The Only Mechanic For Destiny 2’s The Dawning Isn’t Working Right

Destiny 2’s The Dawning is its yearly holiday event that does not feature a special activity like Festival of the Lost’s Haunted Lost Sectors. It really just has one main gameplay addition, snowballs, which can be found out in the world and thrown at enemies to slow and freeze them, adding a (formerly) powerful new weapon to your arsenal in combat that is also just sort of fun.

But if you’ve been playing The Dawning in 2023 here, you may notice that snowballs kind of…suck now. I’ve played this Destiny 2 event every single year and the snowballs, even when fully “upgraded,” are trash, and getting snowball kills for various challenges has been a pain as a result.

I thought I was going crazy, but then I found this lengthy thread on reddit that says that perhaps none of the snowball upgrades you purchase from Eva are working at all. Among the issues:

• Extended slow doesn’t seem to be working.
• Snowballs absolutely do not leave a Stasis mine on impact
• Shattering frozen combatants may not drop snowballs (I think this one may actually work?)
• Snowballs instantly freeze combatants damaged by them (this one is weird, as pre-stasis there was an old “snow covered” mechanic that wasn’t a full freeze, but now it seems inconsistent at best and may freeze maybe one of a group of enemies you hit).

Then, there’s the modifier that is supposed to create snowballs on kill, instead of having them in piles around the map. But this only seems to be active in two places, patrol and the Vanguard ops playlist, not nightfalls, no seasonal activities, so it’s pretty restrictive.

This is pretty frustrating as this is the only mechanic of the event. Yes, you bake cookies for prizes, but in terms of a gameplay addition, snowballs are usually actually pretty fun and useful. Now, I completely ignore them because they’re so bad this year, unless I had to complete those specific challenges (which were exhausting given that you were luck to get one kill every throw, at best).

This absolutely seems bugged. At least half those upgrades are absolutely not functioning at all, and the other half may not be, albeit it’s harder to confirm. But some things like the stasis mines are just full-on missing, and I would not be surprised if simply all the upgrades were not working at all after purchase, for whatever reason.

Given how barebones the event is in the first place, this is pretty unacceptable. I hope Bungie chimes in and recognizes the issue, but given that this is a three week event, the best we can probably hope for is a fix at reset next week, if that, so it’s bad snowballs until then. Great.

Follow me on Twitter, Threads, YouTube, and Instagram.

Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.