Customizable Ghosts coming in Destiny 2: Beyond Light

One quality of life feature that has been long requested by the Destiny 2 community is the ability to fully customize the perks available on Ghost Shells so that players are able to use the perks they want, with the Shells they want.

It seems that Bungie has finally decided to implement this feature alongside the release of Beyond Light according to the latest ‘This Week at Bungie’ blog post.

Bungie Designer Mina Jasinski chimed in during the blog post to give a quick rundown on what the team had planned and what their approach was with this rework to Ghost Shells.

“Ghosts have always been important partners to our Guardians in the Destiny universe, but they haven’t received any meaningful updates in quite some time. To allow Ghosts to truly shine as the useful and interesting companions we’d like them to be, we decided it was time to give them a bit of an overhaul.” says Jasinski.

“One of our goals with this update was to separate visuals from functionality. We wanted any Ghost Shell to be viable and still have access to highly useful mods, regardless of tier or source.” continues Jasinksi.

The following is a brief overview of what to expect of the overhaul come Nov. 10:

• Ghost Shells will now have energy levels and access to mods with various energy costs instead of being pre-loaded with specific perks.
• This treatment has been applied to all Ghosts outside of the Generalist Shell, so you can use your favorite Ghost Shells, regardless of tier.
• A selection of mods will be available on all Ghost Shells by default, while the remaining ones will be obtainable via various gameplay sources. Information on where to find these mods can be learned from Collections.
• Ghost mods will be obtained from gameplay reward loops and will not be purchasable from Eververse.
• Ghosts now have four mod slots. Three are unlocked by default, and the fourth is unlocked by Masterworking the Ghost Shell.

One of the biggest takeaways from this change is that it will be applied to all Ghost Shells, except for the default Generalist Shell. This means the player will be able to take out their favourite looking Ghost from the Collections tab and still be able to take full advantage of the perk overhaul.

The Ghost Shell rework will function in a similar way to Armor 2.0 in that the Shells will now have an energy budget that can be spent on a number of perk combinations. Like Armor 2.0, this energy limit maxes out at 10 but the TWAB does not state what it will cost to upgrade the Shell to the next energy level. Since Ghost Shell perks do not have as massive of an effect on gameplay as armor perks do, then you should expect this upgrading to be significantly cheaper than upgrading armor.

The new Ghost Shells will have 4 mod slots that will each have their own unique mod selection. The mod slots are Experience, Tracking, Economic and Activity, with the last Activity slot only being available once the Ghost is Masterworked at 10 energy.

Here is a quick rundown of the slots and what perks will be available in them:

• Experience - Mods granting boosts to experience rates similar to the ‘Guiding Light’ perk currently available. A screenshot in the TWAB shows the mod ‘Blinding Light’ costing 6 energy and giving a 12% increase to experience gained. Next to this perk seem to be lesser versions of the perk ranging from as low as 1 energy.  It seems that a lot of these new Ghost mods will have different levels of benefits that cost different amounts of energy which will allow for a much greater amount of customization.
• Tracker - This mod slot will contain mods that will help the player tracker resource nodes and chests. It is noted in the TWAB that all destination-specific tracking perks will be condensed down into global tracking perks.
• Economic - Mods that will increase Glimmer gain from slain enemies.
• Activity - This mod slot will become available once the Shell is Masterworked to 10 energy. These mods will grant some powerful benefits across certain activities such as granting a chance of a Enhancement Prism dropping at the completion of an activity. Like the Blinding Light experience mod, these activity modes seem to have varying levels as in a screenshot the mod ‘Greater Core Harvest (Vanguard)’ can be seen which costs 6 energy. Next to this mod can be seen a very similar looking mod that only costs 4 energy so it can be assumed this is something like ‘Lesser Core Harvest (Vanguard)’.

Something important to note from one of the screenshots in the TWAB is that at least some of the mods will expire.

At the bottom of the description for the ‘Greater Core Harvest (Vanguard)’ mod is the following line: “This mod is fragile and will expire at the end of Season 15.”

At the moment, it is unclear whether this is a form of sunsetting ⁠— which means this perk will be retired once Season 15 arrives ⁠— or whether the mod will simply be destroyed.

If it is the latter, Guardians will then be required to obtain a second copy.

This change is still a few months out so it can be expected for Bungie to be constantly tweaking the rework as well as values and costs of any mods featured above. The Ghost Shell overhaul, and Destiny 2: Beyond Light, is planned for release on November 10th.