One of the main goals for Faction Rally that Bungie wants to deliver in Season 3 of Destiny 2 is to make pledging a difficult and meaningful choice. As a result, faction pledges will be per account, so players will no longer be able to pledge to a different faction on each of their three characters.
Reputation will also now last the whole season, which makes sense given leaked information about how Faction Rally rewards are changing. Like with other vendors, each Faction vendor will sell items to players that have hit certain reputation milestones. So if a player is rank 20 with a faction, they can unlock an armor ornament for example. Check out the items each Faction vendor will offer below:
As if choosing which faction to pledge to wasn’t a tough choice already, there will be an exotic weapon catalyst and an exotic armor ornament tied to each group. And apparently, players will need to hit rank 50 with that faction in order to claim the catalyst. There will also be a special weapon for the winning faction, seen below.
To help assist with ranking up, Destiny 2’s Faction Rally event is introducing a new system called Renown. Essentially, Renown is a personal modifier for the player that increases their faction token rewards but also makes every activity harder. Players will earn Renown by completing public events, patrols, or by killing high value targets in the wild. But once that Renown has increased, their health regeneration will be reduced, outgoing damage will be reduced, and defense will be reduced. So there is a risk/reward to having higher Renown and an added challenge as well.
Renown will also be visible in third person view (at the Tower basically) so players can see which faction a player pledged to. It’s a small cosmetic touch but one that will at least help players see which factions are popular.
Overall there are sure to be some changes that will be met with positivity by the Destiny 2 community and those that will be a little more controversial. Specifically, the one faction per account is likely to frustrate those that hope to burn through the Faction Rally rewards in one week, but some would argue this better reflects the spirit of the event. The choice of which faction to align with should be tough.
That being said, we can see an easy win for Dead Orbit in week 1, if not all of Season 3, because of the Graviton Lance catalyst. Nearly every PvP match is filled with Graviton Lances and having the catalyst reportedly boosts the weapons target acquisition. In other words, those that want to compete in Crucible will likely need to pledge to Dead Orbit and grind for the catalyst.
