Destiny 2 balance changes to nerf Final Shape’s overpowered Exotics

Destiny 2 developers have detailed the balance changes coming to Final Shape Exotics like the Khvostov.

The Final Shape expansion brought back Destiny’s first weapon, the Khvostov, as a powerful Exotic Item. In fact, the Auto Rifle’s proven so formidable that its usage in Trials of Osiris marks the highest of any gun since The Craftening.

This is due in no small part to the Khvostov’s incredibly quick time-to-kill in the Crucible, but it’s not the only Exotic causing issues.

Other Final Shape Exotics have also been overpowering to a degree, namely the Red Death Pulse Rifle and Speaker’s Sight.

Bungie developers plan to implement balance changes for all three in an upcoming update. The team outlined the tweaks in its ‘This Week in Destiny‘ blog, mentioning that a “handful of things have jumped out as early issues in Crucible, and we wanted to get those addressed sooner rather than later.”

Recoil on the Khvostov represents one such issue. While the developers meant to reduce recoil on special ricochet rounds by 50 percent, this resulted in a bug that applied the reduction to the rifle’s full magazine.

The unintentional “maximum stability” has, thus, made the Khvostov much easier to use than Destiny 2’s other Auto Rifles. No one wants to rob players of how good the weapon feels in its current state, yet “the level it’s at is objectively too strong.”

As such, Bungie will remove the bugged recoil effect but increase the base stability by 30 to 72. “This will give it back some (not all) of that stable feel, without leaving it so far out of band.”

Destiny 2 devs will similarly tweak the balance on Khvostov’s Ricochet Shots since they’ve become an issue for PvP. The high uptime and orb buffs allow the rifle to enjoy a quick time-to-kill typically “reserved for more difficult-to-trigger damage boosts.”

To address this, Bungie will “reduce the initial bonus impact damage against players only from 15 percent to 5 percent.” Plus, bouncing bullet damage against players will drop from 18.4 to 4.6.

The Red Death’s recoil pattern is also out of whack, though it was a purposeful move to reference the gun’s classic Destiny variant. Still, developers plan on reducing the “added stability the pattern provides… [to] align the burst spread more closely with other Pulse Rifles.”

Finally, Speaker’s Sight makes it far too easy to generate an “extreme number of orbs in the Crucible.” The team’s “short-term solution” revolves around disabling the Orb Generation part of Speaker’s Sight in the Crucible. Long-term goals include plans to later reconsider “allowing the weapon to create Orbs at a more reasonable rate.”