Great PC gaming moments are bite-sized celebrations of some of our favorite gaming memories.
Developer: Bungie
Year: 2019
Gjallarhorn was everything for everyone in Destiny. If you had it, you were untouchable. If you didn’t have it, you spent your days getting it. It was an exotic rocket launcher so hideously powerful it became a golden ticket to endgame content. In many ways, it made a mockery of the checks and balances of Destiny itself.
In a game based on fantastic weapons, what made Gjallarhorn so special? Simply put, it flushed every boss in the blink of an eye. A Fireteam of three or six, all equipped with Gjallarhorn, was a DPS machine capable of taking down even Destiny’s most formidable endgame bosses in the blink of an eye.
The Rocket Launcher came with a unique perk known as “Wolfpack Rounds”. This caused its payload, a single missile, to detonate into many smaller explosives that piled up on the target. You didn’t have to be good at aiming. It would pursue a goal of annihilation, making it a powerful tool for both PvE and PvP.
Sounds great right? I’m sure everyone who reads this and has played Destiny has fond memories of Gjallarhorn in its prime. But things weren’t so rosy for everyone. Gjallarhorn, as an exotic weapon, relied on Destiny’s RNG system, which would award rare weapons after high tier activity. To get it, you had to complete strenuous weekly activities or buy it from the exotic trader Xur.
Xur sold Gjallarhorn for a brief window in the second week after Destiny’s release. It became a running joke that Xur would never sell the rocket launcher again, and when he finally did, in August 2015, the Destiny community celebrated it like a national holiday.
Your other options were to try your hand at Nightfall, a much harder version of the game’s strikes, or complete the raid. To do this, you needed a couple of well-trained buddies to come with you. These activities did not provide in-game matchmaking (and still do not in Destiny 2). So unless you had friends playing the game, you had to go into one of Destiny’s web-based matchmaking systems, LFG (Search by Group). Over in LFG, other players looking for groups posted their upcoming activities for others to join. It was a great way to get involved in more team-based activities, or even have someone guide your party through the tough parts of the heist.
But LFG had a catch: most groups on LFG only accepted players who owned Gjallarhorn. The Rocket Launcher was so powerful that it could massively reduce the time it took to complete high level activities, and as such players looking to maximize their runs would not play with players without it. If you did these activities to get yourself a Gjallarhorn, you were a bit screwed.
Even if you did these high level activities, it was not guaranteed that you would end up getting a Gjallarhorn. In fact, it was incredibly unlikely. The drop rate was low, as was the case with many Exotics and Raid Legends, but Gjallarhorn was another level of rarity. So imagine the relief, the happiness, the sheer joy you feel when the Gjallerhorn finally falls.
I clearly remember the moment when it fell for me after months of raids and strikes. My partner, a friend, and I decided to tackle the Crota’s End raid with just the three of us. This was the easiest, cheesiest raid in the game, and it wasn’t too painful to walk alone, either. We pushed our way through the depths of darkness, surrounded by slaves, leapt over the bridge and quickly passed the whole company. Finally we got to Crota son of Oryx, the final challenge. We immediately smashed him to pieces and Gjallarhorn pops up on my screen.
The sense of relief was immense. Members of my raid group really cried when this rocket launcher finally dropped for them, and so did I. Looking back, it’s a funny thing that one item means so much in game, but this first time my entire raid party went hunting with our Gjallarhorns united, we had a blast. We had made it to the upper echelons of Destiny, accomplished the impossible.
Turns out the impossible would actually be getting to the lighthouse in Trials of Osiris, but that’s another story.
This article was previously published on Source link
