Season of the Splicer has seemingly been another big hit for Destiny 2 players, with Bungie bringing back a number of characters like Ikora, Ada-1, Mithrax, and the Future War Cult faction leader Lakshmi-2. In addition to the story elements, this season also introduced a bunch of interesting exotics, two of which quickly became fan favorites. Boots of the Assembler for Warlocks and the Hunter's Star-Eater Scales have risen up the charts and quickly became go to options.
Unfortunately, the game has recently come over a bit of controversy regarding these two exotics. While the Star-Eater Scales were ultimately banned from the first 24 hour World's First Vault of Glass Raid contest, Bungie then released a new hot fix this week which ultimately reduced the effectiveness of both exotics. For the Star-Eater Scales, not only was the increased damage bonus for weapons and grenades a bug that was not fixed, but the stacks required to get a super damage bonus was doubled from four to eight.
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Naturally, this change has not sat well with players as calls for a reversal to these exotic changes have appeared across social media. However, one player rans some tests with the new changes and discovered that super damage has seemingly been buffed, going from a 60% increase to 90% when a full stack is applied. While one stack now requires two orbs of power, picking up 1 orb will give the player half a stack damage boost of 11.25%.
When applying this new knowledge with the Gunslinger's Bottom Skill Tree, the effect also synergizes with its Knock 'Em Down passive ability. With all four stacks active and hitting three precision Golden Gun shots, Knock 'Em Down allows the player to do 80% more damage than what the Celestial Nighthawk typically can do. Before the Star-Eater Scales, Celestial Nighthawk was the go to damage dealing exotic for Hunters.
While this may reduce the sting of the recent nerfs to the new Destiny 2 exotic, what isn't clear is if this change was intentional or potentially an unforseen bug. Obviously, fans are hoping that this was a silent rework, otherwise Bungie is likely going to correct this in a future patch. With the amount of criticism and disappointment floating online regarding these Exotic armor changes, it stands to reason that this won't be the last time fans hear about the Star-Eater Scales.
These exotic changes aren't the only pain point Destiny 2 is currently going through as players have recently been commenting on the staggering fact that it has been 600 days since Bungie added a new Crucible map. Widow's Court, Twilight Gap, and Fragment were originally introduced all the way back in 2019, and since that point, the Crucible has gone largely unchanged to the disappointment of most PvP fans.
Destiny 2 is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.