Destiny 2 Season 15 Will Nerf Anarchy And Xenophage, Buff Some Other Exotics

Destiny 2's upcoming Season 15 is ushering in a bunch of big changes to gameplay, including an array of balance updates to its weapons. Alongside these tweaks, Bungie is rolling out overhauls to a handful of Exotics--including nerfs to a couple of fan favorites.

The biggest nerf is coming to the Anarchy grenade launcher, a weapon that's been a permanent part of many players' raid loadouts. While Bungie wants to keep the gun powerful, the studio has tweaked it so that it can't be as good for both boss damage and clearing minor enemies. Total ammunition is being dropped from 26 to 16 shots, while its boss damage is getting cut by 30%.

Anarchy's not the only raid favorite to get a bit of a nerf. Bungie's also rolling out changes to tone down Xenophage, the extremely popular Exotic machine gun. However, these tweaks are in response to Bungie's planned buff to all machine guns, and they are designed to keep Xenophage close to its current effectiveness. Xenophage's rate of fire will be cut from 120 rounds-per-minute to 90 RPM, and it won't receive as much of the machine gun buff as other machine guns. Bungie states that its damage-per-second will be lower, but its burst and sustained damage will be improved.

Vex Mythoclast, an Exotic Fusion Rifle with a full-auto mode, is receiving the biggest buff of the Exotics, with a massive 40% damage boost in PvE. It's also getting improvements to range, stability, rate of fire, and charge time (when in Linear Fusion Rifle mode). In addition, its catalyst will grant stability and damage after a kill, and you no longer sacrifice overcharge stacks when you stow the gun if it's in automatic fire mode.

While these are the three biggest changes, Bungie's also implemented a tweaks to a handful of other Exotics. Among others, Bastion will get a PvE buff and PvP nerf, Jötunn's charge time will be reduced, and Fighting Lion will be slightly nerfed. You can read all of the changes at the bottom of this article.

All of these Exotic changes will arrive on August 24 with the launch of Season 15. We don't know what the season's story will cover yet, but we do know that it'll bring Legendary Stasis weapons among other weapons changes. We'll find out more during Bungie's showcase event, where it'll also talk about the The Witch Queen expansion.

Destiny 2 Season 15 Exotic Changes

Anarchy

• Reduced total reserve+magazine ammunition from 26 to 16.
• Reduced damage by 30% vs bosses (Champions are not bosses).

Xenophage

• Reduced rate of fire from 120 to 90 RPM.
• Receives less of the Machine Gun PvE damage buff.

Fighting Lion

• Fighting Lion reserve ammo increased from "a lot" to "infinite."
• Receives the same changes as other breech Grenade Launchers.
• Reduced base reload stat to 0 (breech Grenade Launchers with 0 reload stat reload very, very slowly).
• Now increases reload speed to its previous level on damaging multiple enemies with one grenade.
• We'll be keeping an eye on this, but believe it's in a good place with this change (and note that we're not going to over-nerf an Exotic with its own subreddit).
• You shouldn't be manually reloading Fighting Lion anyway.

Vex Mythoclast

• PVE damage bonus increased by ~40%.
• Range stat increased to be near-best in class for high impact Auto Rifles.
• Increased stability stat.
• Reworked catalyst to grant stability and damage after a kill.
• Increased rate of fire from 360 to 390.
• Reduced Linear Fusion Rifle mode charge time from 820 to 533 (same as standard Linear Fusion Rifles).
• No longer loses overcharge stacks on stow except when in Linear Fusion Rifle mode.

Merciless

• Updated perk to account for fewer shots per burst (should build up charge rate at the same amount per burst as before).
• Reduced the damage penalty for increasing charge rate by 40%.

Jötunn

• Reduced charge time from 0.82s to 0.78s (i.e. charges 0.04s faster).
• Slightly reduced damage per shot.

Bastion

• Reduced damage by 15% (can now not quite kill a Guardian with one shot in the three-shot burst it fires).
• Increased spread angle by 10%.
• Increased PvE damage by 25% (so overall around a 10% increase in PvE).

Sweet Business

• Now refills magazine on picking up Special/Heavy ammo instead of Primary.

Perks

• Firing Line
  • Reduced damage bonus to +20% precision damage for all supported weapon archetypes (was highly variable depending on weapon type).
  • Will roll on some Sniper Rifles, Linear Fusion Rifles and Machine Guns, and maybe some other stuff in the future.
• Certain damage perks only affected impact damage on explosive weapons, we've updated these specific perks to also increase detonation damage.
  • Kill Clip
  • Rampage
  • Adrenaline Junkie