Make sure your Primary has the Quick Access Sling mod equipped. With a Hand Cannon, you typically want to do the opposite. If you have a Bow, you'll start the engagement with the Bow and finish with Eriana's Vow. This pairs well with either a Bow or 120 RPM Hand Cannon to help kill the target. It has excellent range, deals immense chip damage to the body and high headshot damage, and it auto-loads itself with the Catalyst. If the Hand Cannon doesn't kill them, the poison surely will.Įriana's Vow is an underutilized Exotic in PvP yet surprisingly good. Fire a poisonous arrow at a target, immediately swap to your Hand Cannon, and deliver the final blow. Le Monarque is downright oppressive with its AoE arrow explosions that deal DoT damage, acting as a slow-firing Thorn with nigh-infinite range. Le Monarque is what we recommend for most players, but Eriana's Vow is a good pick if don't want to use a Bow. If you don't like Gunslinger, Bottom Tree Arcstrider and Revenant are solid alternatives. The On Your Mark buff is great for smoothing out this playstyle, and you get access to Radiant and Restoration buffs. This build doesn't rely on any specific subclass spec, but we highly recommend you use Gunslinger while starting out. Pick up my sci-fi novel series, The Earthborn Trilogy, which is now in print, online and on audiobook.Le Monarque or Eriana's Vow, 120 RPM Hand Cannon We’ll find out soon enough, I suppose.įollow me on Twitter and on Facebook. Iron Banner changed a ton over the years in Destiny 1, and while I would have hoped that there might have already been more lessons learned to apply to D2, I’m guessing through some tweaks that it can get back on track for the next time around after Bungie listens to feedback.
Penalize quitters and put full fireteams against one another instead of letting them stomp solo players so the activity itself is more fun.Īgain, this is a process. Eliminate non-Iron Banner items from the loot pool and replace those with IB drops instead. Immediate fixes? Implement the “more XP as time goes on” system by increasing token drops as the end of Iron Banner gets closer. While I get that Bungie may have been trying to make Iron Banner more streamlined and accessible in Destiny 2, by using their token system, it seems they’ve actually made it harder to amass Iron Banner gear, and the dupe system makes farming more frustrating as you end up with an X% chance that you will quite literally get nothing from an engram since duplicates serve no purpose. And there was an actual Iron Banner vendor, one who actually sold things that you could specifically purchase when you ranked up. In later iterations of the mode, you could play catch-up on your alternate characters pretty easily, and there were XP boosts that increased as the week went on. While the old Iron Banner system wasn’t perfect by any means, it did have ways of making the grind less tiresome and frustrating. That’s not possible in Iron Banner, and so you’re getting chances at gear way, way less often. You could perfect a farming speed run and have several hundred. You could spend an hour on Titan, run a few public events and lost sectors and have nearly a hundred.
The duplicate drops might as well be air.įaction Rally had a similar set-up, as there you also had a limited time to try and get lucky to find every piece of armor and weapon you could during the week while digging through loads of duplicates, but the difference there was that tokens were way more abundant. You can spend hours to grind out 80 tokens and thanks to a lack of a smart loot system which knows what’s dropped already, you could get three copies of one gun in four engrams, or two helmets, two boots, etc.
Again, everywhere else this is mostly just free shards, but in Iron Banner, dropping a chestpiece or Gunsmith weapon you’ve gotten six times already feels like a waste as that could have been a missing IB piece instead. Also, IB continues the weird Destiny 2 tradition of integrating the “general” loot pool with specific rewards from this activity. While this is now par for the course in other activities, for Iron Banner, when you have a limited time to hunt the items you want, it’s more frustrating when dupes show up. This means that it’s even more of a problem when you get duplicates because you just wasted an entire engram on literally shards. Furthermore, Iron Banner is a limited time activity, so the grind feels…urgent in a way that Crucible does not.