Destiny 2’s Season of Defiance is soon passing the torch to Season of the Deep, which is set to release on May 23, which is also when the Guardian Games event is coming to an end. In this transitory phase of the game, Bungie is making plenty of announcements targeted at the new season and what players can expect from it, especially when it comes to the balance pass toDestiny 2’s Exotic armor and weaponsthat’s accompanying the release. While the changes that Bungie is making to Exotic armor pieces are mostly buffs aimed at making some underused items shine, one of them might have a worrisome side effect on PvP.
Exotic buffs and nerfs are often one of the most relevant pieces of information for players when a new season or mid-season patch drops, as they tend to be what defines builds in most cases. When it comes to Hunters, the recently announcedDestiny 2changes in Season of the Deepmay have skewed things over in their favor in PvP activities, mainly in Trials of Osiris. This is because the Oathkeeper Exotic gloves were already a popular choice to pair with Le Monarque, but now they are going to provide a damage bonus for holding the draw, which could make the Exotic bow a tad too good.
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Why Destiny 2’s Le Monarque and Oathkeeper Exotics Are Going to be The New PvP Meta
The combination of Le Monarque bow and the Oathkeeper gloves has been disruptive in PvP for a long while due to the former’s unique perk that makes it fire poison arrows when fully drawn and quickly released, which benefits from the latter’s ability to indefinitely have a perfect draw on bows. However, starting withDestiny 2’s Season of the Deep, Oathkeeper will also provide players with a damage bonus that increases the more they hold a bow’s charge, but then deactivates after a few seconds.
Essentially, this provides an already powerful combo the ability to deal more damage at all times, since the requirement is to do the same thing as before, just at regular intervals in the case that players don’t find an opponent to shoot with Le Monarque. After the quick realization, the Exotic rapidly became a trending topic on social media and took center stage in many online discussions due to Le Monarque’s already powerful, passive playstyle in the Crucible. It’s unclear what the damage bonus will be, butDestiny 2’s PvPis about to see a drastic increase in usage of both Le Monarque and Oathkeeper.
On top of that, Hunters are not all too pleased with the further changes made to evergreen Exotic ST0MP-EE5, which is now only providing its benefits when players have a full dodge charge. Given that this was still one of the most popular options in PvP for Hunters, it being nerfed alongside a buff to Oathkeeper may have decided a good part of the meta forDestiny 2’s next season. Considering that a perfectly-drawn shot fromDestiny 2’s Le Monarqueis often enough to take a Guardian’s shields down after a few ticks of poison, with this varying based on Resilience, a damage boost to the main shot is going to make this bow all the rage.
It remains to be seen what the damage bonus numbers will be and whether they will apply to just the main shot or also to the poison ticks, but Le Monarque and Oathkeeper will most likely become even more oppressive than they currently are. ThisDestiny 2Exotic bowis already sitting at 2% total kills in PvP, and it ranks 7th among the weapons with the highest number of kills in the game, so it’s no wonder that players were upset by the change. The exact impact will have to be seen, but Hunters may have lost a good PvP toy only to gain a great one.
Destiny 2is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
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