I held off on grinding out the last few Iron Banners in Destiny 2’s Season of Opulence because I had no idea if the armor would transfer to 2.0 or ornaments. Well, now I’m back at it with a brand new 2.0 samurai astronaut set to earn, along with other bonuses like pinnacle drops at 951+ and allegedly enhanced mods.
The Iron Banner grind has been anywhere from cake to a slog in the past, and this one falls somewhere in the middle in terms of its overall quality, I feel. I have my first full IB set for my Hunter, I’m most of the way done with my Titan and I will easily get my Warlock’s set too by the end of this week. Probably by the end of today, with relative ease.
The armor grind is much easier this time around. You have to complete a multi-stage quest where each part gives you a different piece, with the final one giving you two. You pretty much just have to…play normally, capture zones, play games, get kills, and then get final blows with a specific slate of weapons for each step, pulses, then fusions, then SMGs, then grenade launchers but that part is bugged and it’s still just SMGs, thank god. I am hoping to finish all three sets before they fix it. I would say it takes no more than 2.5-3 hours to get a set, depending on how you play, which is a far cry from the slog of the last set of bounties before they nerfed some of the worst requirements last season.
The armor is very sick, and it’s easy to earn. That’s a good start. As for how Iron Banner actually plays, and some of its other aspects? Ehhh.
Most of my games have been wildly lopsided, one way or the other. I would say probably 40-50% of my games have ended in a mercy, which seems…rather high. And this isn’t because there are New Light blueberries wandering in here. Everyone I’m seeing is pretty much above 920, and there really does not seem to be all that much of a power differential between anyone. Also, these objectives, both for the armor set and the bounties, require zero wins. So while that makes them easier, it also means people are just running around like this is Team Deathmatch and blasting away with fusions and SMGs and what not trying to complete quest steps. I guess the “taking over zones” one is okay at keeping people on task, but it’s also kind of a mess.
The other bit of bad news about this Iron Banner is that there are zero, yes, zero new weapons. I get it, we have cool new armor and they had to make raid, moon, Vex and battle pass weapons, but it is still pretty rough to have no new offerings and be getting drops that are months or years old at this point. And it’s kind of goofy because most Iron Banner weapons are notorious reskins anyway.
As for the pinnacle rewards, these are more general issues with the game I may have to get into another time. You have four bounties which can give you armor (after you complete the quest) or weapons at 951. This is part of the comically slow grind to 960, where you need a full set of 951 gear to get to 952, and so on and so forth, with only a few pinnacle sources in the game. So no, I don’t really care about this one light power bump.
I turned in 300 tokens so far and got three enhanced mods, my first non-Nightmare enhanced mods for 2.0. While I appreciate the fact that I finally got some, I am starting to realize the ways in which armor 2.0 has a lot of logical cracks in it. For instance, I got an enhanced unflinching aim sniper mod. That’s cool, I used to have that on my old Iron Banner chest too. But now? It costs 6 energy. That’s 6 out of 10, and that’s only out of 10 when you have maxed a full piece of armor with prisms and shards, which is no easy feat and barely anyone has done that yet (myself included). But even then, that leaves only four slots which can take like, one recovery or intellect mod. So you end up with a chest piece that quite literally has two mods in it, one less than normal armor 1.0 pieces had at baseline, as every piece had two perks and a mod slot. That seems like a step backward, if you ask me, and I think the entire energy system needs some work. But that’s not really an Iron Banner problem, it’s a more general game problem I’ll have to dig into later.
Overall, I appreciate the lessened grind for armor, as it feels like less of a chore now. But no new weapons is a bit rough, as is how most matches play out which are total stomps one way or the other. But I suppose that’s not an entirely new issue to plague Iron Banner.
I will get all three sets and farm for some more enhanced mods, I suppose. I also gotta get Randy’s and Revoker and some other stuff. So I’m pure PvP for the week outside of a Nightmare Hunt or two. We’ll see how things feel by the end.
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