Iron Banner has returned to Destiny 2, and this time Saladin has company — he’s brought some of his Cabal friends’ tech along with him in the new Fortress mode. That said, one thing hasn’t changed — building Iron Banner reputation is an absolute slog. Even with a full set of Iron Banner gear equipped and your weekly challenges completed, it takes a lot of games to get your rank resets in. You might be wondering, then, is there a quicker way to get Iron Banner progress? Well yes, there is — but it’s a little underhanded.
See, winning an Iron Banner match with all of the appropriate modifiers in place gives you about 330 reputation. Losing, meanwhile, grants 220. Winning a contested match typically takes around 10 minutes. But if you’re able to lose a match as quickly as possible, it only takes 3-5 minutes. That means that losses actually give you more Iron Banner progress than wins. The play, then, is to load into the Iron Banner playlist with a full six stack of players and idle or emote until you lose the round. Right now, this is the quickest way to reset your Iron Banner reputation, which will help you get the Iron Lord title as well as the neat new chainmail shader.
Is this behavior befitting of an Iron Lord? Probably not. But if Destiny 2 players are good at one thing, it’s exploiting loopholes like this. It’s unclear how widespread this behavior is right now, but it’s possible that Bungie will look at addressing it for the second and final Iron Banner of the Season of the Seraph. To do so, they’d either have to make wins more attractive or losses less so. I hope they go the former route, since Iron Banner is enough of a slog as it is. Making losses even less rewarding likely won’t make players try harder, it’ll just make the mode even less enjoyable. If wins were worth a few hundred points more, that would be a good start.
