Bungie Set To Change Adept Weapon Perks For Destiny 2 In Season 14

One of the most important aspects of a Looter Shooter-type game is in fact the loot. Loot must be rewarding, useful, and engaging to obtain. Destiny has always worked to find that balance with their weapons and armor but frequently runs into complications as it tries to balance weapons and perks for both PVP and PVE gameplay.

The launch of Adept weapons in Trials only further strengthened the need to make sure the weapons we were earning justified the time and effort required to put in to obtain them. However, players were quick to point out that Adept weapons may have missed the mark at launch as they realized that Adept Mods used the same Mod slot as other non-Adept mods, and not all weapon perks felt like they even mattered when equipped.

In this week’s This Week At Bungie, Weapons Feature Lead Chris Proctor was brought in to describe the goals and bring insight into the feedback collected from the team. Here is what he said about the goals behind Adept weapons:

• Give players a tangible reward to aspire towards, with custom visuals and a unique name, letting them flex a little.
• Give players who've earned an Adept weapon a minor Power boost and some gameplay customization options (in the form of the improved Masterwork granting +3 to all other stats, and the ability to equip Adept mods).
• Do not make players who can't earn these weapons feel like they can't compete with players who have them (*cough*Not Forgotten*cough*).
  

I can certainly see how Bungie has nailed down on these goals. For starters, the look and feel of an Adept weapon is very nice the Trials Sword is probably one of my favorite weapons in the game alongside the Adept Palindrome. I also do not feel players with Adept weapons outshine any other player with a non-Adept version of the same weapon.

But again the feeling of an Adept weapon versus the non-Adept version still doesn’t feel drastic enough on the surface. Many in the community have called for an extra Perk column to be added to help boost the strength of Adept weapons but Proctor goes on to describe why this wouldn’t work out well:

• For performance reasons, we have a maximum number of perks that can run on a character at a time. Legendary weapons have a threshold per weapon, and many of them are right at the limit - adding a perk on top of that without taking one away causes Bad Things to Happen, in the form of random parts of perks turning off.
• Adding a new perk column to weapons from a specific source introduces power creep, and pretty soon we'd end up having to do the same to weapons from other sources.
• Adding a new perk column to ONLY Adept weapons would work against the third goal of Adept weapons, and we believe would feel bad for players dying to Adept weapons that are able to stack Celerity with things like Outlaw and Rampage.
  

So as a response to Player Feedback and to help boost the usefulness of Adept weapons Bungie will be refocusing two perks in Season 14, Bottomless Grief and Celerity.

• Nightfall weapons:
• Bottomless Grief grants a permanently active +30 to Magazine.
• Bottomless Grief is now a fixed alternate perk in the left column on Adept drops of Nightfall weapons (i.e. you can switch between that and the randomly rolled perk in the inspection screen).
• Trials weapons:
• Celerity grants a permanently active +20 to both Reload and Handling.
• Celerity is now a fixed alternate perk in the right column on Adept drops of Trials weapons (i.e. you can switch between that and the randomly rolled perk in the inspection screen).
  

Note that you will need to farm for a new drop of these weapons as the following changes will not apply to the drops you currently have.

At the end, Proctor did also state that the team is planning more with origin perks and that they hope to have something that better achieves their goals for Adept weapons in the future.

Have any Adept Weapon rolls you are proud of?  Tag me in your screenshots @Suttledge on Twitter.

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