The Eternal Masterwork Experiment
Bungie held a live stream Tuesday morning that focused on gear and changes to combat lethality. During the stream, they outlined how the Masterwork system is being redesigned in Forsaken. Their goals are to give players a greater sense of investment in their gear. Currently, legendary weapons can drop or be upgraded to a Masterwork version of that weapon.
It grants a 5-10% boost to a random stat in addition to tracking your kills. If you aren’t lucky enough for your weapon to drop with Masterwork already applied, you can perform an upgrade which will cost you 10 masterwork cores and 25 legendary shards. Also, if you are unhappy with the randomly assigned stat boost, you can re-roll for 3 shards.
So let’s say you have a hand cannon with a handling masterwork, you can re-roll in an attempt to assign the boost to magazine size, reload speed, or range. The same system applied to armor, however it costs 5 cores and redistributes the points for resilience, recovery, and mobility.
In Forsaken, the weapon masterwork system will feature a 10-level upgrade process before granting Masterwork. Each level granting you 1 extra point boost to whichever stat boost the masterwork rolled into, totaling in a consistent 10 point (or 10%) boost on that stat. It is important to note that the stat cannot be re-rolled. So if you don’t get the stat you want, you’ll have to hunt for another duplicate of the weapon. Here is a breakdown of the costs per level. This data was pulled from observing the reveal stream footage.
- Tier 1 – Already Applied
- Tier 2 – 2,500 Glimmer
- Tier 3 – 2,500 Glimmer + 1 Legendary Shard
- Tier 4 – 2,500 Glimmer + 1 Legendary Shard + 1 Masterwork Core
- Tier 5 – 2,500 Glimmer + 2 Legendary Shard + 1 Masterwork Core
- Tier 6 – 2 Shards + 2 Masterwork Cores
- Tier 7 – 3 Shards + 2 Masterwork Cores
- Tier 8 – 3 Shards + 3 Masterwork Cores
- Tier 9 – 5 Shards + 3 Masterwork Cores
- Masterwork – 2 Shards + 5 Masterwork Cores
- Totals – 10,000 Glimmer + 27 Legendary Shards + 17 Masterwork Cores
As you can see, the cost to achieve Masterwork is now significantly higher to ultimately achieve the same thing. The question remains if the economy of masterwork cores will be affected by this. Cores are currently acquired by dismantling weapons attained with masterwork already applied. Netting you 1-3 cores.
Now masterwork weapons will return all used cored back to you, as observed during the stream. So as long as weapons can still drop as fully masterworked versions, the higher cost evens out. If masterworked drops are no longer a thing, we would need a new source of gaining the cores required.
Better Armor
Armor has the same upgrade system, however to 5-levels, granting significant boosts to the ability cool down function the armor rolled with, capping at a 60% overall cool down. If stacked with armor pieces containing similar stat boosts, masterworked armor actually has the ability to grant greater ability cool downs than in Destiny 1.
Masterworked Armor sounds exciting, but Bungie still needs to iterate on masterwork weapons. The upgrade to 10 feels arbitrary. It’s hard to imagine a scenario where I would upgrade a weapon over time. Resources will surely be a factor, however in an over-inflated economy, that wont be presenting a problem to hobbyist players sitting on thousands of shards and hundreds of cores. At least not within the launch window.
It’s too early to tell if the upgrade path will be meaningful. Perhaps I’ll start to feel it more as I begin to upgrade the god-roll Better Devils that I’m currently saving my Shaxx-bucks for.
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