Look, Bungie, what did I JUST fucking tell you?!
Today Bungie dropped their weekly "This Week at Bungie" article and with it came the first bits of solid information regarding the upcoming Season of Opulence for Destiny 2 which begins on June 4th. Not a whole lot of solid information was dropped, however there was this one notable bit regarding the game's Whisper of the Worm exotic:
- White Nail pulls ammo from reserves rather than creating it
If this sounds familiar, that's because this change was also made during Destiny 1 to the Black Hammer (The first iteration of this returning weapon.) Then Bungie brought it back with its non-infinite-ammo version of the White Nail perk as the Black Spindle, along with the changes of now being an exotic instead of a legendary and sporting a way dumber paint job and name. THEEEENNNNN the gun returned in Destiny 2 as the Whisper of the Worm, retaining its exotic status and moving to the heavy slot but they gave it the original and overpowered version of White Nail back (Infinite ammo if you can rapidly chain headshots). And now it seems the famous Bungie nerf hammer is coming back around and removing the infinite ammo yet again.
Fucking why?
Look, I get it. The gun rewarded a skilled hand with infinite ammunition on an extremely powerful weapon. There's not a whole lot that can be done to rein in something like that while leaving its infinite ammo ability intact. But I'd argue a few reasons why it shouldn't have been nerfed it in the first place.
Destiny 2 should be balanced. However the nature of the beast is that some things will always be the best. And in Bungie's space-magic-sandbox there have always existed certain weapons that absolutely dominate certain encounters or builds, and that's okay. Every encounter is going to have the one thing that's best-in-class for that encounter. The interesting point to make here is that it's not always the Whisper.
UwU *Notices your bulge*
While it certainly has its uses, there's never an encounter in the game that forces you to use the Whisper. So what is wrong with having the ultra-powerful weapon there for those who want to buy into the "power fantasy" Bungie tries to purport? The most egregious issue with this change to me however is that Bungie knew the gun would be overpowered as all hell. The studio gives us the weapon back with a tone of "Alright, here you go, have some fun" only to strip it back away for having too much fun with it. While the excuse could be made the first time around that they were new to this and didn't know just how strong the gun would be, this time it was an intentional decision to let players have the outrageous version of the White Nail perk. This signified a Bungie who knew and understood what the community wanted and was willing to give it to them, and said community responded with nothing but absolute joy and adoration. To remove it now signifies a Bungie who will continue their age old methods of pushing out updates that no one asked for, without asking anyone, and where a good chunk of their staff must have known how horrible an idea this was. Worst of all, community manager Cozmo23 (The poor, poor guy) had to be the one to inform the community that regardless of feedback, the update will go live without changes. I think at this point I can safely say my assumption of Bungie being a bureaucratic nightmare behind the scenes might be close to the money. I can't think of any other reason the studio would stare this iceberg they've created with their playerbase and continue the three-week voyage directly into it.
In any case, expect Bungie to respond with their trademark blistering speed in four to six months and completely fix the issue by nerfing fusion rifles and increasing the reserve ammo of Whisper by two.
