The Destiny 2 beta is live on PlayStation 4, which means news is trickling out about the game’s features. One thing we haven’t seen before is the weapon and armour detail screen, which fills in some of the last blanks about how your gear will work.
Headline news: Legendary gear (the most important) will get up to three new mod slots, handling infusion, elemental damage on energy weapons, and individual shaders.
For all the exotics we know of so far, check out our Destiny 2 Exotic weapons guide.
The infuse button, which enables you to sacrifice a higher-level piece of gear to power up an old favourite, returns under an all-new section of the UI: weapon mods. If a gun is an energy or power weapon, there’s space for an elemental damage mod next to the infusion button – it seems likely that we’ll be able to swap this out in the final game, enabling us to choose the type of elemental damage that energy weapons will do. That’d be a welcome new feature, as no-one needs a vault full of only Void sniper rifles.
All legendary weapons also have a weapon shader. The beta doesn’t let us play with any of these, but assuming they work like armour shaders, they’ll apply a preset colour scheme to your gun – this no doubt explains why we saw a Hunter running around the trailer with a New Monarchy gun in green colouring, rather than the traditional red.
On a related note, it looks like armour shaders are applied on individual armour pieces now, rather than with a single shader across your whole character. This, and the addition of weapon shaders, will allow much more precise character customisation. Besides the shader and infusion buttons, armour pieces in the beta also have a mysterious missing mod. Wonder what that’s for – elemental shielding, perhaps?
It’s worth mentioning exotic weapons have no customisation options at all – there’s just one row of perks and no weapon mods UI, so no shaders. It doesn’t even look like infusions will be possible, on current evidence, but there’s every chance this could all change.
