Destiny 2 will nerf ability cooldowns, but the changes in Lightfall should ‘more than make up’ the difference

Destiny 2 players can expect a multitude of ability changes in Lightfall. The base impact that Discipline, Strength, Recovery, Resilience, and Mobility have on cooldowns will see a direct cut in Lightfall. But according to a blog post from today, Bungie believes the upcoming changes to buildcrafting will be worth the price.

In the blog post, Bungie revealed a nerf to the passive cooldown gains from attributes. Starting in Lightfall, the passive cooldown gains mean a tier 10 attribute in the new system will roughly be equivalent to a tier 10 in the pre-Lightfall sandbox, and stats will also spike less heavily. These are somewhat drastic changes, but Bungie believes players may not feel their impact too much in the new Lightfall sandbox.

With Lightfall, Bungie is getting rid of energy affinity in armor pieces, adding an extra type-specific mod slot (to a total of three instead of two), and slashing armor costs. This means players can use a myriad of energy-generating mods, ranging from Bomber and Grenade Kickstart to Dynamo and Ashes to Assets.

The change to ability cooldowns also follows a tweak to the base cooldown timer for some abilities. While Bungie didn’t outline the changes to Warlocks and Titans, Bungie is reverting the nerf to Hunter dodges that took place in Hotfix 6.3.0.5. This will bring the base dodge cooldown of Marksman Dodge to 29 seconds (down from 34) and drop the cooldown on Hunter’s Dodge to 38s (down from 46).

Bungie reiterated that “abilities will always be central to your combat loop” in Destiny 2 and said the team will continue to tweak both the ability economy and the strength of specific abilities to “make them feel more powerful.”

The buildcrafting changes in Lightfall will essentially uproot the entire mod system. The new expansion will slash armor costs and give players more room to use mods, both by making Artifact mods equippable outside of armor and by directly giving guardians more slots to tinker with.

The new expansion will also fuse some Elemental Well and Charged With Light mods into a new combat style mechanic, Armor Charge, which will presumably work similarly to its predecessors. Mods that created Elemental Wells or provided stacks of Charged With Light will now give guardians an Orb of Power, according to Bungie. The functionality of Taking Charge (grants one stack of Charged With Light when picking up an Orb of Power) is also embedded into the Armor Charge system, as outlined in Bungie’s buildcrafting update blog post.

While Elemental Wells will be somewhat retired, they will also give way to new element-specific mechanics, including Firesprites (Solar), Void Breaches (Void), the existing Ionic Traces (Arc) and Stasis Crystals (Stasis), and a new (and yet-unnamed) Strand mechanic. Players can check out the results of the changes for themselves after Lightfall debuts on Feb. 28.