With less than four weeks to go before The Final Shape—the climactic expansion in Destiny's decade-long saga—the flow of information coming from Bungie is fast turning into a fire hose. In the latest This Week In Destiny post, the studio breaks down all the perks that can be combined on Prismatic class items, the new type of exotic armor that you might recall I was very excited about when revealed last month.
For those who missed the news (the recently resuscitated, perhaps) these class items will only work when using the Prismatic subclass and randomly combine the effects of two existing exotic perks. Some of the perks have been toned down slightly to ensure you aren't just literally getting an item that's twice as good as the original, but players' brains were immediately racing at the buildcrafting possibilities.
However, until today we didn't know exactly which perks would be in the pool, or how Prismatic class items would be earned. The blog breaks down all the perks in neat tables that show each class has two pools of eight perks from which the Prismatic class item will be created.
Note that there is some overlap between the class pools, with six perks featuring across Warlock, Hunter, and Titan. These are Ophidian, Assassin, Star-Eater, Inmost Light, Verity, and Synthoceps, which have all clearly been chosen because they confer neutral effects like buffing the damage of your super ability.
Combined with the remaining 10 perks that are exclusive to each class it means there are 64 total combinations that can roll on any given item. In other words, you've got a 1.5% chance of dropping the exact two perks you want. I imagine the discourse around that specific grind could get interesting.
The good news, though, is that there are a lot of strong combinations, so you're bound to find something to build around—even if it isn't your white whale. I'll be looking for a Spirit of Inmost Light and Verity's combo for my grenade spam Warlock, and a Spirit of the Assassin plus Gyrfalcon for my ultimate invisibility hunter.
Interestingly, Prismatic class items aren't going to be available until the World's First raid race is done. Bungie has sensibly decided that many players would have gone on an insane grind for any potentially meta-defining combo. Given that the gap between the expansion coming out on June 4 and the raid releasing is only three days, I doubt that would have been healthy. Also, with so many possible combinations, the chances of one bugging out and breaking something vital in the raid must have been non-trivial.
Instead, the class items will begin dropping from a currently still secret new activity that will be unlocked at the start of the second weekly reset. Bungie says: "We don’t want to spoil what the activity is all about or how to unlock it, but we can say it's farmable, and you will get a guaranteed random roll each time you complete it." Guess how I'm going to be spending the rest of June?
The one major question remaining is whether or not you'll be able to transmog these class items. With Prismatic being the hot newness everyone is bound to want to play, there's a good chance you're going to see everyone wearing this piece of gear for the next few weeks. Which might be a bit of a bummer given that we all know that fashion is the true endgame. As these are exotic pieces of armor, my expectation is that they won't be transmoggable, but we'll have to wait for confirmation. I'll let you know as soon as I do, and please tell me what perk combo looks most degenerate to you down in the comments.
