Destiny 2's latest update nerfs bottom tree Striker and Dawnblade subclasses

The Festival of the Lost has returned to Destiny 2, bringing Halloween-themed fun and frights to the Tower including decorations, special rewards, and the return of the Haunted Forest. It also brings some not-inconsequential behind-the-scenes changes in the less-excitingly-named 2.6.1 update, including nerfs to the Striker Titan subclass aimed at toning down its lunatic dominance in the Crucible.

Bungie explained its goals for the change earlier this month, saying that the Striker's Trample and the Dawnblade's Everlasting Flames ability have been "outliers," particularly in the PvP Crucible. A previous effort to rein them in didn't go far enough, so the developers are taking another run at it.

"In this update, we’ve tightened [diminishing returns] the curve a bit and split it out over PvE and PvP. This should allow Guardians to keep dunking on combatants for longer while being less oppressive against one another," Bungie wrote.

"Additionally, for Striker, we’ve increased the cost of the light attack to make dashing across the map a little less forgiving. We still want this to be used as a way to run people down or dodge and be shifty, but this change should make it costly enough as to be prohibitive as a form of long distance travel. Finally, regeneration will no longer proc on melee kills while in super. The combination was just too strong and overly forgiving of strategic or positional mistakes."

Courtesy of the most recent update notes, here's what those nerfs actually work out to:

Trample:

• Reduced amount returned possible per kill from 15% to 13% (before diminishing returns)
• Reduced the low end of the diminishing returns from 5% to 3.25%
• Changed the kills for the diminishing returns by splitting them out between players and combatants: Was previously 15 kills; is now 14 combatant kills or 7 opposing Guardian kills (opposing Guardians count 2x toward diminishing returns)
• Tuned the amount of Super energy returned per kill
• Cost of Light attack in Super increased by 50% from 2% to 3%
• Regeneration on kill no longer procs on Super kills

Everlasting Flames:

• Increased the low end of the diminishing returns from 0.75% to 0.95%
• Changed the kills for the diminishing returns by splitting them out between players and combatants: Previously it was 30 kills. Now it is 21 combatant kills or 7 opposing Guardian kills (opposing Guardians count 3x toward diminishing returns)
• Tuned the amount of Super energy returned per kill (handled differently than Striker as this attack is an AoE)

Bungie did not nerf One-Eyed Mask in this update (that's coming later, promise), but it did fix a bug that enabled Titans to apply the Pne-Two Punch perk to shoulder charges by firing immediately prior to activating the charge.

"This bug was caused by a quality of life change made for Tempest Strike," Bungie said, offering some insight into how fiddly the game's interconnected systems can be. "Before Shadowkeep, if player's had the sprint button configured as 'hold to sprint', then they would need to be holding the sprint button while sliding in order to activate Tempest Strike. With the release of Shadowkeep, we added a small window of time where players could activate Tempest Strike after letting go of the sprint button. This change had unexpected effects on other melee abilities."

The update also makes a host of bug fixes and some "quality of life" changes, including new functionality for friends lists and invites, and players you have blocked in Steam will also now be automatically muted and blocked in Destiny 2. There are new accessibility options for subtitles, new lore tabs (gotta love that lore), increases to Heavy Ammo respawn times in the Control, Iron Banner Control, and Survival activities in the Crucible, and new "idle protections" on various PvE playlists that will give players more warning before giving them the boot.

The Festival of the Lost runs until November 19.