So, I don’t want to alarm anyone, but I think Bungie might be getting rid of primary ammo in Destiny 2 starting in Season 15.
I don’t think this suddenly means we’ll be without primary weapons next season, mind you, but there’s some evidence to suggest that primary ammo blocks might be getting placed in the Destiny Content Vault. So before we get into what Destiny 2 without primary ammo might look like, let’s look at the facts.
Yesterday, Bungie announced sweeping changes to abilities in Season 15. There’s a lot of good stuff in there, like nerfs to top-tree Dawnblade and buffs to Arcstrider and Nove Warp, but I’d like to draw your attention to the announced changes for middle-tree Titan Striker, also known as Code of the Missile.
Missile isn’t changing, so all you Falling Star fanatics can rest easy, but Inertia Override is going to receive a significant overhaul. The damage boost is going from four seconds to six seconds and sliding over ammo blocks will also provide you with 20% melee energy to make it even easier to keep Inertia Override going.
That’s all well and good, but Bungie also mentioned, “This change will be balanced out by something we haven’t mentioned yet. We’ll say more about this in a future TWAB.”
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At first, I thought this would surely mean a nerf to Code of the Missile’s super damage, but my Destiny 2 guide-making colleague Charles Burgar offered a much more intriguing (and after some consideration, more likely) solution to balancing these Inertia Override changes: remove primary ammo.
Let’s ignore what this means for the rest of Destiny 2 for a moment and think about Inertia Override in a world without primary ammo. The easiest way to trigger Inertia Override is to slide over a block of primary–they drop like candy and there’s almost always a primary ammo block lying around to slide over.
But without primary ammo, suddenly you have to scrounge around for special or heavy ammo, sliding over them whenever either becomes available. This would significantly reduce Inertia Override’s uptime. The solution? Make Inertia Override last longer and give Titans some extra melee energy on the side.
Code of the Missile is perhaps the most popular Titan subclass in Destiny 2 today in PvE content, so it never really needed a buff. If primary ammo sticks around next season, middle-tree Striker Titans will have Inertia Override’s damage bonus up almost all the time considering how easy it is to slide from primary ammo to primary ammo in the span of six seconds. It seems far more likely that these Inertia Override changes are intended to keep Code of the Missile’s power level unchanged in a primary ammo-less world.
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A few other recent changes also hint at primary ammo’s impending removal. In Season of the Splicer, Subsistence got updated to no longer reduce a weapon’s ammo reserves, and Drop Mag was removed from the game entirely. Both play with a player’s primary ammunition reserves, but without primary ammo to manage, both needed to change. Bungie’s solution was to make it so Subsistence only had an upside while Drop Mag was removed as Bungie couldn’t think of a way to tweak its ability in a world without primary ammo blocks.
Removing primary ammo would be a huge change, but one that could easily be managed by just giving players infinite primary ammo reserves. Guardians would still need to reload, but they’d never need to worry about running out of ammo for their SMG or Hand Cannon. The game already gives you primary ammo if you run completely dry anyway, so what’s the harm in just having infinite primary ammo all the time?
If we assume that the reason for the impending Inertia Override changes is correct and primary ammo blocks are truly about to disappear, everything that cared about primary ammo in Destiny 2 has either been changed or removed. We’ll likely just see a small infinite symbol where the primary ammo reserves used to be counted on our HUD, and that’s it.
No more running out of ammo while plinking away in a Grandmaster Nightfall. No more husbanding your Hand Cannon shots in the Crucible. No more worrying about your Submachine Gun running dry midway through a swarm of Thralls.
And honestly? That sounds good to me.
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