Last night did not go exactly as expected, but I am pretty pleased with the results anyways. Last night was a good night, and it started from the moment I got home and got a bunch of things accomplished while waiting on the rice cooker. After a furious round of chores, my wife and I sat down to eat and then I was off to play some PS4. With my leg in its current mauled state it hurts to sit on the couch given that in order to use my laptop I need to use the recliner. This ends up putting pressure on the four wounds and while I can take it for a few minutes… it doesn’t exactly make for comfortable gaming. As a result I am largely upstairs right now, and other than being isolated from my wife it does give me access to my gaming consoles and my legit gaming desktop. The original goal for last night was going to involve running around and doing stuff with some friends in Destiny, but while waiting for that to happen I decided to start doing Iron Banner on my Warlock. I had not actually touched the Banner on either the Warlock or the Hunter during Year 3, and as a result I had the Lady Efrideet quests to complete which also reward some gear. I managed to exit the week long even with my Titan main at 393, Warlock caught up to 391 and my Hunter lagging a bit out of disuse at 389.
I’ve tried a whole slew of weapons and honestly nothing makes me nearly as happy as my Year 2 Iron Banner Auto Rifle… the Haakon’s Hatchet. So for the most part playing on my Warlock meant swapping this over via Destiny Item Manager. For those who are not using this I highly suggest installing the chrome plugin, because it greatly improves the utility of being able to swap gear while playing the game. Essentially I swapped my Auto Rifle and my Gjallarhorn over and was off to the races. There is a part of me that is sad that this Auto Rifle just simply doesn’t exist any more. I wish there was something you could do, like a weekly bounty for Lord Saladin that rewarded the year two weapons… just a random draw at the huge vat of available options. Range Finder is one of those perks on a weapon that I feel like gets overlooked a lot, but given the normal crap range on this weapon… with that perk it allows me to melt targets an entire map away it seems. Counter Balance and Perfect Balance on the same weapon always makes it feel great and I think a huge part of why I keep favoring this weapon… is that I have used it so much that I can predict exactly how it is going to behave in pretty much every situation.
Throughout the course of the evening I managed to go from Rank 0 to Rank 5 and complete all four of the bounties on my Warlock along with the three one time Lady Efrideet quests. That meant I saw an awful lot of gear as a result. Most of it was largely “more of the same” but I am picking out a few items to talk about. Firstly I am not a huge fan of Sidearms, but I am trying to learn how to use them. They play this interesting role of operating somewhere just outside of shotgun range but largely something you swap to when you empty your primary. Normally speaking I would just infuse this into a weapon I am more familiar with but for the moment I am holding onto it largely because I think the perk package looks interesting. With Hand Loaded and Range Finder… this means my side arm is going to have a massive operating range, and with Quickdraw I will be able to swap to it extremely quickly. Combine this with the already insane Stability and Rate of Fire on the weapon… and it might be useful if I can learn to use it well.
One of the strange things about Iron Banner is that your drops seem to be extremely character dependent. For example this time around the drops that were available were Class Items, Helms, Artifacts, Ghost Shells, Scout Rifles, and Fusion Rifles. On my Titan I got Fusion Rifles almost exclusively, save for a single Distant Star Scout Rifle drop. On my Warlock… the Scout Rifles were raining down upon me. I still think that more than likely I am going to be using the vendor roll which includes Full Auto… giving me a crazy high power auto rifle hybrid thing. However I did manage to get a few other interesting rolls, including the one above that I thought were worth talking about. Firstly to spec this out I would end up taking Braced Frame… which I really don’t like doing because it reduces the magazine size. For the second pick I would ultimately take High Caliber Rounds to give some stagger and a bit more impact, and lastly would probably go for Firefly… just because right now I don’t have a decent scout rifle with that on it. For the un-initiated Firefly makes it so that when you kill a with a headshot… it causes it to explode dealing damage to all other mobs around it. Firefly does a really great job at helping with wave clear and it is just fun to watch all of these things explode. All in all it was a pretty great week in the Banana, and I am hoping the next time it comes around I can maybe push my army of characters up to 400ish.