Destiny 2 – Stasis nerfs (but this time it’s for real)

This week in video games May 29, 2021May 29, 2021 stasis nerf, stasis nerf d2, stasis nerf destiny 2

Bungie unveiled some MASSIVE stasis nerfs in their weekly news dump this week, and it could be what the PVP community has been waiting for. On paper, these look like significant changes, plus Bungie has bumped them up in the priority to deliver them earlier than expected, with the original plans set for Season 15. Today I am going to go through the stasis changes in detail and I’d like to gather your thoughts on stasis in PVP and see if you think this is enough.

Before we jump into the update from Bungie, let me know in the comments what you think of stasis in the current sandbox. Do you mainly play PVE or PVP and does stasis improve your Destiny experience or make it worse?

Bungie said on Thursday 27th May 2021:

Hey, all. Kevin from the Gameplay team here. I wanted to take a second to talk to you all about Stasis, our vision for Guardian vs. Guardian combat, and the road that gets us there.

ICE ICE BABY

First, let’s chat about Stasis — our fourth damage type in Destiny, and the newest to join the fold. We’ve heard a lot of feedback about Stasis since its launch alongside Beyond Light in Season 12, and we’ve been using that feedback to help shape the future of the damage type. It’s clear the vision we had for crowd control in PvE is succeeding and players are finding it both useful and fun. We love how Stasis plays in PvE and we want to preserve that experience, but we agree with many in the PvP community who say that Stasis is too dominant in the Crucible for too little effort or skill required.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been open with you that we’re taking this feedback to heart and working hard to reel in this great new power. We adore the long legacy of Bungie PvP games and want the PvP combat sandbox to live up to that adoration. This means we want the Crucible to be as fun for as many players as possible while also serving up those moments of skillful execution and incredible plays. It’s a tight rope to walk, and frankly we overcorrected during development when considering whether Stasis would live up to Arc, Solar, and Void. Stasis and crowd control are key components of the Destiny combat sandbox — they’re not going anywhere, meaning it’s up to us to ensure Stasis plays well across all activities, regardless of skill level. What you’ll find detailed in this TWAB is a series of changes we believe will more evenly position Stasis alongside Void, Solar, and Arc subclasses as an equal option rather than the dominant one, while retaining what is fun about the ability set.

“I NEED A WEAPON…”

Since Forsaken, we’ve been slowly creeping towards a Crucible where it feels like gunplay has taken a backseat to our sweet cosmic magical powers. We believe this is the wrong place for the Crucible to be, and we want to shift the balance more toward weapons. To us, the Crucible plays best when weapons and abilities have complementary usage in any given encounter. When we set out to define what our vision looked like for the future of Guardian vs. Guardian combat, it boiled down to a few key pillars:

Weapons are the primary way players engage with combat.
Non-Super abilities accentuate or augment the combat, but should rarely solve an encounter by themselves.
Abilities have clear strengths, weakness, and counterplay.
Build-crafting is rewarding within the moment-to-moment combat loop of Destiny.

Behind the scenes, we’ve been executing on these pillars by planning out a roadmap of patches that we believe will not only get Stasis to where it needs to be for PvP, but also sets us up to shift the PvP combat sandbox in a meaningful way toward more gunplay.

“DON’T MAKE A PROMISE…”

Our first patch in this roadmap was released in March and was developed separately alongside Season 14. Unfortunately, due to the pieces already moving at the time, some changes were made that buffed Stasis and were not consistent with our goals. We’re working hard to ensure that when we release hotfix patches, we can realign all of those moving pieces to exist more cohesively. Please pardon our dust as we work to get fixes and new features out to you in a timely manner.

Next, we have some details for next week’s hotfix below. As you’ll see, there are a lot of changes to go over here, and they’re all focused on Stasis. This patch is something we’ve moved up from Season 15 to help smooth over some of the pain points players have been feeling. It’s important to note here that shifting our focus like this comes at a considerable cost to the team, so it’s unlikely that mid-season patches of this scope will become a regular occurrence.

Once this patch has shipped, we’ll be diving back into Season 15, where we are planning to deliver another balance patch focused on updates to the Light subclasses while continuing to iterate on Stasis. The goal here is to address some key pieces of feedback and make more of the Light subclasses viable across the game.

After Season 15, things become a little more nebulous because we’re still early in development. What I can talk about are our areas of focus to help paint a picture of where we’re headed. We’ll be looking at ability regeneration rates and redesigning how the ability-energy economy works across the game. Our goal here is to keep the PvE experience largely similar to the state of the game today but reduce how often abilities are used in the Crucible. After that, we’ll be taking a long hard look at the Void, Solar, and Arc subclasses to re-examine each subclass path and how they fit into the combat sandbox.

“OUR BEST DAYS ARE STILL AHEAD…”

I know some of this feels like a tease, and I hope to speak to you all again in the future when we have more to show. Like Joe mentioned in our Beyond Light ViDoc, Destiny’s best days are still ahead of us. I truly believe that. Our love for this game burns bright. I hope what’s written above speaks to that and inspires you all the way I feel inspired when I think of our future. With that, I’ll hand it over to Gameplay Designer Eric Smith to talk you through our upcoming balance patch. <3

HEATING UP

Eric Smith: Hey, Guardians. The Combat Gameplay team is currently working on changes to Stasis gameplay abilities aimed at improving the Stasis experience in the Crucible. We had originally planned to ship these changes in Season 15 alongside a larger subclass balance patch, but we’ve decided to move several of the Stasis gameplay changes up to Hotfix 3.2.0.3, which is planned to go live on Thursday, June 3rd. We’re still hard at work on additional ability changes that will launch in Seasons 15 and 16, but we wanted to get these Stasis changes into players hands sooner rather than later. Without further ado, here are the changes:

General Stasis

Stasis Freeze
Reduced duration of all non-Super freezes vs. players to 1.35s.
Note: This freeze is too short to break out of, so breaking out is now only possible when frozen by a Super.
Reduced Special-weapon, Heavy-weapon, and Light-ability bonus damage vs. frozen players from +50% to +5%.

Stasis Slow
No longer reduces weapon accuracy.
Now increases weapon flinch when under fire.
No longer suppresses class ability and air moves (e.g., Icarus Dash).
Known issue: The Stormcaller’s Ionic Blink is still suppressed when slowed. We plan to address this in a future release.
Reduced movement speed penalty while slowed by ~20%.

Whisper of Hedrons Fragment
No longer increases weapon damage after freezing.
Now increases weapon stability, weapon aim assist, Mobility, Resilience, and Recovery after freezing.

Whisper of Rime Fragment
No longer provides overshield while in Super.

Coldsnap Grenade
Seeker no longer tracks targets after initial target acquisition.
Increased arming duration before seeker spawns from 0.3s to 0.8s.
Reduced detonation radius vs. players from 3m to 1.5m.
Now bounces off walls and detonates on the ground.

Titan Behemoth
Looking at recent gameplay data, the Behemoth generally has the highest win rate of any subclass in most 6v6 game modes and is also among the strongest in 3v3 modes. In Trials of Osiris matches, for example, only top-tree Dawnblade has a higher win rate. We’ve taken these strengths into account when balancing the Behemoth’s abilities. Between Shiver Strike and Cryoclasm, the Behemoth has incredibly high mobility, making targeting the Behemoth frustrating for controller players in particular. We’ve taken steps to make the Behemoth more targetable while moving, which should hopefully alleviate some of this frustration.

Shiver Strike
Reduced flight speed and distance.
Reduced knockback vs. players.
Removed slow detonation on player impact.

Cryoclasm
Now requires the Titan to sprint for 1.25s before activation when not in Super.
Removed cooldown.

Howl of the Storm
Reduced angle of initial freezing/damage cone.
Reduced crystal-creation freezing radius.
Slowed down sequence of crystal formation to allow victims more opportunity to escape.
Now spawns a small crystal on walls if performed into walls.

Glacial Quake
Reduced heavy slam vertical freeze range vs. players.
Reduced damage resistance from 50% to 47%.

Hunter Revenant
The Revenant’s Crucible win rate, kills per minute, and average efficiency is generally within the top six of all subclass trees, but its usage rate is incredibly high. In Trials of Osiris matches, it has the fifth-highest win rate of any subclass tree, but is used by a whopping 36% of Trials players. This high usage means players fall victim to its abilities more often, multiplying the frustration of being slowed by Withering Blade and Winter’s Shroud. We hope that the changes we’ve made to being slowed, paired with the adjustments to the Revenant’s abilities, make this experience better.

Withering Blade
Reduced slow duration vs. players from 2.5s to 1.5s.
Reduced Whisper of Durance slow-duration extension vs. players from 2s to 0.5s.
Reduced damage vs. players from 65 to 45 (after one bounce reduced further to 30).
Reduced projectile speed by 10%.
Reduced tracking after bouncing off a wall.

Winter’s Shroud
Reduced slow duration vs. players from 2.5s to 1.5s.
Reduced Whisper of Durance slow-duration extension vs. players from 2s to 0.5s.

Touch of Winter
Coldsnap seeker no longer has increased movement speed or travel distance.
Coldsnap seeker now spawns a small Stasis crystal on detonation.

Warlock Shadebinder
The Shadebinder’s Crucible performance is generally within the top ten of all subclass trees. In Trials of Osiris matches, it had the 9th highest win rate of all subclass trees. (BTW – I’m pulling all this data from the weekend of 5/14/21, but it generally doesn’t deviate much between weekends. VOG launch weekend shook things up a bit though.) While the Shadebinder may not be the most powerful in competitive play, being frozen by its abilities takes a large emotional toll on the victim. We’ve adjusted Penumbral Blast to require more accuracy vs. players in order to turn this ability into more of a skill shot given its powerful effects.

Penumbral Blast
Reduced tracking and proximity detonation size and tracking vs. players.
Reduced freeze radius vs. players when impacting the environment from 2.7m to 1.5m.

Iceflare Bolts
Seeker now only chains once when spawned from a player shatter.

Winter’s Wrath
Freezing-projectile tracking strength now ramps down to 0 after 2s of flight.

We hope these changes have a positive impact on your Crucible experience. While the Gameplay team is very busy working on future releases, Crucible and the PvP community are incredibly important to us, and we’ll continue to monitor gameplay data and community feedback regarding Stasis and subclass abilities in general. We’ll continue to update Stasis until its win rates and usage rates are in line with the Light subclasses. Expect more updates in the future.

Let me know what you think of the chnages down there in the comments.

That’s it for this look at the latest stasis nerfs in Destiny 2. For more Destiny 2 content like this, check out This Week In Video Games on YouTube and subscribe today.