One of the big changes introduced in Destiny 2’s Lightfall expansion was Buildcrafting 2.0, a new system for customizing your Guardians with armor mods, perks, and abilities. In Destiny 2’s upcoming Season of the Deep, the armor mod system will undergo an overhaul that’s primarily focused on the Armor Charge mechanic and enhancing how you activate it.
Currently, Armor Charges can be triggered by picking up Orbs of Power, and once activated, a number of beneficial buffs and abilities will be temporarily available depending on how you’ve built your loadout. These are consumed by other mods or they’ll expire after a set amount of time. Some mods focus on restoration, others on resilience, and energy generation, and as long as you’re picking up Orbs of Power, you’ll always have stacks of Armor Charges available.
The challenge here is that to pick up an Orb of Power, you’ll need to push forward into enemy territory most of the time, a dangerous move depending on which difficulty you’re playing an activity on. For Season 21, Bungie says that it wants to provide a “more generous” collection method through buildcrafting and two new armor mods.
The first armor mod is Powerful Attraction, which collects all Orbs of Power within a specified radius when you use your class ability. Bungie says that it did consider a “Seeking Orbs” mod solution, but certain technical challenges didn’t make it feasible.
Elemental Charges is the second armor mod that’ll be introduced next season, and this one is focused on the subclass collectible elements, Firesprites, Ionic Traces, Stasis Shards, and Void Breaches. Collecting one of these associated with your damage type will provide an escalating chance to grant a stack of Armor Charge, while destroying a Strand tangle will have the same effect. Bungie added that the frequency of gaining a stack of Armor Charge is tuned differently for each collectible, to account for the differences in how often these elemental collectibles can be created.
Complementing these changes is a tweak to the Shoot to Loot weapon perk that be available in Season 21, as you’ll be to “loot” Orbs of Power in addition to ammo boxes by firing at them. Bungie did consider applying this enhanced perk to subclass-spawned objects, but this is currently technically unfeasible. Buildcrafting will also expand next season with three new Strand Aspects for Lightfall owners, which Bungie named. Titans get Flechette Storm, Hunters can acquire Threaded Specter, and Warlocks can experiment with The Wanderer.
Another interesting change coming up in the new season will be focused on Artifact perks and the ability to refund individual ones with a single click. Bungie explained that this will make overall buildcrafting much faster, as you’ll be able to adjust passive perks on the fly without needing to reset the entire Artifact. You can also look forward to some big changes to Commendations, Guardian Ranks, and a new role for Master Rahool as an Exotic engram decoder in Season 21.
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