Destiny 2’s New Nerfs Are All-Time Awful And At The Worst Possible Time

Paul Tassi, Senior Contributor
2025-08-22 10:59:00
www.forbes.com

While the big buzz at Bungie right now is the pending departure of CEO Pete Parsons, hours before that, the community was lambasting what was one of the worst Destiny 2 TWABs in recent memory, one that discussed coming changes to The Portal, loot and leveling.

All of those points badly need changes, but what’s been proposed here is absolutely the opposite of what should be happening. In a period where everything in Destiny 2 needs to be buffed, Bungie is relying much more heavily on nerfs. What’s happening? Here’s the list:

The majority of Pinnacle Ops missions have had their rewards reduced. All chests in Encore down to two, all chests in Starcrossed down to one and Whisper’s mid-activity chest removed entirely.
Only three of the severely underplayed Fireteams Ops missions have had their rewards increased. Liminality and Inverted Spire to two, Onslaught Widow’s Court to four.
Solo Ops will now drop gear that is one lower power than before, making it much worse for leveling than it was previously. Some of its completion bonus timers will be reduced.
There will be a new Fireteam Ops activity added in Ash and Iron, but not a new Solo Ops one.

Then, changes to The Portal more generally:

Locked Loadout was giving too high of “easy” bonuses so that’s being dramatically reduced.
There’s a new combined Locked Loadout and New Gear Only modifier, meaning you cannot use a wide variety of builds, unlike Locked Loadout by itself.
More loadout restriction options are coming like only explosive weapons, medieval weapons or Old West weapons. Optional, but loadout restrictions do not increase enemy power, so if you do not choose them, you will likely have to just make all the enemies higher level.
The Portal’s prime drops now need to be taken to the Cryptarch in the Tower to be decrypted every time. They believe that since this is like Destiny 1, it’s fun.

Then, outside of all of this, Bungie has made an extremely convoluted system to avoid swapping in the upcoming Epic Raid that players hate and they fail to understand why the system couldn’t just be locked loadouts, at worst.

Is there any good news? A bit:

Timers will expand on Fireteam Ops activities to not be insanely short.
Solo players get score bonuses in Fireteam or Pinnacle Ops.
Account Power versus Equipped Power will be fixed.
Prime engrams can drop from all end-of-run engrams, not just the completion one (though presumably Solo Ops Primes have one less power).
There is a complicated-sounding but ultimately good new system where you are able to buy and/or complete old battle passes that no longer expire and totally disappear at the end of a given season, a long-requested feature.

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But yes, overall, this is awful. Grinding the Portal is getting less rewarding in many ways rather than more rewarding, which it so obviously needs to be. Getting loot, higher tiers, higher power sounds like it will be as bad as ever, if not actually worse. The raid loadout changes are bad. When the best change is “we did something good with the battle pass,” you know you’re in trouble.

The reaction to these proposed changes have been so forceful that I have to believe this is a revised “we’re listening” time where Bungie will not go through with many of these, either reverting nerfs or increasing rewards further. Perhaps that’s putting too much faith in them, but I’ve been around long enough to know when the community is so mad it actually leads to quick change. And this is one of those times.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.

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