The effects of Player Level in the Iron Banner (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Monday, March 23, 2015, 13:24 (3781 days ago)

Now that another Iron Banner event is winding down, I wanted to talk about a few observations.

After the first Iron Banner event, Bungie tweaked the damage scaling so that player rank made more of a difference in terms of your ability to take and deal damage. At the time, I felt this change was good. I still think it was a good change, but I'm now starting to think that it wasn't enough of a change.

If my understanding of the Iron Banner damage system is accurate, then players within 2 levels of your current rank are effectively on even footing with you. If an enemy player is more than 2 levels above or below you, then the mismatch becomes apparent.

During this week's IB event, which I played every night of the week all the way up to Rank 5, I only encountered 1 player who was below level 30. Literally hundreds of opponents over the course of the week, and all but one of them were level 30-32. Since I myself was playing as a 31-32 character, the Iron Banner was essentially just standard crucible for me (not exactly, since the weapon balance is a tiny bit different, but pretty close).

This got me thinking: what else can be done to make the Iron Banner feel unique and special? How else can it distinguish itself from standard Crucible?

A fellow DBOer (was it Slycrel?) suggested the idea of elemental burns (similar to the ones added in the Nightfall missions). I dismissed the idea at first, but the more I think about it the more I think there might be something to this idea. What if every Iron Banner match featured a random elemental burn? Not as drastic as the PvE burns, of course, but a slight boost in elemental damage within the Crucible could be pretty cool. Having the burn change randomly from match to match could help encourage players to switch up their loadouts more often.

Another thought that did occur to me was that maybe the next IB should feature a different gametype. Perhaps Rumble, or introduce a new multi-team gametype? 3v3v3 slayer? Something that plays in to the "gladiatorial" feel of the event.

What do you all think?