Next week, we are supposed to hear about Destiny 2’s artifact mods for Season of the Wish, ones that will finally, after many seasons, focus on Stasis, the game’s ice-based subclass (yes, yes it’s crystallized darkness or whatever).
Stasis has had a strange journey throughout Destiny 2, debuting in 2020’s Beyond Light, with the next full year attempting to fix it so it didn’t totally break PvP. But it was the first real “3.0” subclass, beginning a new system that would eventually apply custom aspects and fragments and “verbs” to classes for better buildcrafting.
The problem, however, is that Stasis has been left behind over the years. It has a relatively tiny portion of usage among the playerbase, and is infrequently buffed to keep up with other classes, something players are hoping may happen this coming season.
The reason for this seems fairly obvious, and it’s something that Bungie has not changed in three years, albeit the answer may be more complicated than everyone thinks. Stasis is only available if you own Beyond Light and play through a campaign on each character to unlock it. While the same is true for Lightfall’s Strand, that just came out this year, while Beyond Light just hit its three year anniversary, and the subclass remains locked inside it. So why invest too much in an old subclass only a portion of the playerbase has?
The most obvious proposal is “just give Stasis to everyone.” This is actually something I’ve said in the past, but since then, I’ve spoken to people at Bungie who assure me that this is not as easy as it sounds on the technical level. It’s ingrained into Beyond Light in such away that you cannot just extract it, as easy as that may sound in theory, so they’ve tried to compromise by making the unlock process at least somewhat easier over time rather than the goofy, annoying miniquests you had to do before to unlock everything. But hitting a button to just give everyone Stasis while leaving Beyond Light the same is not the insta-fix that it appears to be, and not a priority, given everything else Bungie is working on.
The other solution, making Beyond Light cheap or free, also something I’ve suggested about old expansions like it and Shadowkeep, is also likely a non-starter. More conversations with Bungie indicate that even though it may seem like it’s time to do something like that, everyone would be surprised how much old expansions like Beyond Light still sell. And we know that Bungie is desperate for revenue right now, so if that is true, no, it’s probably just not going to happen.
So with no solutions in sight, this will keep happening. Why do you think that light subclasses are getting yet another super option with The Final Shape while Strand only has one and Stasis also only has one after three years. Because with low usage and relatively low ownership, they’re no worth focusing on compared to the subclasses everyone has.
I will say there have been some good Stasis additions, mainly in the form of exotic weapons and armor pieces which have actually appeared at a decent clip. But outside of hyper specific builds for champion freezing and such, it’s very apparent that the class consistently lags behind everything else.
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