Ever since it released in Season of Plunder back in late 2022, Quicksilver Storm has been the undisputed king of the Destiny 2 PvE meta. No Exotic Primary could offer quite the same staggering amount of damage, but when Into The Light drops on April 9, it’s finally getting nerfed.
Announced in today’s This Week in Destiny blog, the Quicksilver Storm auto rifle is one of five Exotic weapons being hit with a balance pass for Into The Light’s launch. Unfortunately for Quicksilver Storm, it’s the only one of the five receiving a nerf. The shots required to trigger its Rocket Tracers is being increased by 50 percent, but even more crucially, the gun’s grenades are getting a 37.5 percent area-of-effect damage reduction against combatants.
Bungie admitted in the post “the time has come to dial it back a little” after Quicksilver Storm enjoyed such a lengthy period of dominance in the Destiny 2 sandbox. “With these changes, it’s slower to build up grenades, and the grenades deal reduced damage. But given that previously one magazine would give you three grenades, and each grenade hit like a heavy grenade launcher, it’s still a very strong option.”
It’s easy to understand that final point—even a nerf of this scale can’t outright make Quicksilver Storm irrelevant overnight. When an Exotic is as strong as this auto rifle has been, and very few alternatives exist which offer a similar damage output, these nerfs will at worst put it on a similar level to its competitors. As content creator Datto rightly put it in the wake of the news, “instead of being the best primary in the game, it’ll only be ONE OF the best primaries in the game. We had a good run.”
At the same time, Whisper of the Worm, One Thousand Voices, The Last Word, and Forerunner are all recipients of small buffs. Both Whisper of the Worm and One Thousand Voices are getting an increase to their reserves, while players using The Last Word and Forerunner can look forward to a six percent increase to their base damage.
Whisper of the Worm isn’t a surprising weapon to see get some tuning with The Whisper Exotic mission on the way back to Destiny 2, but One Thousand Voices is an interesting gun to see receive similar treatment. As Bungie notes, it delivers massive amounts of damage, but its limited ammo made it hard to justify bringing into an encounter—this has the potential to change that. Even still, it’s difficult to make heads or tails of whether it’ll convince players to part ways with the rocket launchers and linear fusion rifles that still pack a massive punch in damage phases.
All of these balance changes will drop when Destiny 2‘s Into The Light update releases next week on April 9. Alongside them comes some Crucible-specific weapon adjustments noted in a previous TWID, as well as a huge serving of classic weapons making their return as part of the BRAVE arsenal.
