Everything we know about Season 19 in Destiny 2
Season 19 is just around the corner with it all kicking off on 6th December 2022. This is the final season of The Witch Queen Expansion, and Bungie are going to want to make it a good one as we lead into Lightfall in February 2023. Today I am going to go through everything we know so far, including info related to the Dungeon, weapons, cruicble, sandbox, economy, raid weapon crafting, plus speculate as to where the story may go.
Before we get stuck into today’s topic, let me know in the comments what you want to see from Season 19 in Destiny 2. Do you want PVP improvements, and what do you think the theme of the Dungeon will be? Plus, what is going to happen in the story, and how do we discover Neptune for Lightfall?
Dungeon
First of all, let’s start out with the things we know. One of those things is the new Dungeon that is coming to Destiny 2. The last dungeon we had was Duality, which was from Season of the Haunted, focusing on Calus and Caital. We don’t know yet the theme of the dungeon in Season 19, but we do know it’s going to launch at reset time on Friday 9th December 2022. If this is like other recent Dungeons like Grasp of Avarice and Duality, then we’ll get a host of new and returning weapons, plus maybe an exotic at the end.
Weapons Leaving
We have a few weapons rotating out of the loot pool next season and they include
Iron Banner
Forge’s Pledge Pulse Rifle
Riiswalker Shotgun
Trials of Osiris
Aisha’s Embrace Scout Rifle
Reed’s Regret Linear Fusion Rifle
Nightfall
Silicon Neuroma Sniper Rifle
Duty Bound Auto Rifle
Hopefully we’ll see plenty of new weapons added as part of the season. With two Nightfall weapons rotating out, it’s likely we’ll see some more D2 weapons come back. I’d love to see Spare Rations come back, but we don’t have a shortage of 140 hand cannons. Let me know in the comments or on Twitter @twivgpodcast which weapons you want to see come back.
Crucible
Iron Banner is set to rotate in a new game mode next season. This season it’s all been about Eruption, which has been much better for the game mode rather than Rift.
Bungie are likely to keep tweaking and changing the SBMM in Control. Plus there is a rumoured ‘rework’ coming to the competitive playlist. We’re likely to hear a little more about that before the start of the season, if that indeed is a thing. Joe Blackburn took to twitter to discuss cruicble in a long thread in August 2021.
“We want to look at what other broad systemic improvements the PVP ecosystem needs. We want to provide something on the scale of this trials rework to players every year.”
I’ve seen Season 19 mentioned previously, but we don’t have a lot of detail on it.
Deep Stone Crafting
In Season 19 we’re going to be able to craft Deep Stone Crypt weapons, which is very exciting, given they are some of the better weapons in the game. The shotgun and sniper in particular are very good. Deep Stone Crypt will have a chance at dropping craftable versions of the weapon, with Bungie saying this in their recent update.
“Each encounter has a chance to drop a Deepsight version of a raid weapon, and players may purchase one per week from the final chest after defeating Taniks. When Deep Stone Crypt is the featured raid of the week, encounter drops are uncapped! This means you can run a full raid and each encounter multiple times hunting for Deepsight drops.”
Economy changes
Planetary materials have been in Destiy since 2014, and they are about to be removed. Here’s the list of everything that’s leaving:
- Dusklight Shards
- Microphasic Datalattice
- Helium Filaments
- Baryon Boughs
- Spinmetal Leaves
- Glacial Starwort
Rahool is going to offer 5,000 gillmer for stacks of destination materials. 5000 for 20 or 250 each. If you are like me and have plenty of these, make sure to get rid of them at Rahool.
Sandbox changes
We have major changes coming to abilties, bringing the intensity of abilities down in PVP, while maintaining their effectiveness in PVE.
Solar: Restoration’s base healing is being reduced. At x1 this means reduced from 25 to 20 and at x2 from 40 to 32.5. This is no longer going to stack with healing rifts too.
Void: Improvements are coming to void overshields, which has a bug, and Bungie are buffing them to 50% rather than 25%. Nova Bombs are getting a buff too which the projectile speed increasing by 21% and the radius and inward pull by 17%.
Arc: Storm grenades are getting a nerf
Stasis: Bungie want to buff Stasis, but not make it as oppressive as when it first came out.
Seasonal Events
We should have two Seasonal events in Season 19 with The Dawning, the Holiday event in Destiny 2 where the tower is covered in snow and we get to bake cookies for our friends. It’s always a fun time, plus now it’s going to contribute towards The Reveler seal (which tracks all events). Hopefully Bungie is going to make this one less grindy than Festival of the Lost, but I doubt they’ve had the time to correct things. We should also be getting Moments of Triumph, which is an end of year celebration, where we look back at what we have achieved throughout Witch Queen.
Story
That leaves us with the story. This is the final season of Witch Queen, which is going to lead us into Lightfall. We know from the trailers that Lightfall is set on Neptune, so it’s likely that sometime in the season we’ll find out how to get there.
After the Witch Queen campaign we got a message on the Investigation Board on Mars.
New intel awaits you on the Evidence Board. The report includes a note to Ikora:
“According to this, before initiating YUGA SUNDOWN, Rasputin killed all protective measures in place for Human colonies and settlements. There’s a big list of codenames for the Moon, Mars, Earth, the Exodus ships, etc. but Rasputin also refers to a place called NEFELE STRONGHOLD. No record of that in any of our databases. Forwarding to A.B. for a cross-ref.”
A follow-up message from Ana Bray brings up more questions than it answers:
“To CHA-319: No hit on ‘NEFELE STRONGHOLD’ in any of Rasputin’s records. Can’t even find the original transcript you’re quoting. If it’s real, someone removed all traces of it. And if they did, they did it so cleanly that I’d suspect Rasputin himself.”
The last time we heard about Rasputin was in Season of Arrivals when he was shut off by the arriving Pyramid ships. Ana did her best to save him, and put him into an engram for safekeeping, perhaps to transfer him into an Exo body at a later date.
With Rasputin safely inside an engram and the knowledge that we have somewhere called NEFELES STRONGHOLD, these could be the clues to the new dungeon coming in season 19. Nefeles translated means Godess of Clouds, and Stronghold is a place that is fortified, to protect it from attack. We know that Lightfall is going to focus on a City on Neptune called Neomuna, which is hidden in the clouds of Neptune, plus they have Cloudstriders, which are like Guardians.
Given Rasputin deleted all traces of NEFELES STRONGHOLD, it’s likely we’d have to consult with Ana Bray, and perhaps remove Rasputin from his engram, and put him into an Exo Body. It could be that Rasputin has some weapons there that would be useful for us in our fight against The Witness.
We have been gathering allies over the past few seasons and Rasputin and Ana Bray would be powerful allies. I can see the story focusing on Rasputin, and sometime throughout the season his AI is transferred from the engram and put into an Exo body. Much like Uldren Sov was originally supposed to be called Crow (and then that happened in he game), Rasputin was supposed to have an Exo body, but we’ve never seen that happen.
Looking at the Lightfall marketing material, we can also see Osiris, so at some point this season I imagine Osiris is going to wake up and help us on our travels to Neptune. I also wouldn’t be surprised if we saw a major death this season, as we move into Lightfall. However, that last bit is pure speculation.
If we do get a season focused around Rapsutin, that leaves room to bring back some great weapons and armour sets including the Seraph weapons and Ikelos weapons. It’d be great to see an origin trait for these weapons and bring them into line with the modern weapons in the game. All the Ikelos weapons are great. We could even see the return of Warmind Cells. While they have been phased out in favour of Charged with Light mods and Elemental Wells, it’d be good to see them come back.
That’s all I have got for everything we know about season 19. Let me know what you think on Twitter or in the comments.