This was Destiny’s worst Iron Banner yet

To the dismay of many players, Destiny has always had a penchant for PvP, for its beloved Crucible. For players like me, who ogle stability perks and high-Intellect armor for their usefulness in Crucible, that’s never a problem. Bungie can push all the Crucible bounties and rewards they want as far as I’m concerned. But for many players, other Guardians are last on their list of targets, so they rightly resent rewards being locked behind PvP activities with no PvE equivalent available. With that said, both camps have usually agreed on one thing: the Iron Banner is worth playing.

Iron Banner, or as it is correctly known, Iron Banana, is an oddity. It’s a tournament, but one so open that its bracket system and ostensible competitiveness become invisible. It’s certainly something to be won, but won by everyone. It all comes down to participation, and in the past most players—both types of players—have had no problem participating. With unique weapons and visually striking armor on the line, why not play a few (dozen) games of Control? Besides, it’s always a chance to flaunt your highest Light level, meaning even die-hard raiders can find glory.

But with the most recent Iron Banner, everyone came up empty. Lord Saladin’s grand tournament has gone from something to win to something to finish, to get out of the way and move on from. And that’s if you decided to return, let alone stick around. Yet, true to Destiny’s history, while there were some significant improvements this Banner, there was far more backpedaling.

Weapon Balancing

Like Trials of Osiris, Iron Banner ditches the Crucible’s regular level normalization. “Power still matters,” as Community Manager ‘Deej’ put it in a recent post, so your Light level alone may be enough to win you some confrontations. This is one of Iron Banner’s standout features, as well as one of its better ones. It makes the event feel exclusive and makes you feel powerful, even if it clearly isn’t and you clearly aren’t. And especially after the most recent update, which promotes sharp power disparity between higher Light levels, there’s good reason to chase 310 Light.

With Banner math in place, though, otherwise stable weapon balance gets put through the wringer. Sometimes it comes out distorted. Such was the case with pulse rifles, indisputably the dominant weapon archetype throughout this Banner. Now, there will always be empirically superior options in multiplayer games. But there’s never supposed to be just one. Bungie seems to know this: with the release of Destiny’s 2.0 weapon tuning, the studio specifically stated, “Pulse Rifles should feel strong in PvP, but [not] become the only competitive option.” Yet with the advent of Banner, that went out the window.

Emphasizing individual power is no reason to abandon weapon balance. Iron Banner is not a free pass; it’s not a rug for imbalanced weapons to be swept under. It needs play testing and weapon balance as much as every other Crucible mode and every other shooter. Perhaps even more so given its higher stakes. Banner should feel different, but not ridiculous.

And as though the overwhelming presence of pulse rifles wasn’t enough, a single weapon seized the throne this Banner: Red Death. An exotic pulse rifle, Red Death has an interesting history. Before weapon tuning 2.0, it was while I’ll call a tier three pulse rifle, one with the highest possible impact and lowest rate of fire (RoF). With the update’s raft of changes, it became a tier two model with medium scores for both impact and RoF, leaving The Messenger and Spare Change.25 as the dominant tier threes.

Weapon tuning 2.0 clearly outlined how pulse rifles should, and were intended to, be designed: “Bursts-to-kill (all precision hits) is 2 or 3, depending on victim’s armor stat.” In other words, given the impact and RoF scores between them, tier three pulse rifles like The Messenger would kill in two precision bursts while tier twos like Red Death would require a third pull of the trigger. That’s just basic math; you can’t put a higher rate of fire on one weapon while still allowing it to kill in the fewest possible shots. It would eclipse the meta otherwise. And that’s exactly what Red Death does.

Because it has two impact modifiers (the “high-caliber rounds” perk and “aggressive ballistics” barrel), Red Death breaks the mold. It breaks the mold, the rules of pulse rifles and, in doing so, the game. I should not be able to kill in two precision bursts with Red Death—ever, against any opponent or in any game mode. Combined with its higher RoF, doing so makes for an unreasonable time-to-kill (TTK). Destiny already has a dangerously low mean TTK, so outliers like Red Death are potential back-breakers. More pertinently, they are guaranteed to overrun and ruin competitive modes like Iron Banner. We saw it with Thorn, now we’re seeing it with Red Death. And since they share damage calculation, you can bet Trials of Osiris will see just as many Red Deaths. This Iron Banner was more than enough to prove its dominance.

Match Rewards

Among the event’s raft of changes, Iron Banner’s increased end-of-match drop rates were the most anticipated feature. “Drop rates have been increased and are intended to be the primary source of rewards from Iron Banner,” Bungie wrote in an update, adding that Saladin’s inventory would still be available as a backup plan. It sure is fortunate Saladin decided to bring some spares along, because that in-game drop increase didn’t pan out in the slightest.

Image via DestinyDB

Speaking from personal experience, reaching max rank in Iron Banner (with no alt boosts active, and in the first four days) will net you a single unique drop on a good week. In my case, it was a stylish cloak for my Hunter obtained at rank two. Judging from the wealth of threads rising the Bungie forums, the actual average is closer to .75, meaning you aren’t guaranteed an item. Interestingly, this is just as low, if not lower, than the original Iron Banner’s drop rates. Said differently, absolutely nothing has changed. At the very least, in-game rewards are nowhere near consistent enough to be considered the Banner’s primary source of loot. Evidently, Bungie buffs loot rates like they nerf shotguns.

To make matters worse, Bungie has still yet to implement meritocratic Crucible rewards. You should not have to place in your team’s top three to receive legendary or exotic loot, but doing so should increase your chance of getting lucky. More broadly, the winning team should receive better loot than the losing team. There are no strings attached here; it’s all additive. The Crucible doesn’t have to punish the average to reward the skilled. For Iron Banner, a mode hell-bent on Guardians “testing” themselves, a meritocracy is a no-brainer. And again, because Bungie made the same promises for Trials of Osiris, we can expect the same unsatisfactory loot from Crucible’s alleged pinnacle.

Matchmaking

The addition of bounties and quests which require wins in the Crucible has brought about a nasty trend: quitting. Because players often have to win to get credit for anything, they’re leaving the very second games look bad for their team. I examined this topic at length in a separate piece, so I’ll give you the short version: the result is a vicious cycle of undermanned teams and unfair matchmaking.

This is especially bad coming from Iron Banner because it already has a system in place to discourage quitting: Medallions of Iron. Stick out a tough game and you’ll receive a Medallion, which, upon winning, is redeemed for experience rivaling the value of an actual win. Because you can hold up to five, these Medallions have been fairly successful in not only rewarding endurance but punishing quitters. That was before Iron Banner’s latest face-lift though, which added some win requisites of its own.

That Iron Banner’s new bounties would cause it problems is more than a little ironic. By and large, the new bounties are great; they’re simpler, less demanding and open to all weapon types. The division of daily and weekly bounties also helps keep matches interesting. But the single weekly bounty requiring seven Iron Banner wins has been more than enough to foster the same cycle seen in regular Crucible play. On top of that, we also have players who are completely ignoring Medallions of Iron because all they need are wins. So not only did Bungie introduce to Banner the same toxicity currently infesting the entire Crucible, they did so after acknowledging the importance of discouraging quitting.

In this, Iron Banner has failed spectacularly. In my climb to rank five this Banner, I came up with a game of my own: How many losing games can I queue into consecutively? My record was three. Three completely unwinnable games that the event’s matchmaking decided to put me and other players into instead of calling the hopeless match. The highlight was the time I joined two players, who between them must have commanded the combined patience of all religions’ saints, in their fight against a 14k point deficit and a full enemy team. (Above image via YouTube)

All of Crucible needs steeper repercussions for quitting. But even that is reactionary, which isn’t good enough for game design, especially when it comes to multiplayer. Better would be to improve Destiny’s woefully inadequate mercy rule. Ending one-sided matches early would not only further discourage quitting but prevent quitters from impacting queuing players. For Iron Banner, which actively invites players of all cloths, measures such as these are considerably more important.

I speak no hyperbole when I say this is the lowest Iron Banner has ever been. That’s made all the more painful by the blue sky proposals which preceded it. The new Iron Banner sounded so good on paper, but in practice it encapsulates the problems associated with Crucible as a whole: poor rewards, imbalanced weapons and a player base caught in a downward spiral. Before Lord Saladin tells us to test ourselves again, I suggest he test his systems first.