Yesterday I talked about the initial quest of delivering cookies to Zavala to cheer him up, but the rabbit hole goes way deeper than that. When you turn that quest in you pick up a second one from Eva Levante to get a secret blueprint from Amanda Holiday for a new sort of sparrow. I also covered all of the recipes yesterday but the quest asks you to deliver Vanilla Blades to Shaxx, Chocolate Ship Cookies to Amanda Holiday and Eliksni Birdseed to Hawthorne as well as bake a grand total of 12 gifts. Now I am not sure if these need to be unique gifts or if you just need to bake twelve in total. Regardless I set about making one of everything yesterday and delivering them, and currently the only gift that has not been delivered is the one for Xur who of course will not be available until Friday.
Your reward for baking one of every possible recipe is that you can “Masterwork” Eva’s Holiday Oven. This essentially lowers the dawning essence cost from 15 per item to 10 per item… which is nice… but still it seems like this holiday is way more about grinding dawning essence than any of the other individual components. It does make it way easier to craft individual items once you have learned all of the patterns which show up in a drop down as I am showing off in the above screenshot. Something interesting of note… the counts seems to be tied to your account and not individual characters because as soon as I collected the quest on my Hunter this morning for the purpose of getting screenshots… I was able to Masterwork the Holiday Oven and showed that I already knew all of the patterns.
Once you have baked all of the cookies and delivered them to everyone needed in Eva’s quest you can go to Holliday and get your Dawning Cheer sparrow. It does in fact look as silly in game as it does in this screenshot and it has a bunch of seemingly unique animations that make it seem way more cumbersome to drive than various other options. Now the thing with this sled is it is not quite complete when you get it… there are three talents that you have yet to unlock and those are started by completing a few quests for Amanda Holliday.
I’ve photoshopped them all together so you can see the requirements. Essentially in order to get all of the talents you are going to need to start making a TON of gifts… 120 in total but thankfully they seem to be cumulative and not separate achievements. This is one of those situations where I am not sure if this is also account based, but I plan on getting the hunter through the first part and getting her sparrow tonight as a test to see if you can effectively bake them on all of your characters and count towards one total. Essentially you are going to need to at a minimum give another round of Gifts to Ikora, Sloane, Devrim, Asher, Banshee and Failsafe… and then a bunch more gifts on top of that to whoever you want until you reach the magic 120 in total.
Now the positive is each time you turn in a gift you get a chance at getting interesting gear… as I picked up a new roll of the Avalanche HMG that I talked about yesterday by turning in a package to Sloan last night. All in all I like this version of the Dawning quite a bit, but I miss the sparrow races greatly. They really need to bring that concept back to Destiny 2. I am however enjoying doing stuff… and then getting random bonuses from doing said stuff… which in truth is going to keep me engaged in this event way longer than it probably should. I want the nonsense tricked out sparrow that causes glitter to spawn when you do stuff… so I guess I will be baking 120 gifts? So far Crucible and Gambit seem to be the best use of my time for the purpose of farming Dawning Essence… and I have objectives that I need from both of those so I might be farming those tonight.
your post yesterday got me back into Destiny. I still haven’t bought the expansion and I’m not super sure I am going to. 40$ is 40$ is 40$ right now and I just spent 1200 on a new computer. On another note, I am starting to slowly get the hang of Monster Hunter so we should definitely do a hunt soon. I’m slowly figuring everything out and what not.