Destiny 2 Season of the Deep - All weapon changes

Destiny 2 Season 21, also known as Season of the Deep, will debut on May 23, with Bungie revealing what players can expect regarding weapon changes, including nerfs, buffs, and slight reworks across the board.

In a blog post shared on May 17, Chris Proctor, senior design lead, explained that for Season of the Deep, they'll focus on hip-fire reticles, various other changes to a bunch of Exotic weapons, and a few other "bits and pieces."

First, let's break down all weapon changes before we move into more specific content Bungie revealed would be coming in Season 21.

• Read more - Destiny 2 - Best exotic weapons (2023)

All weapon changes in Season of the Deep

There is plenty of stuff to sink our teeth into, but let's kick off with exotic weapon changes.

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Credit: Bungie

Eyes of Tomorrow

• Killing four targets with a missile volley will refund one ammo.

Graviton Lance

• Increased RPM from 257 to 300 (reduced burst delay by 20%, now matches Revision Zero's Hakke Heavy Rounds rate of fire).

Rebalanced damage per shot.

• Increased first shot damage from:
• Body: 9.5 to 19.
• Crit: 15.7 to 31.4.
• Decreased second shot damage from:
• Body: 35.6 to 25.6.
• Crit: 58.7 to 42.3.

Jade Rabbit

• Added buff text to show when Fate of All Fools increased body shot damage is active.
• Quickly hitting three critical hits now refunds three shots instead of one.

The Manticore

• Increased the catalyst's damage resistance from tier 3 to tier 4.
• Increased movement speed during hang time.
• Activating the catalyst perk (through an airborne kill or sustained damage following an airborne kill) now partially refills the magazine.

Lumina

• Increased Noble Rounds cap from five to six.

Heartshadow

• Damage increase now activates quicker while invisible, after 0.25s instead of 1s.
• Heartshadow now weakens upon dealing any damage while the damage increase is active.

Worldline Zero

• The sprinting Heavy attack can now be chained into itself once.
• Sword guard energy cost from each sprinting heavy attack reduced from 100% to 50%.
• Increased damage from an individual sprinting heavy attack by 8.3%.

Sweet Business

• Now fires explosive rounds every 20 shots (fewer shots while fully spun up).

Legend of Acrius

• Increased total ammo from 12 to 16.
• Increased maximum projectile distance from 9m to 12m.

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Credit: Bungie

Tommy's Matchbook

• Catalyst updated: While overheated, sustained fire scorches your target. Every five shots applies 14+7 (with the Embers of Ashes Fragment) scorch stacks.

No Time to Explain

• Updated drone to work with anti-barrier (will break Barrier Champion shields and over penetrate combatant shields).
• Updated drone to work with Feeding Frenzy (from the NTTE catalyst).
• This also resolved an issue where the feedback for Feeding Frenzy would always play when the player spawned and then never again.

Skyburner's Oath

• Increased scorch stacks from 3 to 5 and 5 to 10 with the Embers of Ashes Fragment.

Salvation's Grip

• Reworked to have two firing modes. Charged shot creates a pattern of Stasis crystals (where the number of crystals is no longer dependent on charge time). Uncharged shot is a normal Grenade Launcher shot, which does more damage to Stasis crystals and frozen targets.
• Added a new perk that reloads the magazine from reserves when you quickly shatter at least 3 crystals with the uncharged shot.

Bad Juju

• Fixed an issue that was causing the weapon to recoil like an Auto Rifle, making it harder to control. The recoil pattern will now be similar to other Pulse Rifles.

Fighting Lion

• Fixed an issue that was causing this weapon to do more damage than intended to red-bar combatants.

Thunderlord

• Fixed an issue resulting in hits against a Divinity bubble counting as two crits instead of one.

Winterbite

• The impact damage has been removed and redistributed to the detonation damage.
• The self-damage scaling has been tuned to account for the increased damage of the detonation.

Still with us? Why not check all the ability changes coming to Season of the Deep while you're here?

Now, let's move to perk changes.

Destiny 2 Season of the Deep perk changes

Fragile Focus

• Bonus lasts until shield pop, returns when shield regenerates to 100%.
• Thresh, Demolitionist, and Pugilist have always granted increased energy on Shotgun, Fusion Rifle and Sniper Rifle kills, but Glaives missed out on that bonus until now.
• Grants increased energy to Glaive projectile kills (same as Shotguns, Fusion Rifles, and Sniper Rifles).

Reconstruction

• This results in a slight change to the timing of the perk where the initial timer and the cooldown timer between reloads have been unified.
• Base perk: 4 seconds.
• Enhanced perk: 3.5 seconds.

Shoot to Loot

• Updated to pick up Orbs of Power.
• Currently, this only works on direct hits. The ability for the orbs to be picked up with weapon detonations will be added in a future patch.

Weapon reticles

Rebuilt the reticles for the following weapon types so that they move more visibly at high FOV, while still conveying the current state of the weapon accurately.

• Fusion Rifle
• Hand Cannon
• Sidearm
• Trace Rifle

Bungie plans to update other weapon reticles in a similar way in a future release.

Shotgun reticles also now scaled with FOV, such that the reticle will closely match the pellet spread regardless of your selected FOV (and note that as of Lightfall they dynamically scale with Shotgun pellet spread angle changes).

Charge Meters

• Fusion Rifles now have a charge meter under the reticle.
• Sword reticles now show the current Sword guard energy.

Experimental Aim Down Sights reticle

Bungie will experiment with a new ADS reticle in an SMG.

Shayura's Wrath

• Now has an aim-down-sights reticle that reacts to the weapon's accuracy and autoaim state, and ties into "red reticle," meaning this will change color when an enemy that's within this weapon's engagement range is under the reticle.

Custom Exotic weapon reticles

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Credit: Bungie

Plenty of Exotic weapons have perks with states or counts that are important information for players - Bungie added reticle elements to show these to several Exotic weapons (note that Exotic Swords and Fusion Rifles also benefit from the above charge meter and Sword meter elements).

The specific additions to Exotic weapons are:

Charge meter added to Exotic weapons whose base weapon type doesn't typically have a charge meter.

• Devil's Ruin
• Salvation's Grip
• Grand Overture

Perk counter shows pips for perked shots.

• Quicksilver Storm grenade count.
• Ace of Spades Memento Mori shot count.
• Lumina Noble Rounds shot count.
• Traveler's Chosen Gathering Light stacks.

Perk progress meter shows perk buildup.

• The Manticore

Perk active shows when the Exotic perk is active.

• Hawkmoon
• Ager's Scepter
• Tarrabah
• Touch of Malice
• Cryosthesia 77k
• Trinity Ghoul

Charge meter and perk counter.

• Vex Mythoclast

Inspection screen improvements

Yes, you can finally inspect weapons!

Finally:

Weapon archetype changes in Season of the Deep

Bows

• Tyranny of Heaven's stats were always weirdly low, and we were touching these weapons anyway so opted to update its stats while we were in there.

Submachine Guns

• Aggressive Submachine Guns
• Reduced base damage from 15 to 14.
• Increased precision hit multiplier from 1.45 to 1.5 (crit damage goes from 21.8 to 21).
• The Immortal is such a stat monster that no other Aggressive SMG can compete.
• Reduced base range value by 10.

Sniper Rifles

• Increased PvE damage by 10%.
• Note: Izanagi's Burden's Honed Edge perk shots don't receive this buff, all other Exotic Sniper Rifles receive the buff as written.

Scout Rifles

• Long Arm was inadvertently receiving the damage bonus vs minors for Exotics, so we've addressed that (it still receives the Scout Rifle PvE damage buff from the Season 20 mid-Season balance update).

And that's it; why not also check out our selection of best PvP weapons in Destiny in 2023.