The long awaited patch for Destiny leading into the official year two content headlined by The Taken King has gone live. The patch brings the much discussed nerf for both Thorn and the Gjallarhorn, as well as a complete overhaul of some of the perks and a pre-launch level cap increase for all players.
The details of the patch are rolled out over on the official Bungie website, where ahead of the Taken King's launch players will get a level cap increase to 34. Additionally, after the launch of the expansion on September 15th, the level cap will increase to 40.
One of the biggest changes is the separation of levels and light. That's right, your character level will now be separate from your character's light level. This should prove to be interesting as to how players balance their leveling with their item stacking.
As it was promised a while back, both Thorn and Gjallarhorn have taken major hits in Bungie's sci-fi title. Their damage have both been collectively reduced by one third. However, in the case of Thorn the weapon can now stack damage over time by up to five times. This DOT will carry over as poison damage against players and NPCs.
It's kind of funny because in one of the activity updates it simply states “The Ghost is now voiced by Nolan North”. I imagine a sigh of relief by some players, rosy-cheeked excitement by others and maybe some fanboy and fangirl gushing from hearing about Nolan North officially joining Destiny. Plus, maybe hearing the iconic voice actor in Destiny will help hold over gamers until Uncharted 4 arrives early next year on the PS4.
The update also brings a number of fixes to many of the game's past expansion packs, including updates for the House of the Wolves and even Crota's raid in the Dark Below.
Bungie has tweaked Destiny's Crucible in a number of ways, balancing out some weapons hear and there, adding damage to some while taking damage from others, as well as fine tuning the game's armor systems.
Some of the more obvious changes include the ability to completely skip the game's cinematics, as well as show and hide helmets in the character option screen. They also fixed some issues with the suspend and resume feature on the Xbox One, along with addressing a crash on the PS3 if you cycled through too many activities.
For gamers who have been putting in a lot of time and dedication in Destiny's Crucible, they also made some modifications to the game's networking efficiency. Lag has been greatly reduced along with an improved damage validation system to “reduce the effectiveness of players with extreme lag”. So you'll no longer have to worry about getting tagged by some laggy player and then attempting to tag them back and they manage to teleport away while you die an ignominious death at the hands of a newb with the power of lag on his side.
This major patch will set the tone for the highly awaited launch of The Taken King expansion, which is due to go live on September 15th. For more information on the patch feel free to visit the official Bungie website.
