Artifice Armor rewards being added to Destiny 2 PvP in Update 7.3.5

Destiny 2’s PvP experience has long lagged behind PvE when it comes to the kinds of rewards—and the number of them—available for players to earn. Bungie is taking some big steps to address this in Update 7.3.5 on March 5, which includes the opportunity to earn Artifice Armor.

Previously, Artifice Armor was a reward exclusively tied to Master difficulty dungeons. But according to today’s This Week in Destiny blog, it will soon become available for players to get their hands on through Competitive Crucible as well. Destiny 2′s year one Crucible armor is being given “a new lease on life” in the words of the PvP strike team, with all of it being reprised for Update 7.3.5 to potentially drop as Artifice Armor for players who complete a new tier of the Competitive weekly challenge.

“We want Crucible to feel at least as rewarding as PvE,” Bungie said. “The inclusion of Artifice Armor as a reward aligns with our goal of allowing PvP-focused players to have an endgame track that rivals PvE rewards.”

The aforementioned new third tier to the current weekly challenge system will be the method of adding this reward. Players who reach rank Gold III or above each season will have access to this third tier once it goes live on March 5, with the tier requiring victories instead of completions to complete and acquire the Artifice Armor prize. Not only that, but each victory thereafter will have a chance to drop Artifice Armor as well, with players in higher ranks having improved drop rates to further incentivize the climb.

Bungie isn’t stopping at just Competitive, though. Trials of Osiris is also getting another big pass at its rewards system with the update. The main addition that the majority of players will be interested in is the new Passage of Persistence. Unlike every other Trials Passage in Destiny 2, this one is built to allow players who struggle to go Flawless to still earn an Adept Trials weapon drop every week. At seven wins, you’ll be granted a drop of the current Adept weapon, regardless of how many losses you took beforehand.

There are a few mechanics with the Passage of Persistence to keep in mind:

• A loss will remove a win from the card, but consecutive losses do not remove additional wins.
  • This means winning two games in a row will add one permanent win to the card, allowing even struggling contenders to slowly climb up to seven wins and a free Adept roll if they keep trying.
• You can still go Flawless with this Passage equipped, but only if a win hasn’t been removed.

The developer is making a change to how rewards are dished out to fireteams of three in Trials of Osiris, too. Ever since Trials was reworked to allow for solo queue, the number of players taking on the mode solo has vastly outweighed the number of people queueing in a stack. Bungie wants to “encourage players to team up with friends” more, and the devs are doing so by adding an additional 50 percent chance to earn Trials Engram and non-Adept weekly weapon drops from match completions as a three-person squad.

The improved rewards will be the main draw of the Crucible updates spotlighted in the blog, but further changes were outlined for both maps and modes that speak to the macro pass on the PvP ecosystem that Update 7.3.5 represents.

A quality-of-life pass is being done on the spawns for Destiny 2’s larger maps, and the locations of initial spawns, Heavy ammo crates, and tiebreaker zones are all being updated for the first time in years. “Our players have spent millions of Guardian hours on our current selection of maps, playing the same game modes in the same arenas,” Bungie said. “It feels as though most of these stories have already been told, and there is only so much you can do in the same play spaces.”

Combine that with updates to three-vs-three Clash, a new hill-based three-vs-three mode called Collision, and sweeping updates to Iron Banner’s Tribute mode, and the Crucible is going to feel like an entirely new experience on March 5. That’s before factoring in the PvP sandbox overhaul that the Strike Team discussed in last week’s TWID, which is slated to launch simultaneously.