#Iron banner hunter armor taken king free#

It breaks the mold, the rules of pulse rifles and, in doing so, the game. And that’s exactly what Red Death does.īecause it has two impact modifiers (the “high-caliber rounds” perk and “aggressive ballistics” barrel), Red Death breaks the mold. That’s just basic math you can’t put a higher rate of fire on one weapon while still allowing it to kill in the fewest possible shots. Weapon tuning 2.0 clearly outlined how pulse rifles should, and were intended to, be designed: “Bursts-to-kill (all precision hits) is 2 or 3, depending on victim’s armor stat.” In other words, given the impact and RoF scores between them, tier three pulse rifles like The Messenger would kill in two precision bursts while tier twos like Red Death would require a third pull of the trigger. With the update’s raft of changes, it became a tier two model with medium scores for both impact and RoF, leaving The Messenger and Spare Change.25 as the dominant tier threes. Before weapon tuning 2.0, it was while I’ll call a tier three pulse rifle, one with the highest possible impact and lowest rate of fire (RoF). An exotic pulse rifle, Red Death has an interesting history. Banner should feel different, but not ridiculous.Īnd as though the overwhelming presence of pulse rifles wasn’t enough, a single weapon seized the throne this Banner: Red Death. Perhaps even more so given its higher stakes. It needs play testing and weapon balance as much as every other Crucible mode and every other shooter.

Iron Banner is not a free pass it’s not a rug for imbalanced weapons to be swept under. Bungie seems to know this: with the release of Destiny’s 2.0 weapon tuning, the studio specifically stated, “Pulse Rifles should feel strong in PvP, but become the only competitive option.” Yet with the advent of Banner, that went out the window.Įmphasizing individual power is no reason to abandon weapon balance.

But there’s never supposed to be just one. Now, there will always be empirically superior options in multiplayer games. Such was the case with pulse rifles, indisputably the dominant weapon archetype throughout this Banner. With Banner math in place, though, otherwise stable weapon balance gets put through the wringer. And especially after the most recent update, which promotes sharp power disparity between higher Light levels, there’s good reason to chase 310 Light. It makes the event feel exclusive and makes you feel powerful, even if it clearly isn’t and you clearly aren’t. This is one of Iron Banner’s standout features, as well as one of its better ones. “Power still matters,” as Community Manager ‘Deej’ put it in a recent post, so your Light level alone may be enough to win you some confrontations. Like Trials of Osiris, Iron Banner ditches the Crucible’s regular level normalization. Yet, true to Destiny’s history, while there were some significant improvements this Banner, there was far more backpedaling. And that’s if you decided to return, let alone stick around. Lord Saladin’s grand tournament has gone from something to win to something to finish, to get out of the way and move on from. With unique weapons and visually striking armor on the line, why not play a few (dozen) games of Control? Besides, it’s always a chance to flaunt your highest Light level, meaning even die-hard raiders can find glory.īut with the most recent Iron Banner, everyone came up empty. It all comes down to participation, and in the past most players-both types of players-have had no problem participating. It’s certainly something to be won, but won by everyone. It’s a tournament, but one so open that its bracket system and ostensible competitiveness become invisible. Iron Banner, or as it is correctly known, Iron Banana, is an oddity. With that said, both camps have usually agreed on one thing: the Iron Banner is worth playing. But for many players, other Guardians are last on their list of targets, so they rightly resent rewards being locked behind PvP activities with no PvE equivalent available. Bungie can push all the Crucible bounties and rewards they want as far as I’m concerned. For players like me, who ogle stability perks and high-Intellect armor for their usefulness in Crucible, that’s never a problem. To the dismay of many players, Destiny has always had a penchant for PvP, for its beloved Crucible.

#Iron banner hunter armor taken king free#