Destiny 2 exotic 'Witherhoard' is absolutely obliterating bosses thanks to new Season 11 glitch

The Exotic Kinetic Grenade Launcher ‘Witherhoard’ is the current Seasonal Exotic for Season of Arrivals and has certainly entered the sandbox with a bang. This weapon may end up being one of the most versatile weapons in Destiny 2.

‘Witherhoard’ can be unlocked at Rank 1 of the paid track of the Season Pass or at Rank 35 on the free track. The Exotic perks on this powerhouse of a weapon are as follows:

• Primeval’s Torment - “Projectiles fired from this weapon blight the target or nearby area on impact.”
• Break the Bank - “Blighted targets take damage over time and blight the nearby area on death.”

Rounds fired at the ground will create a small pool of dark energy that will cause a large amount of damage to any enemies that step in to it and ‘blight’ them.

Once a blighted enemy dies to Witherhoard’s damage it will create a new blight where it died. This can create a large chain of enemies dying to the blights and spreading new blights around the combat area.

Witherhoard also has an Exotic Catalyst that can be acquired through a quest from Gunsmith. This quest has a few steps which boil down to completing activities and getting kills with grenade launchers but can still be fairly time consuming.

The catalyst gives a significant increase to Handling while also giving the weapon the ability to auto reload after a short time while the weapon is stowed.

It’s not clear if this next feature is a bug or not as it’s not mentioned anywhere on the weapon inspect screen but if a target is blighted and it’s struck with a direct hit from a Witherhoard projectile it will suffer a high damage critical hit on top of the constant damage over time.

This can lead to some extremely solid DPS against some of the larger bosses due to their size making it easy to score direct hits.

As an example I was progressing through Altar of Sorrow while using the new Witherhoard yesterday. A direct hit with Witherhoard would deal a bit under 1,000 damage and then continue to deal more damage over time from the blight. If I scored another direct hit on the same enemy while it was still blighted a whopping 13,000 would be dealt and then the damage over time would follow.

What certainly is a bug though is Witherhoard’s ability to completely delete the health bars of various bosses. Destiny 2 streamer and Youtuber ‘Sweatcicle’ uploaded a video to his channel titled “INSTA KILL RAID BOSSES - Witherhoard vs All Raid Bosses [Destiny 2]” that showcases the obvious bug.

In the video Sweatcicle and his raid team all fire their Witherhoard’s at different raid bosses dealing decent DPS until through some unknown bug the health of the boss is instantly reduced to 0 and the encounter is then completed.

Currently, it isn't known how to reliably replicate this bug as some players are reporting that it isn't working for them 100% of the time. A key ingredient so far seems to be the use of the Hunter Tether.

Even though Witherhoard is supposed to have decent boss DPS it's quite obvious that this level of damage is not intended by Bungie.

After numerous clips of Witherhoard deleting raid bosses were shared on Twitter Bungie Community Manager Dylan ‘dmg04’ Gafner replied with the following:

“1. Oh no.

2.  This is absolutely, positively going to be fixed.

3. Enjoy it while it lasts.”

So it seems Bungie has their sights set on fixing this as soon as they are able to identify the cause.

No further information from Bungie has been shared on their progress with a hotfix for the bug so it could be some time before it is properly dealt with.

Until then feel free to make use of this ridiculous bug to quickly and easily progress through some of the more challenging content in the game.