Last Bungie held a livestream, showing off the new Armour 2.0 system that’s going to hit with Shadowkeep on the 1st of October 2019. We know that not everyone has the time to watch an hour’s worth of video to catch up on all the news, so we’ve summarised everything from the stream here in this article for you. Check out the video below if you want to, otherwise enjoy the rest of the article!
Armour 2.0
Armour 2.0 launches with Shadowkeep on the 1st of October, and it’s a brand new way of customising Guardians. While there are more features than just the ones mentioned in this stream and article, this is a good idea of how we’ll be able to build Guardians around the way we play, with more than just perks.
Using the Solstice of Heroes 2019 armour as an example, Bungie showed us how we can upgrade this armour, and only this armour, to the new system. On the 1st of October Banshee-44 will have an upgrade package available, and it will automatically upgrade all the armour.
First things first, the character screen now shows you Guardian and the equipped Sparrow. Second things second, Intelligence, Discipline, and Strength are coming back to join Mobility, Resilience, and Recovery in Destiny 2. third things third, the Glimmer cap is now 250,000. All stats scale from 1 to 100, and each one has a greater impact on how your Guardian feels to play. With every 10 points in a stat, it upgrades by one tier, and each tier brings a more powerful perk with it.
- Mobility affects movement speed and jump height
- Resilience affects the damage you can take before dying
- Recovery affects the speed at which a Guardian recovers health
- Discipline affects grenade recharge rates
- Intellect affects how quickly a Guardian’s super recharges
- Strength affects the cooldown of a Guardian’s melee attack
Stats are increased by the stats on each piece of armour, so if you want to max out a certain stat, you need to have pieces of armour that have more points in that stat.
Exotics 2.0
All Exotics will drop as Armour 2.0 after the 1st of October, but in order to get an Exotic you already have in an Armour 2.0 state, you’ll have to pull it from your collection.
Editing Armour
When viewing the details of a piece of armour we’ll now see Armour Energy and Armour Mods, instead of randomised perks. Each piece of armour has an energy type and number, ranging from 1 to 10. this number can be upgraded in order to allow you to put more mods, or more powerful mods, into this piece of armour with its specific type of energy. To summarise, you now have a budget of how you can mod a piece of armour, you can swap mods in and out within that budget. You can get more budget by upgrading the energy of that piece of armour. So if you’ll be using a piece of armour a lot, you can upgrade the energy all the way to 10, and simply swap out the mods depending on what you need from that armour piece. Upgrading energy on a piece of armour costs Enhancement Prisms, Legendary Shards, Ascendant Shards, and Glimmer.
Masterworking a piece of armour, which is done by upgrading the Armour Energy to 10, will automatically boost all stats on that piece of armour by 2.
Mods
Mods, once acquired, can be swapped in and out of a piece of armour forever. You don’t lose a mod once it’s been added to a piece of armour. You can use old mods to purchase new mods, meaning you won’t be overwhelmed with so many of them.
Mods have been enhanced so that they are incredibly specific, allowing you to gear towards being a support character who finds ammo for a certain type of weapon, such as Energy Weapons, more of the time. If you know you’re going to be using one Exotic or set of weapons more of the time, you can then gear your armour towards that so that while you play you’ll be playing in a way that suits your loadout and character down to the ground.
Probably the most powerful thing that this new mod system does is allow for multiple piece-specific perks on any piece of armour. This means that on Chest Armour you can have two unflinching mods for different weapons, or two scavenger mods on your Leg Armour, which you would never have found with perks on armour dropped in the wild. You can also add mods that specifically boost stats, allowing you to gear your Guardian’s build to a certain play style even more.
Universal Ornaments
Universal Ornaments are literally Ornaments that you can apply to any piece of armour in order to change its appearance into another piece. This isn’t possible with Exotics, but it is with everything else. It looks as though the Ornaments are specific for now, but Bungie has said that these will be expanded in the future as they figure out the next steps for Armour 2.0 following the launch of Shadowkeep.
Hunter Way of the Pathfinder Upgrade
Bungie teased how they’ve changed the Void Subclass for Hunters, Way of the Pathfinder, which makes for some interesting ways of using mods. To briefly cover the new powers of this Subclass see the following.
- Causing damage to enemies with grenades will grant melee ability energy, whilst using the Smoke Grenade to make allies invisible will grant Grenade Energy
- Shadowshot is largely the same, but will now produce Orbs of Light for dealing damage to tethered enemies, and grant the Heart of the Pack buff
- Grenade effects now last twice as long
- Smoke Grenades now make allies invisible and grant the Heart of the Pack buff. This buff grants Weapon Haste, and increases Mobility, Recovery, and Resistance for you and allies
Demonstration
Bungie then demonstrated some armour with these new mods added on in action in a Strike. There are some really noticeable changes, all of which are due to the way each armour piece has been customised. Ammo perks, for example, will provide a special glow on ammo they cause to be dropped, which is an excellent way for you to check just how much your mods are working.
It’s worth mentioning here that for allies, or all Guardians while in social spaces, we’ll be able to see a character’s class now, instead of the usual number that we see over their heads. This allows us to get an idea of how that Guardian will play, rather than just knowing that they’re good, or in some cases bad.
Bungie mentioned that builds are going to be locked in activities. This means that once you’re in the activity you won’t be able to swap around armour mods, so teamwork will be required in order to get through many activities after Shadowkeep launches.
Finishing Moves
We saw one Finishing Move in the demonstration. It was from a Titan, and it was a Superman Punch. It was really cool to see in action, but it was also great confirmation that enemies need to be weakened before the Finishing Move is activated, much like in Doom. To read more about Finishing Moves check out our article on them.
That’s everything important from the stream, let us know what you think of all of these new features in the comments.
Image Source: GamesRadar
