How to unlock old Iron Banner armor ornaments in Destiny 2

Even though Destiny 2 offers plenty of novelty as part of its Season 23 content roster, Bungie has chosen not to leave some of its old content to the annals of history. Notably, the new version of Iron Banner allows you to unlock almost its old armor sets and weapons.

Naturally, the only way to actually unlock Iron Banner-themed content is to play the new Iron Banner multiplayer PvP mode, so the first step is to strap in if you’re not a fan. What makes Season 23’s Iron Banner interesting is that it incorporates elements of Destiny 2‘s Gambit into full-blooded PvP combat.

The way this works is that, upon killing a Guardian, you’ll notice a special Engram-looking item dropping at their feet. You’ll need to collect that Engram and then take it to a specially designated location to dunk it in the name of the Cabal empress, Caiatl. It’s a curious take on classic Destiny gameplay tropes and, for the most part, it works. Most importantly, such a huge change to the game’s PvP combat loop means that even players that weren’t keen on it before might enjoy it this time around, so this could be your chance to stock up on sweet Dark Age gear, if the new Warlord’s Ruin dungeon armor doesn’t tickle your fancy.

You can now get old Iron Banner armor and weapons in Destiny 2

On top of changing Iron Banner quite massively, Bungie has also used this opportunity to reintroduce a surprisingly comprehensive set of legacy gear into Destiny 2. This includes a whole slew of old fan-favorite weapons, such as the Wizened Rebuke fusion rifle and the Hero’s Burden sub-machine gun. Perhaps more importantly for fashion-minded Guardians, however, there are the old, legacy Iron Banner armor sets to choose from as well.

In total, as part of Season 23’s Iron Banner content roster, you can expect a grand total of 20 unique weapons, as well as the following armor sets:

• Iron Pledge
• Iron Symmachy
• Lordly Iron (Gheleon’s, Efrideet’s, Haakon’s, Weyloran’s, and Perun’s pieces)
• Iron Remembrance
• Iron Fellowship
• Iron Truage
• Iron Will
• Iron Forerunner
• Iron Companion

This means Iron Banner players now have the biggest choice of cosmetics Destiny 2 has offered yet, and it’s all readily accessible without gear lockouts. The only thing you’ll need, really, is time. Lots and lots of time, as you’ve got a heck of a grind ahead of you, depending on how much of this gear you actually want and/or need.

How to get Iron Banner Engrams in Destiny 2

The only way to get Iron Engrams is to play Iron Banner. A loss nets you one Iron Engram, while wins may get you more. Rank upgrades with Lord Saladin get you extra Engrams as well, but you need to be careful not to accidentally spend them in Saladin’s main vendor UI. Clicking on the upper right corner of the UI to “claim” an Engram actually spends one to roll a random piece of loot, more specifically.

Iron Banner Engrams and Glimmer are the only two currencies you’ll need to get the items you want from Lord Saladin over at the Tower. The good news, then, is that you can unlock any item you want, from weapons to armor pieces. The bad news, however, is that you need three Iron Engrams to unlock an item you’ve never had before.

This means that the full suite of, say, Iron Companion armor will set you back a whopping 15 Iron Engrams if you’ve never managed to grind any of its pieces in any of the prior seasons. In other words, if you’re particularly unlucky and unfamiliar with Destiny 2 PvP and lose every single match you end up in, you’ll need to get through 13-15 matches of Iron Banner before you have the whole set.

This is less than ideal if you need a huge list of items, naturally. Since Season 23 is going to be fairly long, now that The Final Shape has been postponed, at least we’ve got plenty of time to fill out our Iron Banner collections.