Destiny 2’s Deep Stone Crypt raid perks may trickle down to other weapons

Destiny 2: Beyond Light is a little over a month old, and players have been clearing the new Deep Stone Crypt raid for a few weeks now. The Deep Stone Crypt is one of Destiny 2’s best raids, and that’s due, in part, to the host of powerful and useful weapons players can get from it. Some of these weapons even include powerful, unique perks — something we saw in the original Destiny.

But those powerful perks won’t stay exclusive to the Deep Stone Crypt weapons forever. We spoke to Destiny 2 assistant game director Joe Blackburn about trickle-down raid perks and what players can expect.

“We definitely want raids, when they come out, to be able to showcase ‘Hey, here’s some new, awesome things about weapons that we haven’t shown you before,’ and really get players excited about those rewards,” said Blackburn, highlighting the need for powerful weapons exclusive to Destiny’s pinnacle PvE activity. “We’ve sort of been all over the spectrum on here before. We’ve been in places where every good gun comes from a raid [...] And we’ve been on the other side of the spectrum, where the raid is really only about power, right? [...] I think Deep Stone Crypt is hitting a really good place.”

Image: Bungie via Polygon

Since the original days of Destiny 2, where raid weapons like Midnight Coup and Inaugural Address dominated every activity, we haven’t seen many must-have raid weapons. But the Deep Stone Crypt weapons both look and feel amazing. And they come with incredible new perks like Reconstruction, which can refill your magazine to double capacity, or Redirection, which deals bonus damage to powerful enemies after fighting rank-and-file foes.

But as Blackburn mentioned before, Bungie doesn’t want a world where the only good weapons and good perks come from the raid. As Blackburn put it: “How long does Deep Stone Crypt need to be out before we start carefully putting those perks on other guns?” But that question is for more than just casual players who don’t run raids. Blackburn used the example that Recombination — another new perk — currently can’t drop on a submachine gun. What would a submachine gun with Recombination look like? We’d never know if the perks didn’t trickle out to other weapons eventually.

But all of this is for the future, and Bungie’s designers still seem to be weighing that question. For now, the only way to get some of these perks is to do the Deep Stone Crypt raid. But what about two seasons from now? How sacred will those perks and weapons be anymore? Does taking “raid-only” perks away and spreading them to new weapons cheapen the raid guns? Is that worth doing anyway, for the sake of enhancing all the other weapons? Those are all philosophical questions that different types of players will answer in different ways.

What Deep Stone Crypt reminded players is how good it feels to get a great gun from Destiny’s best kind of activity. And even if Bungie ends up trickling raid perks down to the rest of the population, players will likely see new perks debut in future raids, meaning that week-one raiders will still get to keep that special advantage.