With the introduction of Stasis in Beyond Light and the gradual rollout of 3.0 subclasses across The Witch Queen era of Destiny 2, players were able to build their Guardians into powerful defenders of humanity. Once Lightfall launches though, expect a stiffer challenge as Bungie begins fine-tuning the baseline difficulty of the game.

While multiple difficulty levels in content such as campaigns, Nightfalls, secret missions, dungeons, and raids will still be offered, the studio is looking to bring more challenging content back to the game via a two-pronged approach. According to game director Joe Blackburn, the first part involves tuning abilities across the board for both PvE and PvP.

"Destiny is a game about guns and powers; we want both to shine," Blackburn said in a Bungie blog post. "So, starting with Lightfall, we are moderately increasing ability recharge time across a wide selection of our abilities as mentioned in the ability tuning preview last week. With the buildcrafting updates in Lightfall, we believe great builds will be much more accessible to the community, and while we still want your gear and your mods to be critical, some of the buffs to Guardians’ damage and survivability were just a bit too strong in the old system, and so we’ve taken this opportunity for a balancing patch to gear-driven buffs."

On a more subtle level, the amount of damage resistance granted by resilience and increasing the energy cost of resilience mods is also being adjusted, so that enemies can hit harder without Bungie having to worry about fireteams being instantly wiped out. Blackburn added that this new direction is designed to scale back unintentional power creep that was seen throughout 2022, and the combination of the Strand subclass, buildcrafting, and new weapons will fill in any gaps on your way to create the ultimate monster-killing machine.

The second part of Bungie's strategy involves enemy difficulty, specifically the "difficulty knob" that was introduced in Heist Battlegrounds and enforces just how over-leveled players can be when dealing with various foes. Season of the Seraph saw "aggressive" adjustments of the knob that Bungie was pleased with, so the base Battlegrounds playlist in Season of Defiance will use the same settings.

"Carrying this approach over, we are also going to be adjusting this same difficulty tweak on the Vanguard Ops playlist," Blackburn added. "We aren’t going to set this playlist knob to a level quite as intense as the Battlegrounds playlist, but we do want to use this setting to make Vanguard Ops a lot more engaging to the average Guardian starting in Lightfall."

The new location of Neomuna will echo these changes, with that location feeling constantly dangerous but not unfairly so. Lastly, Bungie will be tweaking over player power throughout the year of Lightfall, ahead of a big change to this system that will be introduced in next year's expansion, The Final Shape. Lightfall will have a power climb similar to that in The Witch Queen, but come Season of the Deep, Bungie doesn't plan to raise the power or pinnacle cap at all.