The latest patch for Destiny 2 includes an undocumented change that is bound to completely upend the game’s PvP meta: Thresh now works in the Crucible.
Previously, the Thresh perk was considered a waste of space. With this perk, you get a bit of extra Super energy for every enemy you kill. Sure, this means you can cast your Super more often, but Supers aren’t particularly great in PvE anyway. And on top of that, it’s a boring concept, too, not just because it’s a lame passive buff, but because all it does is let you press F more frequently. It doesn’t make you feel more powerful than before in the way perks like Frenzy or Quickdraw do.
YouTube channel Fallout Plays released a video in which he toys a bit with the perk in The Crucible. In the video, he confirms that Thresh is now working in PvP. And by manually counting frames, he found that a single kill using a normal weapon with the Thresh perk and tier ten Intellect reduces your Super cooldown timer by nine whole seconds, two seconds faster than the regular seven second reduction without the perk. And if you have Thresh, Battle Harmony, Nezarec’s Sin, and a Void weapon, you can get that reduction up to a ridiculous 13 seconds per kill.
So, what does this mean for PvP players and Crucible events? With this change, Thresh has instantly gone from trash tier to a must-have Perk if you want to perform well in Crucible events, like the Trials of Osiris. Being able to reduce your Super timer by a cool 9-13 seconds per kill means players who aren’t rocking Thresh are at a significant disadvantage in the arena.
It also means the gap between the most skilled players and us regular Joes just got a whole lot bigger. Unlike in PvE, Supers in The Crucible can be game-changing. That slick gunner who’s racking up kill streaks like nobody’s business can now, with the right build, use their Super nearly twice as often.
Warlocks were already popular in PvP thanks to the Chaos Reach quick charge build, which relies on Geomag Stabilizers to reduce Chaos Reach’s cooldown while increasing the Super’s duration. With the Mantle of Battle Harmony and Thresh plus some careful quick-swapping from Nezarec’s Sin to Geomag Stabilizers, some players report that they’re getting Warlock Super timers down to around two minutes.
According to a tweet by Dylan Gafner, Bungie’s community manager, the developers simply forgot to put it in the patch notes. We’ll never know if this is a bug turned social experiment or if it was meant to be this way all along. What’s clear is that this tiny change has Destiny 2’s PvP player base in a mad rush to find Thresh guns to take into the Crucible.
Of course, while Thresh is clearly going to be a favorite among the PvP elite, your mileage with the Perk may vary. Depending on your skill level, you might not get such significant cooldown reductions — you do, after all, have to be able to kill other players to get the benefits of the Thresh passive. This means instead of grinding for a new Thresh item, you might be better off going for a gun with a bit more oomph, like the Destiny 2 Xenophage or Leviathan’s Breath.
It’s early days, yet. The community is currently busy theory crafting Thresh’s viability on different builds and classes, tweaking and tinkering to discover the most optimal loadouts for the newly buffed Perk. We can assume Bungie is also closely monitoring player data to see how the change has transformed the PvP meta. If the data indicates that Thresh is severely overpowered (and all the numbers point to that being the case), then we can expect a balancing patch to pare down its strength.
Information Source – Gammicks, a source of exclusive news from the world of gaming
