revival. All of these updates on paper sound phenomenal and I can’t wait to actually jump in and see how they play out.

Are you looking forward to the Gambit changes? Let me know in the comments or @Suttledge on Twitter.

Follow me on Twitch and on Twitter to stay up to date with my content as I cover Destiny News, Guides, Sherpas and More!