I’m not very good at Player versus Player (PvP) gaming. The only time I was pretty good at it was back in the Unreal and Unreal Tournament days. These days, I avoid PvP, except Destiny won’t let you get away with that. First, three of the five exotic bounties (that give nifty exotic weapons: Thorn, Bad Juju, and Invective) require Crucible (PvP) play, with various restrictions in some cases (void kills, etc.). Second, the Iron Banner tournament is a great way to get armor that can help me max out my character level.
So while I’ve managed to muddle my way through the Crucible to get 3 Thorns, 3 Invectives, and 3 Bad Jujus, I’ve never had any interest in playing Iron Banner. First, Iron Banner rank resets each time it comes around. Second, a character needs to be rank 3 before anything good is available. Finally, each armor piece or weapon is very expensive. So while I’ve been able to get enough raid gear to get my Warlock to level 32, both my Hunter and Titan are languishing at 31. I thought the solution would be to put my Titan through the Iron Banner to get the chest armor and boots that are the only armor pieces available this time.
So I started midweek and quickly made rank 1. Then I got sick and skipped a day or two. When I returned, I made it to rank 2, but rank 3 took a while. At ranks 1 and 2, I bought the emblem and shader that boost Iron Banner reward points, so that helped, and, of course, I bought the ever-increasing buff every day from Lord Saladin. Finally on Saturday I made it to rank 4 and could buy the armor pieces and one of the guns (the other takes rank 5, but I don’t want it anyway). The problem was/is that everything is very expensive, so I’ve been grinding out glimmer so I can afford the bits that I want. And while grinding in Destiny is pretty fun, it can get tedious, so I think the Iron Banner should give glimmer as rewards to so we don’t have to grind so much!
So how did I do? Not great, especially when people were watching. When I was alone and randomly matched, I came in at the top of the leader board a couple of times (one for a win and one for a loss), but usually was in the middle. But when I was teamed with my raid buddies (well, they’re not really my buddies, but they sometimes let me tag along), I was consistently near or at the bottom of the list. One way to view it is that they are so good that they clearly outshined me, and to some extent, that is true, but the more reasonable explanation is that I did poorly. I don’t know if I got too aggressive, or what, but it was embarrassing.
Even more embarrassing was that after we lost a match yesterday, I got a network error that dumped me to orbit and out of party chat, so they probably thought I rage quit. I was unable to rejoin the party chat because of a nasty little bug in the system software: if there are 2 party chats with the same name, joining the one I wanted always put me in the other one. Damn.
The ironic ending to all of it is that I was talked into doing the Crota raid in hard mode on Friday night, so I took my Titan in for the first time (both my Warlock and Hunter have finished it a few times). We had a great time and I got a raid helmet and boots, so I didn’t really need the Iron Banner gear I worked so hard to get. Oh well…