It'd probably be easier to list features that aren't broken at launch, considering Destiny 2's poorly managed playtesting environment.
- The community was delighted to see that Guided Games would be gated through admission passes which drop randomly. How did they find this out, you ask? Bungie was fiddling around with the servers and the tickets dropped as part of the side effects.
- The "Infinite Coil" glitch, where you use a Titan's Rally Barricade and shoot the Wardcliff Coil while spamming the crouch button, resulting in multiple Wardcliff Coil rockets being directly returned to the magazine. Doing this for long periods of time allows players to gather an otherwise impossible amount of rockets to use, trivializing many PvE encounters. This has been thankfully patched by the time "Curse of Osiris" launched.
- Upon Mayhem Clash's introduction in the Dawning event, players noticed a glitch which allows for Voidwalkers with the Attunement of Chaos path to hurl an infinite number of Nova Bombs. Normally, using the Chaos Accelerant ability to power up your grenade at the expense of your Super's energy prevents you from using the latter, but since Mayhem recharges every ability so quickly, the rate at which you drain your Super's energy is negated by the enhanced Super charge rate. All you need to do assign the Super's activation button/key to a separate input from the grenade's, then activate the Super while powering up the grenade. This cancels the powerup's animation and goes straight to hurling a Nova Bomb without an actual Super animation, and can be spammed relentlessly since it doesn't consume Super energy.
- The Exotic grenade launcher "The Colony" was bugged on the PC version of the game, being unable to track targets if the game's framerate is higher than 40 FPS. This has been fixed by the end of February 2018. Similarly, the One Thousand Voices had superior damage on PC given the higher framerates, but was brought down to console standards for consistency in January 2019. Unlike the Colony, this induced disappointment in both console and PC players, feeling that such a rare raid Exotic would rather benefit from being as strong as it was before the PC fix. Joker's Wild buffed the One Thousand Voices by 25%, but then another bug appeared along with it, as simply having the exotic weapon equipped would increase all of your weapons by 25% damage as well until Bungie fixed it a couple of weeks later.
- If you're a either a Stormcaller or Dawnblade and have two Lunafaction Boots in hand (one pair equipped and the other stowed away), you can reset your Super's duration by swapping the boots, essentially making it infinite for as long as you remember to swap before the Super expires. The exact same bug applies for the Titan's subclasses, only replacing Lunafaction Boots with the MK. 44 Stand Asides in the equation.
- Should an Arcstrider get caught by an enemy Nightstalker's Shadowshot tether, the former can simply spam light and heavy attacks to get out of it and have an infinite Arc Staff, so long as they never get their feet off the ground even once after the tether activates.
- For the boss fight against Val Ca'uor, one player can simply stand on Calus's robot double as it's being raised right before the damage phase, then intercept the three Greed orbs note and throw them back on the ground, ripe for other fireteam members to pick them up and chuck them at Ca'uor for a whopping 400,000 damage (which is a lot, considering the boss's middling health). Note that this discovery was purely incidental, as the team in question
is no stranger to melting Ca'uor in one phase through conventional damage stacking. - On 8/28/2018, the week preceding the release of the Forsaken expansion, after the 2.0.0 sandbox update and Forsaken preload, many players were able to obtain Forsaken gear from flashpoint engrams. For those who hadn't maxed out to 405 power they were able to equip said weapons or armor, but those whom had reached 405 were unable to.
- It was discovered that the Telesto explosive bolts were being treated as enemies, so you could shoot it at the ground and destroy them with another weapon or grenade before they explode, registering as kills in the game system. This impacted Crucible most significantly, allowing players to charge their super instantly. The Blind Well's waves could be essentially skipped as, for some reason, the bolts registered as enemies that accounted for the Well's progression, making it a breeze to speed your way to the boss phase.
- The Synthoceps were discovered to boost the user's weapon damage by 50% when they proc'ed the gauntlet's perk while standing in an allied Warlock's Well of Radiance; apparently, the game assumed that because you are standing in someone's super, you are also using a super, hence the Biotic Enhancements perk appyling itself to your weapons. This in turn made Synthoceps-wielding Titans a massive boon to raid fireteams with at least one Well of Radiance user. These were thankfully patched on Black Armory's release, as it would otherwise trivialize future challenging bosses.
- The week before Black Armory launched, the Inverted Spire strike was temporarily unavailable due to a bug. The bug in question? The boss, Protheon, Modular Mind, spawned three times its normal size, spawning hilarious "Big Boi" and "Swoltheon" jokes.
- The update for Arc Week buffed a lot of Arc subclasses, but inadvertently made the Combination Blow perk for the "Way of the Warrior" Arcstrider branch apply itself to the Arc Staff, making the super much more potent that it actually should be. Combine that with Raiden Flux for longer super uptime, and you have a fairly busted combo that destroys bosses that don't keep you away from melee range. The bug was fixed by the end of the Revelry 2019, but not before one player managed to completely solo Riven with it.
- The Menagerie's take on the Gauntlet can be largely skipped over due to an oversight which designates grenade launcher projectiles and Telesto bolts as entities that count towards passing the Gauntlet's final gate in the same manner a player would, allowing players to simply spam grenade launchers at the finish line and inflate the score. Additionally, running past the third checkpoint and going back through it removes the "Keep Moving" death debuff, allowing you to stay in the course until the encounter ends. Update 2.5.1.1 was thought to have fixed it, until it players found out that you can still kill yourself on the finish line with the grenade launcher and count as multiple finishes, essentially making the cheese still functional.
- The mission "The Other Side" wherein you obtain the Bad Juju can be unexpectedly turned into a cakewalk if you bring an Arcstrider tuned to the Way of the Warrior and buy the Orb Tribute from the Visage of Calus. Upon activating the Arc Staff and hugging the Orb Tribute stand, the game will mistake your character as building another super even though it's already active, and once you gather enough orbs to officially activate it, you can use your dodge ability and the super bar will instantly refill itself note , essentially granting an infinite Arc Staff within the Tribute Hall and the mission, so long as you keep tabs on the gauge and refill it when necessary.
- Similar to the framerate hijinks on the Colony and the One Thousand Voices, players found out in September 2019 that the PC version of Jotunn deals significantly higher point-blank damage the higher your framerate is, with a 100-144 FPS Jotunn dealing nearly ten times its normal damage. This led to various shenanigans like melting Riven's entire health pool by having a fireteam point-blanking her right claw while standing in a Well of Radiance (given it negates the self damage of Jotunn's explosion at such a close range). Bungie had to go out of their way and disable the Jotunn entirely for the first 24 hours of Shadowkeep's "Garden of Salvation" raid while ironing out the issue.
- Near the end of the Season of the Undying, players discovered a glitch that allows them to perform Finishers whenever they want (since it practically clones the enemy that the Finisher was meant for), which in turn allows them to go outside map boundaries due to the Finisher's wonky animation. Since Finishers have a considerable knockback effect, this can also be used to push some bosses, including Morgeth from the "Last Wish" raid, off a cliff.
- In the Pit of Heresy dungeon, you can duplicate the Hive orbs needed to extinguish the various doors and pedestals by swapping weapons while in the middle of extinguishing (which is binded to holding the interact button),sparing you a lot of time for the encounters. This has unfortunately been patched during the second week of the Season of the Splicer.
- During Season of Dawn, the Wish Ender inadvertently got its PvE damage tripled, turning it into a stellar mob-clearing weapon. When Bungie deployed a patch mid-January 2020, an oversight somehow got its way into the bow and multiplied its damage tenfold, so long as there's a small visual obstacle (like grass) between you and your target. The bug eventually got fixed at the start of the following season.
- Players also found out during Season of Dawn that some exotic armor pieces that build up stacks (like the Titan's Wormgod Caress and the Warlock's Winter's Guile) were able to retain their stacks for an unlimited amount of time until you kill an enemy, just by quickly unequipping then re-equipping the exotic in question. Combining that bug with various multipliers like the One-Two Punch shotgun perk and Season 9's Solar Plexus artifact mod then turns Titans and Warlocks into literal boss-killing machines, with even raid bosses getting melted in less than a couple of ludicrously boosted melee hits. It's gotten to the point that Bungie quickly scrambled to disable the Wormgod Caress mere hours after it became widespread, then Winter's Guile a little while later. And the patch that was supposed to fix them so they no longer hold on to stacks after being unequipped? Not only did it not work, but it also made them retain the buff even after killing enemies, forcing Bungie to repeatedly disable the Exotics!
- The Wormgod Caress and Winter's Guile bugs mentioned above turn out to be a mere fraction of the inherently broken item swapping; you can gain unlimited Super by casting it once, then quickly browsing to your menu so you can swap your Kinetic weapon out and back in, with the caveat that you have to constantly spam the Super's attack (it's considerably more practical on a Dawnblade's Daybreak) and you lose any increased damage resistance after the Super energy bar officially runs out; you can also retain damage stacking perks like Multikill Clip by getting the desired stack, then quickly getting into your weapon details to swap Multikill Clip out and back in, though this is only feasible on weapons with alternate perks like Breachlight and Steelfeather Repeater. Season of the Worthy's launch mercifully fixed this oversight.
- A lesser-known exploit also discovered during Season of Dawn enabled players to, by swapping around and renaming language audio files on the PC version, trick the game into thinking that one installed language was another. This was mostly used to get a Japanese dub with English subtitles following a series of videos on the former's acting that compared it to actual anime lines. An update later in 2020 ended up fixing this in a rather excessive manner, which kills the game process if it detects any discrepancy with the audio files.
- The Worldline Zero exotic sword has a perk that allows a Flash Step attack. Meant to close gaps between you and a target, it was found that if you timed your Double Jump right (particularly with Warlock glide jumps) allowed a player to maintain that massive speed boost and launch yourself like a cannon. The Fan Nickname was "Worldline Skating." It became vital to the Speed Run communities and was rather harmless (in casual gameplay you're more likely to miss the timing or hit a wall and die), but was eventually debugged in a general change to how swords behaved.
- Upon Season of the Worthy's launch, enemies found within secret missions like "The Whisper" and "Zero Hour" somehow became super fragile, with only a few bullets taking out even the beefiest targets. This turns these secret missions' combat zones into a complete joke as you merely point your gun at hordes of enemies and watch them drop dead in mere seconds. Update 2.8.1 fixed this oversight to prevent those missions from being too easy.
- The Heavy Frame you can spawn during the Seraph Tower public event will sometimes fail to despawn once said event ends, allowing it to move around and keep attacking enemies in subsequent Seraph Tower activations. It will eventually despawn by itself after a long while, or if someone spawns another Heavy Frame.
- The Raiju Harness came with the unintended side effect of making the Arc Staff's duration infinite, forcing Bungie to disable the exotic right after Season of the Worthy launched. A little while later, Felwinter's Helm also got shelved since players found a way to trigger the helm's perk on any kill (as opposed to just charged melee and finishers), making it two out of three Exotic armour pieces from Season of the Worthy getting disabled due to poor playtesting.
- The Warden of Nothing Ordeal on the week of March 31, 2020 conspicuously had double loot drops, making it the most lucrative Nightfall week ever; Exotic armour, Enhancement Prisms and Ascendant Shards all had a chance to drop twice. Players thought it was because said Ordeal is among the most grueling ones (with a whopping total of 22 Champions of all types on Master difficulty), but Bungie confirmed that it was indeed a bug, and that they let it slide for that particular week.
- Before a patch that fixed the problem, the Witherhoard originally launched with unintended side effect of dealing ridiculous damage to some enemies —up to a few raid bosses— if there are multiple Witherhoards being fired. The damage computation was so ludicrous that the server response usually translated into the enemy's health bar dropping from full to zero in the blink of an eye.
- The Stasis subclasses are generally considered to be broken and poorly playtested, but the Warlock's Shadebinder takes the cake by way of its Super causing some bosses to drop dead in an instant just like the Witherhoard bug when enough Warlocks use the Super simultaneously. One week after the expansion launched, the Shadebinder got nerfed hard and this bug was thankfully removed as to avoid trivializing the first day of the Deep Stone Crypt raid.
- With a simple input combo (jump, sword swipe, switch weapon, then Shiver Strike), the Behemoth's Shiver Strike melee charge can somehow create a decoy that's stuck in the lunge animation on other players' screens, while the Titan player themselves can walk around just perfectly fine. While the exploit looks like it's another weapon removal glitch on the surface, the decoy moves in the direction you're looking and actually interacts with the environment, allowing you to open doors and even capture Crucible points even though you're not physically on the points. This was such an exploitative glitch that it led to Bungie cancelling Trials of Osiris for all of Beyond Light's opening month!
- Deep Stone Crypt in general has a ton of incredibly cheesy options for clearing encounters thanks to poorly constructed maps.
- The Sparrow portion of the raid features a Frostbite debuff that kills you if you stay outside of a shelter for too long, but players got around by hopping into a Sparrow that's parked outside of the shelter, while the Guardians themselves are still inside the bubble. This allows players to explore the tundra at their own leisure without the fear of dying, as long as they don't step into a shelter after doing the glitch. This works even for the Pikes at the start of the map, making the "Not A Scratch" triumph a breeze. Update 3.0.2 fixed that, though players found a way to get around that by parking their Sparrow outside the starting door, wait until it shuts and re-opens, then quickly get on the Sparrow. When that got fixed too, players still found a way across the map, though it's convoluted and requires skimming out of the map's boundaries, making it simpler to just navigate through the section normally.
- It is possible to use Salvation's Grip in the Atraks-1 encounter to phase through the door leading to the next section of the raid, whereupon you can stumble across a Fallen captain with Atraks' health bar above his head. Attacking this captain deals damage to Atraks, meaning you can get an entire team of four Guardians to constantly deal damage to Atraks throughout the entire fight and end the encounter in under three minutes. Crypt Security can similarly be cheesed by walking through a wall that has no collision in the lower chamber, allowing two players with both Scanner and Operator to initiate the damage phase much earlier than normally possible. This can be used to reliably one-phase the encounter. Update 3.0.2 patched the spot, so players can no longer get out of bounds to cheese the encounter.
- Last, but not least, the final boss of the Deep Stone Crypt will start bombarding you nonstop with Turbulent Barrage, which oneshots you if you get hit even once. However, you can survive everything by simply emoting with max Recovery. That said, it won't take long before the bosses does an automatic Total Party Wipe, but it's just amusing to see an almighty attack getting nullified in this fashion, and is useful if you really can't get out of the attack's range.
- While it was certainly present long before Season 13, exploiting the matchmaking to accomodate up to twelve players in any PvE activity (raids, Nightfall strikes and dungeons included) became commonplace mere weeks into the Season of the Chosen. To do this, you just have to join a fireteam that's about to launch said PvE activity with your own fireteam at a precise timing. This exploit was fixed the same week Grandmaster Nightfalls started their rotation.
- The "Always on Time" exotic sparrow from Scourge of the Past was always unique for its "Stealth Running" perk, but after the launch of Beyond Light, it was discovered that it unintentionally also moved faster than any other sparrow in the game, despite still being listed as having a speed of 160. As of Season of the Chosen, this has still yet to be addressed.
- During the opening week of the Season of the Splicer, players who unlocked the Energy Accelerant mod, which normally only buffs the damage of explosion-related weapon perks like Dragonfly and Chain Reaction, were shocked to discover that it affected things it had no business interacting with, inadvertently doubling the damage of weapons that use unconventional projectiles like Symmetry's Revolution mode, Deathbringer, Black Talon's Crow's Wings and Telesto (were you really surprised at that last one?). The abuse in Crucible became so widespread that Bungie quickly disabled the mod before too many use it in Trials of Osiris. When they re-enabled the mod in the week following Vault of Glass's launch, different objects instead got buffed, namely swords, relic slams and Ruinous Effigy.
- The Vault of Glass raid is subject to a lot of exploits upon its reintroduction in Season 14:
- The Gorgons have a formidable amount of health, but fall victim to three full volleys from the Wardcliff Coil, since these special Harpies are programmed as vehicles (not enemies), which the Wardcliff Coil is especially strong against.
- During the Gatekeeper encounter, you can forego the use of the Relic and simply kill the Praetorians by yourself with either the Prometheus Lens or a point-blank shot from Colony, as these two weapons somehow bypass and break the Praetorians' invicibility shield that's normally only broken by the Relic's attacks.
- By killing yourself inside the Venus portal right as the Gatekeeper encounter ends, then killing yourself some more after that, there is a chance that you will be respawning inside the Venus portal, where a phantom of Atheon now spawns and can be damaged; whatever damage you inflict on this phantom will carry over to the real Atheon when you start the final encounter. This trivializes the "Eyes on Atheon" triumph, as you will never have to deal with any Supplicants if you fully deplete Atheon's health that way, though no other triumph requiring the final encounter clear will trigger with this bug.
- Finally, Warmind Cell explosions, if correctly placed and buffed with the gamebreaking combination of Rage of the Warmind and Global Reach, will simultaneously destroy all three Oracles in the dimension Atheon sends you in, negating the need to shoot them in the order provided by the players still in the Vault. That said, because there are three waves of Oracles before you can safely return through the portal in time for damage phase, you'll have to produce more Warmind Cells by way of slaying the additional mobs that spawn in-between the Oracle appearances.
- Season of the Lost somehow broke middle tree Sunbreaker Titan in a way that made their hammer throw melee melt bosses in no time flat. This apparently has to do with the hammer bouncing off the throwing player before hitting the target. This means that particularly annoying bosses like Riven and Atraks-1 get completely annihilated once a Sunbreaker casually wanders up and taps them with a hammer.
- Telesto made another appearance with a duo of PvP-warping bugs. Initially, using the Thermoclastic Blooming mod on a Telesto grenade made a veritable fountain of Orbs of Light appear, allowing players to pop Supers essentially on demand. This was fixed first by allowing the game to throw up a RUTABAGA error and return the offending fireteam to orbit, then later by balancing the grenades around being immune to player damage. This was the catalyst for a second bug, detected less than 12 hours after the patch went out, allowing players to block doorways with Telesto bubbles, which then deflected anything up to and including projectile Supers.
- The release of The Witch Queen was predictably full of hijinks, despite the delay that lasted an entire season.
- Gambit is no stranger to poor coding, but this expansion busted the damage scaling in some exotics by mistaking their damage values against Guardians to those against PvE combatants, resulting in said exotics doing way more damage against players than intended. For example, Eriana's Vow oneshots Guardians regardless of headshot or bodyshot, and Dead Man's Tale handily kills in two headshots.
- If you stun the Caretaker between the messages "An obelisk accepts your offering" and "The ritual is complete. Power awaits you...", the boss will stay stunned for a fairly long while, allowing for a longer-than-intended damage phase. This is easily exploitable on all floors of the fight.
- Also in the Caretaker's encounter, it's coded in a way that if you happen to forget which symbols you need for the obelisk, you can just spray all symbols on each side at the same time and it will accept it like you put in the correct sequence, instead of rejecting it. Handy for those who aren't the best at memorizing symbols.
- Season of the Haunted's new Duality Dungeon has some interesting ways to cheese the encounters.
- Players quickly figured out that they could extend the Collapsing Nightmare timer during the Nightmare of Gahlran by having one player be dead while entering the damage phase. When the nightmare collapses, the dead player revives as the party wipe timer appears. They revive one other guardian and rinse and repeat.
- The amount of Psions that spawn during the Nightmare of Caiatl can be a hassle. Luckily, a well-placed Fusion Grenade right as they enter the arena will lock the doors open and prevent them from spawning again.
- Season of Plunder had a fun bug. One of the Week 1 seasonal challenges was "shape 3 seasonal weapons." Normally, this is a fairly arduous grind, requiring a ton of red-border weapon drops. However, due to a bug, if you shape any weapon, no matter what the weapon is, with three seasonal weapons equipped in each weapon slot, the game will register the challenge as complete.
- Season of the Seraph has its own share of exploitable glitches:
- Volatile Rounds works on the basis of damage thresholds in order to proc one detonation, but if you apply that basis to a powerful weapon that has a high rate of fire, the threshold is reached and reset almost instantly. This is why the seasonal machine gun, Retrofit Escapade, was busted and capable of outpacing other top damage dealers until Hotfix 6.3.0.4 came around and reigned in Volatile Rounds' thresholds.
- Proccing Incandescent, then scorching nearby targets with it and killing said targets with a weapon that has the Vorpal Weapon perk, will result in a nonstop chain of Ignitions.
- Akelous can accidentally die to physics if a Conduit Minotaur spawns on it while it's headed towards you once you activate all fuel rods.
- Persys, Primordial Ruin is an intimidating boss to take on alone, but you can cheese it by luring it into the core room after destroying both Incarcerator Hydras. Once in there, it'll stand still if you hide behind the reactor, and you can spam jolting grenades with the Spark of Shock Arc fragment on Arc subclasses, spawn killing a group of Goblins and Supplicants while you're at it. Even though Persys is clearly immune to any damage including the jolts, your objective here is to stack up lots and lots of Vex corpses so that Persys runs out of space to even maneuver and the game would eventually decide that it needs to disappear. Once there's enough Vex debris lying around, Persys will simply go "poof" and the encounter will automatically complete itself; it's a safe, if boring and time-consuming, exploit.
- Lightfall, as a major expansion, shipped with a sizable amount of exploits:
- Silkstrike had a bug related to the extra damage from striking with the rope's tip that caused the super to hit twice for double the DPS. This was rectified by reworking the super's damage calculations to remove the tipper gimmick entirely.
- Hierarchy of Needs's Guidance Ring became a solid object, allowing it to destroy enemy projectiles.
- Grand Overture caused Explosive/Timed Payload weapons to blind enemies on every hit when equipped.
- Pairing a finisher mod with Empowered Finish caused the user to gain Armor Charges whenever the former mod was triggered.
- Fighting Lion's splash damage had its damage to minors massively increased.
- Winterbite's projectiles suffered from a damage glitch similar to Witherhoard's early days, wherein multiple projectiles hitting a target at once would instantly kill them regardless of HP.
- Jotunn received quintuple the expected amount of ammo from special bricks with scavenger mods.
- Citan's Ramparts allowed Wish-Ender to hit for five times instead of the usual three per target, similarly to how standing in grass during Season of Dawn conferred similar benefits.
- Season of the Deep introduced an exploit that allowed players to acquire an unlimited amount of free exotic armor and then dismantle it for glimmer, shards, and enhancement cores. This was done by picking up any of the Exotic Armor quests Ikora started offering that season and then doing the quest up until step 6, where you're supposed to claim the exotic from her. Instead, you can talk to Ikora, abandon the quest, and then talk to her again and retrieve an unlimited amount of the exotic associated with the quest.
- Season of the Witch introduced a new Strand Aspect for Warlocks called Weavewalker, which summons pseudo hatchlings in a circle around them and gives a 90 percent damage reduction. There is no single shot weapon capable of killing them in crucible, requiring attrition, but balanced by limit time, moderate movement speed, no other abilities, no weapons and no gameplay interactions (chests, items, revives). The ONE thing that it overlooked was glaive melees, which basically turned them into invincible glaive pokers. This resulted in the aspect being locked before Trials started as they developed a fix.
- In September 2023, it was revealed that game lag while crafting weapons on the Relic on Mars allowed intermingling intrinsic perks between different craftable weapons, particularly those that don't match the base frame's weapon type. The timing is very tight and involves intentionally slowing down the game (via things like FPS cap and other methods of taxing your computer) but allows for feats of absurdity such as auto rifles Ammit-AR2 and Perpetualis being chambered in buckshot but retaining auto rifle range, grenade launchers like Koraxis's Distress firing a dozen shells per trigger pull, and bows like Under Your Skin shooting Trinary Vision grenades. It was dubbed by many as Laser Tag 2.0 after a special ammo glitch years prior for trace rifles in PVP. Notably, Bungie has admitted it is a glitch and not a bannable offense, which allowed the players to go insane with weird combinations until it was patched.
- An interesting fact about this bug - it's seemingly been a part of the game ever since crafting was introduced, but was never publicized until this moment, so very few knew of its existence. Knowledge of it surged practically overnight as soon as it was exposed to a wider audience.
- The week after it was discovered and Bungie announced fixes were on the way, with one already in place, players who abused this bug responded by using another method to trigger the bug, and gathering together to unleash so much damage on enemies that the servers just could not handle it. It resulted in server instability rather quickly, taking the "Good" part away and making it go headlong into "bad".
