Destiny 2’s new infusion cap system — often called weapon sunsetting by the community — is no more, assistant game director Joe Blackburn announced on Thursday. In a post on Bungie’s website detailing major changes for the game, Blackburn revealed that players no longer have to worry about losing their favorite weapons to the sands of time.
In Blackburn’s post, he noted that the team believes shifting the weapon meta is key to keeping Destiny lively, but that the team overstepped with weapon sunsetting. Starting next season, weapons will no longer see an infusion cap after a year. Anything players can use now, that didn’t get sunset at the start of Season of the Chosen, will permanently retain its functionality.
This change comes with two major caveats. In order to maintain balance, Bungie will reign in some current outliers that otherwise would’ve been sunset later this year, specifically Warmind Cell builds and the Felwinter’s Lie shotgun. Blackburn also revealed plans for a meta-shifting system down the line — something that helps Bungie achieve its goal of getting players to try new weapons. However, the studio isn’t ready to talk about its plans yet, and players won’t hear more until after The Witch Queen expansion in early 2022.
If you’re unfamiliar with infusion and infusion caps, Guardians can feed powerful guns they don’t want to their favorite weapons, bringing their desired weapon to a more useful power level — allowing them to use it in more difficult encounters. Infusion capping limited payers’ ability to do that. By “sunsetting” weapons after a year and capping the highest power level they could be, the weapons became effectively useless for raids, dungeons, Nightfalls, or anything with a high difficulty level.
After announcing it in early 2020, the studio implemented sunsetting in Beyond Light, removing years worth of weapons from the pool at once. But over the past few months, players have started to feel that their weapons don’t matter as much, hence the change away from sunsetting.
While Guardians should still expect some kind of system to inhibit the constant use of the same weapons for years and years, it should be much friendlier than the sunsetting system Bungie launched in Beyond Light.