Destiny 2 aiming to promote armor diversity with new Beyond Light mods refresh

Armor mods in Destiny 2 can be a source of substantial power. These bonuses can range from neutral reload speed increases and faster ability regeneration, all the way up to the super destructive Warmind Cells.

While these armor mods do allow us Guardians to reach new heights of power, the restrictions like elemental affinity and certain obsolete mods have made creating a worthwhile armor build to be somewhat cumbersome. Thankfully, according to the latest ‘This Week at Bungie’ blog post, Bungie has decided to follow community suggestions and make certain changes to the armor mod economy for release with Beyond Light.

Energy Type Requirements

Elemental affinity has always been a sore point for the Destiny 2 community since its inception with Armor 2.0 as it places restrictions on the types of mods that can be placed in certain armor. It is, quite simply, a player retention tool to coax players into grinding multiple sets of the same armor in order to be able to use the full selection of mods. This is changing, somewhat, with Beyond Light. Here is the list of changes:

Energy Type Requirements

• All of the weapon-oriented armor mods (i.e. Hand Cannon Loader, Fusion Rifle Ammo Finder, etc.) have been changed to be Any Energy Type.
• As a result of the above change, all Arc Charged with Light mods now activate their second perk if you have any other Arc mod equipped on the same armor piece, OR if you have any other Arc Charged with Light mod socketed in any other armor piece you are wearing.

It’s important to note that this only changes the weapon-orientated mods. Armor mods such as Supercharged will still require Solar armor and Powerful Friends will still need Arc armor. You get the idea.

This is still a great change as it allows for greater build diversity. Before these changes, if a player wanted to use the aforementioned Supercharged mod on their Solar chest piece, they would be restricted to using weapons such as Auto Rifles, Submachine Guns, Fusion Rifles, Linear Fusion Rifles and Rocket Launchers if they wanted to take full advantage of the Extra Reserves mods. With the above changes, the player will soon be able to use whichever weapons they wish.

Enhanced Mods

Enhanced mods are extremely worthwhile mods that can add huge bonuses to the Guardians power ceiling. The interesting aspect of these mods is that while the enhanced version of certains mods such as the Weapon Loaders feel great, the non-enhanced versions often feel like they aren't really pulling their weight. To combat this Bungie are making changes:

• All mods that have an Enhanced version of that mod (i.e. Enhanced Hand Cannon Loader) have had the base mods’ efficacy increased to match that of the Enhanced version of the mod.
• As a result, those Enhanced mods have been deprecated, and the base mods’ energy costs have been adjusted upward slightly (but are still lower than the equivalent Enhanced mods).
• Some mods have moved to different slots to create more competition for mod sockets across armor pieces (for example, the Fast Ready mods have moved to the Arms socket).

Enhanced mods can only be obtained from endgame content, which only a small amount of the player base complete regularly, and from Iron Banner. Since Enhanced mods give such a significant bonus, and are mainly obtained from the hardcore portion of this playerbase, this creates a case of “the rich become richer”. This change will simply make the bonuses granted by Enhanced mods more accessible to a larger portion of the playerbase.

Raid Mods

Like the Enhanced mods above, certain Raid mod such as the “Anti-Faction” mods create a large power gap between the hardcore and casual portions of the playerbase. This is mainly prevalent in Gambit where a Fireteam stacking these Anti-Faction mods is at an enormous advantage simply from participating in endgame content. While its reasonable to expect that a player who puts more time into the game should have some kind of advantage, Bungie has finally decided to cut back on this power imbalance:

• Starting in Season 12, the Last Wish, Garden of Salvation, and the upcoming Beyond Light raid armors will now drop with a fifth, dedicated armor mod socket that is exclusively for the mods related to that raid.
• Last Wish and Garden of Salvation armor acquired prior to Season 12 will not have this dedicated armor socket, but will still be able to use the mods related to that raid in the new Legacy armor mod socket.
• Anti-Taken mods from Last Wish will only function in the Last Wish raid.
• Anti-Hive mods from the Leviathan Raid will be deprecated.
• Anti-Fallen raid mods from Scourge of the Past will be deprecated.

Combat Mods

This next change is quite a simple but is one that the community has been clamouring for for an extremely long time:

• All armor released in Beyond Light and Season 12, all Last Wish and Garden of Salvation armor acquired starting in Season 12, and all Armor 2.0 Exotic armor pieces (including those already possessed by players) will have a Combat style mod socket. In Season 12, this socket will accept all Charged with Light and Warmind Cell mods.
• All Armor 2.0 armor acquired during Seasons 8-11 have had their Seasonal mod sockets replaced with a single, unified Legacy mod socket that can socket all Charged with Light mods, all Warmind Cell mods, all Nightmare Hunt mods, all Garden of Salvation mods, and all Last Wish mods.

This change, like most of the changes listed further above, give a large boost to build diversity by allowing the player to use the mods they want with the armor they want. Charged with Light mods are extremely fun to use so it’s good to see they will soon be able to be used with a larger variety of armor pieces. Now if only we can get Bungie to put a mod slot on Exotic weapons too!

We are only a month out from the release of Beyond Light but all these changes are still subject to change depending on community feedback. Be sure to let Bungie know via social media what you think of these tweaks to the armor mods.