What has become the best gun for ripping through the hearts of bosses in Destiny 2 has, at last, received a significant nerf, knocking down its enormous damage numbers and possibly clearing the way for some new builds for dealing with some of the game’s toughest adversaries, like The Witness. Bungie has cut the damage of Still Hunt, the sniper rifle that can become a Golden Gun–at least when utilized by Hunters running the Exotic helmet Celestial Nighthawk.
Bungie noted the change in its patch notes for Update 8.0.0.8, released today. While the rest of the notes pertain to minor issue fixes, there’s one line that will have a significant impact on anyone running high-level content, including raids and dungeons:
“Reduced Still Hunt’s Golden Gun damage while using Celestial Nighthawk by 33%.”
That’s a pretty huge reduction on a build that has become standard for ravaging the strongest enemies the game can throw at you. If you’re not aware of how this all works, a quick explanation: Golden Gun has been, for the last 10 years, a Super ability reserved to Hunters that deals a huge amount of damage, especially on a critical hit. Still Hunt, a new sniper rifle released with the Final Shape expansion, can power up and become a Golden Gun for anyone, regardless of class. That has meant that Hunters could get a second Golden Gun to amp up their damage numbers.
Golden Gun has traditionally been paired with Celestial Nighthawk, a mainstay of the Hunter kit. The Exotic helmet channels a Super that normally offers three Golden Gun shots into one single blast, and then increases its power when you land a critical hit. So paired with Celestial Nighthawk, Still Hunt’s Golden Gun was getting boosted even more.
It was, in a word, overpowered. The thing about builds that are super-effective like the Golden Gun / Celestial Nighthawk / Still Hunt setup is that they tend to preclude any other possibilities for player creativity and freedom–why would you run any build other than the one that does the most damage possible? Bungie doesn’t tend to like when these situations crop up in the meta game, and while the developers will sometimes let them run for a bit so players can have their fun, they always get rebalanced eventually.
It’s worth noting that, while Still Hunt is going to be one-third less devastating with Celestial Nighthawk, it’s still a great gun in a build that probably isn’t going anywhere. Celestial Nighthawk and Golden Gun have been go-to among Hunters for pretty much the entirety of Destiny 2, so while you might not need Still Hunt for that build, it’s probably still plenty viable. That’s doubly true because of several mods on the Echoes episode artifact that further amp up sniper rifles and solar weapons, so while this is bad news, it’s not necessarily terrible.