Destiny 2’s New Solstice Gun Is Broken In A Ridiculous Way

The Solstice event is here in Destiny 2, bringing a summertime celebration to the game that has unique rewards for players to earn and a new “event card” system to dish out rewards. Solstice also comes with a new gun for players to earn called Something New, which features a trait you can’t get on any other weapon. As with many new things to pop into Bungie’s expansive MMO, however, Something New is not behaving exactly as it seems to have been intended, with a bug working in players’ favor.

Something New is a hand cannon–in Destiny parlance, a big revolver–that features a specific new trait called “Dreamwork.” The new trait encourages you to work together with your teammate by giving you a reward for “assists,” or enemies killed by your teammates that you also shot. When a teammate kills an enemy you shot with Something New, Dreamwork is supposed to add ammunition to the gun’s magazine from your ammo reserves automatically, allowing you to keep shooting without stopping to reload. The interesting thing is that the Dreamwork trait can put more bullets into your gun than the magazine would normally hold, potentially giving you an overloaded weapon. If the magazine holds seven rounds when you reload it normally, for instance, successfully using Dreamwork might load 11 rounds into the magazine.

The Dreamwork trait is supposed to overload your hand cannon when you get assists, but it can overload your other guns too.

The thing is, the Dreamwork trait is working with other guns, not just Something New. As the Twitter account Destiny Bulletin pointed out, if you shoot an enemy with Something New, then quickly switch to another gun before your teammate kills that enemy, the other gun will get the overload bonus from the trait. That means you can overload weapons that are absolutely supposed to have their magazines capped at a certain number–for instance, rocket launchers, which are mostly supposed to fire only one shell at a time before being reloaded.

I tested the Dreamwork trait in-game, and sure enough, it allows you to overload weapons to fairly ridiculous levels. For instance, the Gjallarhorn rocket launcher, can normally hold two rockets in its magazine once you’ve upgraded it with its special Exotic catalyst. Using Dreamwork, I popped that number up to four rockets in the magazine, which is a ludicrous amount of power to have in your hands without having to stop and slowly reload the launcher. The same was true of the Calus Mini-Tool submachine gun, which normally tops out at 38 rounds in a magazine. With Dreamwork, my Mini-Tool packed some 61 rounds into the mag, which is about 61% more ammunition than normal.

More bullets in my submachine gun and more rockets in my rocket launcher, thanks to Something New.

It’s possible you can increase your overloads even more; my testing was limited by the ammo I was able to find during PvE events such as strikes, which I was running with matchmade teammates. Dreamwork operates once per reload of Something New, so you have to use at least some of the bullets in the gun and manually reload it before you can trigger the origin trait again. You can definitely trigger the trait more than once and overload multiple guns–I was able to get four rockets into Gjally and 61 rounds in Calus Mini-Tool at the same time. That seemed to be the maximum magazine for the Mini-Tool, but the top end might be different for different guns.

All that said, this definitely doesn’t seem like Something New’s origin trait operating as expected, and that is likely to mean that Bungie will work to correct the mistake before long. One can imagine scenarios where Something New could greatly shake up top-tier PvE events or competitive activities against other players in the Crucible. Enjoy this weird, broken new gun while you can, just in case Bungie decides to roll out a fix.

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