Destiny 2’s Season of Opulence has launched with a lot of great new content, but some old traditions as well. Namely, the arrival of a new set of pinnacle weapons, and me being crazy, I’ve done my best to acquire them in week one, when theoretically this should take a few weeks or months of play.
But my sacrifice (seriously, my hands hurt) is your gain, and I’m here to tell you whether or not I think it’s worth it to grind for these at all. So here we go:
Wendigo (Vanguard Pinnacle Grenade Launcher)
Grenade Launchers have been low key buffed to the point where they are actually wicked powerful heavies at this point. Gone are the days of cluster rockets and cluster rockets only, and obviously the Whisper era is pretty much over too. So a solid GL in your heavy slot freeing up an exotic to go elsewhere is good. And you could do much worse than Wendigo.
The grind for this is not bad at all. All you pretty much have to do is run about 20-25 strikes using Fighting Lion, which will never run out of ammo, and some sort of heavy grenade launcher. I used Edge Transit for the memes but it was actually pretty good given all these recent buffs. I actually had fun during this run because you learn to get real good with Fighting Lion shots, and going through the strikes you learn where there are parts where enemies cluster to get the multikills you’re looking for.
As for the launcher itself, it shoots tiny, blinding grenades, which is fun, but it relies on its central perk, explosive light, which charges up its rounds to make them bigger and badder whenever you pick up and orb of light, and you can do this 6x to fill up the entire drum. Without explosive light, Wendigo is kind of garbage compared to other GLs, but with it? The thing does massive damage with its shots, and outclasses pretty much every other type of GL, possibly even an exotic like Prospector.
Wendigo also has an added bonus in that it allows you to pick up orbs even when your super is full. This means you can trigger your class item perk to get your health back or recharge your grenade or melee when you have it equipped, which is actually pretty huge.
So yeah, fun grind, solid weapon, go for it.
Hush (Gambit Pinnacle Energy Bow)
I have less good things to say about Hush, a grind which was more brutal than the one above, and for a weapon that so far, I really don’t like at all.
The bow part of the grind here was easy. I used Le Monarque to rack up bow kills quickly, getting probably 60+ a game easily. Get a shotgun in your primary slot and be a cool dude who kills all the enemies from afar while clearing out blockers up close. Your team will thank you, and I won a lot of games farming this as a result. I’ve used Le Monarque previously in Gambit a lot, and honestly, I really like bows in general, so this part wasn’t hard.
Racking up 100% in medals, though, took a while. I finished the bow stuff by 50%, but after that was a slog. My advice is to equip a mob clearing super like Stormtrance or Thundercrash because you can easily get medals for super mob kills and sometimes massacre medals if you kill enough. Focus on staying alive so you can get medals like Killmonger and Overkillmonger or whatever it’s called. Killing a primeval will get you at least or two medals. Killing Envoys quickly will get you a medal. Being first to send a blocker is a medal. Do all of this and you might get maybe 3% progress a game. So yeah, this is a lot of Gambit.
I don’t like Hush. The bow’s central perk is that you get crazy fast draw speed after hitting crit shots when hipfiring, but guess what? On console hipfiring sucks, and hipfiring bows especially sucks, meaning that this thing feels very clumsy to use. And the problem with bows is not really draw speed as you still have to take the time to line up your shots, so the benefit here is almost negligible. Also, hipfiring means you lose pretty much all long range accuracy which is the whole point of bows in the first place, turning Hush into a midrange weapon that is outclassed by…pretty much every other midrange weapon.
This seems like something that was designed with PC in mind, giving how much better hipfiring works there. It can be a fun gimmick when you get in the flow of it and hit a bunch of crits in a row, but I am trying to think of a context in which you would use Hush in the energy slot over like, thirty better options, including past pinnacle weapons like Luna’s or Loaded Question. It just doesn’t work for me, and the grind is hard enough where I don’t think it’s going to be worth it. And I normally love bows!
Revoker (Pinnacle Crucible Sniper Rifle)
Alright, confession, I do not have Revoker. I have never liked sniping on console and only do it when I have to (Whisper burning), and as such I have no desire to get 300 sniper kills in Crucible for this thing, even though they changed the grind to make glory accumulation much more doable.
But it seems that even the type of Crucible players who would like this weapon, don’t. Here’s god tier PvP sniper TripleWRECK:
The point is that the central perk of the weapon, where you will get ammo back if you miss shots, doesn’t benefit the type of skilled snipers who hit their shots more often than not, and are dedicated enough to grind for this thing in the first place. And there are other snipers that seem to outclass this despite the perk, so why not just use those instead since the central perk offers so little benefit?
The one good thing I hear about the sniper is its short scope, but overall, this doesn’t seem worth the grind. If you’re a bad sniper, grinding exhaustingly for this isn’t going to change that once you get it. If you’re a good sniper, even if the grind is easy, this is probably not in the top tier of sniper rifles anyway, and its central perk does nothing for you, so why bother?
Overall, not my favorite season of pinnacle weapons. The only one I can definitely recommend is Wendigo, but even then, I still don’t think we have any clear must-haves here like Loaded Question or Luna’s or Breakneck.
But hey, you do you.
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