As a seasoned guardian, I've only owned two good hand cannons. "The last word", and "The Devil You Don't". I'd never really choose one straight up, when selecting gear I'd normally choose either a scout rifle or a pulse rife as my primary. That was until I got Thorn.
Some will argue that a low fire rate can impede your ability to breeze through strikes, but after getting into the playstyle handcannons can be extremely fluid and a pleasure to use. The high impact makes them devastating in PVP, and Thorn's special perk obliterates shields in PVE. It is an all round amazing weapon, aesthetically and in practice, I'll walk through the bounty guide and then discuss the weapons perks and why its great.
You'll need to randomly win an exotic bounty, namely "A Light in the Dark". These can be rewarded at complete random from the bounty collector, you'll just have to get lucky. However, turning in multiple bounties at once seems to make them crop up more, but I've got no evidence to concrete that.
Complete the summoning pits strike on the moon. Any difficulty, breeze through on the lowest original level to get this step out the way. You don't even need to get a huge amount of kills or land the final blow on Phogoth or whatever, just completed the strike and you'll be directed to the next step of the bounty. That's the easy part done.
Back to the moon! For the next step you must mow down 500 Hive. Red health bar enemies give you 2 points, yellow ultras and majors give you 20. Defeating Phogoth again gives you 50 points, so I'd suggest running the summoning pits strike a couple of times on a harder difficulty. If the weekly nightfall is on the moon that week go for that, there'll be tonnes of ultras to take down.
Time to equip your shotgun, You have to head to the crucible for the next step. This part of the bounty requires you to earn 500 void kill points. That's not just normal any old kills, that's specifically void damage. This'll be easier if you're an voidwalker warlock or striker titan, but hunters will find this step considerably harder as they have no void abilities in either subclass.
Each kill gives you 5 points, but you'll loose 2 points per death. I found this to be the hardest part of the bounty, as I suck at Crucible, aside Iron Banner. I was lucky enough to have a void damage shotgun, "The Comedian", and with various voidwalker abilities I managed to get this done in an evening.
Time for a quick stop to the tower to buy an Infusion of Light. This is super simple, buy it for 1 mote of light from The Speaker. He'll then direct you to take down Xyor the Unwed.
- Level 26
- Epic modifier
- No matchmaking
Time to make your decent into the Hellmouth for the final time to take down Xyor. All enemies have super tough shields, and if you linger in the blasts from any Wizard you're going down in a matter of seconds. I found this stage really hard the first time, don't be fooled by it being only a level 26 strike. You're going to want somethings good at blasting down shields, like a fire-damage fusion rifle or shotgun. You'll want a member of your fireteam to hang back and keep the shields down while you reload, this can take a while. Keep going slow and you'll make it to the final boss fight. Do not kill Phogoth! Keep him alive till the third dropship spawns, you're going to have to just keep killing the enemies till then. Xyor herself is pretty easy to take down once she spawns, after that you don't even have to complete the strike.
Return to the Speaker to collect your hard earned reward, and man was that hard earned. I've done all the exotic bounties now and this was by far the hardest but it's so worth it.
So was all that worth it? I'd say yes, Thorn is a much sought-after prize, it's a real badge of your worth as a guardian.
It handles beautifully, it's very fluid and fun to use even if you don't really prefer hand cannons like me. I'm yet to unlock it's signature perk of lingering damage, but I'll probably get that done tonight. Even without said perk though this beauty far surpasses some other exotics which I originally held with high regard. Personally I would say it's better than The Last Word exotic hand cannon, it performs above the bar in both PVE and PVP. If you come across this bounty I'd say go for it no matte what other bounties there are, you will not regret owning this testament to hard work and aesthetic quality.
Bootiful.
No comments:
Post a Comment