bungie dropped a bigol list of exotic weapon changes in its latest destiny 2 blog post and many of them are underwhelming reduced recoil here a little extra damage there only a few weapons got substantial changes like promising buffs for borealis and a pretty big nerf for witherhoard there are far more insubstantial changes one of which stands out as one of the most pointless and inexplicable weapon changes in fps history whisper of the worm a heavy sniper rifle has had its airborne effectiveness dramatically increased let me try to unpack just how useless this is because it is like changing the air filter of a car on fire alrightbungiethatdidmakemechucklealittle from rdestiny2airborne effectiveness was added to destiny 2 a few seasons ago primarily to curb flyby shenanigans in pvp you cant just slap on an icarus mod and jumpshot everyone across the map anymore most weapons have terrible base accuracy in the air now and increasing that inair accuracy costs an arm and a leg hence why the stat was unpopular at launch and remains controversial to this day with many players still calling for its removal bungie says its looking to make primary weapons much more accurate in the air by default but sniper rifles were hit particularly hard by airborne effectiveness tuning and outside of a few niche builds and skills are now highly unreliable once your feet leave the ground naturally this includes whisper of the worm and darci the heavy sniper we dont talk about the thing is nobody cares about whisper of the worms inair performance seriously nobody players dont generally use whisper in pvp simply because its a heavy sniper rifle it cant onehit with body shots so its functionally the same as a normal sniper rifle only its so sluggish that it feels like aiming a frickin longboard and it requires hardtofind heavy ammo the jumpshot potential isnt going to change thatin pve jumping is the last thing you want to do while using whisper its exotic perk is explicitly designed to reward sequential headshots and punish even a single whiff the optimal way to use the gun is to superglue your feet to one spot and absolutely unload on a giant raid boss weak spot with an effectively bottomless clip on top of that you need to aim whisper for a few seconds to trigger its essential exotic catalyst which makes a quick shot from the air even less viable bungieafterseeingthewhisperbuffbacklash from rdestiny2whisper has been buffed in and out of the meta several times since its original release in destiny 1 the guns been overhauled from black hammer to black spindle and now to whisper of the worm its been busted every time it offered infinite ammo provided you never miss a crit and its been pretty weak otherwise whisper hasnt been good in destiny 2 for a long time and legendary linear fusion rifles have eaten its lunch so players were excited to see it getting a change next