The Destiny 2 designer responsible for the once game-breaking, still game-changing Titan ability Banner of War was also leading the charge on the game's newly minted Exotic shotgun, Slayer's Fang, which is noticeably less game-breaking but still mighty cool.
That developer is associate designer Danny Nanni, who normally handles abilities but jumped at the chance to work on his first Exotic weapon. Other members of Bungie contributed to its design and creation, of course, but Nanni was at the forefront.
"I definitely took a lot of the inspiration and sensibilities that we have on abilities," Nanni tells 12DOVE, "and when there was an opportunity for me to work on the weapons team for this release, they were like, 'we need somebody who wants to make a vampire shotgun.' And I'm like, yes please. I don't know anything else. Please let me make that."
The result was Slayer's Fang, an oddball, magazine-fed shotgun that specializes in precision damage but triggers scattershot, target-seeking Void crystals that can apply the Weaken debuff. It's also packing innate anti-Overload Champion tech (which sadly can't stack with this season's anti-Barrier shotgun Artifact perk). Shotguns face inherent limitations in difficult Destiny 2 content because getting into shotgun range might get you killed, but especially after recent PvE buffs, the weapon type has found some places to shine. Slayer's Fang slots right in there, especially when paired with builds like Gyrfalcon Hunter and No Backup Plans Titan. For Warlocks, random Void nonsense is still working just fine for me.
"The vampire hunter fantasy is what sort of drove the whole design from the get-go," Nanni says. "The use case, I think, is to get a kill on a smaller guy and then go boss hunting, or beast hunting in a way, because once you get that first kill, the gun really powers up. And there's some uniqueness here too – instead of firing a bullet, our play here was, what if it was firing a Void crystal, sort of like a stake through the heart?"
The strange firing pattern of Slayer's Fang brings a few tricks to the table. The ricochet shots bounce more when you have the on-kill buff active, and it gets better in a group. "It's not written anywhere, this is a secret that players will discover probably, but if you get a kill, you spread the buff to everybody that is also using this gun," Nanni confirms.
As a cherry on top, Slayer's Fang got a special bit of flavor text calling back to a Destiny 1 Exotic called Voidfang Vestments. Lore heads may remember that Exotic's entry: "You will dream of teeth and nothing else." It's no coincidence that Slayer's Fang reads: "Fear neither dreams nor teeth."
"As this is the vampire killer gun, I wanted the flavor text to be a reference to that," Nanni confirms. "It's an homage back to D1 and we were able to tie that in. It was just an idea I had, and the narrative team, we were able to make that swing.
I asked how Slayer's Fang will compete with Conditional Finality, a dual-element Exotic shotgun that's so good me and my friends just call it The Shotgun. It turns out it has more secrets up its sleeve. "It's tuned to be a little bit better against Fallen and Scorn," Nanni says. "There's a secret little bonus there for this gun that I'm sure players will discover in time.
"If you really want to lean into Weaken and Overshield and those kinds of survivability tools, this'll be the shotgun for you and it will highly synergize inside of those kits," he argues. "And I think that synergy is very valid. But also, because of its range as a slug shotgun, there's boss DPS implications here that Conditional Finality can't compete with because it's not designed for that. ... There's definitely different use cases there. We don't want to ever invalidate someone's choice. Conditional Finality is your favorite weapon? That's awesome. We respect that. But I think there's some enticing opportunities elsewhere for you to apply to this gun."
Slayer's Fang also faced the immense challenge of following up Choir of One as a Void special Exotic. Choir has barely left my hands since it came out, and Nanni says it was his favorite weapon through the Final Shape dev cycle, so he knew his weapon had a lot to prove. "I was like, I gotta live up to this, especially as my first gun," he recalls. "So I think it will live comfortably next to it. They're so different ... and I love that there are different builds that they support."
All that being said, I also asked about Bungie's approach to power budget with new Exotics. When is it time to drop a meta-breaker?
"A lot of it depends on where we want to go with the meta at the time," Nanni begins. "You know, we like to have our seasonal themes and our seasonal meta. A lot of that's highlighted in the Artifact. For instance, this season, we had a huge Stasis push, right? And so, one of the things we did was, Salvation's Grip got a catalyst. It's time, Stasis season, let's get Salvation's Grip out there. So I think it depends a lot on what our direction is at the time.
"Sometimes if there are certain builds or play styles that we see other teams working on, like if I'm on abilities and they see my balance pass, they're like, maybe we want to do an Exotic that matches into what we're working on on abilities, or [vice-versa]. We may try and match that. A lot of synergy and teamwork goes into deciding, well, is the meta stale? Do we want a new king of the hill, or is it time for something like a pass on older stuff to see if there's a new synergy we can highlight, or a quirky one? It's really just a lot of collaboration, monitoring what's going on in the game. All of us in sandbox play the game a lot."
