Grind is the order of the day in Destiny 2, but some perks just don’t seem to want to drop. Bungie now admits that there was more to it than just bad luck.
What’s the problem? In Destiny 2, players have had the feeling that they are missing out on loot for years. Guardians have long believed that certain perks are weighted differently than others – which often makes the chance of a coveted “God Roll” devastatingly small.
The discussion recently arose at Raid Vesper’s Host, but Bungie hastened to refute the allegations. The official Destiny account on Reddit assured that there is no system for weighting perks on legendary weapons in Destiny 2.
Community lead dmg04 reported that an internal check did not find any bugs that would affect drop chances – players were just really unlucky.
The Destiny streamer “Vendetta” now presented a new theory as to what could be behind the low drop chances.
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Proximity theory for perk drops
This is the theory: Vendetta noticed that 3 of the 8 most common combinations on the VS Cold Inhibitor grenade launcher consist of perks that are listed side by side in the API. For the remaining 5 pairs there was only one perk in between.
What started as a joking remark from the Twitch streamer turned into a serious theory: It seems as if it is not the possible weighting of the perks that affects their chance of dropping, but rather their proximity to one another.
The most common drops would be combos where the distance between the perks is 0 or 1. If there are two places in between, the chance of such a combination is significantly lower. For combinations where the distance between the perks is 3 places, the chance of dropping is already negligible.
The observations come from data from the website light.gg. They immediately provided a new tool to visualize the connection between proximity and drop chances of individual perk combinations.
The example of the Auto-Rifle Chroma Rush shows that the frequencies of combinations with a short distance (light colors) are significantly higher. Combinations of perks with greater spacing, represented by darker tones, are becoming increasingly rare:
“Biggest scandal in Destiny history”
How does the community react? Paul Tassi, Forbes’ Destiny expert, called it possibly “the biggest scandal in Destiny history.” According to him, the theory provides a plausible explanation for making RNG feel even worse than RNG already has ( via X).
Since the weighting in this case does not affect the individual perks, but rather perk combinations, this would also explain why Bungie has not been able to find a bug so far: they were simply looking in the wrong place – and may have been doing so for years.
Players in the comments are mostly discussing how long this issue has been going on and whether Bungie might have known about it. However, the developers seem just as surprised as the community:
Bungie admits: Something is wrong
What does Bungie say about this? A Reddit post from the evening of October 25th of our time says:
Our team worked through community data and internal simulations to reproduce the reported issues with RNG for legendary weapon perks.
After investigation, we can confirm that we have found an issue in our code where some random perk combinations for a legendary weapon perk set are becoming harder to obtain.
In some cases, it goes on to say, the desirable perk combinations are a little easier to get. Either way, this should be over soon, because the team has found a solution to the problem and is already working on implementing it quickly.
There is no date for the planned hotfix yet. A breakdown of the problem should also follow, but first we want to concentrate on fixing it (via X).
Players who have spent countless hours grinding for a god roll without ever getting the coveted combination can at least take comfort in the fact that their perception wasn’t playing tricks on them. Meanwhile, Destiny 2 has completely different problems: Sony is now bringing in the Destiny 2 creative team – needs Bungie’s experience for new MMOs on PS5