Destiny 2 Auto Rifle, SMG and Machine Gun Changes Coming in Season 17

Bungie dropped a Season 17 sandbox patch preview bomb for Destiny 2 Thursday, going over a healthy amount of topics from an overhaul to airborne gunplay, to massive buffs to Exotic and Glaives.

Covered as well in the near-9,000 word developer blog was a breakdown of several major changes coming to Destiny 2's weapon arsenal, with Auto Rifles, SMGs and Machine Guns finding themselves having some promising changes coming to each of their weapon classes come May 24.

In Season 17, the sandbox team is making changes across all aspects of the sandbox to improve the player experience of PvP. Here are the weapons team's goals to support that.

- Bungie staff designer Chris Proctor

With Auto Rifles and Pulse Rifles, Bungie staff designer Chris Proctor mentioned that the team feels as though they haven't been as competitive as they'd like at mid-range.

As such, the following changes were made to make Auto Rifles and Pulse Rifles better compete with Hand Cannons in mid-long range and outrange standard zoom Submachine Guns:

Auto Rifle

• Increased damage falloff near distance by 0.75m

Pulse Rifle

• Increased damage falloff near distance based on the range stat: 0 range increased from 15 to 16m , 100 range increased from 22.5 to 24m, damage falloff far distance remains 40m regardless of the range stat
• Increased Lightweight (450RPM) Pulse Rifle damage per bullet from 15 to 16 (with a 1.65x precision scalar this will increase precision damage from 24.75 to 26.4)

For submachine guns, Proctor wrote that "zoom is too important a factor" for the weapon class, noting that SMGs with low zoom especially haven't felt competitive in PvP.

As such, the variance in zoom between these weapons has been reduced, and the damage falloff distance has been increased in order to make SMGs more competitive in PvP:

Submachine Guns

• Increased damage falloff by 1.5m 
• Adjusted zoom values on most viable Legendary Submachine Guns and one Exotic

Adaptive Submachine Guns

• Decreased body damage from 12 to 11.25 
• Increased precision multiplier from 1.35 to 1.44 

Lastly, with Machine Guns, Proctor shared that they still aren't where Bungie wants them to be in PvE.

As such, without also simply making them even better against bosses, this change has been made with the idea in mind that they'll shred most enemies:

• Increased damage by 40% against PvE enemies (20% vs bosses)

Ultimately, there were plenty of more teases for upcoming moves and in-depth discussion on the state of the sandbox in Destiny 2, so be sure to check out the full TWAB post.