The guardians have spoken I suppose and told us that they don’t care about cool weapons nor do they care about the best looking gear… and instead they care about… honestly I am not sure what? Back in Destiny 1 folks went dead orbit because they had the coolest looking emblems, including one with a skull and crossed axes. Additionally the logo for dead orbit itself is a weird simplified skull. I guess this makes them the edgelord faction in spite of actually having a faction called Future War Cult. The problem with FWC however is that their gear generally looks like a bowl of fruity pebbles, but at least in my case it has sort of begrudgingly grown on me over time. I too was one of the Dead Orbit legion during Destiny 1 for a very long time, largely because I thought they had the coolest weapons… Year 2 Hung Jury was fucking amazing. However in Year 3… FWC pulled ahead of them and had a ton of really awesome to use weapons. Mix this with the fact that I had to swap to them to get my No Time to Explain weapon quest wrapped up, and I just sorta got used to looking like a Nascar driver. Why I stayed however is because Lakshmi-2 is hands down the coolest faction leader in the tower. Go Team Exo!
To be fair… I pledged a different faction on each character so I would have access to whatever weapon happened to win. I think that was the part of this whole equation that people forgot about… we were ultimately competing for a weapon. Thanks to Dead Orbit winning we got a weird weapon that does not stack up well against other offerings in the form of the Haunted Earth. This weapon is effectively in the same fire rate group as the Song of Justice VI that I talked about on Monday, so it is an extremely slow firing and as a result heavy hitting scout rifle aka 150 rounds per minute and 67 impact. It has considerably shorter range than the Song of Justice…. with 70 verses the Song’s 89. Where this gun gets a little odd is in the alignment of its perks. Firstly you have a set of sight options that are largely going to be personal preference… I opted to go with the default IS 5 Circle, but you can also get a longer zoom red dot scope. From there you have the choice of Tactical Mag or High Caliber rounds. Generally speaking I would want the ability to stagger and go with High Caliber, but the scout already has what feels like a small magazine and dropping from 13 to 12 just feels lousy but potentially worth it. The last perk is the real head scratcher in the form of Field Prep… which increases the ammo reserves of a weapon and causes it to reload significantly faster while crouched. If you can get used to using this… it is a fairly nice perk especially given how slow the reload of the weapon feels normally.
The curse of Haunted Earth however is that it is functionally a slightly slower and harder hitting version of the already existing Call to Serve scout rifle, and when you compare the two it just ends up being the universally worse option. Call to Serve is slightly faster firing in the 180 rounds per minute space, and as a result sacrifices a barely noticeable 5 impact to land at 62. It does however sacrifice a lot of range taking it from the 70 of Haunted Earth down to 47. It however picks up a ton of stability and handling at 46 and 60 respectively as well almost 30 more points of aim assistance. All of this however is just icing because the reason why you choose Call to Serve over Haunted Earth are the perks. Firstly you have a choice of two options to bump up the Magazine size, however in truth there is only one option here… so you want to take Appended Mag for 17 rounds which does nothing to slow down your reload speed unlike Extended Mag that only gives you one more bullet. The best perk however is Triple tap which causes you to gain a 4th phantom round every time you land 3 precision shots in a row. I talked about this perk a little bit in the review of the Dire Promise hand cannon. Effectively if you can land streaks of precision damage you can fire 22 shots before needing to reload, which is great in situations where you are burning something down that is effectively a static target like bosses often are. Basically there are no reasons why I would ever choose to use Haunted Earth over Call to Serve or even Song of Justice VI. So gratz Dead Orbit… you won and earned all of us another piece of vault clutter. If you like the gun however then by all means use it… but I have a feeling you will be swapping it out the moment you get something better.
