On Destiny's Age of Triumph...

This is our "final hurrah" as guardians of the last earth city before Destiny 2 drops and everything changes. Once Destiny 2 is released, we will lose all of our armors, weapons and items. Also, from what we can guess so far, all of our progress as well. For these reasons, Bungie is finally fulfilling the prophecies and has released Age of Triumph as a free update for guardians to enjoy. The live team is spitting out the reworks for all of the raids with now light-relevant gear and new cosmetic options for our characters. Players have been waiting desperately for new content to Destiny and it has finally come. With this update, players can finally relive the moments that shaped their legend. They even gave us a new handy-dandy record book to track all of these new and renewed activities, awarding special emblems that you can only get from doing the activities in the book.

The player can now collect older gear from the different expansions and activities by purchasing engrams from the new kiosk in the tower with silver. How do you get silver dust? You do the different daily and weekly activities to be awarded Radiant Lockboxes (Yay, more game lockboxes) upon completion. You pop 'em open and inside of them can be practically anything from year two: emotes, ships, shaders, sparrows, ornaments, dust, chroma colors, and even chroma or event armor. If you don't like what you got, the non-collectable items can be broken down into silver dust, unless it's chroma armor, which will break down into chroma. As an awesome weekend bonus, Xûr is now selling bundles that include a weapon and an ornament for that weapon at the cost of a combination of both Strange Coins and Silver Dust.

Ornamented King's Fall, Vault of Glass, Crota's End and Wrath of the Machine raid armors.

The retouched raid weapons are awesome, but there is a catch. If you want the elemental solar, arc, or void damage, you've got to use the exotic version of the weapon, otherwise, the legendary versions of those weapons will do kinetic damage. All of the perquisites are the same; it's just one has the elemental damage and the other doesn't. Also, the exotic weapons do have a little change to them that colors them nice and pretty-like, and are always the same rolls.

There are other new items as well: Age of Triumph Ornaments and Knuckles of Eao. Age of Triumph Ornaments are new legendary ornament items that serve the function of unlocking cosmetic changes to raid armors, allowing the player to express their guardians individuality or to just show off. Unlike the weapon ornaments, Age of Triumph Ornaments can be used on any piece of the new raid armor, not just a particular set or piece. Some pieces of armor even taken more than one Age of Triumph Ornament to activate their special look. Knuckles of Eao are a new consumable, similar to Three of Coins, that grant the player a wish when killing raid bosses. This wish gives the player a chance at more and better loot drops from these encounters. I say "player" because you only get one a week per game account.

They began with Crota's End. It's strange that they released the new version of the second raid, instead of the revamped Vault of Glass, the first raid. Crota's End was the raid at the end of The Dark Below, in which the actions of the guardian, having finished the raid by killing Crota, would be responsible for the setting into motion events that would ultimately foment the coming of The Taken King. Crota's End has seen some improvements and a few changes to it's mechanics, adding new challenges for the guardians to overcome, granting them more loot. When activated, the raid armor's ornaments make the armor emit green and blue spikes.

The new Hunter armor from Vault of Glass with ornaments on.

The next week came and we were given the gift of Vault of Glass, the first raid from vanilla Destiny and the favorite of most of the people in my personal gaming circle. We went down into the vault to destroy Atheon and stop him from messing with the flux of time. This opening of the Vault of Glass would lead to the events of House of Wolves, wherein the Fallen commander Skolas would use the Vex technology in the Vault to attempt to make himself into the legendary "Kell of Kells". Vault of Glass has seen only minor changes with the addition of Challenges. Make sure you don't let that Templar teleport and you kill Atheon in one round or your whole fireteam will be forfeiting your chance for extra goodies. The armor, once socketed with ornaments, take on the appearance of being Vex-infused, the warlock boots even looking like Vex Hobgoblin legs.

In the third week of Age of Triumph came the refreshed King's Fall, the raid from the release of The Taken King. The guardians killed Crota and, as a result, he wants his vengeance. This is the raid where the guardians raid the Dreadnought, use the Court of Oryx to invade Oryx's realm and destroy his threat for a second and final time. None of the mechanics have changed, but all challenges are active. That means no one can hold the brand during Warpriest more than once, everyone must hold the gaze each round during Golgoroth, and you must kill Oryx from full health to dead by detonating at least sixteen orbs in a single round. Using ornaments makes your armor glow cyan-colored.

The final raid to get a rework is the more recent one: The Wrath of the Machine. During the story of Rise of Iron, the Fallen splicers have taken charge of their own evolution and become one with their gods, using the nanotechnology of Siva to do it. As for the challenges, the Vosik and Aksis challenges are both active. This means that a fireteam must use Siva charges to close the clean-room doors during the Vosik encounter, and guardians who have empowerment will have to supercharge on those plates every time Aksis teleports during the second phase of the final fight. The ornaments unlock the ability for the your guardian to look like they are fragmenting physically, but it's slightly different for each class.

All of this and more await those who get in and get going for this Destiny update. Also, Bungie is selling t-shirts for $777,777.77 USD. Who's gonna' pay that much for a t-shirt? Oh, wait, what's this in the book about hitting rank seven? That's right, you get a discount code once you hit rank seven that drops the price to twenty-five bucks; thirty if you want the personalized name-tag on the sleeve. Good luck with that, Bungie. We don't know what the future of Destiny will be with the sequel on the horizon, but we are hopeful that it will be better than it has been and we can hope that until our hearts are either filled with light or disappointment. Good hunting, guardians.