Bungie took to Twitch once again today. This was the second installment of their live stream schedule leading up to the release of the Taken King DLC. With just shy of three weeks remaining until the Taken King releases this is a great way to allow players to see whats coming. That being said, it’s also a dice roll because what happens if players don’t like what they see? Lets jump in to what we saw today.
After about a 15 minute delay due to technical difficulties a problem Deej blamed on the “experimental power core” of the Thunderlord Replica he had in hand when the cameras finally kicked back on. The Bungie strike team, composing of Cosmo, Mr. Fruit and Claude Jerome showed off the perks on the new Subclasses. There wasn’t a lot of new news that stood out here.
Obviously the Titan has a sweet flaming Hammer, the Hunter has a Void trap bow and the Warlock can call down lightening storms. The specifics that they covered only revealed that one of the new grenades for the Hunter is simply the old Warlock Vortex grenade. The other is the old Spike grenade borrowed from the Defender Titan subclass. That’s not the only hand me down we saw either. The new Titan grenade is the old warlock Solar Grenade, you know the one. The same one they built into an exotic Rocket Launcher perk for the Dragons Breath. There was one new grande that both Hunter and Titans will share, with different color effects of course. One is a wall of damaging void energy, the other a wall of fire.
The strike started as most Destiny strikes do. The Strike team found a hole and ran past 90% of the enemies in the first room. Not that different than the strikes of today. From then on we got to see some of the new weapons in action. None of them really jumped out at me other than the sword, at one point a player did pull that out. I was impressed by the fact that it appeared to have a block function, but beyond that it was short lived and didn’t seem to do a high amount of damage. The New Supers where also on display and, I believe this was the first time we publicly got to see them in action.
There were some new mechanics at play in the boss battle that made an attempt to keep the fight fresh. It consisted of two bosses, both of them Cabal. One of them slammed around the map with rocket wings. The other sat back launching a huge shoulder mounted arc cannon. In the fight you see one boss first, the winged one, after a brief encounter with him he retreats for some tea while the other begins to engage you. After another short fight, he also leaves. Apparently thirsty as well. Then, following a brief wave of enemies both bosses return for the final showdown which requires you to finish them both off together.
The only piece of news that really stuck out to me was the mention of Boss specific gear. Something I love from one of my all time favorite games, Borderlands. They only touched on this briefly but, basically this means that specific strike bosses will now have gear that exclusively drops from them. So if you want that specific item it gives you a reason to run said strike over and over until you get it. I can only hope that weapons and armor are included in this system. Depending on how Bungie plays this card this could be really good for the game. All and all I relate this live stream to a $8 4th of July firework. It flared up, wowed me a little and burned out quick.
