The Destiny 2 damage meta is a fragile thing, twisting at the mercy of balance and efficiency and encounter design. You can go a long way in the game with a good grenade launcher and a decent one-shot Super, but the real sickos are out here doing unholy things with weapon switches, armour hotswaps and niche loadout combinations. And yet for a brief period yesterday, the meta loadout was a solved problem thanks to a Warlock exotic that basically nobody uses.
A bug with the Ballidorse Wrathweavers—an exotic armour piece that boosts the damage of the Winter’s Wrath super ability—was causing raid bosses to fall over in mere seconds. Below you can see a video of six Warlocks tackling a selection of raid and dungeon bosses. Very few of them survive.
It’s not immediately clear why this is happening. Yes, Balidorse increases shatter damage of the super, but by default that super’s damage is… not really worth speaking about to begin with. There’s a reason Balidorse has always been the neglected stepchild of Warlock Stasis builds—you get far more mileage out of the subclass’s neutral game, boosted by exotics like Osmiomancy Gloves or the new Rime-Coat Rainment. For context, Balidorse was buffed in a patch last Tuesday, presumably leading to the creation of this glitch. The fact it took nearly a week for the bug to be discovered goes to show just how neglected it is.
With the bug, something is clearly going wrong when combined with another damage source. You can see in Aztecross’s early testing that the Winter’s Wrath light attack, when it hits simultaneously with a grenade from someone running Song of Flame, is causing the latter to break the damage scale. Hence why the bug seemed most effective when paired with a damage-over-time weapon like Anarchy. You’re more likely to hit the big numbers if there’s a constant chance of a simultaneous damage source. That also seemingly helps make it possible to replicate in a solo run—although the more guaranteed method was multiple people running the same kit.
This isn’t the first time a major DPS bug has overturned the damage meta, and once again Bungie has been quick to respond. Within a few hours of the bug being widely shared, the Bungie Help team tweeted to say Ballidorse Wrathweavers had been disabled until a fix could be deployed. The dream is over, and the niche exotic can return to your vault.
Naturally the community is disappointed—although not surprised—that the fun came to an end so quickly. If there’s a lingering sting right now, it’s about just how prevalent bugs seem to be this episode. Both other classes also have beneficial super bugs right now—with Golden Gun Hunters running Celestial Nighthawk unintentionally getting the recent roaming super energy buffs, and Sentinel Titans getting increased super melee damage. But that’s a rare case of the bugs working in a player’s favour—both are less extreme than the Warlock example, so they get to stay until a patch planned for December.
More generally, though, things are looking pretty shaky. The known issue list is steadily growing—everything from minor UI glitches to blocked quest progress to the fact that Hunter tether is still disabled in the newest dungeon because it’s causing the second boss encounter to crash. It’s hard not to draw a link between the current stability of the game and the multiple rounds of layoffs Destiny 2’s development team has experienced over the last year.
