With the PS4 beta for Destiny 2 going live today, we now have confirmation that weapon and armor items will be getting mods for both stats and shaders. In the first game most loot came with prepackaged perks and attributes which were selected from a pool of possibilities by an invisible dice roll. For the sequel, we know that RNG is being reduced with static rolls for gear, but to stop that from being boring, you’ll also be able to customise your gear with various mods.
Dive into the inventory menu then inspect a weapon, and the mod slots are listed in the bottom half of the screen. The first slot in the image enables you to ‘infuse’ (ie consume) another weapon of the same type with higher stats in order to power up the existing weapon. Nothing new there, but it’ll be interesting to see if infusion still offers a 1:1 exchange rate in terms of Light level.
The second slot is used for the perk of your choosing. In this case, as this is an ‘energy weapon’, the slot is used to change the weapon’s elemental type to Arc, which is basically sci-fi electricity. This being a beta, access to content is tightly restricted, and we haven’t seen any mods dropping yet, so can’t confirm what the non-elemental perks are, or comment on their power levels. At this point it’s also not clear whether weapons will be able to have multiple perk-adding mods attached. Weapons also come with intrinsic perks, which may or may not be static. There's a chance RNG is still in the mix, though we're betting those perks are more specialized than the swappable mod perks.
The remaining slot is for the more fashionable among us, and used for swapping out shaders to color and decorate weapons and armor. Previously, only Exotic weapons could change appearance, via the use of ‘ornaments’ (ie skins), which could either be found in loot packages or bought with silver dust, the currency used for microtransactions. While armor could always be altered with shaders in Destiny 1, weapons couldn’t, and previously the shader had to be applied holistically, meaning you couldn’t just have purple legs. It was all purple or bust.
Being able to color individual weapons and pieces of armor is going to lead to some glorious and terrible looks, and probably one of the improvements I’m most interested in. Make sure to bookmark r/DestinyFashion in advance.
Finally, below the three slots is an empty grid, which I’m guessing is just inventory space for spare mods. It’s also worth noting that in the current build, exotic weapons don’t seem to have slots for mods, which is no great surprise as these guns have always had static perk rolls to reflect their uniqueness.
We’ll be playing the beta throughout the day, so look forward to our impressions of the new Crucible maps, the updated campaign mission, and the single included Strike in the near future.
