The gun that keeps breaking Destiny has struck again. Bungie announced it’s once again taking the Exotic fusion rifle Telesto offline in PVP activities after Destiny 2 players were caught exploiting a new bug to demolish their opponents in this week’s returning Trials of Osiris competitive mode.
“Due to an issue, we have disabled the Telesto Exotic fusion rifle in all Crucible and Gambit activities and the Thermoclastic Blooming Artifact mod in all activities,” Bungie announced on Twitter.
The “issue” in question is that players discovered they were able to use Telesto to get almost immediate and unlimited supers, powerful player abilities that will turn the tide of any match in the blink of an eye. Normally, it takes several minutes and a lot of kills to get a super charged up. Telesto players were doing it almost immediately.
That’s because its complex fusion projectile mechanic collided with this season’s Thermoclastic Blooming mod in a weird way. The mod spawns an Orb of Power, which charges up player supers, every time an enemy is destroyed with a Stasis or Solar attack. It also happened to be counting the mini-time bombs Telesto creates as enemies, allowing players to fire the fusion rifle at an object, watch its projectile detonators spawn, and then quickly shoot them to spawn a bunch of Orbs and get their supers right away.
Here’s how the infinite Orb of Power glitch worked in real time:
Reports of a new auto-win Trials of Osiris cheat started spreading immediately and Bungie acted fast and took the exploit offline. But this isn’t the first time Telesto has acted up like this. In fact, it’s already infamous in the Destiny community as the game’s most bugged gun, in part because the game seems to keep recording its projectiles as enemies.
Telesto originally arrived back in 2015's Taken King expansion and was carried over to Destiny 2 when Forsaken dropped in 2018. That expansion’s Blind Well activity required players to fill up progress meters by defeating enemies. They quickly discovered they could just shoot Telesto a bunch instead. The gun was also used to cheat across the finishing line in Menagerie races, occasionally imposed itself over other gun models, and was at the center of another infinite super glitch back in 2019. The list goes on.
This track record has also cemented the fusion rifle as one of Destiny’s biggest memes. “We are over a week into a Fusion rifle meta season and Telesto hasn’t broken anything yet,” wrote user WildBilly2 on the game’s subreddit just over a week ago. The post has since been updated: “Whelp!”
Wrote another player, “At this point, if the 30th Anniversary Dungeon’s final boss isn’t a sentient Telesto with the power of all the bugs it has accumulated over the last 5-7 years I’ll be very disappointed.”