Lord Saladin and his Iron Banner return to Destiny 2‘s Tower next week, for the first time since Shadowkeep brought us back to our extremely haunted, bug-infested moon. As always, Iron Banner’s PvP activity will be a more intense version of the Crucible’s “Control” mode, with the main difference being that power levels are not equalized between players, and therefore blueberries are the delicacy of the day. This time though, Bungie has made some changes to how Iron Banner rewards are dolled out, which it outlined in today’s This Week at Bungie post.
The big difference this time around is that players won’t be able to exchange Iron Banner tokens for Iron Banner engrams until after they’ve completed a new Iron Banner pursuit, which is Destiny 2 speak for “quest chain.” Bungie doesn’t go into detail about what the pursuit requires for completion, but it does say that “most of the objectives within the pursuit track progress at any point during Season of the Undying, even if you have not yet acquired the pursuit.” This means that as long as you pick up the pursuit from Saladin at some point during this season, you’ll still get credit for activities you completed before the pursuit was in your inventory.
Players will receive Iron Banner weapons and pieces of the new “Iron Will” armor set as they complete each step in the pursuit. Once the pursuit is completed, Lord Saladin will once again accept tokens in exchange for engrams, but during that time they’ll also receive items at the end of each match, and from completing Iron Banner bounties, as per usual.
And speaking of Iron Banner bounties, Bungie has adjusted them to grant Pinnacle rewards, rather than Powerful rewards, up to a power cap of 960. There are seven Pinnacle Iron Banner bounties in total, but only four will be available each time Saladin slumps it in the tower, so die-hards will have to participate in multiple Iron Banner events to collect the full set.
Bungie gives no explanation for why it has decided to make the exchange of Iron Banner tokens for engrams contingent on completing this pursuit. In past seasons, any random jerk off the street (read: me) could roll up to Saladin on day one and exchange some tokens for some engrams. He didn’t seem to mind all that much! Dude always seems real happy to talk about honor and power or whatever to anybody that’s willing to listen, tokens or no.
I’m also not sure what the lore reason is for Saladin’s periodic returns to the Tower. What’s he supposed to be doing when he’s not here? He out running strikes? And if he’s one of the original Iron Lords from the Dark Age, shouldn’t he be old enough to remember some important junk about the Collapse? Everybody is always talking about how the Collapse was so long ago and how nobody remembers anything, but Saladin was runnin’ around doing hero stuff like, right afterwards, so he probably heard some shit from the humans that were still alive back then. Just seems like he should probably have some answers that he ain’t given yet. Dubious.
