Destiny 2’s New Weapon-Swap Delay Will Be Dialed Back Soon

As part of the newest Destiny 2 patch, Bungie implemented a limitation on weapon-swapping in order to curb an exploit that allowed players to deal significantly more damage than intended. But the end result for some players, even those not using the exploit, can be a frustrating window in which you can’t fire your weapon. Bungie has now provided more details on why it made the change and reassured fans that it will be reducing that delay.

The shotgun exploit involved attacking a boss, opening your inventory, swapping from a slug shotgun to another shotgun (most notably, the Fourth Horseman), and then unloading it on an enemy. Doing this properly and under the right circumstances could absolutely erase boss enemies in the blink of an eye, rather than being potentially multi-minute encounters. This has been known for at least a couple of weeks, as seen in this video:

To prevent this, the 7.0.5.3 patch implemented a delay after swapping a weapon in your inventory: For two seconds after the swap is made, the new weapon can’t be fired. This effectively undermines those attempting to utilize the exploit, but it’s also annoying to swap a weapon and then have to stand around, not firing a weapon for two full seconds. It’s ultimately an issue that will only impact a relatively small group of players, as this type of behavior isn’t common for many people, due to the need for both a fast internet connection and a fast PC. But Bungie has now explained more about why the change was made, saying the shotgun exploit wasn’t the only such issue that needed to be addressed.

“[T]o safely fix the underlying problem we needed to introduce a global firing delay when swapping weapons via the inventory screen,” the Destiny 2 dev team said in a series of tweets. “Due to the networking differences across players and environments, we couldn’t guarantee the shortest possible delay would address the exploit.”

However, with the two-second delay in place, it says it now has enough information to reduce this delay to one second. That change will be introduced “shortly after” the launch of Season 21, which is scheduled for May 23.

You can also expect Season of the Deep, as it’s called, to make numerous other changes and additions, including overhauls to a bunch of Exotic armor, new ways to obtain Exotic armor and craftable weapons, new Strand Aspects, and more.