Destiny 2’s The Edge of Fate expansion is launching this month, and it promises to be a big moment for the future of Bungie’s live-service game. After the Light and Darkness Saga wrapped up in The Final Shape, the series has been tying up loose ends within its episodic structure, and now the upcoming expansion is taking the story to a new location, Kepler. But despite what Bungie has said about the changes coming to Destiny 2’s systems, there is one change that the developer will not be implementing, and it’s been a sore point for some in the community for a while now.
Destiny 2 has more than a few rough features in it, and while some that have been addressed with time, such as consumable shaders, others are still present. While opinions differ on which features are good and bad, the falloff in players after the Witness was defeated has shown that the game needs to change in a few ways to keep people engaged. This one might not be the biggest change, but it would signal that Destiny’s design principles are moving forward.

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It’s Time to Ditch Champions After Destiny 2 Edge of Fate
Champions have no doubt been at the top of many players’ lists of most annoying Destiny enemies. Introduced in Shadowkeep, they added a new level of difficulty to activities with their high defenses and aggressive movesets. Since their introduction, players have needed to bring specific anti-Champion mods just to deal with them, as an unstunned Champion is often the largest obstacle to any encounter. As these mods are tied to the seasonal artifact, the weapons that stun each kind of Champion change with every season, which raises questions about how stunning Champions will work in The Edge of Fate’s new sandbox.
The Problems With Champions in Destiny 2
One of the longest running complaints is that activities with Champions restrict loadouts. Due to requiring specific stun setups, certain weapons and abilities are necessary for Grandmaster Nightfalls or solo Lost Sectors. For a game that incentivizes build crafting, it’s never fun to have to painstakingly change to a cookie-cutter loadout in order to face down a few Champions when another build would be a lot more fun.
The other elephant in the room is how buggy they are. Champions don’t like staying stunned, particularly Overloads, and combined with Destiny’s servers, they can often be seen breaking out of stuns far too early. Destiny 2 is known for its bugs, but Champions refusing to stay put is not one of the funnier ones. When Telesto breaks the game for the 50th time, it’s amusing, but when a stunned Overload insists that teleporting behind a player is nothing personal, it’s pretty tiresome.
There Are More Ways to Deal With Champions Than Ever, so What’s the Point Anymore?
Over the years, Bungie has added more intrinsic anti-Champion traits to Exotic weapons as well as giving ability verbs stunning properties. These changes have been a welcome addition for dealing with Champions, as loadouts can be more flexible now, but it begs the question of why Champions even matter if there are so many ways to stop them. Not to mention how powerful abilities became after Witch Queen, which wasn’t helped by Prismatic Destiny 2 builds. Champions feel more and more like an artificial way of inducing difficulty, while not providing a real challenge, and if Destiny 2 wants to change, it needs to look for new, more engaging ways to add challenge to its activities.

Destiny 2
- Released
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August 28, 2017
- ESRB
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T For TEEN for Blood, Language, and Violence
- Engine
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Tiger Engine