Dead Man’s Tale and Dead Messenger’s reign of terror in Destiny 2 PvP may finally be at an end

With the exception of pulse rifles, which have dominated recent seasons in Destiny 2 thanks to the introduction of airborne effectiveness, two Exotic weapons have been notable outliers in the meta. Dead Messenger has been the Wave Frame grenade launcher of choice for many high-level players, and a recent buff to the Dead Man’s Tale scout rifle has seen it skyrocket to the top of pick rates.

Bungie plans to put a stop to the oppressive nature these weapons can have in the right hands, and both are on the chopping block for nerfs in the midseason balance patch announced in today’s This Week At Bungie blog. The nerfs will join adjustments also coming to various weapon archetypes, abilities and—to the relief of Trials players—Citan’s Ramparts.

The rework to the airborne effectiveness stat will more than likely steal away the attention of most players, but the rest of the contents coming with the midseason balance patch are just as juicy. With Lightfall only a month away and the new Strand subclass set to shift the sandbox in unexpected ways, Bungie is reining in some of the current outliers so that Destiny 2’s PvP and PvE experiences are in a healthy state before it arrives.

Changes coming to Exotics

When it comes to Exotics, that means hitting Dead Messenger, Dead Man’s Tale, and the Citan’s Ramparts Titan Exotic.

“Dead Messenger can be oppressive to play against, as the triple wave pattern can easily be combined with a number of abilities or other weapons to effectively one-hit kill a player,” the Destiny 2 sandbox team said in the blog. “We’ve brought the damage down significantly to make such playstyles less effective. With this change it still has use cases in PvP, but is a lot less frustrating to play against.”

Dead Messenger

• The splash damage from the wave is getting reduced against players by 35 percent.

Dead Man’s Tale required significantly more adjustments to curb the power level of, all thanks to a buff the weapon got that “had a much more dramatic effect than expected.” As the weapon was first tuned around its aiming accuracy preferring body shots, when a tweak was implemented that made it prefer critical hits, the weapon spiked in effectiveness.

“We’ve pulled back various hip-fire tuning to make hip-firing at long ranges much harder and removed the Cranial Spike penalty,” Bungie said.

Dead Man’s Tale

• Removed the damage penalty for reaching five stacks of Cranial Spike.
• Reduced hip-fire and airborne aim-assist cone angles by 25 percent on MnK.
• Reduced hip-fire cone angle bonus scaling from 20 percent to five percent.
• Reduced hip-fire precision aim cone angle from 3 degrees to 0.8 degrees.
• Reduced hip-fire auto aim falloff scalar from 1.5 to 1.1.

Citan’s Ramparts has been a pain point in the Crucible specific to the Competitive and Trials of Osiris playlists more than most, becoming a particularly oppressive Exotic during Season of the Seraph. Bungie is aware of this fact and is hitting the Exotic armor piece hard to curb how consistent its pick rate is and offer “more opportunities for effective counterplay.”

Citan’s Ramparts

• Increased the cooldown of the Barricade ability while Citan’s Ramparts are equipped by 70 percent.
• Increased the amount of damage players deal to a Citan’s Barricade by 25 percent.

Changes coming to abilities

In the same midseason balance patch, some abilities are getting tuned as well. The changes were a part of Bungie’s Lightfall playtests but will be released early to address some specific outliers in PvE and PvP.

“In the Crucible, class ability uptime has inflated significantly over the course of the last year,” the blog reads, something that Bungie has been trying to avoid in its attempts to curb the reliance on abilities over guns in PvP. “We’re increasing the base cooldown of Barricade, Thruster, and Dodge by 20 percent.”

Barricade (Titan class ability)

• Towering Barricade base cooldown increased from 40 seconds to 48 seconds.
• Rally Barricade base cooldown increased from 32 seconds to 38 seconds.

Thruster (Titan class ability)

• Base cooldown increased from 30 seconds to 36 seconds.

Dodge (Hunter class ability)

• Marksman’s Dodge base cooldown increased from 29 seconds to 34 seconds.
• Gambler’s Dodge base cooldown increased from 38 seconds to 46 seconds.

Bungie is also revisiting Storm Grenades after they already received a nerf in a prior balance patch. “At the launch of Season 19, we reduced the linger time of Touch of Thunder’s enhanced Storm Grenades, but this hasn’t meaningfully moved the needle on either their potency or usage across game modes, so we’re taking a harder swing here,” the devs said.

That harder swing involves dramatically reducing the damage dealt by each lightning strike and reducing the effectiveness of the grenade’s player-tracking abilities.

Storm Grenades (enhanced by the Touch of Thunder Aspect)

• Secondary strike damage reduced from 40 to 30.
• Added a 0.24-second delay between the grenade’s initial strike on impact and the creation of the roaming storm.
• The roaming storm’s travel speed now begins at 1.5 meters per second and ramps up over 1.3 seconds, to a maximum of three meters per second. This previously traveled at a flat 3.5 meters per second.
• The roaming storm’s target search range now increases over two seconds after creation, rather than starting at full size.

Changes coming to weapons

While weapon tuning is more on the minor side for the upcoming Destiny 2 update, Bungie has still seen it fit to hit a few specific outliers amongst the currently popular weapon archetypes. This includes sweeping tweaks for pulse rifles and submachine guns, as well as some more specific hits on sliding penalties and the Legendary Revoker sniper rifle.

“Submachine guns (SMGs) have long been heavily dependent on the range stat to be competitive,” the sandbox team explained when addressing the upcoming nerfs facing the archetype. “We recently made a change that brought these higher range options more in line, but the difference between them and other SMGs was still too large. As such, we have made a large improvement to SMG performance at lower range values, combined with a small decrease to the higher range values.”

Submachine guns

• Increased damage and aim assist falloff start at zero range by about 30 percent.
• Reduced damage and aim assist falloff start at 100 range by about six percent.
• Adaptive Frame submachine guns will get an increased critical hit multiplier from 1.44 to 1.5.
• Adaptive Frame submachine guns also receive an increase in critical hit damage from 16.2 to 16.9.
• Forensic Nightmare (a Legendary submachine gun from the Throne World) is getting a buff to its zoom from 13 to 14.

Pulse rifles are the other weapon type to face a balance pass, understandably so since pulse rifles have routinely appeared at the top of the meta since the introduction of airborne effectiveness. “Pulse rifles are very potent in the current meta for a multitude of reasons,” said the team, pointing to both the current map pool favoring long-range options as well as the heavy focus on grounded gunplay.

As both the map pool and airborne effectiveness are getting changed in the near future, Bungie refrained from heavily nerfing pulse rifles here, instead hoping to see how they fit into the new sandbox when Lightfall launches before making any major adjustments.

For now, Bungie has “reduced the top end range of pulse rifles on all input types and increased their native recoil on MnK to bring their ease of use more in line with controller,” it said. “These changes should combine to make pulse rifles less effective at longer ranges without hurting players who choose to use them more actively.”

Pulse rifles

• Reduced aim assist falloff start at 100 range by about 10 percent. 
• Reduced damage falloff start at 100 range by about five percent.
• Increased recoil by 20 percent on MnK only.
• The BxR-55 Battler pulse rifle specifically is getting its zoom reduced from 20 to 18.

The change to sidearms is only a small one but focused mostly on reining in the buff they received by a small margin. “After letting the meta settle, sidearms have cemented themselves as very strong contenders in close quarters engagements, but they are exceeding their intended effective range by a small amount,” Bungie said.

Sidearms

• Reduced the season 18 aim assist falloff distance buff from 30 percent to 20 percent.

One of the more entertaining changes to see coming to the game is specifically geared toward a now mostly redundant Ritual weapon of the past. The Legendary Revoker sniper rifle, which has been vaulted with its Power level capped for years now, is seeing a return to regular use in the Crucible as more modes in PvP have Power level removed.

“The Reversal of Fortune perk is extremely strong, particularly in combination with certain playstyles,” Bungie said. “Ultimately, we decided to cap the maximum return on this by requiring multiple misses to return one shot.”

Revoker sniper rifle

• Reversal of Fortune now triggers after two missed shots within six seconds.

The final detailed change concerns sliding penalties, something that was introduced back in August 2021 and is now on its way out again. “The goal of this change was to reduce the percentage of engagements where the outcome was effectively decided by sliding, especially when used with Shotguns that instantly ended the fight from significant range,” the blog explained.

“Shotguns and other weapons have been tuned since then, and we’ve implemented skill-based matchmaking into the Crucible, so we’re removing the slide penalties in order to improve the feel and consistency of combat.”

Sliding

• Removed penalties to weapon stability, incoming flinch, and shotgun pellet spread while sliding.

These changes alone make for a sizeable shift in the PvP meta on the horizon, but even more changes await Destiny 2 when Lightfall launches in late February. For now, players will be able to sink their teeth into most of the announced adjustments when the midseason balance patch for Season of the Seraph goes live on Jan. 24.