Ryan Gilliam
(he/him) has worked at Polygon for nearly seven years. He primarily spends his time writing guides for massively popular games like Diablo 4 & Destiny 2.
Destiny 2: The Final Shape is fast approaching, and we’ve reached the point where every weekly blog post has some bombshell to shake up the community. But on Thursday, Bungie dropped some of the biggest news that veteran players have ever seen: Destiny 2’s weapons are getting un-sunset.
Yes, when The Final Shape rolls around, Bungie will remove power limits from all legacy gear. Players will be able to upgrade any legacy gear to current power standards, meaning that all weapons will be usable in the expansion’s new content and the rest of the game.
A brief history lesson for the new Guardians out there or for those who stopped playing before Beyond Light. In 2020, Bungie introduced what the community calls “weapon sunsetting.” The idea was that, in order to entice players to use new things, Bungie would remove the ability to infuse (power up) gear of a certain age. So, weapons from the old Leviathan raid, Forsaken, and even seasons like Dawn eventually became obsolete. This wasn’t because new guns were better (although that’s certainly the case now); Bungie blocked the player’s ability to infuse those weapons up to the new power levels, meaning they just did less damage than other options.
Sunsetting was met with a lot of backlash during the Beyond Light era, and Bungie quickly turned around and announced that it would no longer be sunsetting any gear coming to Destiny 2. However, the damage was done to the legacy items from before Shadowkeep and Season of the Dawn, and those weapons have remained “sunset” ever since.
With this new update, Guardians can now infuse every piece of gear up to the max power limits if they’d like. This is extremely exciting for longtime players, as beloved weapons that have sat dormant for years and years in their vaults will be available to use in the fight against The Witness.
However, there are two major problems here. First, many players — myself included — have deleted some of these beloved weapons, as Vault space is limited and the guns didn’t really have a use anymore. For instance, I’ve only kept two weapons from that era, purely out of nostalgia: my original Midnight Coup and my Inaugural Address, both from the Leviathan raid.
The second problem is that these guns just aren’t as powerful as new weapons. They don’t have access to the newer, extremely powerful perks Bungie has added since 2020. And they straight up don’t have an Origin Trait, which is a new perk slot that ties weapon families together that Bungie added in The Witch Queen expansion.
Bungie did offer good news on both of those fronts, however. While there aren’t any ways to help players recover beloved weapons that they’ve deleted, Bungie does have plans to introduce new sources for players to get “most” of these old guns back. And they’ll all be updated to modern Destiny 2 standards, including with new Origin Traits.
The reason for this change is the new Fireteam Power system, which Bungie also discussed in this blog post. Starting in The Final Shape, the highest Power player in the Fireteam will elevate everyone else to just five Power below their level. Under sunsetting, this would’ve allowed the boosted players to bypass that mechanic entirely, hence its removal.
The studio also announced a variety of convenient Power changes coming in The Final Shape on June 4, including account-wide Power to help players with multiple characters level up faster, and clearer indicators of how difficult an activity will be. You can read more about those features in Bungie’s weekly blog.
Source: Polygon
