‘Destiny 2’ Reveals New Final Shape Enemy Race, Prismatic Subclass, Exotic Combination

Bungie was hyping up today’s Destiny 2: The Final Shape preview stream to a point where the community slipped into “fool me once” mentality, flashing back to Lightfall. But now after the debut, they really did blow past expectations of what to expect from the final expansion in the Light and Darkness saga. Huge, series-changing developments, including some a decade in the making.

Prismatic Subclass

Bungie appears to have stopped overly-building things around balance or restrictions at this point, unleashing players to do essentially whatever they want with all their light and darkness powers, even if it borderline breaks the game.

The idea of the new Prismatic subclass is that since we have mastered three light and two darkness subclasses, we now have enough power to mix them all up together. This results in using combinations of aspects, fragments, grenades, melees and supers from all different classes with each other, and I think I counted up to three mixed subclasses together at the same time.

On top of that, when you fill light and dark power meters you can slip into the Avatar State (sorry I forget what they actually called it) and unleash new moves like a combination light/dark grenade with new effects. They showed off builds so wild in the preview trailer it’s hard to even process the possibilities, and knowing the community, things are about to get insane. And this is in addition to the new three subclass supers they already previewed in the initial reveal, which will be a part of this too.

One thing I’m not quite understand is if we are meant to…ever use just a normal subclass again? I am trying to think of what the advantage of that would be other than maybe getting burn bonuses, but I guess we’ll see.

Exotic Class Items

This new feature plays into the above. Exotic Class Items are being added to the game which will randomly roll with different exotic perks that can be combined together. Even perks sometimes stolen from rival classes.

The idea here appears to be to search for combos to upgrade your Prismatic build, as you can see the problem would have been that many exotics only do one thing for one elemental class, and now you have two or three. So now you can get exotics that gank two of those subclass powers, or something similar. Again, the buildcrafting (and powercreeping) here is intense. And again, I wonder why you’d often go back to wearing an exotic with just a single exotic effect. At least not for any you can get in the combo pool.

New Enemy Race – The Dread

Burying the lede here but yes, after ten years, Destiny 2 is finally getting something akin to a full new race. Taken were warped versions of all other races. Scorn were dead Fallen. Now, The Grim are their own thing, a combination of Rhulk’s old race, it seems, and a few hijacked units like Psions that function completely differently now. We have:

• Grim – Flying bat units that hold guns and can screech to surpress you
• Husk – Giant blades that whack you and a Geist pops out of their corpse to chase you if you kill them the “wrong way.”
• Weaver – Previously revealed Strand units that can rubberband you toward them against your will with a Strand pull
• Attendant – Its counterpart that can Stasis freeze you.

Also in this race appear to be one more generic base soldier unit (I think with mini Strand and Stasis powers) and Tormentors that we already have count as its “heavies,” it seems. So six units in total, a good “baseline” as presumably this race will be sticking around and can have more units added in time like we’ve seen with the others.

There’s a lot more to say, but a truly wild reveal that was not overhyped, and should no doubt generate a lot more interest in The Final Shape. Will be discussing this for a while to come, but also Into the Light launches today, and I have to start playing that!

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