Destiny 2 is overhauling activity rewards, creating ‘tiers’ for weapons and armor

Destiny 2 is almost getting a rebirth in the future. One of the steps to breathe new life into the game is tuning the rewards for core activities, Bungie said today.

Bungie outlined the changes to rewards from specific activities in a blog post on Sept. 9. The new system aims to tackle the staleness of the loot chase from a rarely updated model by adding tiers to weapons and armor—though it’s unclear how they’ll work in practice.

“In past Destiny Seasons, only a narrow range of activities received updated rewards, leading to a narrow selection of activities worth playing,” the blog post reads, and with chases that were “not very deep either.” The few activities that did have worthwhile rewards were plagued by “shallow, unsatisfying grinds,” the studio acknowledges.

As a way to kickstart a new chase, Bungie is adding quality “tiers” to weapons and armor. For weapons, the current Legendary rarity will be the baseline under this new system, with the max tier being close to an Adept weapon.

Bungie hasn’t explained how this will work with armor, however. The closest parallel to the weapons system is Artifice Armor, which also drops from higher-tier activities and comes with an extra slot that grants three stat points to an attribute of choice. The blog post explicitly says this is coming to armor but fails to provide examples.

Additionally, Destiny 2 is updating the reward pool for some activities in every Major Update—the future equivalent of a season, with a new one every three months. The activities will be split into PvE and PvP with two tiers each. Core refers to the basic activities in that type (Strikes or regular Crucible), while Pinnacle denotes harder challenges, such as dungeons or Trials of Osiris.

Upcoming expansions—which will shift to a twice-a-year cadence with smaller content drops—also have two pools associated with their content, including the regular activities and a Pinnacle pool for raids or dungeons.

The latest gear and armor will also get branded as “New Gear.” Artifact mods may focus on that category rather than on weapons with origin traits, and Bungie may have special, optional events that have these sets in mind. The post mentions “Seasonal Events centered on posting high scores in specific activities” using New Gear, for instance.

Depending on how these work, however, Bungie may be trying to artificially jumpstart a chase for armor. Seasonal vendors have been a reliable source of high-stat Legendary armor for players, which leaves little need to farm them specifically. The studio could try to instill more reason for an armor chase, even for players who already have their dream sets.

The changes to rewards are part of a thorough overhaul of plenty of the game’s systems in the future. This also includes an updated expansion model, tweaks to the activities themselves, and a new node to find them. The changes aren’t final, however, so their implementation could be extremely different once this all is released—though Bungie hasn’t set an actual date or time frame yet.