This Week At Bungie has answered a lot of questions for Guardians the world over, giving us a few morsels of information to salivate over & discuss.
Destiny Update 2.2.0 will deploy on April 12th, 2016. The first Twitch reveal is on March 23rd.
Now on to the rampant speculation!
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Taken Guardians
Below their announcement of what this April Update will contain – gear, story updates, higher Max Light (going up to ~345?) and other “rewards” – plus this:
The image appears in the Reef with either a Taken version of the Prison of Elders armor, or a ‘Taken Shader’ that can be applied to other sets as well.
The particle effects above the helmets would seem to indicate something inherent to an item set, like the new PoE reward, rather than a shader… but datamined information shows us that a new Shader system could be coming as well! The discovery of a potential new Shader Hacker which may be attached to Eva Levante, discovered by /u/Darkovian.
Then again, it could also be a consumable effect, like Jackolyte or Flight of Shadows – something temporary that gives us the appearance of being Taken no matter what armor or shader we have equipped.
And then, it would certainly provide an interesting set of challenges to face Taken versions of our own subclasses, but that’s probably not gonna happen.
Whichever of those possibilities turns out to be true, one other very exciting thing that this does seem to be strongly indicating is a Taken-Themed revamp of the Prison of Elders, a piece of content which has long deserved both attention and an update from the developers. Stuck at Level 35, even Skolas has become remarkably easy for those familiar with the fight’s mechanics – and right now, that’s a good thing!
Given the likelihood of new Reef and Prison of Elders armor and weapons, you can be sure that I’ll be ranking up my House of Judgment Faction reputation on all 3 characters in the coming weeks. This is probably a good time to revisit those Queen’s Wrath bounties, too, if you haven’t pushed all of your characters up to Rank 3.
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Blighted Chalice Strike
Bungie has announced a new quest involving a brand new Strike – The Blighted Chalice.
The only Chalice we know anything about in Destiny is The Chalice of Light, a relic in Crota’s End that provided the only form of healing (aside from Infusion, Warlock Self-Rez, Red Death, Suros Regime…okay, so not the only form) during the boss battle with Crota. It’s pretty safe to assume, then, that we’ll be returning to the Moon.
Redditor GlitchIT has already uncovered evidence that we’ll be heading to the Hellmouth for at least part of the Strike. Hidden in the Destiny Manifest, a Blighted Chalice activity has the following description:
“A blight of Taken now roosts In the Hellmouth. Unchecked, they could refocus the Darkness within and descend on the City.”
Those who have been around for a while know that most Year 1 Strike bosses were largely slow moving bullet sponges, stomping slowly (or teleporting – looking at you, Sepiks!) around the boss battle arena but posing little challenge aside from avoiding their big attacks while continuing to throw damage at them.
Bungie recognized the weak design of these boss battles and upped their game for The Taken King in a big way. Shield Brothers, Echo Chamber, Sunless Cell, even SABER 2 – all introduced new environmental and mechanical challenges to Strike bosses. Darkness, relic-usage, tag-team tactics, destructible subsystems, circular arenas without cover, changing arenas where we are forced to hold differing positions as the fight drags on – all represent really satisfying and meaningful changes to the way we approach a Strike boss battle.
Many think that the infamous Hood of Malok will also be obtainable after the April 12th update.
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Bungie Foundation
With the advent of its new Twitch Studio, Bungie is now moving ahead full throttle as a content provider on the streaming platform. They are now accepting subscriptions and rewarding those subscribers – called, suitably, Vanguards – with a set of unique emotes for use in the Twitch Stream’s chat window.
Even better, all funds from subscribers are being funneled directly to the Bungie Foundation, which contributes to a wide variety of charitable organizations including Make-A-Wish, Seattle Children’s Hospital, Child’s Play, and many more.
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Clan Leaderboards
Finally, Bungie has also decided to give Clans some love, bringing out what I think is a long overdue feature: Clan Leaderboards!
This is something that I, as a small-time clan leader, am really pumped to see. The tools that we have to bring our clans together have been pretty limited so far, and I know that a lot of people (myself included) turn to third party websites and tools for both data and communication. There are definite signs that the times, they are a-changin’.
Hopefully we’ll see either customization on these leaderboards that allow us to select the stats we want displayed, or else highly detailed leaderboards that let us compare (and compete!) with our clanmates.
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