Yesterday was the beginning of the very first Iron Banner of the Shadowkeep expansion and more specifically the Season of the Undying. Now I have a weird relationship with Iron Banner as a whole, because I have never really been much of a Crucible Rat… but I generally look forward to participating in the Banner each time it rolls around. It might be something about Lord Saladin that I like in particular or the concept of the Iron Lords… or it could just be that there are a lot of interesting weapons associated with it that you can earn. Whatever the case it is an event that I tend to look forward to and last night was no exception as I was anxious to get home and started.

This time around Iron Banner was a Control map, which probably adds to my enjoyment as that is generally my favorite game type. Ultimately you complete matches of Iron Banner and collect tokens that you then turn in for packages and ultimately gear drops. There are bounties you can complete this time around that reward Pinnacle gear and they all seem to be themed off of the original Iron Lords. This also means that it seems like there is a limited quantity of them that you might be able to complete. Before you can get started turning anything in however you have to complete a quest chain called Scour the Rust. The First step requires you to:

• Capture 10 Iron Banner Zones
• Kill 30 Enemy Guardians
• Get 3 Kills With Your Super

Your reward for the first step is the Claws of the Wolf and a piece of Iron Banner armor… I believe I got the arms first. I am not sure if this weapon is a curated roll, or if I just got lucky and wound up with one that was super easy to complete the next step with. My roll in particular included Full Auto, Snapshot Sights and Appended Mag. When you complete one step you get the next part which involves the following:

• Complete 6 Iron Banner Matches
• Capture 20 Iron Banner Zones
• Kill 25 Guardians With a Pulse Rifle

Once again you get a new weapon to play with and a new piece of armor, this time the Fusion Rifle the Wizened Rebuke. I believe the armor piece was the legs. I got a perfectly cromulent roll, but then again I have no clue what a good roll on a fusion actually looks like given that I don’t run one often. I should note that the quest chain objectives appear to be cumulative during the course of this particular Iron Banner period. Quickly you wind up in a situation where all you need to finish the next step is to get the weapon kills. Everyone seemed to be on this step of the quest which ended up with some interesting gameplay. To move the chain forward you need the following:

• Defeat 100 Guardians
• Capture 30 Iron Banner Zones
• Defeat 20 Guardians with Fusion Rifles

Your reward for this step is another Iron Banner weapon and another piece of armor… I believe it was the Helm this time around. I should note that I am not 100% certain on the order I got any of the pieces of armor, I just know that each time I got a weapon I got one. Again I have no clue if this is a curated roll but I got a pretty solid Hero’s Burden including Kill Clip, Zen Moment and Appended Mag. I was able to melt face in the Crucible completing yet another series of objectives based on the weapon you just got. To move the chain forward again you need the following:

• Eliminate 15 Guardians With Your Super
• Eliminate 15 Guardians With Your SMG
• Capture 40 Iron Banner Zones

Now is where things get really weird. First off I got a reasonable roll on the Grenade Launcher including Rampage, Snapshot Sights, and Thermoplastic Grenades. The challenge of course in any Crucible match is getting Heavy Ammo. I noticed at first that for some reason I was showing 2 launcher kills without having picked up any purple bricks. When I did get launcher kills… it didn’t seem to move the quest chain forward. This lead me to do some googling and find out that apparently this step in the quest chain is bugged…. and that SMG kills will progress the Grenade Launcher step. In theory… this makes the quest way easier and you should probably go ahead and push through to this point just in case Bungie patches it. You are going to need the following:

• Capture 50 Iron Banner Zones
• Complete 15 Iron Banner Matches
• Kill 10 Guardians With Grenade Launchers (if still bugged SMG instead)

After completing this step you get your final piece of armor which for me was the chestpiece. However the REAL prize of hitting this step is being able to turn in all of the medallions that you collected along the way. If you got the various bounties associated with the Iron Banner you should in theory also have several of those to turn in as well. It was a fun grind and I am hoping to get back in tonight and run a bunch more matches. Ultimately for my trouble I got a full suit of the brand new Iron Banner gear and four really good weapons. This makes me want to run through this on my Hunter as well.

In the grand scheme of things I am seemingly way better at the crucible than I give myself credit for. It could be that we still have an influx of brand new players thanks to the PC launch, but in my best match for the night I wound up with a 3.5 Efficiency score, which I realize is not exactly the same as a KDR but I will take it regardless. The boost in valor gained took me up to Mythic II for the season which also had its own share of crucible rewards associated with it.

Another thing that you should absolutely not sleep on is the fact that Iron Banner seems to be worth a nonsense amount of XP for your seasonal grind. I entered the night part of the way through 33 and closed the night sitting at 40. So that is a little over seven levels from what felt like casually playing Iron Banner and knocking out quest steps. It probably was a lot more matches than I realized… in fact looking back at Destiny Tracker it was apparently 17 total matches throughout the course of the night. Ultimately if you enjoy Crucible at all I suggest you at least participate to get some levels. If you don’t like Crucible… the rewards are good enough for you to maybe stomach it regardless.

Closing thoughts… the armor looks really sweet. Additionally it seems to be a good source of some light levels as I managed to get 8 during the course of the evening. I am a big fan!

Morning folks. I am still playing an excessive amount of Destiny 2, but I am not sure if I have any new thoughts to add to it. Right now I want to be talking about how I wish Blizzard would pull their heads out and do the right thing so we could be friends again, however I get the distinct feeling you are sick to hell of talking about it. I know this because anytime I mention or forward it, I slowly bleed a few more followers in the process. I care less about that than it sounds, because really… I have no clue why the majority of you follow me at all at this point. You are either in it for me and my nonsense or you are probably one foot out the door already. Instead of writing something on my own I am going to share a few things with you. I have a fondness for YouTube think pieces. A lot of the conversation that happens back and forth between myself and the AggroChat crew is discussion of the pieces that make up gaming. Sometimes we record an episode that goes down these avenues, but more often than not that discussion just dissipates into the ether because it was for our own benefit and not necessarily something we wanted to share with the world. That is not to say that there are not an awful lot of great think pieces out there so this morning I am going to drop a few that I find cogent.

First off let me state that I have some issues with the presentation of this video. It bugs me to no end that he keeps saying the phrase “the lady that I live with”, but what he is saying is nonetheless interesting and a conversation that I have had a few times with Tam especially. Gaming has a vocabulary that we are just arguably better at speaking and comprehending now than we were at the dawning age of MMORPGs for example. There are extreme hurdles for someone to get up to that level of fluency and the games we play really don’t do any favors in that department. I dislike tutorialization as much as the next person, but this is still a worthy watch as it talks about the struggles of someone with minimal exposure to these “rules”.

Folding Ideas is a great think piece channel, and one of the better ones is once again relevant with all of the discussion of Fornite over the last few days. The video presents the treatise that modern games set out to create just a tiny bit of discomfort and shame so that we will spend more money in order to remove that. That they set us up for a world where we are constantly dissatisfied with the state of affairs and the only way out is to spend more money. I think this is key to understanding the “seasonal mastery track” thing that is infecting games, and why skins matter.

Since I am playing an awful lot of Destiny, I have also been getting quite a lot of Destiny videos suggested to me. This one is worth a watch because honestly it feels a lot like how I feel at times about the game. I am super positive about what the future for this franchise might hold in their presently untethered from Activision state. Shadowkeep in its “smaller size” is actually quite possibly the best expansion that Bungie has come out with yet. I feel like I have so many options at any given time and they are all equally rewarding with different sets of items that I could be chasing. The game feels better than it has since the end of Destiny 1, and personally hope they abandon the notion of ever creating a Destiny 3 and just keep making this version of the game better. That is all I have to share this morning. If you have some really good think pieces, feel free to share them in the comments below.

This weekend I spent most of my time in Destiny 2, and as a result I started working furiously on trying to knock out a bunch of objectives that had been clogging my inventory. During the podcast on Saturday night I spent the entirety hanging out with Thalen and working on some objectives he had surrounding the completion of escalation protocol on Mars. It is funny how much more reasonable that seems to be when you are grouped up with at least one more person. We managed to get it through I believe wave 5 before ultimately having to retreat and start over. I miss the days when you could drop down on planet as a solo and get all of the way to seven.

The highlight of the weekend however is that I finally got through the Last Word exotic weapon quest. This one features a few sections that are a colossal pain in the ass. The biggest of these is the pure Crucible section, that involves moving a gauge to 100. A guardian kill gives you 2 points and a death takes 1 point away. I apparently had a good weekend as far as crucible goes and found myself only a few kills away from completing this objective and thankfully managed to push through. The next step involved farming a bunch of things up… and then getting 25 “revenge” medals from the Crucible, which weirdly went way faster than I would have expected. Finally I had one painful mission to get through and a duel with a hive that I failed out like 20 times before finally getting through and claiming my weapon.

Another thing I spent time on this weekend was working through the Rat King’s Crew quest. I never really prioritized this one because it isn’t a weapon I would likely ever use. I really do not enjoy sidearms in Destiny. However it has clogged my quest log for ages and I spent part of yesterday getting Thalen caught up. Sadly I needed to run out and get some errands taken care of so we only got one of the two crucible matches in. I think after that we just need to run a Nightfall… of which I am really hoping that the modern Ordeal style ones will work.

I also managed to get the last piece of exotic armor for Titans this weekend, because apparently Xur’s overly expensive engram finally includes the Season of Opulence gear. I had read somewhere that this was the case so I went ahead and gambled a stack of Legendary Shards on it. There is apparently a super powerful build based around these legs that I might try at some point. Mostly I just wanted to check another space off on my list of exotics. I need to start working on the same for Hunter and Warlock as I am way behind on both of those.

All told I am up to 927 light and my Hunter is up to 919 without the best weapons swapped over. At some point I will push up the Warlock as well so I can have all three active and at reasonable light levels. Most of my running around with Thalen on Saturday night was with the Hunter, and I only swapped back to the Titan to get exotic quest steps done. In my downtime I am working on slowly knocking out other Triumphs that I never got when I transferred from PS4 to PC initially. There are a bunch of lost sectors that I have never quiet collected for example, or region chests opened. For the time being it seems like Destiny 2 is my main game, so I am settling in and finding stuff to keep me happy.