In Destiny 2 grinding is the order of the day, yet some perks seem simply not to drop. Bungie now admits that it’s more than just bad luck.
What is the problem? In Destiny 2, players have felt for years that they are shortchanged when it comes to loot. Guardians have long believed that certain perks are weighted differently than others – often making the chance of obtaining a coveted “God Roll” devastatingly low.
Currently, the discussion arose during the Raid Vesper’s Host, but Bungie hurried to refute the allegations. The official Destiny account assured on Reddit that there is no system for weighting perks on legendary weapons in Destiny 2.
Community Lead dmg04 reported that no bug was found during an internal review that affects the drop chances – players just have really bad luck.
However, Destiny streamer “Vendetta” has now introduced a new theory regarding what might be behind the low drop chances.
Proximity theory for perk drops
This is the theory: Vendetta noticed that 3 of the 8 most common combinations on the grenade launcher VS-Cold Crusher consist of perks that are listed next to each other in the API. Among the remaining 5 pairs, there was only one perk in between each.
What started as a joking remark from the Twitch streamer has developed into a serious theory: It seems that it is not a possible weighting of perks that influences their drop chance, but their proximity to each other.
The most common drops would thus be combos where the distance between the perks is 0 or 1. If there are 2 spots in between, the chance of such a combination becomes significantly lower. For combinations where the distance between the perks is 3 spots, the drop chance is then vanishingly small.
The observations are based on data from the website light.gg. They immediately provided a new tool to visualize the relationship between proximity and drop chances of individual perk combinations.
Using the example of the auto rifle Chroma Rush, it is evident that the frequencies of combinations with small distances (light shades) are significantly higher. Combinations of perks with greater distances, represented by darker tones, become increasingly rare:
“Greatest scandal in the history of Destiny”
How does the community react? Paul Tassi, the Destiny expert from Forbes, called it potentially “the greatest scandal in the history of Destiny.” According to his assessment, the theory provides a plausible explanation for why RNG feels even worse than RNG already does (via X).
Since the weighting in this case concerns not the individual perks but perk combinations, it would also explain why Bungie has not been able to identify any bugs so far: They might have simply been looking in the wrong place – and possibly for years.
Players are mainly discussing in the comments how long this problem has existed and whether Bungie might have known about it. However, the developers seem just as surprised as the community:
Bungie admits: Something is not right
What does Bungie say about it? In a Reddit post from the evening of October 25th our time, it says:
Our team has worked through community data and internal simulations to reproduce the reported issues with RNG for perks on legendary weapons.
After an investigation, we can confirm that we found a problem in our code where some random perk combinations for a legendary weapon perk set are harder to obtain.
In some cases, it continues, the desirable perk combinations are also somewhat easier to obtain. Either way, this should soon come to an end, as the team has found a solution to the problem and is already working on implementing it quickly.
There is still no date for the planned hotfix. A breakdown of the problem is also to follow, but for now, they want to focus on fixing it (via X).
Players who have ground countless hours for a God Roll without ever receiving the desired combination can at least take comfort in the fact that their perception hasn’t played a trick on them. Meanwhile, Destiny 2 has other problems altogether: Sony is now pulling Destiny 2’s creative team in-house – needing Bungie’s experience for new MMOs on PS5
