If you were planning your raid team for composition for Destiny 2’s Vault of Glass tomorrow, chances are you probably started with something like “Well, we need at least a few Hunters with Star-Eater Scales.”
The new exotic boots have been dominant in the Destiny 2 meta since they arrived with Season of the Splicer. But…a little too dominant. Bungie announced in yesterday’s TWAB that Star-Eater Scales would be disabled for the World’s First (second?) VoG race this weekend:
“The team has discovered an issue where some abilities were being granted a bit more damage than intended. We don’t want Hunters to take this race like they did Guardian Games, so we’ll be putting this exotic on a short time out.”
So, what this actually means is that not only is Destiny 2 disabling them for this weekend, but Star-Eater Scales are probably heading for a broader nerf more generally, or a “bug fix,” depending on how you want to look at it. And if you’ve used them in any meaningful capacity, it’s not exactly hard to see why.
The core concept of Star-Eater scales is that once you have a full super, you pick up four additional orbs with each one increasing the damage of your super.
This results in a 60% damage increase for most supers, and Star-Eater Scales can directly out-damage Celestial Nighthawk in the same solar tree, kind of instantly negating that well-used exotic.
It’s not clear if that 60% increase, which stacks with all other buffs, will be scaled down in some way, either lessened or making it so it doesn’t stack with other things. In some instance weapon damage also appear to be getting buffed 60%, which may be what gets fixed. But we may also see a change to what the boots do to Hunter tether.
For tether, the boots create something like 140% increased weapon damage on tethered targets for the Hunter that cast the super, in addition to tether’s usual bonuses for your teammates. So you can tether an enemy with fully stacked Scales, then switch to something like a rocket launcher and amass hundreds of thousands of damage in seconds. My guess is this is going to be targeted in a future nerf for sure.
Some are complaining that the Scales are no different than the Titan Thundercrash Cuirass, which dramatically increases the damage of that super, but here they’re doing it for essentially all Hunter supers, plus this crazy debuff ability with tether. Something has gone wrong here which has made this just a little too good, and I do not expect these crazy numbers to survive the season.
I hope they don’t do too much to it. I would be fine scaling back the tether thing, but I really enjoy say, Blade Barrage doing 60% more damage and actually feeling like a real super again for the first time in ages. I hope it doesn’t lose that. Bungie has a habit of nerfing overperforming things into the ground, and I really don’t want them to do that with a fun exotic that just came out with this season. But we’ll see how long it takes to “fix” the Scales after this opening weekend of being disabled. And they are not disabled for Vault of Glass period, only for this first day one raid race, so they don’t feel like the only strategy.
After that? Enjoy your Atheon burning, provided they haven’t now given him like 20 immunity phases to mitigate the increased power of our Destiny 2 Guardians.
I’d say I’ll see you tomorrow for the race but I won’t because I’ll be at a wedding. How dare they.
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