In just a few short hours, Destiny developer Bungie is expected to let fans in on their plans for the future. Unfortunately for Bungie many of their bigger surprises, specifically those to do with their next Destiny expansion’s new content, has been leaked ahead of time.
So, now the Destiny expansion, rumored to be called The Taken King, is all but a formality. Still Destiny fans are eager to see how Bungie is improving on their core game, and enticing players to come back.
And just because Bungie is shifting its focus towards the future, that doesn’t mean they’ve forgotten about the main game. In fact, while everyone is waiting for Bungie to say more about The Taken King, the developer released a new patch that features two significant changes.
The first of those changes has been detailed before, and will knock about 12,000 points of health off the Prison of Elders level 35 boss Skolas. Many Destiny players reported struggles with Skolas, specifically if they didn’t have the right elemental damage weapon to take Skolas down quickly. Basically, those who didn’t have a high impact sniper or Gjallarhorn faced a tough challenge – one that Bungie did not anticipate.
Starting today, however, the final round of the level 35 Prison of Elders will not have an elemental burn during the fight with Skolas. Instead the combat arena will rotate in some of the other modifiers, like ‘Small Arms’ or ‘Airborne’. As a result, it’s likely that the "burn him with Gjallarhorns" strategy won’t be as effective as it once was, and Destiny players will actually have to learn the mechanics of the boss fight.
- 'Ashes to Assets’ and ‘Quintessence Transfer’ can now no longer be stacked (they now have cool-downs that can only be used every 10 seconds)
- Fixed a bug where players cannot pick up a quest from Variks to continue the Elder Cipher chain
- Adjusted difficulty of Level 35 Skolas Challenge Mode
- Burn Skulls are now replaced by non-elemental skulls
- Skolas' health reduced (from 27000 to 15000) to compensate for lack of burn skulls
- Reinforcement spawns are now based on Skolas’ health instead of a timer
Alongside the removal of the elemental burn, Bungie has also made reinforcement spawns more predictable. With the new patch, Skolas will summon reinforcements when he hits certain health thresholds.
The next Destiny update also tweaks an exploit that only recently starting generating attention, despite being in the game since launch. For those unfamiliar, there are two perks – ‘Ashes to Asset’ for Hunters and ‘Quintessence Transfer’ for Warlocks – that let players generate almost 75% of their super energy with a single grenade kill. Apparently, the perks inadvertently stacked on each other, and generated an inordinate amount of Super energy.
For the most part the exploit was hardly an issue, but the introduction of The Trials of Osiris changed that. With the exploit, Hunters could have their Golden Gun super every other match, which is a huge advantage for a very competitive PvP mode.
Thankfully, the exploit is gone and so too is Skolas’ beefy health bar. Now players should have a much more agreeable experience in both PvE and PvP.