Destiny 2's lead gun guy answers our biggest questions about The Final Shape: new weapon mods, the next raid DPS meta, and just "a small amount of power creep"

A lot is riding on Destiny 2: The Final Shape, and per my hands-on preview of the expansion's campaign, Bungie is checking all boxes so far. The narrative looks promising, the new Prismatic subclass feels incredible, and sweeping balance changes across the game seem to be moving it toward a healthier spot. 

One element I didn't get to spend all that much time experimenting with in my play session, simply due to the limited time and access involved, was the broader arsenal coming in The Final Shape. The new guns that I did see, including a precious few Exotics, all seemed to have potential or immediately impressed me, but there are dozens more waiting in the wings. This expansion is also making some foundational weapons changes, and setting up more to come in the future, with a few key mods disappearing and blanket buffs coming to many archetypes. 

To get a better understanding of the new guns and how our old guns are changing, I sat down with weapons lead Chris Proctor, beloved in the Destiny 2 community for frequently sharing details from his legendary balance spreadsheet. We talked through the potential of weapon mods, how to deal with power creep, The Final Shape's "above average" injection of new guns, and a whole lot more. 

To start, let's talk about why the Spec mods are gone and why now is the time to get rid of them. I've heard some of the reasoning, and I can guess some more, but I'd love to get your take. 

Chris Proctor: We've long felt that Spec mods, including Dragonfly Spec and that kind of thing, were not very interesting mods. If you have Dragonfly, you must put Dragonfly Spec on your weapon. If this is a primary weapon, you must put Minor Spec on your weapon. So anything that's a non-choice, we kind of want to remove it from the pool. Bluntly, it's just boring. What we've done in The Final Shape is crank the damage on almost all weapon types up after it accounts for removing the Spec mods, which means that you can instead pick a mod that you're more interested in. Which is also not perfect, because in most cases, that's just going to be Backup Mag, although for certain weapon types, maybe counterbalance or something like that. But it opens the door for us to introduce new mods which are more interesting in a future release. So there are no new mods coming in The Final Shape, but there will be further down the line. 

I was wondering if you’re going to add new mods, obviously not to replace them with the same effect, but to fill that void of, okay, we have some open mod slots now, we're not defaulting to Boss Spec, as you say. So that might be an Episode thing to come?

We don't have a specific release schedule we can talk about, but yeah, definitely in an upcoming release. Not like a year from now, but sometime in the year of Final Shape, we're intending to introduce more mods and make those more interesting, like expressions of your playstyle give you more choices that actually matter.

And I had the same reaction: we're running Backup Mag now. Maybe Counterbalance in PvP. Looking at the damage bump, if we can get a bit nerdy with some of the math, what are the big winners here? 

Yeah, we can. The balance page is like four pages of numbers. But I can pick and choose some stuff. So firstly, certain things, like rockets – rockets are not getting a damage bump because those are already far and away the most popular boss damage weapon. They're honestly a little overtuned. We didn't feel like we needed to bring them down, but we weren't going to bring them up either. But pulse rifles are getting a 20% damage buff in PvE; pellet shotguns 10%. It's roughly those kinds of numbers, 7 to 10% in general across most things. Linear fusions 5%, machine guns are getting 7%, swords are getting 7%. It's worth noting this applies to Exotics as well. And that's significant because Exotics can't equip Spec mods. So that's just a flat buff to most, particularly special and heavy Exotics, which had tended to lag a little bit behind Legendaries.

So some weapon types, like rockets, aren't getting bumped up, but nothing's coming down. So our guns are getting stronger, generally. 

Yeah, a little bit. Although since you would just equip those mods before, it's giving you more non-power options for customizing your weapons. And okay, maybe it's just Backup Mag Now, but the intent is not to introduce a lot of power creep. With Exotics, we're okay with bumping those a little bit. The other aspect of this change is, because almost all of the weapons are going up by like 7 to 10% or 20%, we've reduced the exotic damage bonus against red-bar enemies from 40% to 30%. So Exotics aren't losing out, but some Exotics are also not going up. If you're using Riskrunner, that's roughly even but Legendaries are coming up a bit. 

Was this partly motivated as a response to some of the feedback around Legendary primaries against red-bar enemies?

Yeah, exactly. That's exactly why we started tackling that. We had it on our backburner for a long time. We really want to give players more options for mods and finish clearing out the Spec mods. And this was just the perfect time to hit both of those. Because if we'd done one and then the other, that probably would have been a feel-bad for players one way or another.

So we're all on the same page that Backup Mag is going to be popular. Looking at the mod pool, and the potential for future mods, how do we prevent having the same problem again? Instead of a Spec all the time, now it's Backup Mag all the time. How do we refresh that pool? 

I think it's a lesson that putting damage in the mod slot just takes away player choice, because players will almost always go for damage if they have an option. So we probably wouldn't do that again. I think that Adept mods are a pretty good example of something that we could do to make it more interesting. This is hypothetical, we're not doing this exact thing, but something like all weapons have the ability to slot +10 to any stat in the mod slot and we bump Adepts up to 15 or something. That would be an example where, yeah, you care about stability and range and handling on a hand cannon, and you pick the one that most matches your playstyle the best or something along those lines. We would like to actually go further with it and make mods more significant to build crafting overall, but yeah, it’s way too early to drop any hints. 

This is a separate topic, but still ties into the weapons sandbox. So right now, everyone's playing Onslaught and getting these god roll Brave weapons. And we've just heard that sunsetting is now sunset, and some legacy gear will come back in the future, better than ever. So I've been thinking about how The Final Shape guns are going to earn a slot in my loadout without power-creeping the game to oblivion. How do you make me put down the Mountaintop and Midnight Coup and so on that I just got? 

It's a trickier one to answer. Just being completely honest, we accept a small amount of power creep. It is important that the new stuff be competitive with the old stuff. I don't think we're at risk of all the sunrise weapons suddenly being go-tos again, because everything from Witch Queen onwards has an Origin Trait. Yeah, you could get Kindled Orchid with Rampage and Kill Clip, but it doesn't have an Origin Trait. It doesn't have stats that are as high as some of the current weapons, that kind of thing. 

We're also pushing more into new types of experiences, some more novelty. You've probably experimented with some of the new weapon types, like micro missiles, obviously, the micro missile grenade launcher. Rocket pistols, the support auto rifle, or the area denial grenade launcher. There's a bunch of stuff in Final Shape, including some things which probably you won't see until after the raid. We expect those to fill fairly unique roles in the sandbox. So if you want a weapon that fills that role, you do go for the new thing.

It feels like there's richer design space, at least from what I've seen and what you've described, with more options versus the same weapon types getting stronger. More colorful guns over better guns.

Yeah, that's definitely a focus. We want players to have really cool, different options for things, not just providing vertical growth every release.

Power creep is definitely a word on my mind. Just 10 minutes ago, I finished unlocking all the Prismatic stuff and was able to make my Warlock build with the perfect Exotic class item. Are you especially comfortable with a little bit of power creep here because it's The Final Shape, it's a big climactic expansion – do you need to push the sandbox not just in Prismatic but also in the guns?

I think there's a large amount riding on the weapons landing really strong in The Final Shape. I think, yeah, we probably just need a little bit more as a result. But Destiny's continuing. We’ve definitely got plans for the next few years after this, so we need to not consume all of the power space in Final Shape. We've got to keep the game going. 

Compared to previous expansions, especially Witch Queen and Lightfall most recently, how does the sheer quantity of new guns compare in The Final Shape? A little above average or about par for the course?

Slightly above average, I think. Witch Queen, if I remember correctly, had like 48 weapons or something like that, Lightfall had slightly less. The Final Shape has slightly more. A lot of the weapons are higher-profile. You probably saw the Season of Dawn weapons popping up there with an Origin Trait. I think the quantity overall is around the same because the [Episode] is longer, it's like a four-month Season, so there are more seasonal weapons. It went from six weapons to 10. So that's definitely higher. And we're also rotating weapons a little more, rotating more weapons through the pools for rituals, sort of like Trials and that kind of thing. Again, because of the longer 'seasons.'

And as I was thumbing through some of the new guns, it felt like special attention has been paid to element types in specific weapon archetypes. Oh, we didn't have that many Strand options here, or this many Void options for this type. That kind of thing. It feels like The Final Shape has helped fill a lot of those gaps, in part to support Prismatic, which is super damage-type heavy. 

Yeah, definitely. Prismatic put some more pressure on that. We're always on the lookout for holes to fill, whether that's all-up roster, which is a little bit less important now with sunrising, but also just the currently acquirable pool of weapons should have representative damage type and weapon type combinations as much as we're able. We're complicating it for ourselves of course by introducing new weapon types as well. So, ah shit, now we've got to introduce new damage types for the rocket pistol in addition to all of the things we already had. 

This is about the most loaded question I can give you, but how do you see these sandbox changes affecting the DPS meta? Which, as you said, is very, very rocket-heavy. 

I'll refer again to my balance page. I actually think that the DPS meta, particularly for the Final Shape raid, is going to be very different from normal. I'm not going to drop any hints about it, but the setup of the raid is such that certain strategies that the players are banking on are just not going to work because of how the encounters are set up. There's also some specific changes that we've got, like rockets are relatively, slightly weaker because machine guns and swords are coming up. There's some new sword meta options that are coming. I think we'll see it shift around a bit. Rockets are still strong. I think a team that comes prepped with rockets will do fine. But they'll be less dominant. 

You figured we'd still pull out rockets anyway. 

Speaking of rockets, you might want to try Truth.

Really? Tripod is finally going to justify it? 

Yeah, we made a change where the AoE damage is now as high as the total impact plus AoE on other weapons. So you've got three in the mag, it fires full-strength rockets, and they've got more reserves. There's a bunch of other Exotic weapon changes like that. 

Destiny 2: The Final Shape's release date is set for June 4.