$newsInfo.title_Destiny: Rising - Epic Sci-fI RPG Shooter

Dear Lightbearers,
Over the past few weeks, we've been listening to your feedback and discussions, including many valuable suggestions and opinions. These voices are incredibly important to us, as they help us better understand your expectations and needs. Through this developer update, we'd like to share our recent changes and progress, and provide more detailed explanations and background on some frequently discussed topics. Moving forward, we'll continue to keep you updated on our thoughts and progress through similar updates.

Adjustments to Character Strengths

Following the release of the major updates for Act 2 of Season 1, the community has been actively discussing the strength of the new character Helhest and the prior Mythic character Estela, as well as the endgame sandbox. Shortly after the update, we addressed some bugs that caused confusion and frustration among players through a hotfix. Now, we'd like to delve deeper into these topics with you through this update.

Destiny: Rising aims to bring a fresh experience to the Destiny IP through rich, diverse combat experiences with each character offering a unique combat style and value. We hope players can enjoy the growth and combat joy of different characters and find their favorite playstyles in various challenges. To this end, we've designed diverse levels and difficulties to ensure each character's unique traits can shine in suitable scenarios. In the long run, we don't want any single character to dominate all playstyles; instead, we aim to achieve balance so each character can stand out in specific circumstances.

In terms of specific character designs, Helhest and Estela are meant to thrive in different environments. Helhest excels at high burst damage in short periods, while Estela is better suited for stable, long-term damage output. However, based on community feedback and data analysis, we found that Estela hasn't met expectations in some endgame game modes, particularly in environments where she was supposed to shine. (Part of the reason is also that the current end-game environment doesn't provide enough challenge for players with fully progressed characters. We are speeding up our content roadmap to enrich players endgame playlist with fun and challenging content, stay tuned! —— A System Designer) Therefore, we’ve decided to adjust Estela’s skill kit and related weapons to improve her competitive edge in the endgame content while preserving her unique playstyle. These adjustments will take into effect either from today's hotfix or by Thursday after our weekly maintenance. The specifics are as follows: 

Estela Adjustments

• Recharge time for Misfortune's Guide has been reduced from 11s to 8s.
  • Misfortune's Guide has a significant impact on Estela's combat flow. Reducing this recharge time grants her more room for error in battle.
• The base damage Bewitched Illusions deal per hit has been increased from 90 to 100.
• The base damage Violent Reverie deals per hit has been increased from 210 to 230.
• While firing weapons and for a short time after firing, Estela's two Signature Abilities will support left-handed mode: Casting a Signature Ability will not interrupt firing, and Estela can begin firing at any point while casting. This adjustment will appear in-game after our weekly maintenance on Thursday. This change lets the weapon begin firing sooner.
• The length of time allotted before the barrel will need to spin up again after firing has ceased has been extended from 2.5s to 4s.
  • In some situations, Estela can gain Corruption very efficiently, which results in the need to repeatedly cast her Signature Ability. With these changes mentioned above, casting Signature Abilities will have less of an impact on firing weapons.

Exotic Machine Gun - Heir Apparent (Changes will be implemented after Thursday's maintenance)

• Precision damage multiplier has been increased from 1.2 to 1.35.
• The damage boost Catalyst Band 2 provides when repeatedly firing has been adjusted from 5% per stack (up to 10 stacks) to 10% per stack (up to 5 stacks).
  • This allows the wielder to reach the max damage boost quicker when switching targets.
• The barrel's spinning up duration has been decreased from 1.2s to 1s pre-catalyst and from 0.8s to 0.6s post-catalyst.
  • This change lets the weapon begin firing sooner.
• The length of time allotted before the barrel will need to spin up again after firing has ceased has been extended from 2.5s to 4s.
  • Now, if the wielder casts an ability while firing or stops shooting for a short duration, they won't need to prepare the barrel again, significantly improving how the weapon feels.

This is the first time we have tweaked Estela and Heir Apparent's stats, we will continue to monitor character performance and balance in our core play modes. We’ll make adjustments as needed to ensure each character meets our expectations for a rich and diverse combat experience. Each time we make such balance changes, we’ll communicate our design philosophy with our community.

Endgame Activity: Expanse

As one of the main endgame activities, Expanse is a key focus of our design efforts. Each challenge cycle, we dynamically adjust the level design and modifier pool to create the intended challenge experience.

However, with ongoing and character updates varying synergy between characters and perks, we test and adjust the activity extensively each cycle to ensure it offers a balanced and fun experience. As a result, we regularly update the time benchmarks for different tiers of Expanse.

During testing, we found that some perks were overperforming, which could disrupt the balance of Expanse for different characters. Therefore, we made adjustments during the S1 latter half maintenance. However, as mentioned in previous hotfix notes, some level configurations were incorrectly incorporated due to errors, and combined with other bugs, these issues led to a poor player experience in Expanse during the early part of Act 2 of Season 1.

In the upcoming Seasonal updates and Expanse updates, we'll conduct more comprehensive testing and balancing of level quality, perk values, and challenge experiences for all characters. We're also working on new content for Expanse to expand its possibilities further.

Server Merging: First Step

We understand that server isolation since launch has limited interaction between global players. We've been exploring technical solutions to reduce barriers to co-play. After ongoing efforts by our technical team, we are excited to announce that we plan to roll out the first phase of server merging in Season 2.
Currently, we have four regional server groups: North America, South America, EMEA, and APAC. In the first phase, we'll merge the NA and LATAM servers, and the EMEA and APAC servers.

Once servers are merged, players from different regional servers can freely add friends, chat, join fireteams, and play together. They'll also compete together on new leaderboards.
This is just the first step in our server merging plan. The development team is still exploring the possibility of merging all server groups in the future. We hope that one day, players from any region can freely team up and play together with friends around the world.

One thing to note, however, while we've optimized as much as possible on our servers, latency due to physical distance is unavoidable. We'll prioritize matching players with closer geographic proximity, but when playing with teammates from farther away, you may experience higher latency than usual. We will look into the performance of the server merges once they roll out. We’ll share more details about server merging in a separate update closer to release.

Closing Words

Thank you to every Lightbearer for your support and feedback. We know that our game is driven by your passion and participation. We'll continue to listen to the community and improve the gaming experience. This first batch of changes is just the beginning.

In our next update, we'll share our latest roadmap, including our plans and focus areas for the coming months. Stay tuned.

Until next time,
The Destiny: Rising Team