Summary
Fallout 76has revealed the Gleaming Depths update patch notes, delivering the most significant overhaul to its endgame experience yet. At the heart of thisFallout 76update is The Gleaming Depths raid, a new endgame activity for teams of four seasoned Vault Dwellers. Players can also explore new 4-Star Legendary items, personalized Player Titles, and the addition of C.A.M.P. Pets to enhance their adventures.
Since its troubled launch in 2018,Fallout 76has seen significant improvements, with Bethesda rolling out 20 major updates packed with new content. In recent weeks, the developers have been building anticipation for the game’s 21st major update, Gleaming Depths, which officially launched on December 3.
The centerpiece of this latestFallout 76update is the introduction of the Gleaming Depths raid, an endgame activity that requires a party of four highly skilled and well-equipped Vault Dwellers to cooperate and overcome unique boss mechanics. Unlike solo-friendly activities like Daily Ops, this raid emphasizes teamwork by assigning specific roles and demanding strategic communication. To support this, a new contextual Ping system has been added to mark targets and points of interest, helping those who prefer not to use voice communication. The raid stands out for its lack of time-gating, allowing players to complete it repeatedly without having to wait for resets. However, the challenge is heightened by the fact that players cannot be revived until the encounter is finished, adding an extra layer of difficulty.
TheFallout 76update also introduces 4-Star Legendaryitems, expanding the Legendary Crafting system. These items enhance gameplay with powerful effects like health regeneration for critical hits or reduced V.A.T.S. action point costs. Players can earn these items through the Gleaming Depths raid and either trade loose mods or learn recipes by scrapping gear. However, once a mod is crafted onto an item, it becomes untradeable.
Additionally, theFallout 76Gleaming Depths update introduces the highly anticipated C.A.M.P. Pets, which lets players add a dog or cat to their settlements, complete with customization and interactive commands. Player Titles also debuted, offering a new way to personalize characters by earning and combining prefixes and suffixes through challenges, events, and quests. The update also kicks offFallout 76Season 19: The Scientific Forge,centered around the Enclave’s quest to rebuild America through scientific innovation, adding fresh thematic content to the game.
This is not all; the update also introduces the new Mutated Public Events playlist, featuring five events. Additionally, substantial changes have been made toFallout 76’s Perk Cards, combat balance, and weapon adjustments, alongside various visual and gameplay improvements.
Fallout 76 Gleaming Depths Update Patch Notes
Mutated Public Events Update
We have added five public events to the Mutated Public Events playlist.
These events are:
Perk Cards Balancing Update
The Gleaming Depths update releases with some substantial balancing changes to a handful of Perk Cards.
Our goal was to take generally underperforming perks and make them more interesting and easier to incorporate into your builds by removing some extra ranks, lowering the cost, and changing their effect to scale with the related primary stat.
Adjustments to Explosion VFX
We’ve reduced the radius in which screen flash effects appear for a multitude of explosions throughout the game. This is purely a visual change and does not impact the radius in which damage is dealt.
A few of these have had sizeable reductions (especially Fatman and Fatman MIRV explosions). Please be sure to provide feedback on whether these changes are sufficient in reducing unwanted screen flashing, if there’s any additional explosions that we should adjust, or if some explosions no-longer feel impactful and satisfying to use.
Player Weapons
NPC Weapons and Environmental Effects
NPCs’ use of player weapons listed above will also be affected.
Combat Balance
The notes you see below are a continuation of the combat rebalancing work that we began during the Skyline Valley patch. This is an ongoing process we will continue to do combat rebalancing work into next year.
Armor
Weapons
We have made changes to Damage and AP Costs for many weapons which primarily focuses on improving cases where weapons don’t perform well enough to meet players’ expectations.
Damage Buffs
These values represent the weapon at its maximum level (45 or 50, depending on the weapon). Lower-level values have similar increases in damage. Damage for the following weapons has been increased:
Hellstorm Missile Launcher:- Projectile damage (all barrels): 120 -> 178 - (Hex Barrel damage is based on this and also will be increased proportionally) - Standard Barrel explosion damage: 80 -> 178 - Cryo Payload explosion cryo damage: 78 -> 107 - Napalm Payload explosion fire damage: 78 -> 107 - Fire Damage Over Time is unchanged. - Plasma Payload explosion energy damage: 78 -> 178
While these weapons are still being evaluated for overall balance, these particular mods over-shot the current target for fire damage mods (especially when taking into account the recent adjustments to creature health and resistances) and are being brought in line with similar mods for other weapons. This allows for more consistency among weapons and mods when making future changes.
Human(ish) Creature & Weapon Balance
Creatures that previously used player weapons (Blood Eagles, Cultists, Lost, Mole Miners, Raiders, Scorched, and Super Mutants) will now use NPC versions of their weapons with balance adjustments to account for this change (see notes below).
When defeated these enemies will have a chance to drop the base version of their weapon alongside some junk items. When a weapon isn’t dropped, the enemy will instead drop more junk items that players can scrap to make up for the loss components you would receive from scrapping these weapons. Increases have also been made to the components earned from scrapping many junk items in the world, so now you will also have more components at your disposal.
We have also increased the rate at which you learn mods from scrapping weapons by 10% to account for the lower number of weapons you’ll find from these NPCs. This increase will not affect your chance to learn Legendary weapon mods.
Creature Balance
The types of health, damage, and resistance adjustments mentioned in the creatures below have also been applied to other creatures as part of earlier updates:
Accessibility
When you enter the game for the first time, you’ll be presented with the Accessibility Menu that includes the new settings you see below. This will only appear once and if you need to change any of these settings in the future, go to Settings > Accessibility.
Fallout 76
WHERE TO PLAY
Bethesda Game Studios, the award-winning creators of Skyrim and Fallout 4, welcome you to Fallout 76. Twenty-five years after the bombs fell, you and your fellow Vault Dwellers—chosen from the nation’s best and brightest – emerge into post-nuclear America on Reclamation Day, 2102. Play solo or join together as you explore, quest, build, and triumph against the wasteland’s greatest threats. Explore a vast wasteland, devastated by nuclear war, in this open-world multiplayer addition to the Fallout story. Experience the largest, most dynamic world ever created in the legendary Fallout universe. Expand southward to Skyline Valley – a brand-new region of Appalachia. Investigate the cause of the electric storm circling overhead and unveil the mystery around Vault 63 and its dwellers, including a shocking new Ghoul type – The Lost.
