Destiny 2’s Lord of Wolves Exotic shotgun is dominating in Crucible PvP right now, and players aren’t happy. Many were hoping that Bungie would implement a quick fix before last week’s Iron Banner, but no such luck. However, Bungie did actually consider temporarily banning the weapon, but decided against it. The studio is also holding off on developing a fix right away to avoid developer crunch.
Destiny 2 Delayed Lord of Wolves Fix Reasoning
During the recent GuardianCon 2019 charity livestreaming event, Bungie hosted a small segment with Destiny 2 creative director Luke Smith. As part of the panel discussion, Smith addressed Lord of Wolves and agreed that it does feel a bit overpowered. A recent wave of Exotic changes nerfed the shotgun’s PvE viability and re-tuned its Release the Wolves perk. Now, users can manually trigger Release the Wolves, making the weapon a nigh unstoppable force in Crucible PvP.
According to Smith, a nerf for Lord of Wolves is incoming, but it won’t arrive until Destiny 2’s next patch. Said patch is currently scheduled for sometime later this summer. Smith said the reason that Bungie isn’t rushing to implement is a fix is that he wants to avoid crunch. Players getting some more time with an over-powered Lord of Wolves and Bungie taking it easy feels like a win-win. Bungie implemented a similar strategy back in 2017 when Destiny 2’s Prometheus Lens was on the fritz.
Luke Smith Weighs In Further
After the livestream, Smith expanded on his Lord of Wolves discussion in a blog post on Bungie’s website. Smith revealed in the post that Bungie had considered temporarily banning the weapon during Iron Banner. However, Smith and the other developers ultimately felt that’d be too heavy-handed a solution:
“Internally, we had a bunch of spirited debate this week around whether or not we should just prevent players from equipping Lord of Wolves throughout the game. This is a blunt tool, and basically banning an item from being equipped isn’t something we take lightly.
In this instance, Lord of Wolves dominance (and its really showing out on PC) didn’t rise up to meet the bar of “this is broken enough to turn it off in all activities.” If the Wolf Pack continues to grow, we can revisit turning it off. From our perspective, this feels like a week where the Wolves run wild and supers trample their way through Iron Banner a little less.”
Speaking of changes, Bungie also has some major plans for Destiny 2’s Eververse store this fall. Players can expect universal armor ornaments, Bright Dust changes, and more.