Destiny players love to break the game. Pushing against the limits of the engine and searching for ways to destabilize and circumvent Bungie’s designs is ironically the best way to show your love and respect for the game. Every expansion is a new opportunity to find unique ways to utterly destroy Destiny from within, and players are already hard at work combining weapons, mods, and builds in ways that the devs never anticipated.
Raid week is a particularly exciting time for discovering unintended interactions. Now that everyone has had a chance to play through The Witch Queen campaign and familiarize themselves with the new crafting system, people are finally starting to find the really broken weapons. With Vow of the Disciple launching this Saturday, Bungie is working quickly to stomp out any exploits that would make the race to World’s First unfair. It’s a bit of a cat-and-mouse game between the devs and the players as we work to break the game while Bungie tries to stop us. As with every expansion, people are finding tons of things that would likely trivialize the raid if the developers don’t deal with them quickly. I certainly hope this process doesn’t cause the devs undue stress, but I must admit, it’s a lot of fun to watch unfold in real time.
So far, only one major exploit has been stamped out. Titans found a way to use the new Enhanced 1-2 Punch trait with the exotic Peregrine Greaves to delete bosses like the One Punch Man. Bungie disabled Enhanced 1-2 Punch on all weapons until March 10 so that it doesn’t ruin the raid. However, the non-enhanced version of 1-2 Punch seems to still have an overpowered interaction with a different Titan exotic, Wormgod Caress. Interestingly, a very similar Wormgod Caress exploit was discovered last season with the Sunbreaker subclass. Bungie disabled the exotic then, so we might see that happen again before Saturday.
There’s a couple of weapons that seem to be working in unintended ways that Bungie hasn’t addressed yet. The Ikelos SMG is getting a 40 percent damage boost against minor enemies, but only exotic primary weapons were meant to get that buff. Supposedly, the game thinks the weapon is Osteo Striga, an exotic SMG that does get the buff. This isn’t going to allow you to delete bosses, but it may give you an advantage in the raid since you can equip an exotic weapon in addition to the Ikelos SMG and reap the benefits of both. There’s a chance Bungie might disable this weapon too.
There’s something very strange going on with Wardcliffe Coil as well. Wardcliffe coil has always done reduced damage to bosses, but apparently that changed this season despite not being mentioned anywhere in the patch notes. Currently, Wardcliffe Coil is out damaging Gjallahorn – the strongest rocket launcher – by nearly 30 percent. Depending on the mechanics of the raid’s boss fights, this could have a huge impact if it isn’t dealt with. Wardcliffe Coil also has a strange exploit in Gambit that allows players to collect way more heavy ammo than they ought to. It’s worth clarifying here that exploits used to achieve a competitive advantage against other players are never okay to use, and anyone purposefully using bugs to win in Crucible or Gambit should be marched through the streets barefoot in a Game of Thrones style-walk of atonement. Shame! SHAME!
Suspiciously absent from the mix is Telesto, a weapon that has broken Destiny 38 times already, according to Telesto.report. Yes, Telesto is such a prolific problem that it has its own dedicated tracking website. It’s been 111 days since the last Telesto incident, meaning it’s likely overdue for an appearance. If we make it to Saturday without a Telesto bug, it will be a miracle. I wouldn’t be surprised if Bungie disables it this week just for good measure.
With all the wacky hijinks you can pull off with Void 3.0’s long list of buffs and debuffs, it’s unlikely that all potential problems have been identified. Stacking suppression, weaken, devour, and volatile seems to be working suspiciously consistently, especially once you factor in unique damage sources like Le Monarque’s poison effect. Count on more heinous displays of power in the coming days, including during raid day itself.
Breaking Destiny isn’t about destroying the game or hurting the developers – quite the contrary. Searching for OP abilities is as much about destruction as it is creation. It’s a collaboration between the players and the developers that makes us feel like we’re part of shaping Destiny’s ever-evolving world. Some might see this is Bungie treating its players like beta testers, but Destiny players live for this. There’s no possible way the dev team could have tested and identified every possible interaction in the game even if they spent years working on each expansion. The amount of experimentation the community can accomplish in a single day dwarfs what the devs could ever do by a magnitude of hundreds, perhaps thousands. Breaking Destiny is one of the game’s greatest privileges. If you aren’t pushing the limits, you’re missing out.
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