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Bungie is adding new ways of maintaining challenge to some of the main activities of Destiny 2, starting with new modifiers to enemies that’ll start popping up randomly in its next content drop.
The new modifiers, called Banes, will require players to change strategy as they encounter enemies afflicted with them. Bungie detailed the Banes in a blog post running down changes coming to the game with Codename: Frontiers, its next two content expansions. The developer will test at least two of those Banes in Episode: Revenant, Destiny 2’s next content addition, which releases on October 8.
As Bungie describes them, Banes can appear randomly on enemies as you make your way through something like a Nightfall Strike. They’re a bit like less- intense versions of the Champion enemies currently in the game. One Bane, Meteors, causes an enemy to randomly spawn Solar Meteors that fly through the air and track players, but can be shot down–similar to what the end boss of the Proving Grounds Strike throws at players now. Another, Shock, sees an enemy building up an electric shock that can then be discharged onto a player target within line-of-sight. If you kill the enemy with the Shock Bane, the effect can transfer to other, nearby enemies. You can see them in action in Bungie’s video below.
You’ll know enemies sporting a Bane based on a big, colorful crescent that hovers over their head, which also indicates what kind of Bane you’re dealing with. Other Banes Bungie detailed included Punchable, where an enemy has an unbreakable shield until someone hits it with a melee attack; Berserk, where the enemy with the Bane causes nearby enemies to gain the Enrage buff and become more powerful; and Nuclear, where the Bane enemy explodes in a Solar shockwave after a certain amount of time passes once it hits low health.
All of the Banes are still in development, according to the blog post, so how they work in-game and what they end up looking like is still subject to change. Bungie also noted that Banes won’t be applied to Champions, at least in Revenant, and that Banes won’t stack on a single enemy.
Banes are part of Bungie’s larger approach to changing PvE activities in Destiny 2 to increase their challenge and make them more fun to replay over and over, since replaying activities is a central part of Destiny 2’s MMO design. In addition to Banes showing up randomly while you’re fighting enemies, you can expect larger Enemy and Combat Modifiers to be applied to different content to change up how you approach it.
Some of these have already been in the game–Surges applied to specific element types, for example, are a Combat Modifier that can change how players approach an activity. As for Enemy Modifiers, Bungie hints that you might see some enemies dropping boobytrapped loot, an element from the Trickster boss that appeared in the Forsaken expansion’s campaign.
Bungie writes that it’s looking to add new modifiers to both enemy behavior, giving them new powers or requirements to defeat, and player combat, but it wants to move away from modifiers requiring players to come into an activity with custom loadouts in order to deal with or take advantage of them. That doesn’t mean it’s replacing all the modifiers that are currently in the game, but it sounds like at least some of them are getting reworked or replaced by new ones in keeping with the new design goals Bungie has laid out for Codename: Frontiers.
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