It's been teased and bandied about for some time now, and at long last, the biggest update to Destiny has arrived. All whopping 17+ Gb of it. This update undoubtedly includes much of the content for the Taken King expansion, which is due to arrive next week, but the big focus is the changes it makes to the game starting today. Let's review, shall we?
The full list of changes is available on Bungie's site, but here are the quick highlights:
Character Level Cap raised to 34 for all players
Your Character Level will be grandfathered into your highest possible Light Level from all gear in your inventory and vault Character level will be raised to 40 on 9/15/15 (with purchase of Taken King expansion) Light and Character Level are separate, with Character Level solely based on XP and Light Level being an aggregate of all gear's damage/defense valuesWeapon changes discussed previously (including changes to Exotics)
Weapon damage is also changed now to "renormalize" to Year Two stats [translation: all 365 damage weapons will now be 170]Ghost is now voiced by Nolan North; RIP Dinklebot 9/09/2014 - 9/08/2015
Quest HUD is now implemented and Year 1 Activities have been converted to Quests
New questlines for each classes subclass (i.e., Titan Defender, Hunter Bladedancer, etc)Bounty slot size increased to 16
Vault size increased for weapons and armor to 72, and general is increased to 36
Players can start earning rep with Gunsmith (Banshee) starting tomorrow
Emblems, ships, and exotic blueprints can be accessed from their respective terminals located near Eva Levante, Amanda Holliday, and Vanguard Mentors
In other words, the game has changed. Like, quite a bit. If your system supports it, I'd start the download and then put it into "Rest Mode" or whatever and go do something else while it's doing all that. Like maybe watching this cinematic trailer for The Taken King. And then re-watching another 10 or 12 times.
Alright, now that that's over, go on, Guardian. Revel in the new changes.