Last night’s This Week At Bungie post revealed the new plan coming in with Season 13. Rather than get tokens from matches and bounties to cash in, we’ll instead have a progression track offering new rewards as our PvP Valor rank goes up. On our first climb up the ranks, we’ll get Upgrade Modules, Enchantment Cores, a seasonal shader, Enchantment prisms, an emblem, and an Ascendant Shard. After resetting the rank and restarting, the shader, emblem, and Ascendant Shard will be replaced with more Cores, Prisms, and an Exotic Engram. Going up Valor ranks will still give Ritual Engrams too. Bungie say Gambit (which doesn’t have tokens anyway) will run to a similar system from Season 13 too. Your Vanguard tokens are safe for now, with Strikes apparently still running to the current system, but a Bungie community manager does note that they plan to bring this system to the Vanguard too. He added, “Regarding other token based vendors, we don’t have specific plans to share yet.” But come Season 13, Crucible Tokens and Crucible Token Gifts will be useless junk items so you should cash ’em in now. The new rewards sound a lot more useful than what I’d probably get from tokens. You can get some good stuff from cashing in, ever since Bungie made vendors hand out items from the world loot pool, but the odds are poor. Armour in particular is trash. Almost everything I get, I dismantle into Legendary Shards. I feel bad for Shaxx. He encourages me as I fight, celebrating my victories, cheering me up after losses, and rewarding me for my dedication when I hand in tokens. I accept his gifts, give them a quick once-over, then, while standing before him, crush them in my bare hands. No wonder he’s done with tokens. The TWAB also briefly touched on plans to rebalance PvP, in particular Stasis abilities. Update 3.0.2, launching on Tuesday the 19th, will tweak Whisper Of Fissures (the Fragment boosting damage from shattering crystals and frozen people) as well as the Hunter’s daft Shatterdrive instakill combo. Looking further ahead, they plan to boost underperforming subclasses while also “restoring a better balance where proper gunplay is rewarding” after going a bit too wild with abilities. Shatterdive Hunters are a nightmare if they’re any good, but I will admit I derived a lot of satisfaction in the latest Iron Banner from watching stacked teams of Hunters repeatedly fail to pull it off then get mashed. But oof, PvP balance is a mess right now. The TWAB also noted that Bungie plan to rework rewards in the Dreaming City and on the Moon from Season 13. Currently they give useless gear capped below the max Light level, which is well cheeky when these expansions cost money. They’ll reissue the Reverie Dawn and Dreambane armour, and high-stat drops of them will drop from the Shattered Throne and Pit Of Heresy (but sorry, Pit gear won’t be Masterworked anymore). Four guns from the Dreaming City and four from the Moon will be reissued with new perk pools, though god knows why two of these will be rocket launchers when we’re already drowning in those garbage weapons. I do hope Season 13’s brand new guns will fill some of the weapon archetypes that are currently empty thanks to sunsetting. Or Bungie realise this isn’t working out and they need to rethink it. Weapons dropped in Throne and Pit will be able to roll with perks they can’t elsewhere from S13 too. That’s a nice change. Sure, running Pit to dismantle the Masterworked reward is an easy source of Prisms, but it’s not very satisfying. Will be nice to head back in for good guns. I’ve not done Throne in forever either. Season 13 is expected to start on the 9th of February. Bungie haven’t revealed much about it yet, though we do know two Strikes from the first game (Fallen S.A.B.E.R. and Devil’s Lair) will return to the Cosmodrome. Four Lost Sectors on the Moon will be added to the Legendary and Master rotation too.
