Destiny 2 Iron Banner Armor Guide: Season 18 Edition

This guide covers every Iron Banner armor set in Destiny 2, including the current Iron Forerunner set.

Season 17 Iron Banner schedule

The official Iron Banner scheduled for September 2022 is the following:

• The event starts on Tuesday, September 6, 2022, at 10 AM PDT
• The event ends on Tuesday, September 12, 2022, at 10 AM PDT

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

Guide updated as of Season of the Plunder’s release (S18).

Iron Banner armor in Season 18

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

Destiny 2’s Iron Banner armor in Season 17

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 is definitely looking up, with new weapons, new armor, and now an exclusive armor perk added.

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 gear.

How to farm it: Forging Iron quest

Completing the seasonal quest is a good way to add the new weapons to the loot table, allowing you to farm them more easily. For that reason, I definitely recommend you complete the seasonal Iron Banner quest as soon as possible.

In Season of the Haunted, the Forging Iron quest involves the following steps:

• Step 1: Complete a match in Iron Banner.
• Step 2: Complete a daily challenge.
• Step 3: Earn Iron Banner Rank points.
• Step 4: Collect an Iron Banner engram from Lord Saladin.
• Step 5: Complete Iron Banner matches while wearing at least one piece of Iron Banner armor. Each additional piece grants extra progress.
• Step 6: Speak to Lord Saladin at the Tower.

To farm Iron Banner armor as quickly as possible, you’ll have to save materials to focus Iron Banner engrams:

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 is 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, 16, 17, 18:

Good farming!