Hard Light's reign of terror in Destiny 2 comes to an end after update 2.8.1.1

Hard Light’s reign of terror within the Crucible may have come to end as Patch 2.8.1.1 has just hit the live servers and with it comes the lowering of Hard Light’s lethality in both PvP and PvE.

For a large portion of Hard Light’s time within Destiny 2 it was considered a fairly sub-par weapon. It's hard to control recoil paired with its nausea inducing screen shake while firing led to many shying away from the weapon in favour of other more user friendly Auto Rifles.

The only real use that Hard Light saw was in content with the Match Game modifier where its ability to switch element types made it a must have.

It was only within the last few months that Hard Light was granted two back to back buffs that saw it go from a niche choice to king of the Crucible.

Firstly, earlier in the year the aforementioned screen shake was drastically lowered which greatly improved the overall usability of the weapon.

Unfortunately, Auto Rifles in general were still on the weaker side in Crucible so Hard Light still did not see much use. This was until a second buff was granted to Hard Light in the form of a buff to all Auto Rifles across the board, Hard Light was even a part of the archetype that benefited to most from these buffs.

So in just a few months Hard Light saw a screen shake reduction, stability increase,  and damage increase.

Pair this with its Exotic perk granting it zero damage falloff and it isn't hard to see why this weapon rocketed to an almost 10% usage rate in the Crucible in just a few days.

All good things must come to end though and it seems Bungie has finally decided to address the issue with Hard Light as even though the weapon might have been powerful and fun to use, it isn't healthy for the game to have one weapon dominate the meta for too long.

Here are the recent changes to Hard Light:

• Hard Light's damage falloff now floors at 0.7x (Auto Rifles use 0.5x standard).
• Split ricochet bonus damage between PvE and PvP.
• PvE damage remains at 2.0x damage.
• PvP damage is now 1.35x damage.
• Removed a hidden recoil adjustment that made the weapon more stable than intended.

Previously, Hard Light’s ‘Volatile Light’ perk granted the weapon with zero damage falloff meaning that the weapon would deal its full damage whether the target was 1 meter, 10 meters or 50 meters away from them.

At greater ranges it could still be hard to hit the target but if the player was skilled enough then the Hard Light could still manage a low time to kill that an Auto Rifle just shouldn't be capable of.

Hard Light is finally getting some amount of damage falloff to bring in line its previous infinite range granted by its Exotic perk.

Although, the damage falloff will cap out at 70% of max damage instead of the usual 50% that all other Auto Rifles have. This will serve to lengthen the time to kill at greater ranges and bring it almost in line with other Auto Rifles.

Hard Light will still have a better average TTK at range than other Auto Rifles but hopefully now it won't be quite as obnoxious.

Bungie has done something with Hard Light that they very rarely do and that is to split the damage multipliers between PvE and PvP.

The ricochet multiplier for PvE activities will still remain at 2.0x for double damage but this multiplier is being lowered to 1.35x within the Crucible.

This has happened a few times in the past but Bungie has always had the philosophy that they want clarity between the two sections of the game when it comes to know how much damage you are dealing and how much you are taking.

It seems Bungie can be somewhat lenient in this philosophy when it comes to overpowered Crucible weapons.

Finally, Hard Light will be seeing a small bugfix to address the weapon having slightly more stability than was intended.

This serves as a double nerf to Hard Light’s TTK at higher range as higher recoil means more missed shots when the target is further away.

All in all the Hard Light has been hit with multiple nerfs that aim at lowering its lethality at range to the same as other Auto Rifles.

These changes shouldn't kill the weapon as it will perform largely the same at its intended ranges and will still outperform other Auto Rifles slightly at the longer ranges.