Bungie has a lot of work to do to regain the support of its core community and the work is already underway. On January 30th, Destiny 2 will see the start of its second Iron Banner season. This week-long event will pit Guardians against each other in a specialized Crucible event in the quest for more loot. So the two big questions are: will it be worthwhile, and what else is being improved?
Iron Banner Season 2
Iron Banner Season 2 will introduce a new set of armor ornaments designed to turn your Iron Banner armor into the designs shown above. In order to accomplish collecting a complete set, Bungie has left the items from season 1 in the loot pool. This means that if you’re missing pieces, you’ll still be able to get those. You also won’t run up against any kind of artificial limits in regards to how many tokens or engrams you can earn during the week.
Three new weapons, a ghost, ship, and sparrow are also available. Lord Saladin will sell these items directly, so you’re not purely relying on RNGesus to grace you with the loot you want.
Masterwork Armor
If you’re not interested in Iron Banner, the newly introduced Masterwork Armor may keep you entertained. Following in the footsteps of Masterwork Weapons, this armor features extra perks and provides the ability to re-roll certain stats. Any legendary engram has a chance to produce a Masterwork Armor item and each piece of gear features a 3% damage resistance perk while in your Super. This stacks up to 15% if you are wearing five items.
Perhaps more interesting is the ability to re-roll Masterwork Armor items to change the intrinsic perk of Heavy, Restorative, or Light. These correspond to the kind of build you are going after and you can learn about these perks in our guide.
Raid Rewards Revamp
Finally, the Leviathan Raid and the Raid Lair from the Curse of Osiris DLC may be getting some fresh life breathed into them. Their rewards have been nothing short of mediocre and Bungie is attempting to remedy this. Raid items will now get raid specific perks, both on new and existing drops. These will be modifiable, allowing you to choose the desired setup for each raid run. I applaud Bungie for applying this new feature to existing items, thus not forcing me to go kick Ghaul’s butt again.
Some of these mods are fairly powerful and they are interchangeable. They are not single use, like so many other items in Destiny 2, and can be swapped out at will. Bungie is also increasing the overall drop rate, providing players, who choose to attempt the prestige mode raid, the opportunity to get double drops.
An entirely new ghost shell is also being added in the form of the Contender’s Shell. This exotic shell has a small chance of dropping from the final encounter of either raid and Bungie assures us that even players with the worst of luck will eventually get one. Its perks are naturally beneficial to the raid and should provide another reason to attempt the raids.
For a full list of these and more changes coming, check out This Week At Bungie and let us know if this will get you back into Destiny 2.
