Next month, Destiny 2’s new expansion The Witch Queen launches, and with it comes some nice quality-of-life changes. Perhaps the biggest and most exciting is that blue engrams, currently junk that annoys longtime players, will become much rarer at higher power levels. Good start. Other coming changes include the removal of certain in-game currencies and materials as well as changes to Tower vendor Rahool.
In a new blog post on Bungie’s official site the dev shared details about the many changes coming to the game’s overall economy and progression systems upon Witch Queen’s February 22 launch. This time around, it seems Bungie has finally decided to address a popular complaint that Destiny 2’s blue engrams are worthless junk. Starting with Witch Queen, players who reach the new soft cap of 1500 will stop seeing blue drops during playlist activities.
When you first start Destiny 2, or whenever the game’s power level cap is increased, players will find blue engrams useful as a temporary way to level up. When acquired, they turn into items like guns or helmets and will move your level up a bit as you equip them. However, within a few hours most players will reach a point where they only want purple or gold engrams, as these legendaries and exotics have better abilities, are worth upgrading, and can be used to create specific builds.
At that point, blue engrams are well on their way to becoming completely worthless, junk that just fills up inventory space or clutters your in-game mailbox. Even more annoyingly, you can’t avoid them. Even if you see one drop and run around it, the damn thing will still end up in your mailbox, waiting patiently for you to destroy it, wasting your time in the process.
This new change is a nice first step toward fixing the issue so many players, myself included, have with the things. However, it still feels like more could be done. Bungie even acknowledges this in its blog, stating it will continue to “look at [blue engrams’] place in the overall game.”
Perhaps removing them from the game entirely once a player hits a certain power level is too drastic, but I’d be happy if there was an option to just ignore or auto-dismantle them upon pickup—a feature the original Destiny had. Still, I’m happy that when I grind strikes and crucible matches next season I will eventually stop seeing blue drops. That’s comforting.
Some other nice changes happening next month include the removal of gunsmith materials and weapon telemetries. Now Banshee-44, the Tower’s resident gunsmith, will have a reputation system similar to those of other vendors like Zavala. You’ll be able to upgrade his rep level by completing bounties or by dismantling legendary and exotic items. Also getting removed are mod components. As a result, weapon and armor mods sold by vendors like Ada-1 will now instead cost 10k glimmer each.
One final change I appreciate is that in addition to gaining Spider’s currency exchange offers, Master Rahool will now be able to decrypt umbral engrams. You’ll still need to head to H.E.L.M if you want something specific, but if you just want to open all your prime and umbral orbs in one place, you’ll be able to do so once Witch Queen is out. This should save players time, so they won’t have to hop between the Tower and H.E.L.M. as often.
All of these should help make it easier to spend more time playing Destiny 2 and less time in menus and inventories getting ready to play Destiny 2. Now, let’s bring back some old campaigns too and everything will be great.
