Seasonal Ding

First off we are going to start off the post with a little bit of “good guy Bungie”. There is a patch coming up that changes the way pinnacle drops work. Currently Pinnacle rewards give you a single point of light, making it exceedingly hard to change the calculation and increase your light past 950. In truth I never quite expected to be needing pinnacles to move me forward but I find myself in the same position everyone else is. After Thursday there is a change coming in that bumps this up to a guaranteed two light levels per pinnacle reward.

Now this week is the Iron Banner and with it comes a bunch of bounties that all reward pinnacle gear. There has been a bunch of talk on the internet about saving up your bounties to turn in AFTER Thursday’s patch, but just in case someone missed this when you log into the game you get the big damned notice across your screen that you see in the first screenshot. I greatly appreciate them going above and beyond to make sure no one was unaware that a patch was coming and that they should not spend any of those precious precious pinnacle loot drops until then.

I’ve now reached the end of the seasonal journey track and still have 34 days left to go until the end of the season. Like I said yesterday I was honestly not sure if I would make it, but I did with plenty of time to spare. Now I am continuing to gain ranks but to the best of my knowledge there is nothing gained from them. It appears that post 100 you gain a Nostalgic Engram every 500,000 experience points, and since each rank is 100,000 xp that is every 5 levels. I feel like that is a perfectly reasonable reward for time spent grinding thanks to all of the xp boosts that come with the seasonal ranks. Now doing this without the pass… probably is a massive pain in the butt.

The interesting thing about the process is that as you move upwards you start getting these perks that say you have a chance of getting one of the weapons from the seasonal journey in various activities. I’ve run a bunch of activities after getting these “scavenger” perks but never actually saw one of the weapons drop. Then last night I managed to get a second Machine Gun and a second Auto Rifle within two matches of hitting Rank 100. I am wondering if the chance of getting these goes up exponentially after hitting 100, or if Iron Banner is somehow juiced to give higher drop rates?

Whatever the case I have shiny new versions of the two weapons. I am not at all certain if they are better than the original rolls that I got, but both have Range Finder which may or may not be useful. I was not a huge fan of either when I first got my hands on them, but I figure I will give them some more testing to determine if they are useful. I might break out the original rolls just to see how they feel as well. The original HMG had Hip Fire and Pulse Monitor, so I definitely think the new version with Quick Draw and Range Finder was an upgrade. The Auto Rifle however I am not sure about with the original having Outlaw/Dynamic Sway Reduction and the new version with Range Finder and Mulligan. Given the spray and pray nature of an Auto Rifle… Mulligan might be a pretty solid perk.

The real win for the night however is that I managed to finish the “Get Guardian Kills with Void, Hand Cannons or Void Hand Cannons” step of the Thorn quest. Slowly bit by bit I whittled away at this for what felt like ages, but thanks to the Iron Banner giving extra credit it seems… I managed to go from just under 50% to finished in a single night. I still need to run the mission for both this and the Lumina so I can get both weapons. Side note I also finished 3 of the 4 bounties available for the Iron Banner. The one that increases thanks to super kills is always the one that lags behind.

Tonight however I am planning on running around in WoW Retail and doing the 15th anniversary quests lest I forget to do them before they disappear. So I logged in this morning to park at the Caverns of Time where they I believe all start. I got the letter in the mail and have the quest step to talk to Chromie, so I will get all that taken care of tonight.