Destiny 2 Season 23 weapon tuning preview buffs Vex Mythoclast, nerfs Osteo Striga

Glaives are also getting some love, but the community isn't sure the buffs are enough to make the niche weapon more appealing.

Sam Chandler

October 25, 2023 6:30 PM

Bungie

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The Season 23 Weapon Tuning preview for Destiny 2 has hit the internet. Though it’s not an exhaustive look at the changes coming, Bungie has outlined a few important pieces of information relating to some weapons that have long needed an adjustment. Chief among these is Vex Mythoclast and Osteo Striga – except one needed a buff and the other needed a nerf. Additionally, the preview offers up some changes coming to Glaives, which help boost them a bit, but not quite to the extent some players were hoping.

Destiny 2 Season 23 weapon tuning preview

On October 25, 2023, Bungie released a Developer Insight blog giving players a preview of the weapon tuning coming in Season 23. This blog goes into quite a bit of detail for a few weapons, though it leaves some surprises for the upcoming patch and for players to discover on their own.

But first, Bungie set the scene by offering an overview of how it approaches adjusting a weapon for PVE. The team starts with a base comparison or an assumption of how a weapon should behave, and then asks specific questions designed to tweeze out whether or not the weapon is performing as expected. If it’s not, adjustments can be made, slowly and overtime, but with the end goal being to fit it into the sandbox without invalidating another weapon class.

Among the upcoming changes to weapons is a highly anticipated and yet lukewarmly received buff to Glaives. Here’s what Bungie had to say about the weapon class:

We wanted to improve how good it feels to use Glaives as both a melee and projectile weapon. We also wanted to increase the uptime of the shield without pushing it too far into the realm of being overpowered. As such, we have made changes to all three aspects of Glaives: 

• Projectiles: Glaive projectiles were generally just slow enough that they felt unreliable to use against fast-moving targets, and Impulse Amplifier was seen as a must-have perk for Glaive usage in PvP. Meanwhile, in PvE, the Glaive projectiles felt underpowered compared to other Special ammo options, like Fusion Rifles and Shotguns. So, we gave Glaives a healthy portion of the Impulse Amplifier buff at base and increased their damage in PvE by a substantial amount to make them feel more worthy of their limited ammo. In PvP, the increased projectile speed has greatly improved their ease of use, so we brought the damage dealt by the projectile down just a bit to keep Glaives in line.
  • Increased projectile speed by 30%.
  • Increased projectile damage in PvE by 25%.
  • Decreased projectile damage in PvP.
    • Aggressives: 123 (edited 10/25/2023 at 1:15 PM PDT)
    • Adaptives: 113
    • Rapid-Fires: 101
  • Melee: The long delay between firing the projectile and being able to melee made Glaives feel clunky and unintuitive to use, so we have reduced that delay to a more manageable amount. This delay exists so that people cannot dive on other players and fire then melee as a single event, but 3/4 of a second was definitely more conservative than what was needed to prevent that behavior. It should now feel far more intuitive to shoot a projectile and follow up with a melee attack—without it feeling overly frustrating to fight someone using that combination.
    • Reduced the delay after firing before you can melee from 0.75 seconds to 0.2 seconds.
  • Shields: Relying on dealing damage with a projectile to grant shield energy was a choice made to limit the amount of uptime the highly damage-resistant shields had in Crucible and in endgame PvE content. Unfortunately, it effectively gated a significant portion of the weapon’s effectiveness and made using a Glaive without energy feel like you were wielding half a weapon. We wanted to increase the uptime of the shield, so you could get a little bit more of the weapon fantasy to shine through, but we had to be careful not to give too much or to allow the shield to become too strong in competitive content.
    • Made the shield energy now recharge passively when the Glaive is held at a rate of 1% per second.
    • Set up the base Glaive shield damage resistance to be tiered in PvP.
      • Base Glaive shield damage resistance remains at 50%.
      • Damage resistance against Primary ammo weapons and melee attacks has been reduced to 30%.

All of these changes are a step in the right direction, but as one Reddit user points out, more is needed if Glaives are to be adopted by a wider range of players. For starters, Glaives do not proc several melee-based abilities, perks, and mods nor do they feel particularly fluid in their movement and use. Several commenters echo the sentiment that Glaives feel “clunky” and only tend to shine is very specific use cases.

Outside of the overarching improvements to Glaive, Bungie is also buffing the three class-specific Exotic Glaives. The Warlock Glaive will now grant cure and provides restoration, which should make it more useful in endgame content where healing is needed. The Titan Glaive will grant bonus reload speed, handling, and a stacking bonus damage when passing through the shield along with the overshield. The Hunter Glaive’s Lightning Seeker now jolts targets on impact.

Osteo Striga has been a dominant SMG for players, especially those Warlocks who combo it with Necrotic Grip. Bungie notes that the add-clear potential made it near impossible for anything else to compete. As such, the poisonous SMG is having its damage bonus scalar removed, which was affecting the poison damage. This will bring it in line with Necrotic Grip poison – still powerful, but not the mindlessly potent option it once was.

There are a host of other changes coming to the weapons in Destiny 2 next season as well. Players can anticipate adjustments to Salvation’s Grip, Winterbite, and a consistency change to Kinetic Tremors in order to make it feel similar across the weapon archetypes.

Looking toward the future, Bungie says there will be Bow tuning for PVP, weapon tuning for Checkmate, a buff for Necrochasm and a new catalyst, as well as buffs to some other Exotics that have lagged behind including Truth, Colony, and Dead Man’s Tale. Finally, we might see a change in the Heavy Weapon meta as Heavy Grenade Launchers will finally receive some attention. Be sure to check out our Destiny 2 Strategy Guide for more information on weapons, especially during the coming seasons when the meta may shift.

Sam Chandler

Guides Editor

Hailing from the land down under, Sam Chandler brings a bit of the southern hemisphere flair to his work. After bouncing round a few universities, securing a bachelor degree, and entering the video game industry, he's found his new family here at Shacknews as a Guides Editor. There's nothing he loves more than crafting a guide that will help someone. If you need help with a guide, or notice something not quite right, you can message him on X: @SamuelChandler