Enhancing Weapon Crafting

There’s a ton to be excited about for Lightfall. From buildcrafting updates to weapon and ability changes, we have packed a lot into this upcoming expansion. As Destiny 2 Game Director Joe Blackburn explained in yesterday’s “Lightfall and the Year Ahead” blog, we’re making some important changes to weapon crafting in the future, which we’d like to explain further here. Want the short version? Check out the TL;DR below. Looking for the details? We’ve got those too, so let’s roll!

TL;DR

Deepsight

• No more Deepsight Attunement objectives after Lightfall launches.

• Only craftable weapons will drop with Deepsight Resonance after Lightfall launches.

Resonant Elements

• We will remove Resonant and Harmonic Alloys in upcoming seasons.

Three new features planned for later this year

• Weapon enhancing: upgrade an Adept Lightfall raid weapon with enhanced traits, level, and a memento socket. Coming a few weeks after the Lightfall master raid release.
• Deepsight activation: it's going to be possible to apply Deepsight to a weapon. Coming in Season 21.
• Weapon level boosting: leveling up a weapon will not require equipping it. Coming after Season 21.
• You will still be able to level up crafted weapons the current way if you like.

Deepsight’s New Insights

Currently, red border Deepsight weapons drop far too frequently for weapons that have no pattern available to unlock. Any excitement (or relief) about obtaining potential pattern progress is diluted by receiving red border weapons which have no capability to be crafted. You can also receive a red border for a weapon that you already unlocked, making it feel like a wasted Deepsight.

In Lightfall, we are overhauling the red border Deepsight weapon drop behavior.

Deepsight Attunement objectives are being removed.

• In Season 18, we added the ability to obtain pattern progress and resonant elements by dismantling a Deepsight weapon, bypassing the hard requirement to complete the Deepsight objective. In Lightfall, the optional Deepsight objective will be entirely removed.
• If you obtain a Deepsight weapon and just want the pattern progress, you can dismantle it. If you want pattern progress and also want to keep the Deepsight weapon, you will also have the option to immediately obtain the pattern without dismantling the weapon.

Deepsight will no longer drop for any weapon that does not have a pattern available to unlock.

• When a Deepsight weapon drops after the release of Lightfall, it will signify a reward you will want to engage with immediately, rather than an afterthought you might toss into the vault for later. Deepsight will operate like a checklist – every red border weapon that drops will be pattern progress that can be earned.

Resonant Elements & Alloys

In Lightfall, shaping perks will now require standard currencies (glimmer, enhancement cores, Legendary shards, et al).

• We’ve identified a number of problems with the resonant element economy, including:
• Element usage itself is infrequent (spiking only when you need to shape or reshape a weapon).
• The element currency cap is easily bypassed by simply hoarding excess Deepsight weapons in the vault.
• There is a disparity between the haves and have-nots, where hardcore players can have a glut of elements, whereas more casual players are starving for them, as elements are directly tied to weapon acquisition.
• In addition to those problems, the larger concern is that elements aren’t integrated into the broader Destiny economy, and so for Lightfall we are removing them altogether. The Relic Tether, which will now serve no purpose, will also be removed from your inventory.
• While we will not be making changes to crafting alloys (Resonant, Harmonic, Ascendant) at Lightfall’s launch, we are planning to remove Resonant and Harmonic alloys in the following seasons.
• There are no significant changes currently planned for Ascendant Alloys.

Activate, Enhance, Level Up

We will be adding three new crafting capabilities during the Lightfall year: Deepsight Activation, Weapon Enhancing, and Weapon Level Boosting.

Deepsight activation, AKA "manual Deepsight"

• This feature allows you to electively apply Deepsight to a weapon that has a pattern available to unlock.
• Only weapons that have not previously rolled with Deepsight are valid for Deepsight activation.
• Deepsight can’t be activated on the same weapon instance multiple times.
• The ability to manually activate Deepsight will be tightly controlled, and there will be some variation in cost depending on the weapon (e.g. a raid weapon will require additional currencies compared to a seasonal weapon).
• We’re targeting a Season 21 release for this feature.

Raid Adept weapon enhancing

We want to expand the enhanced trait perk capabilities of crafted weapons over to other weapons without increasing the amount of Deepsight you need to acquire.

To do this, we'll be introducing a new weapon enhancing feature to a very limited number of new weapons. The first weapons to obtain this enhancement capability will be the Adept weapons acquired from the Master difficulty Lightfall raid (the non-Adept base raid weapons will remain crafted).

Note that Master raid adept enhancing will be introduced a few weeks after the Lightfall Master raid release. The feature will be backwards compatible with the Lightfall raid Adept weapons you have already acquired but won’t include previous raids.

• Weapon enhancing allows a weapon to be upgraded with enhanced traits, a level, and a memento socket. This upgrade will consume standard currencies (and Spoils of Conquest, for raid weapons) and will be applied through a new tiered weapon mod. Once enhanced, you will be able to modify limited aspects of the weapon at the crafting Relic.
• For the initial limited rollout, weapon enhancing will have three tiers:
• Enhancement Tier 1:
• Replaces the existing Masterwork. Grants an enhanced intrinsic, weapon level, “first enhanced” timestamp, and memento socket.
• For raid Adepts only: allows full selection over the barrel and magazine perks (these perks are individually gated by level, same as crafted weapons).
• The cost of weapon enhancing tier 1 will vary based on the Masterwork tier that is being replaced. Enhancing a weapon that has a Masterwork tier value of 10 will be much cheaper than enhancing a weapon with a Masterwork tier value of 1.
• Enhancement Tier 2:
• Weapon level 11 requirement. Allows enhancing of the left column trait perk.
• Enhancement Tier 3:
• Weapon level 17 requirement. Allows enhancing of the right column trait perk.
• This enhancement feature will be added to new raid Adepts starting in Lightfall. Due to technical limitations, we will not be committing to a wide expansion of this capability to other weapons until we investigate further.

Weapon level boosting

There are far more crafted weapons than there are equipment slots to accommodate them, so we're adding another avenue to increase a weapon's level without needing the weapon to be equipped.

• A new weapon mod will be added that will increase the level of a crafted or enhanced weapon for the cost of standard currencies.
• While this will not be initially positioned as the only method for leveling up a weapon, it may be a convenient method for unlocking early perk choices and an outlet for any spare currencies you have stockpiled.
• We are looking to add this behavior sometime after Season 21.
  

Regardless of how often you craft your weapons, we believe these changes will improve your gameplay experience. Some are coming with Lightfall in just a few short weeks; others are planned for later in the year. As always, making games is a journey and sometimes our plans and timelines change. If our plans change, we will let you know. We will also continue to tune weapon crafting as we gather more feedback and data after these changes go live. Keep crafting your favorite weapons and keep the feedback coming!