Destiny 2 has temporarily disabled item transfer in all third party and Bungie applications. This means players that use a site like Destiny Item Manager or Ishtar Commander are unable to equip items directly from the app.
Luckily, this does not affect item transfers, which would have made grabbing specific gear from characters or the vault a pain. All Destiny 2 players need to make sure they do is transfer the item to the desired character rather than attempt to transfer AND equip it.
Bungie currently doesn’t have a timeline for when item equip may return, but we suspect it could take some time to get a fix live. Destiny 2 is set to receive an update on May 29th that will include some new features and tweaks, and Iron Banner goes live later today, May 22nd. Really, this is a stop-gap solution for a problem that could have gotten out of hand if enough people found out.
The problem to which we refer is a bug with the item equip system that essentially allowed players to reach power level 385 – the hard cap with mods equipped – using a few powerful rewards. While there are some players that hit power level 385 using traditional methods, these other players were exploiting an oversight in the third party application system and using it to their benefit.
Basically, what players were doing is deleting an item at the same time an app attempt to equip it. As a result, that slot on the player’s character would be empty. The player could then do this with every slot on their character except one, and the power level of that item would be “read” by the game as the player’s power level.
So, if you had a power level 365 helmet, the game would think you were power level 365 and give you drops that scaled based on that. Then you would equip the new item at a higher power level, clear the helmet slot, and get an even higher power level reward. This process could continue for as long as the player had powerful rewards to redeem or until they hit 385.
As soon as Bungie caught wind of the exploit, it disabled the item equip option and is now presumably working on a fix. It’s a shame that some players hit the power level cap via exploits but at least Bungie caught it before everyone knew.
Destiny 2 is out now for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.