Bungie Tunes Down Destiny 2 After Making New Raid Impossible to Complete at Max Difficulty

Destiny 2 will receive difficulty changes in Update 9.0.0.5, as announced on the official X (formerly Twitter) account of the game’s development team.

With the launch of the new DLC The Edge of Fate on July 15, 2025, and the start of its first raid, The Desert Perpetual, on July 19, 2025, game developer Bungie balanced the game in a way that made it impossible to complete the raid on the maximum difficulty level.

As of the time of writing, the game lacks a combination of weapons and abilities that allows players to kill the final boss in two phases, making it impossible to complete the raid on max difficulty with any build due to new difficulty modifiers implemented for the first time in The Desert Perpetual.

In the announcement, Destiny 2 devs declared that they will be updating the difficulty for Legacy Raid and Dungeon activities to address player feedback, reducing combat difficulty by 10 Power for both normal and master modes, meaning enemies will deal less damage, and players will be able to deal more.

They will also be updating the difficulty and the Combined Mastery Triumph in the Desert Perpetual Raid to require only a single completion at base difficulty, which will upgrade gear rewards by one tier depending on the number of feats active.

On top of that the Cutthroat Combat Raid Feat will also be adjusted, specifically, the combat difficulty will be lowered by 10 Power, from +40 combatant power to +30.

Destiny 2 is a free-to-play online first-person shooter developed by Bungie. The game was initially released as a pay-to-play title for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on September 6, 2017, and for Windows PC on October 24, 2017. The game even got ported to Google’s Stadia cloud gaming service on November 19, 2019, and then received versions for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on December 8, 2020. Destiny 2 was originally published by Activision until, on December 31, 2018, Bungie acquired the publishing rights to the franchise.

Simultaneously with the launch of the Shadowkeep DLC, the sequel to 2014’s Destiny turned free-to-play on October 1, 2019, subtitled New Light.

The Edge of Fate became the tenth DLC, following Curse of Osiris, Warmind, Forsaken, Shadowkeep, Beyond Light, The Witch Queen, Lightfall, and The Final Shape. The tenth expansion features the Guardians traveling to the planet Keplar, located in the Oort Cloud of the Sol system. The next DLC, Renegades, is expected to launch in December 2025.

Set in a mythic sci-fi universe, Destiny 2 features a multiplayer environment with elements of role-playing games and, like its predecessor, is divided into PvE and PvP environments.

As of the time of writing, Destiny 2 has a “Mostly Positive” rating on Steam with 630,917 reviews and all-time peak of 316,750 concurrent players according to SteamDB.