Solar 3.0 Buffs Plus New Solar Fragments Are Available in Destiny 2

This week in video games June 3, 2022June 3, 2022 Solar 3.0 Buffs

Bungie was back this week with thier This Week At Bungie update, and this week we’ve got news of Solar 3.0 buffs coming, which is a VERY FAST turnaround (so massive shout out to the team for that). We’ve also got news of new fragments added to the game given we’ve completed the community Nightmare Containment target, plus a whole bunch of known issues Bungie are currently working on.

Without delay, let’s dive into the Solar 3.0 buffs.

Solar 3.0 Improvements

The Sandbox Team has been monitoring feedback since the launch of Solar 3.0 closely and with that feedback, comes a few new updates to share with y’all. To help Solar 3.0 live its best life, here are some of the tweaks we have on the horizon from Sandbox Discipline Lead Kevin Yanes:

Kevin Yanes: Hey folks. As you’re all aware, we recently launched Solar 3.0, the latest of our Subclass 3.0 updates. As with any launch, we’ve been watching and reading reactions to the feature, and it has become clear that we needed to circle around the campfire to share a bit about our plans. So, I’d like to get together and talk about our intentions, our next steps, and some expectation-setting for the rest of the Seasons this year.

First, I want to reiterate some of the goals we laid out for the 3.0s, starting with the Void 3.0 update that went live when we announced The Witch Queen: “…we are taking the subclasses you know and love and remixing them. That means adding new abilities and mechanics, ditching some old ones where it makes sense to do so, and spreading out existing ones to create enticing new combinations.”

A common feedback thread is some frustration around losing elements like Heart of the Pack or nerfs to things like Sunspots or Benevolent Dawn. We know that losing things can feel unsatisfying or painful at first blush, but part of our 3.0-ification of these classes is also a rebalancing of some of these atoms. Those passive or self-looping ability-regen benefits silently power-crept over the years to levels that made them too dominant in many activities. With our focus on buildcrafting, we don’t want to have one singular perk complete large parts of your kit by itself. As we continue the process of moving the Light subclasses into the 3.0 system, you’ll see us continue to rebalance gameplay atoms in this manner, with the goal that the new combinations and possibility space they open up will offset the loss of any one perk.

Initial reactions to Solar have not met our “new thing that melts your face off” bar and we believe that’s due, in part, to a few things:

Ember of Benevolence shipped in an inconsistent state that left healers feeling underwhelmed with their kit when it didn’t behave as expected.
Warlocks who wanted to specialize in healing had limited ways to interface with that fantasy, with two of their three Aspects focusing on aerial mobility or Scorching, and losing the flexibility of choosing to use their grenade to heal allies or damage enemies on the fly.
Titans, while bombastic and potent, lacked ways to keep their engine running without needing to run Throwing Hammer or burning multiple cooldowns.

As we’ve said in the past through TWABs, socials, and other dev updates, we’d much rather ship something a little too spicy than something bland that makes a bad first impression. I think with Solar 3.0, we landed somewhere in the middle, and the team feels very passionately that this is the wrong place to be. To that end, the team has pulled some heroics and shifted resources to make some buffs to Heat Rises, Icarus Dash, Celestial Fire, Burning Maul, Roaring Flames and Consecration, as well as bug fixes for Ember of Benevolence and a few of our damage-over-time linger grenades. These changes will go live next week with Hotfix 4.1.0.2.

Solar Warlock:

Heat Rises:

Added behavior: Consuming your grenade now also releases a burst of Cure x2 around you, healing you and your nearby allies. Consuming a Healing Grenade increases the strength of the burst to Cure x3 and consuming a Touch of Flame Healing Grenade provides Restoration as an additional benefit.

Icarus Dash:
Added behavior: While airborne, rapidly defeating targets with your Super or any weapon Cures you.

Celestial Fire:
Each Celestial Fire projectile now applies 10 Scorch stacks. This is increased to 15 stacks with Ember of Ashes equipped.

Solar Titan:

Burning Maul:
Buffed damage in PvE by 25%

Roaring Flames:
Added behavior: While Roaring Flames is active, your uncharged melee attack now deals Solar damage and applies 30 Scorch stacks to targets per hit. This is increased to 40 stacks with Ember of Ashes equipped.

Consecration:
Fragment slots increased from 1 to 2.
Raised the height of the secondary attack’s ground wave by 25% to more easily catch players who jump too late.

That’s no small list of changes. The team takes feedback seriously—we’re players ourselves, so when things don’t land, we also feel that internally. To say it out loud, a hotfix of this magnitude comes at the cost of other changes, so to set expectations here, the team is unlikely to take another balance pass until much later this Season. It’s important to our team that on top of doing amazing new things, we maintain a healthy work-life balance and this patch necessitates some breathing room.

On that note, what’s next for abilities? Well, Arc 3.0 is still cooking up nicely, and we’ll have more to talk about there in a future update. But just to reiterate points the team has made in the past about the next subclass update, after Arc 3.0 you should expect the abilities team to go dark for a little while. Since shipping Stasis with Beyond Light, the team has made huge abilities changes Season over Season. Over the last year, we’ve been back-to-back shipping new aspects for Stasis, adding the Variable Ability Cooldown system, and creating the three Subclass 3.0 experiences—it’s been busy. We hope the changes you’ve read today reinforce our commitment to being responsive to feedback and candid in our communication. We’ll be there right alongside you on the Derelict Leviathan snapping, slamming, and flipping our way to victory.

New Fragments

We have a community target for Nightmare Containment activity completions, and we’ve now hit that target, so all the fragments are now available. If you want to go and pick up the new ones, then go and visit Ikora Rey in the Tower.

Known Issues

Given the season has recently launched, there are a bunch of known issues in the game. Many of us have felt them this week in Iron Banner, but here’s a good list of current issues Bungie are working on.

The Cloak of Bakris doesn’t flow like normal cloaks and is extremely rigid.
The top part of the Mark of the Falling Star ornament disappears if a player’s helmet display is turned off.
Killing Fikrul too quickly can sometimes trap players in the gauntlet.
The Polaris Lance catalyst is no longer progressing with Perfect Fifth burn kills.
We are investigating reports of players who are unable to unlock their Void and Arc subclasses.
The Conscripted weapon ornament for the Travelers Chosen Exotic Sidearm can no longer be equipped.
Some Artifice armor from the Grasp of Avarice dungeon have lost their extra mod slots.
The Anarchy Exotic Grenade Launcher loses its 2x damage against enemies after a character dies or picks up a relic.
Tethers from Hunter Supers can cause severe framerate drops in various activities.
Vortex grenades are doing less damage than intended.
Some players who die in the final boss encounter of the Duality dungeon get stuck outside the area and can’t respawn.
Some Iron Banner emblems don’t count toward the Iron Banner rank boost.
The Spark during Rift matches can sometimes be lost in certain scenarios.
Players will sometimes spawn repeatedly between rounds during Iron Banner matches.
Some players are not getting credit for the Jorum’s Howl Triumph in the Iron Banner Seal or for the Forging Iron quest steps. Based on our investigations, we believe this is caused for two reasons:
Players have equipped more than five (5) armor pieces in total. This can be caused when wearing Iron Banner armor while having universal ornaments made from Iron Banner armor equipped, which can double the amount of armor being worn.
Our system has detected that your character has gone AFK, meaning that our system thinks that your character isn’t participating, resulting in progress not being counted for Triumphs and bounties.
Some players aren’t gaining progress for various Crucible/Iron Banner Triumphs or bounties.
Our system has detected that your character has gone AFK, meaning that our system thinks that your character isn’t participating, resulting in progress not being counted for Triumphs and bounties.
The tooltip doesn’t appear on consecutive items when dismantling them one-by-one.

Let me know in the comments what you think of the Solar changes, plus let me know what you think about those new fragments.

That’s it for this look at the Solar 3.0 buffs and fragments. For more Destiny 2 content like this check out This Week In Video Games onn Youtube and subcribe today.