Destiny’s Child #3: Banner Time

Iron Banner has always been the awkward step-child of Destiny.

It is neither the hyper competitive Trials of Osiris nor the chaotic free-for-all of the Crucible and so sits in a rather ill defined role as a Pinnacle activity that isn’t the pinnacle of the section of the game it represents.

What it is is Crucible 2.0, Destiny’s PvP element but with exclusive gear drops and the chance to earn more Light raising Pinnacle engrams than usual. Its time limited appearances (popping up as it does once every few months or so as a weekly event) lends it perhaps more importance that it would otherwise garner and so when it does come around again it brings with it a certain sense of anticipation.

However it is perhaps the biggest hold-over from vanilla Destiny 2 that remains in the game. It is Control, a capture-the-point mode where teams gain more points for each kill the more bases they command, but with a single altered mechanic: when a team controls all bases they lock down for around a minute. The problem is not the gameplay itself but the rewards system, the reason the majority of people play at all.

Firstly there’s the way the gear is distributed. Each Iron Banner event allows you to hoover up 4 bounties related to the activity, and the completion of each gives you a fistful of tokens and a Pinnacle engram. The tokens work the same way as with other vendors, with you cashing them in to gain a random item from that NPC’s loot pool. But the engrams you receive from completion are also random, meaning that completing the exclusive armour set becomes an exercise in abject frustration. I had to amass over 400 tokens (each bounty grants 50, a match win 5 and a loss 3) across all three of my characters simply to complete a single Warlock set.

Then there’s the rewards themselves. With the imminent arrival of the transmog mechanic, I like many other players are hoarding as much armour as possible in-case Bungie forces us to actually possess the type of armour we want to base our new trans-mogs on. But the Iron Banner armour hasn’t been updated since…I want to say Curse of Osiris. Each event cycles through 3 different varieties of armour, all of which I have. There’s no incentive except to make sure I have one of each item in my Vault in case the worst case trans-mog scenario comes true.

None of this touches on the problems of the mode itself; the fact that the matchmaking is basically broken, the presence of thundering six-stacks of clan members steamrolling teams of randoms, the general lack of innovation at play or the treatment of the event as some sort of treat for players in place of actually exciting content. But you get the point.

Iron Banner is fascinating as a facet of the game that has lain untouched for years, its primary purpose these days being a record of just how far the rest of the experience has come.