With my general disappointment I have over Black Armory and the direction the game seems to be going now… with focusing only on the end game and not actually giving us anything new that we can do the moment a content update drops. It got me feeling notalgic about Destiny 1 and some of the things I miss that have never quite made it over to Destiny 2. So I am going to take this morning as an opportunity to rifle through my vault and pull out the things I would love to see over here. This is mostly just me posting a bunch of pictures of weapons and talking about them, so if that is not your thing then today’s post is likely highly skippable.
Legendary Weapons
Destiny was largely a game about collecting the exotics, but there were a handful of legendary weapons that stood out and that I coveted. I figured a handful of these definitely needed to be talked about. There were a lot of them that I liked, but these were the weapons that I absolutely loved.
We are going to start things off with the weapon that I bring up so many times… my perfect roll Haakon’s Hatchet, or at least what I considered to be a perfect roll. It came from Year 2 Iron Banner and still has one of the overall best looking Iron Banner weapon visual aesthetics. It had Range Finder, Perfect Balance and Counterbalance so was insanely stable and while relatively short range… it could melt targets especially in the Crucible or Iron Banner. This also doubled as probably one of my favorite PVE weapons for just dealing a bunch of reliable damage to targets.
The Haakon’s Hatchet was eventually replaced with the Genesis Chain which dropped on my first time through Wrath of the Machine when I was super carried hard by my friends in Tequila Mockingbird. I admit a lot of why I used this weapon was because it looked cool and it had an interesting perk called Focused Firefly… which was essentially a much bigger version of the normal firefly that caused targets to explode when you to a precision kill. It also had this super satisfying noise that it made when you triggered one of these explosions… which I think is the real reason why I kept using it. It sounded sorta like the ping of kicking brass out of a Mosin Nagant in all of the WW2 era FPS titles with a bunch of reverb at the end.
I generally hated the look of all of the Year 3 Iron Banner weapons… there is just something about having a bunch of bits crudely cobbled together that didn’t do it for me. This is weird because in general the Fallen weapon aesthetic is very similar… but somehow works with all of its spiky nonsense. The main reason why I loved this weapon was its absolutely crazy high impact, and the fact that enhanced battery took the available shots up to 6… and with performance bonus it had a chance of refunding some ammo. This could just straight up melt any target in front of you, and was a pretty good option to help burn elites.
My heavy weapon of choice has usually always been a machine gun because it always feels like you have a lot more versatility due to the larger magazine size… or in the case of most of them drum size. Once again this gets a strike against it for the horrible asethestic of year 3 Iron Banner weapons, but it has a lot going for it when it comes to stats with Extended Mag, Hand-Laid Stock and Counterblance giving me a fairly high impact and very stable machine gun. Not much else to say about it… it was very much a utilitarian burn option that wasn’t flashy but got the job done.
Exotic Weapons
While we have ended up with a large number of carry over from Destiny 1 in the Exotics department, there are still a handful that I really enjoyed using that it would be nice to see reborn in one form or another.
I have to give an initial shout out to Hawkmoon, which was the very first Exotic that I ever got to drop. Now rumor has it that we are getting this back at some point in the upcoming seasons… but for the time being an equivalent does not exist in game. It was a high damage high capacity hand canon made interesting by the fact that two of the bullets would deal extra damage. Ultimately I replaced this in my line up with the Eyasluna which was essentially the legendary version of Hawkmoon allowing me more leverage in where I chose to use my exotic slot. It still bears mentioning however for introducing me to how cool exotics could be.
Another weapon that was also near and dear to my heart that absolutely no one else liked playing with… was the Fabian Strategy or the Titan exclusive exotic. I have always been a very run and gun player and as such was regularly closing the gap on a pack of mobs, which triggered crowd control and the front lines perk that increased weapon stability and rate of fire. The fact that a portion of the ammo was reloaded into the magazine on kills meant I could storm the castle and maintain a killing screen while taking out minions. This all fits my general play style and made me love this weapon far more than I should have given how many other people kept telling me it was garbage. Proof again that weapon choice is absolutely a personal preference thing.
Red Death was my go to for whenever I needed to sustain my life in a situation where I knew I would be taking a significant amount of damage. This made it the ideal weapon for those affixes that would cause your shields not to regenerate normally, or anything where there was a aura effect that would be slowly damaging you over time. Sure we got Crimson which is effectively a Hand Canon version of this weapon, but it feels lousy to play with in my opinion and as such doesn’t really count for me. I would love to see the original Red Death back. Given the storied past of this weapon it feels like the perfect option for a lengthy chain to unlock it.
Now for the weapon that inspired this post… Thunderlord is awesome and does a great job of melting a bunch of minions because of its arc damage proc… but the best version of that was on the Zhalo Supercell. Not only was it a really stable auto rifle, but the chain lightning proc made it perfect for clearing waves of mobs. It also held a special place as one of the few elemental primaries that survived the year one cull, which made it amazing for arc burn weeks. I would love to see a version of this gun back with a similar proc, especially given how many horde mode encounters we are getting in the game now.
While I never got to experience the grandeur of year one Gjallarhorn because I stopped playing shortly after launch… I fell in love with this weapon during Year 3 and it is impossible to make a nostalgic post without mentioning it. There was just nothing cooler than watching an entire pack of mobs melt to wolfpack rounds. During much of Year 3 this was pretty much the dedicated exotic that I used for everything because even if it was not solar burn week… it still was the best option for killing all of the things at once. Sure one might say that made it too powerful, but it was insanely fun to play with so it deserves on this list.
Another weapon that I would love to have back that we will probably never get back… is Invective or the shotgun that regenerates ammunition over time. Sure this and the Icebreaker the sniper equivalent were a little broken… but I loved this weapon so much in The Crucible because I didn’t have to care about the meta of trying to camp the special ammo. It looks amazing as well which as we all know goes a lot way to making a weapon feel good to use. Party Crasher+1 was the only shotgun I used regularly other than this one, but for most of my iron banner nonsense it was this in the special, Haakon’s in the primary and some machine gun in the heavy slot.
Sure we got a version of this with the Curse of Osiris DLC called Machina Dei 4 but it is nowhere near as good as this classic exotic version. It also looks nowhere near as cool. I would love to see a version of the original return, because again… this was an epic quest in the original Destiny and would give ample opportunity to make it a seasonal quest to recover the weapon. Everyone loved the Stranger’s Rifle and this was just an updated version of that, so would love to see it back.
These next two are largely situational, but I felt like they were unique enough that I wanted to include them as well. Touch of Malice was a must have raid weapon for the Taken King expansion, given that there were many burn phases where you were given an invulnerability effect allowing you to effectively pour rounds into the target without reloading with this weapon. It’s special effect allowed you to drain your own life and convert it into a bullet to keep firing after you have essentially emptied your magazine. This mean’t that it was super useful in a few clutch situations, but also was a great way to kill yourself if you were not paying much attention. In either case it was fun for the entire family.
Lastly we have Bad Juju that had two situations where it worked amazingly well. String of Curses did two things… firstly kills caused your ammo to reload and give you a damage buff. Secondly this effect when procced caused you to gain additional super energy, allowing you to charge your super significantly faster if you could be put in a situation where you had to kill waves of mobs. This made this the go to weapon in situations where you needed to have your super up regularly, which came in super handy in Prison of Elders and similar activities where you were both fighting a bunch of stuff and also getting additional credit for using your super. Other than that I was not a huge fan of the weapon, but I liked it because it filled a specific niche in my armory.
What were some of the weapons that you miss from Destiny 1? I largely excluded the elemental swords because I would have had to have included all three of them… because they were all great in their own way. Drop me a line in the comments below about your favorite Destiny 1 weapon that we have not seen yet in Destiny 2.