I’m about to say some blasphemy here….Gjallarhorn was broken and an entire game’s design around it was broken because of it. After the time I’ve been able to spend in The Taken King and Year Two, I can say this with a more confident level of certainty. Destiny was broken into a homogenized cycle of the same 4 items needed to approach the high-level content. Fatebringer, Black Hammer, Gjallarhorn and boots that gave extra rocket ammo. If you had a Titan with Weapons of Light then you were the “leet” class of Bungie’s shared world shooter. While it was a 4 part build, Gjallarhorn was the crux, the lynchpin, the absolute must have that if you went online to LFG to find a group to raid with, the phrase “Must have fully upgraded Gally” was as common as “Hunter LF 3 to run VOG”. How did this come to be? It all comes down to level design and how players chose to min/max.
In the beginning when we were all forever 29, Gjallarhorn did not have a major presence in the game. Rocket Launchers were not the optimal way to take out the bosses in the Vault of Glass raid due to the ability to dole out much more damage through critical hits with sniper rifles. This was much more apparent in the final bout with Atheon where rockets would just explode on the relic’s protection wall in the damage phase and it was much safer to just snipe him down rather than jump and shoot rockets. It wasn’t until the influx of the strikes and the first DLC, The Dark Below, that the power of Gjallarhorn was seen when it was discovered that even with arc or void burn on, it would out-damage any heavy weapon of those classes even though it was always solar damage. Add in the tracking ability and wolfpack rounds and you had a weapon that was tailor-made to take out the biggest and best Destiny had to offer.
The Dark Below raid “Crota’s End” continued cementing the legacy of Gjallarhorn with the Deathsinger and final boss, the titular Son of Oryx, Crota. These two bosses, while requiring many different strategies, were both reduced to “lock on and fire” with Gjallarhorn. The Deathsinger will sing a song of your demise after a set amount of time if you do not kill the wizards protecting her room, the Shriekers keeping the shields up around her room and then finally, the Deathsinger herself. You are usually given a few minutes to take out the first two but only 60 seconds when she begins her song. This is where Gjallarhorn comes in, with its high damage and tracking perks. An able team armed with Gjallarhorns could easily kill the Deathsinger in 20 seconds flat and lose nobody to the fight. While Crota was vastly different, the strategy is burned into our collective minds now and it sounds like this “He has the sword….take him” and 5 people fire GHorn rockets to drop Crota’s shield allow the damage phase to occur.
Now, during this time, this was fine. Only one raid needed you to have it and if you didn’t then you wouldn’t be excluded because Crota would actually drop it in the raid loot (this is actually how I got mine). It really wasn’t until the second DLC, House of Wolves, where the legend of Gjallarhorn was etched in Destiny lore forever.
Instead of a raid, we were treated to a challenge mode of sorts called “The Prison of Elders” where we would go through room after room of more and more powerful enemies until we received cores to exchange for gear and to use keys found in the open world to open a chest for rare loot. The major problem with the POE was that literally the entire mode was built around using Gjallarhorn due to the lack of diversity in boss design. Every boss fight in the Prison went something like this
1. Get to a safe spot or begin running the safe circuit.
2. Wait until mobs were clear
3. Use a Titan bubble with Weapons of light (if applicable, not necessary but super useful)
4. Unload all 7 shots of Gjallarhorn
5. Pick up ammo dropped from mobs or use heavy ammo synth
6.Repeat
I can only go off my own experiences with the game, but after that game mode released, the dominance of Gjallarhorn was set. It was seen in almost every strike, every raid, and every PVE encounter. People would spend hours grinding on 3 different characters for it and if you did not have it after so many hours then you had sinned against RNGesus. It was only until Xur, who had actually sold it in the first week in the tower and before anyone could predict this would happen, finally offered it for sale to the masses who did not have it did it start to lose some of its legendary status but not its ability to absolutely destroy 90% of any PVE element regardless of element burns or actual optimal ways to defeat them.
Around of this is actually when I quit playing Destiny for a little while. I had the “holy build”, was able to do every role in both raids, Nightfalls were only a challenge in how much time I wanted to spend in it and by the time I got to level 34 I had no interest in finishing the Prison of Elders because nothing it offered to me would beat my 3 guns and boots. It wasn’t until more information about Year two came out and when Bungie dropped a Gjallarhorn sized bombshell about how weapons were gonna be treated from the first year…..
Gjallarhorn was being nerfed and not given a Year two version.
This angered a large amount of the community, they had spent literal days getting the biggest badest gun in the loot chart only to see it go away but….but….for Destiny to survive, Gjallarhorn had to die.
Because, you see, ever since I stopped using Gjallarhorn to clear out everything, I have found myself and everyone I know who plays saying the same thing…” this is fun again”. It wasn’t even until we finally were able to get a raid party together to go after Oryx in “Kings Fall” that I even noticed this. In a team of 6, we had two Sleeper Simulants, two heavy machine guns, a sword and a rocket launcher. We were all playing to our strengths and through that were able to cover the weaknesses of each other. The strategy came back and the grind that Gjallarhorn play brought had for the most part been removed. Drastic changes in gameplay also helped this concept along immensely. Don’t have a power sniper or primary? Be a gaze taker on Golgoroth. Have armor that produces orbs out the ass? Clear mobs on the Deathsinger sisters. Are you amazing at jump puzzles? The you’re gonna be the taken Guardian against Oryx.
The gameplay changed, bosses have an emphasis on crit hits and rockets are better suited for clearing mobs rather than high-velocity burst damage. While this is far from perfect, the Crucible still has a strong meta determined that the Trials of Osirus is just going to solidify and PVE still has problems with bosses that have too much health and slow, grinding chipping away of its health is a more viable alternative than actually getting into the scrap. Bungie finally gave us the Destiny we all wanted and the highs that Year two have brought have sure been better than any low it’s created so far.
So what do you think? Let us know in the comments below and get engaged with us!
