OK, two minute warning for the Live feed.

www.twitch.tv/bungie if you want to watch.

Confirmed that Queen's Wrath is back, and is the center of House Of Wolves. With Wrath rank you'll be able to buy the old emblems and shaders again, along with new shaders (one looks like it may be mostly black), and a ship.

Prison Of Elders will drop Queen's Wrath armor and weapons.

There is a Fallen character with gear and weapons as well. Also has class armor, plus shaders and ships for each Fallen House (Winter, Devils, etc.). So there's 3 full sets of gear in this DLC (Queen's Fallen, Osiris).

Trials of Osiris will run every weekend, starting on Fridays and running through the reset.

The Reef has it's own Bounty Board, postmaster, vault and cryptarch. So you won't have to go to the tower and reef. Xur "might" show up in the Reef.

The Reef is open for all players, not just those with House Of Wolves.

Black Hammer may finally be fixed with HOW.

The Speaker is now relevant!!! He will have exchanges for materials (shards for energy, shards for motes, and you can sell them for glimmer as well)

Each faction has new weapons and gear. Each faction will now sell 6 weapons instead of 4. Some weapons are new, and some are holdovers (Red Hand IX is still in New Monarchy).

Looks like Crucible/Vanguard have been reduced to 6 weapons for sale to match the factions.

And here we go with the upgrades. There is a new material! Etheric Light. This is for legendaries. One Etheric Light will upgrade legendaries to the new standard.

Exotics will still use Exotic shards. Xur will no longer be required for upgrades.

New Legendaries can be REFORGED!!!! The Gunsmith can reforge new weapons, and sells tememetries. Still not selling weapon parts.

Old Legendaries cannot be reforged.

ALL legendary/exotic armor can be brought to max level. That includes faction gear, old raid gear, etc.

Your gear is not reset when you upgrade it.

WARNING: There was a Gjallarhorn dismantling in the video. Brutal.

Etheric Light will drop in Prison Of Elders, Osiris, Nightfalls, and Iron Banner.

OK, the video is over, those were my live thoughts.

Overall, it was pretty much as expected. You'll be able to upgrade your exotics from day one to the new standard immediately. You can swap armor based on appearance and perks as opposed to just light level. Yeah, there's a new material, but it's basically the equivalent of the exotic shard for legendaries, so not too bad.

at work and can't watch the feed
I'll count on you Scott to bring us the good info instead of wading through the posts on Reddit .... best I get from there is that Gothalion is annoying

365 Mythoclast

Nice that weapon upgrades will be available to those that don't purchase HOW.

Is Osiris a PvP thing like Iron Banner?

And is PoE the PvE thing ala Firefight (Halo)?

This is wonderful. Exotic no longer reset when you upgrade them. Just need an exotic shard, some weapon parts and a little glimmer.

HOLY SHIT! You can refordge new legendary weapons(dlc) and reroll them without losing progress

wow .... that sounds great
good thing I have almost 20 exotic shards sitting around and additional duplicate exotics in my postmaster that I never broke down

looks like the Gunsmith finally has a job instead of just standing around offering rare fusion rifles every now and then for newbs

how many times Scott did we bitch about this

from what I am seeing/hearing this roll out is being met with overwelming positivity

shards/energy to glimmer is great but ......
what can I convert my 400 strange coins into??!!

So, someone please tell me what I should be doing now to get ready for HoW.

Farm mats, motes? Are commendations still relevant? Do I need to tee up completed bounties? Get the vendor to an almost leveled state?

keep playing Bloodborne

I hope this announcement does encourage some of you who have moved on to other things to come back and invest some more time with the current content

There's still some question marks. They didn't go into detail about how rare of a drop Etheric Light will be. It's possible that it could be hard to come by. There won't be the kind of mad rush to buy vanguard/crucible gear because of the fact we can upgrade our current stuff. It all just depends on how many Etheric Light we can come across. If you get three of those, you could be at Level 34 immediately (with an upgraded Exotic of course).

What I am really jazzed about is that all those exotic pieces I recently upgraded with better rolls are not going to waste. I can now finish working on them and getting them all ready. I can also max out that 3rd GHorn

Pop bottles and Pimp out your Ride. Stock up on telemetry like a mofo. And buy Heavy ammo like you are getting ready for the zombie apocalypse cuz you can never have enough rockets to take out aliens.

Did I see it right that you can transfer 55 shards/energy into 250 glimmer? If true that seems terrible

so along those lines .... I understand Xur will no longer be necessary for upgrades but will he still be offering upgrades?

I am going to assume no ... you may be able to get better stats by a outright new purchase from him or a new drop but not by upgrading from a previous int/disc/str level to a new one, correct?

No, you saw he had 55 shards. It's 250 Glimmer for 1 shard. So for those 55 shards, you'd get 13750 Glimmer. Not bad at all.

The video is up now for those that want to watch but couldn't live:

http://www.twitch.tv/bungie/b/652463271

You know, it completely slipped by me during the live feed, but I am noticing one thing: The new gear doesn't use shards or energy. It all uses the Etheric Light to get to the max damage/light level. You do have to do the whole upgrade path for perks, but not for damage/light.

That makes a lot more sense, and makes a GREAT use off all my extra ascendent mats.

Still keeps the old raids relevant too; farming mat runs and getting those legendaries you may have not gotten before.

Come on HoC!!

They didn't address it, but I can't see why Xur would continue to offer upgrades. He will still sell the shards. It will make my Xur Reports shorter

New Perks on the New Monarchy shotgun: Kills increase your sprint speed for a short time. Melee kills while this weapon is equipped grants a chance to fill the magazine. Wow. Just wow. That is a crucible weapon if I've ever heard of one.

Another new perk: Replenish. Magazine will be refilled upon activation of your super. Wow.

Army Of One: Unassisted Kills give you boosts to your grenade and melee cooldowns.

OK, here's a first look at a HOW exotic piece of armor.

Say hello to The Ram:



It's a Warlock Helmet whose perk I believe is that when you revive yourself with Radience, it disorients enemies around you.

Guess I need to start running VOG on normal since all I have armor wise are the gauntlets and chest for the Titan and the boots for the Warlock. At least it'll give me something to shoot for the next few weeks.

Looks like a horse head with horns coming out of its eyes.

This is great. Looking forward to keeping old armor relevant.

you mean all that white, blue, and green stuff you still have

One thing I wasn't a huge fan of from what I saw was it looked like if you have a maxed out exotic you need an Etheric light to bump it up to the new higher level

but .... if you have an exotic with all but the exotic shard circle filled you can use an exotic shard to bump up to the higher level

I guess I'm glad I'm holding on to exotic weapons/armor I haven't fully maxed out since it looks like acquiring etheric light for all you need it for will take much more time than having or getting exotic shards