Bungie is reworking almost every Destiny 2 ability in Season 15

In the "This week at Bungie" (TWAB) news post that Bungie posts, as the name alludes to, weekly, Combat Gameplay Designer Eric Smith at Bungie has outlined some pretty significant balancing to almost every single ability within Destiny 2, all slated to come in the next season, Season 15, and not everyone is happy about this.

Perhaps the most long awaited and celebrated change is the separation of keybinds for "powered" melee, and "unpowered" melee. See, in Destiny 2 you can use a "powered" melee, this enables the user to do such things as throw fireballs from their palms, throw smoke bombs to make themselves invisible, or throw a knife from your hand. An unpowered melee is almost always a palm strike to an enemy when in melee range. This often lead to situations where you could find yourself striking an enemy at close range and putting yourself in harms way, rather than making yourself invisible with a smoke bomb for example.

However, there are some changes in this TWAB that have not been so favourably recieved. One such example is what is widely percieved as a large nerf to the top tree of the Dawnblade warlock subclass. Top Tree Dawnblade is one of the most used classes in endgame PvP and also used by the speedrunning community in PvE because of the sheer speeds and "movement tech" that it offers. A Warlock running top tree dawnblade can reach speeds that no other class can reach, due to the "Icarus Dash" ability. 

The class currently allows for two of these "dashes" in quick succession, which allows for users to gain competitive advantage by getting to advantageous spots on maps (in PvP) sooner, and progressing through encounters (in PvE) faster. The coming "nerf" is to reduce this down to one dash, with the unlock of a second dash available when the user "specs in" to their grenade ability, which allows them to "eat" their grenade to enable an ability called "Heat Rises". With Heat Rises active you will regain the second dash.

Naturally, this change is a controversial one, and the community concensus seems to be to only apply this nerf to PvP but not PvE. We will have to wait and see if Bungie will relent and apply this to the separate sandboxes. Historically they have not done this for abilities, and only recently with the Stasis subclass nerfs have they even revealed that they have the ability to balance for the separate sandboxes.

Another significant change that has been outlined is a nerf to any class sliding, adding a penalty to users attempting to slide into an engagement. This is to attempt to stop the dominance of what the community has termed "Shotgun apes", where with a shotgun you can slide into an engagement, fire, and 9 times out of 10 you will win.

Now, when you slide into an engagement with any weapon you recieve the following weapon penalties: -20 stability, +15% shotgun pellet spread and 1.5x flinch. This is quite a significant change that wil affect all sandboxes, and again the community seems split about it.

Personally I'm looking forward to seeing how these changes play out in game, as with Destiny 2 a lot of things on paper don't always feel as good or bad within the game itself.

You can read the full list of changes over at the This Week at Bungie blog post here.