Destiny 2‘s Season of Dawn arrives next week, bringing with it a slew of quality of life improvements and gameplay adjustments, including changes to Exotic engrams, weapon mods, bounties, Mars’ Escalation Protocol event, the game’s Power cap, and more. Here’s the haps:
Exotic engrams (read: the rarest loot boxes of all) and Fated engrams (read: duplicate-protected Exotic engrams) fuse into the same thing with next week’s update, meaning that all Exotic engrams now attempt to award an item that has yet to be acquired. If none remain, the engram will drop an random Exotic piece of class-specific armor only, which means no more duplicate Exotic weapons from Exotic engrams. Is this an improvement? Who can say!
The Power soft-cap for normal weapons and armor remains at 950, but the cap on Powerful gear will raise to 960 in Season of Dawn. Likewise, Pinnacle gear will now top out at 970, up from this season’s cap of 960. This means that, once again, those of us at the Power cap will be back on that upgrade grind, but enhancement cores will hopefully be easier to come by this time around. Bungie is adding repeatable bounties to the Gunsmith, which should hopefully translate to an endless supply of enhancement cores for anyone willing to put in the work.
Additionally, the Gunsmith’s weekly Field Calibration bounty will no longer require explicit participation in Crucible and Gambit, which is great news for people who dislike the PvP side of Destiny 2. Players will instead receive credit towards the bounty from damage done in Vanguard or Crucible or Gambit activities, rather than and. Elsewhere on the bounty spectrum, Bungie is lowering completion requirements on “several” Crucible dailies/repeatable bounties, though it doesn’t name which ones. And finally, grenade and melee Crucible bounties will no longer drop from the repeatable bounty pool, thank God.
It’s not like Glimmer is especially hard to come by in present-day Destiny 2, but Bungie has decided to reduce the cost of slotting in new weapon mods anyway. Applying a mod will now cost 500 Glimmer, down from 5,000, bringing it in line with the current cost of applying armor mods. Neat!
Back on Mars, changes are coming to how the Escalation Protocol public event doles out goodies. Specifically, the chest that spawns after completing the event’s final wave no longer requires a key to open, ensuring loot to all participants. Bungie has also adjusted the chest’s drop table to ensure that every piece of a Guardian’s Escalation Protocol armor set drops before it starts to award duplicates. Escalation Protocol weapons, meanwhile, will continue to drop based on the rotating weekly final boss, as per usual.
Bungie will also make some adjustments to the Eververse cosmetics shop, which players have complained about since Shadowkeep‘s launch in October. (Essentially, players feel like the Eververse store has way more real-money-only items than it did when Activision Blizzard was footing the bills.) This is probably true, and while Bungie does take the time to gently remind players that real-money Eververse items help keep the dang lights on, it can still fiddle with the ratio.
“By the end of Season of the Undying, around 50% of Eververse content will have been offered for Bright Dust,” according to this week’s This Week at Bungie blog. “In Season of Dawn, we’re going to make around 80% of Eververse content available for Bright Dust at some point during the season.” As new items are introduced to the shop, Bungie’s social media accounts will tell players if the item is slated for Bright Dust availability in the future, or if it will only ever be available for actual dolla-dolla bills. I’m personally thankful for this transparency going forward, as I almost blew $10 on that witch’s broom before it showed up in the Bright Dust tab at the end of the Halloween event.
Speaking of Bright Dust, Bungie is increasing the flow of Bright Dust into the general Destiny 2 economy in Season of Dawn. During Season of Dawn’s holiday-themed Dawning event, all weekly and repeatable Dawning bounties will grant Bright Dust, in addition to their usual rewards. Likewise, weekly bounties for Destiny 2‘s Valentine’s Day stand-in, Crimson Days, will also grant Bright Dust.
