Next ‘Destiny’ Update Will Help You Land A Punch

Bungie revealed plans for the next update to Destiny Thursday. The PlayStation and Xbox online shooter has a few lingering issues left over from the April 2.2.0 update the developer wants to address. This includes a much-needed resolution to a pair of melee issues that have been bugging players.

Destiny will receive update 2.2.0.2 on Tuesday, May 3. It will fix some minor glitches with chests, quests, and rewards, according to Bungie Community Manager David “Deej” Dague, who calls these issue “nothing major.”

In addition to these minor fixes, the update will correct a pair of melee hit detection bugs that have aggravated Destiny players for a while. The first is when your character punches an enemy and you hear and feel it land, but it does no damage. The second annoyance is when a punch completely misses or “whiffs” when it would have landed in any normal circumstance.

While the 2.2.0.2 update will be delivered on Tuesday, the melee fixes will be held back initially. Bungie is taking the cautious route and plans to monitor the game’s stability for a week with the new update in place before flipping the switch on the new melee code on Tuesday, May 10. The studio will obviously continue to monitor the game afterwards to see if there are any negative impacts from the changes.

Sandbox Engineer Jon Cable explained his quest to find the cause and a solution to the melee problems experienced in Destiny.

“When a melee attack seems like it connects, but it doesn’t do any damage, this is usually a networking problem. Most commonly, it occurs when there is an issue communicating your position to the other machines in the game, or if your would-be victim is having a similar problem. I’ve tweaked some networking logic related to player positions during melee attacks which should help address these issues. This error can still occur, because the internet isn’t perfect, but it should be better.

“When a melee attack whiffs, this is usually a sandbox problem. I’ve fixed a bug where we were starting the target search from an incorrect position. Normally, we begin searching for targets from the perspective of the attacker’s head. This bug would result in the target search falling short. If the melee lunge didn’t get you close enough to the target, or if the target was moving away from you, your melee would not connect. The new fix should make Arc Blade and Shoulder Charge much more reliable. There are still situations – especially when the target is moving away from you – where you will not connect.”

This update is great news for those that enjoy playing Bladedancers. Players have complained about not connecting blows when using the Hunter sub-class’ Super ability for quite a while. Better hit detection will make the class a little more viable to use.

Meanwhile, last week’s Challenge of the Elders invited Destiny players to go crazy with grenades and they did just that. Bungie shared the top scores from the activity with the highest score coming in at 112,595 from the crew of RainDog56, Crunchytime, ianskills1995, and substitute Bladed_Wolf. That’s over 30,000 points higher than the previous week, which gave bonus points for Precision Kills. It looks like Warlock with double grenades reigned supreme.

If you haven’t checked out Iron Banner yet, now is a good time to start. The Destiny 2.2.0 update made some welcome changes to loot drops in the week-long competitive multiplayer event and Legendary Iron Banner items are now dropping up to five levels higher than your current Light level up to the current cap of 335 Light. They are not only dropping more frequently, but dropping earlier too while at Rank zero and 1.

[Image via Bungie]