Destiny 2 Iron Banner Armor Guide: Season 16 Quest & Rewards

Destiny 2’s Iron Banner is back for the last time this season and you won’t want to miss it.

Iron Banner will receive a major revamp next season, which means you should spend all your tokens this week. Bungie has already warned that all tokens that were not used will be deleted at the end of the season.

This will be your chance to get more Iron Banner weapons and armor pieces. And by the way, now that it features an intrinsic perk, Iron Banner armor is among the best in the game, stats-wise.

2022 Iron Banner schedule

This is the official Iron Banner schedule for April 2022:

• Starts on Tuesday, May 10, 2022, at 9 AM PDT
• Ends on Tuesday, May 17, 2022, at 9 AM PDT

This means you have an entire week to complete the seasonal quest and farm high stat Iron Banner armor.

List updated as of The Witch Queen’s release (S16).  

Iron Banner armor in Season 16

This time around, Iron Banner features the Iron Forerunner set, released for the first time in Season 15:

Granted, the actual aesthetics of the Forerunner set are up for debate. Some like it, but some find it hideous. This is definitely not Bungie’s best work, especially compared to some of their excellent Destiny 1 Iron Banner sets.

Still, this remains excellent news for Iron Banner in general:

1. It stopped recycling the same old armor year after year
2. It features an intrinsic Armor perk

The new Iron Banner Exotic perk

Every piece of the Forerunner armor set comes with the following perk:

Iron Lord’s Pride

Grants a chance to receive an Enhancement Prism as a reward at the end of Iron Banner matches. Each piece of armor you are wearing with this perk on it increases the chance of receiving an Enhancement Prism, to a maximum of 4 items.

Iron Banner as a PVP mode still has a long way to go, but new weapons, new armor, and especially a new armor perk, are extremely promising.

Farming 60+ stat armor

Of all the sources of high stat armor in the game, Iron Banner is one of the most reliable.

Looking at all the Iron Banner armor pieces I have accumulated this past year, many had 62+ base stats. That may not sound like a lot but it’s still better than most of the armor you’ll find elsewhere. More importantly, armor pieces with more than 62+ base stat points are quite common. This is all but one example:

Prime engrams can also drop 60+ stat armor pieces, but you cannot farm Prime engrams as directly as you can farm Iron Banner tokens.

How to farm it: Flame in the Forest quest

Completing the seasonal quest will add the new weapons to the loot table, allowing you to potentially farm them. For that reason, I definitely recommend you complete the seasonal Iron Banner quest before turning in tokens.

In Season of the Risen, the Flame in the Forest quest involves the following steps:

• Step 1: Flame in the Forest
  • 15 Void or Solar final blows
  • 10 Zone Captures
  • 30 Guardian Defeats
• Step 2:  Blood for Bread
  • 6 Match Completions
  • 20 Zone Captures
  • 15 Hand Cannon Final Blows
• Step 3: Lessons Well-Learned
  • 30 Zone Captures
  • 100 Guardian Defeats
  • 10 Sniper rifle or Glaive final blows
• Step 4: Iron Will
  • 15 Super Final Blows
  • 40 Zone Captures
  • 15 Sword or Melee final blows
• Step 5: A Story Told
  • Return to Lord Saladin

Recommended loadout: For the specific objectives, I recommend the new Cantata-57 for the hand cannon kills and The Enigma for the glaive kills.

Destiny 2 Iron Banner armor sets (per season)

Iron Banner armor generally comes with high stat armors, but even if the sets you collected weren’t impressive stats-wise, they will certainly be useful now that Transmog is a thing.

These are all the Iron Banner armor sets that have been offered since the release of Shadowkeep in 2019:

As you can see, the situation of having the same old armor sets every season was becoming harder to swallow, especially when some excellent Iron Banner sets from Destiny 1 could be easily recycled instead. Granted, The Witch Queen did introduce several armor sets, but more new Iron Banner sets would be much appreciated.

In case you’re curious, these are all the Iron Banner armor sets (2.0 versions) available in Destiny 2:

Iron Truage: 2.0 version reprised for Season 9 and 13:

Iron Remembrance: 2.0 version reprised for Season 10:

Iron Fellowship: 2.0 version reprised for Season 11:

Iron Will: 2.0 version reprised for Season 8 and 12:

Iron Forerunner for Season 15:

Good farming!