Marathon's most powerful gun gets a major nerf, as Bungie seeks to 'curb a little bit of its dominion in the game'

Marathon's Cryo Archive endgame map is stuffed with juicy, high-tier loot for Runners to shove into their backpacks. But by far the most prized item in Bungie's formidable lose everything factory is the Biotoxic Disinjector. This unique red-tier weapon, acquired by defeating Marathon's endgame boss The Compiler, can incinerate rival Runners with a laser beam or blast them to smithereens with a grenade launcher alt-fire.

It's a tremendously powerful gun. Too powerful, it turns out. Over the weekend, Bungie rolled out a small but significant update that carves a big chunk of damage out of this endgame weapon.

"Biotoxic Disinjector. It's strong! … too strong." Wrote Marathon's Game Director Joe Ziegler in a Steam post, adding that Bungie would be nerfing the weapon's damage by 35%. He stressed that this change was not necessarily final, however. "We're likely to make some adjustments to Biotox in the near future and may not stick to this damage nerf but for now we wanted to make sure we could curb a little bit of its dominion in the game."

Reducing the Disinjector's damage by more than a third might seem dramatic. But it's reflective of just how much of an advantage the weapon conveys—particularly its grenade launcher mode. Not only does it deal explosive damage at a high rate of fire, its projectiles also bounce off walls and stick to enemy players, making them incredibly difficult to avoid.

"People keep turning up with the Biotoxic Disinjector and spamming the 'nades and instakilling the entire team in seconds," explained Marathon player Rawssy in a reddit post written shortly before then nerf. User LJE_Shot1 concurs. "The fact you never ever see people use the laser mode says a lot, yet still get massive run time out of the gun."

The reaction to the nerf has been largely positive, though some players are complaining that it doesn't go far enough. "Nerf didn't do anything." Writes MadBuc, while futon_potato says "35% isn't even a Band-Aid. It's like putting a loose piece of cheap toilet paper on it."

Part of the issue seems to be not just the weapon's power, but its availability. It was originally much harder to acquire, due to the fact that one of the key items to access to the Compiler boss—Subroutines—didn't always spawn. But Bungie changed this a few weeks back, which has had a knock-on effect of endgame weapons appearing much more frequently in Cryo.

It's an interesting dilemma. In such a competitive, high-stakes game, how do you effectively reward players for completing a challenge like Cryo Archive, without making the experience worse for everyone else? It seems like Bungie isn't wholly convinced that a straight damage nerf will solve the problem, so it'll be interesting to see if any further changes arrive in the coming weeks.