So, I jumped into Destiny 2’s Edge of Fate raid, expecting the usual grind, but quickly noticed bosses that felt like tanky brick walls rather than challenging foes. Honestly, I’m amazed at how absurd the health pools have become.
After the recent Contest Mode of Desert Perpetual, players started questioning how much health bosses have now. The new raid bosses sport the highest health bars we’ve seen in a Destiny 2 activity of this sort, even though this mode is tuned to be the hardest. Top-tier players admitted that to dish out the damage needed, swapping between multiple gear sets was almost mandatory, a move Bungie has historically frowned upon. But here, it’s the only way to keep up.
There’s a theory floating around that boss health numbers might be bugged in Edge of Fate. It’s not a crazy thought. Bungie revamped nearly every system for this launch, including damage scaling and the display of damage numbers. Now, you see hits for dozens or hundreds instead of millions.
And this problem isn’t just confined to Desert Perpetual. Players report that bosses in other raids and dungeons, even on normal difficulty, now require two, three, sometimes four times more damage phases to bring down. The same fights feel stretched out with bosses sporting absurdly high health pools.
On the player damage front, things look just as messy. Damage numbers sometimes don’t match what’s actually happening, and very important hit scalars occasionally don’t seem to work. One bizarre bug discovered during the raid was that reinstancing an encounter could actually boost your damage if your previous attempt felt too weak. It’s a patchwork of strange issues.
Bungie wanted to increase boss health to reduce one-phasing, a common complaint. But the sheer scale of these health boosts feels excessive, especially when it looks like older dungeon bosses got a health buff that’s three times what it used to be in content that’s mostly irrelevant now.
Player frustration isn’t surprising. This contest mode run was one of the most contentious in recent memory, and the problems seem to be spilling into the rest of the game. It’s going to be interesting to see what Bungie says about this. If these were bugs during a limited-time event, admitting that would be rough. The bigger question is what this means for the future of Destiny 2 and whether this approach to boss health and damage is actually what the game needs.
System overhauls often come with hiccups, but this one hits a core part of the gameplay loop. Even if the contest mode wasn’t broken, the issues seem widespread. I’m waiting on Bungie’s clarification, and you should be too.
