Welcome back Guardians. I know most of you are trying to enjoy the Holiday spirit by partaking in the Crimson Days event that is currently ongoing until Tuesday morning. I would like to take this time to personally thank all of the Guardians out there who are being a part of our Lifetakers & Heartbreakers (Stack-Up.org) event happening in conjunction with Bungie’s Crimson Days. That being said, let’s see what Xûr has brought to the Tower for our benefit. As always, the following is based off of my opinions based on playing with these exotics already.
First off with the Titan, we have a set of Leg armor specifically designed for the Striker Titan. The “Peregrine Greaves” come with a perk called Peregrine Strike. These boots help to cause significantly extra damage to targets while using shoulder charge”¦”¦in the air. Basically the only catch with these boots is the shoulder charge has to be activated while airborne to get the extra damage boost. This week’s stat roll is intellect and strength combined with shotgun/machinegun ammo and Arc Double-Down perk.
Overall Opinion: This Leg armor is extremely fun to use while you are just messing around. The downside of them requires you to get into melee range of your target to activate the shoulder charge. This, in more challenging modes, can make you take unnecessary risks to get a big hit off onto the target. For the PvP side of the house, I have yet to see a guardian use these in the Crucible due to the fact there are far more well-rounded exotics to be utilized within the PvP style gameplay. For PvE though, they are nice for causing bonus damage while the airborne perk is on, but just like in PvP there are a lot more well-rounded exotic armor pieces that can be utilized by a titan to give more flexibility to your fireteam.
For the Hunter this week, we have a helmet that sure packs a bunch of heat for the Gunslinger subclass. This helmet so happens to be the “Celestial Nighthawk” with the primary perk of Big Game which allows your Golden Gun only one shot but with it now being six times as powerful and able to over penetrate your target damaging enemies behind them. This week’s roll isn’t too bad overall being balanced between intellect and discipline. In addition, the second perk helps grant faster supers with grenade or heavy weapon kills. When this helmet was sold previously, I discussed how it would be better if it had the Better Already perk, and this week it does. In the realm of PvE, I would prefer to have Better Already or Infusion for that perk. This provides more survivability by recharging shields or health after picking up an orb of light.
Overall Opinion: Super great for PvE for when you have solar burn modifier active. It is still quite powerful without it as well. I would pick this helmet up just for fun seeing how the gunslinger class doesn’t offer the same type of group support that the night stalker has. When it comes to PvP this helmet is a waste, you would want to keep your three shots to be more flexible and kill more enemies.
Next up is the Warlock. This week Xûr is selling an old year one helmet which has always been a great helmet for the PvE Voidwalker class. The reason why the “Obsidian Mind” has already been so great for the Voidwalkers is due to its primary perk “Insatiable”. Insatiable makes it so whenever you kill targets with your Nova Bomb super it reduces your cooldown for your next Nova Bomb. You can imagine if players are chaining their supers together, or if you get enough kills with one nova, another nova one will not be far behind it. The rest of the perks on the helmet are decent. The second tier allows more super energy when getting kills with special weapons or melee kills on minions of the darkness. The third tier allows bonus grenade energy on orb pick up.
Overall Opinion: When this helmet is used properly it can rain some serious hate on your enemies. I love this helmet in PvE as a Voidwalker since it helps to set up my next super in a quicker manner. I’ve used it a couple of times in PvP, and if you can gather 2-3 kills in a single nova then it can turn the tides to help give you another nova sooner. This is extremely true while in control, put on Vortex, Annihilate, and either Vortex mastery to increase duration or Bloom to cause chain like explosions where your opponent died. Just wait for a team to get a quick capture and, as long as you get your aim right, you can really mess up the other team’s plans. The only downside when comparing this helmet to another exotic Voidwalker helmet “The Ram,” you give up survivability with the extra armor. I would always advise picking up this helmet if you love playing the Voidwalker class.
Besides those armor pieces, Xûr has decided to sell an exotic gauntlet engram for 19 strange coins a piece instead of a weapon this week. Other than that, it looks like he is trying to be extremely sneaky selling a “Legacy” exotics helmet engram for 29 strange coins a piece, so be very careful if you decide to pick up engrams this week from Xûr. Verify before you buy!
As always, Xûr is selling two Sparrow drives this week which includes the Plasma Drive (Blue contrail) and Emerald Coil (Green contrail). Each will cost you 23 strange coins. If you are low on Heavy ammo, synthesis three of them will cost you one strange coin. The two other consumables you can purchase from Xûr every week are the “Three of Coins” at 5 for the cost of 7 strange coins, and the Glass Needles at 3 for the cost of 3 strange coins 3 motes of light and 1 exotic shard.
