Iron Countershade is one of the new shaders that was added in Destiny 2: Season of the Seraph, but this one is kind of special—at least more so than new Dawning shaders. Any armor that you apply it to gains a chainmail texture, which is perfect for some of Destiny 2’s more knightly and Medieval-looking armor sets, of which there are plenty.
Along with the returning Iron Banner armor sets, this shader is pretty desirable, but alas, it’s very hard to get your hands on. If you’re new to the Season of the Seraph, you might be curious about the new craftable exotic, Revision Zero (opens in new tab), or want to know all of the Resonance Amp locations (opens in new tab) to collect some red border Ikelos weapons. Otherwise, here’s how to unlock Iron Countershade and how long it’ll take.
How to unlock Iron Countershade
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To unlock Iron Countershade, you need to reset your Iron Banner rank once and then get to rank 16 again to claim it. This is because the shader is the second-to-last reward on the prestige reputation track. Usually, this would mean a fair bit of play, but there are a number of factors that make this prospect even grindier.
First off, there are only two weeks of Iron Banner this season, as opposed to the normal three, meaning you’d have to gain 17-ish ranks each week the event is active. Second, the new area control game mode, Fortress, is often pretty close so matches go to full time and take even longer to complete. However, if you’re dead set on getting the shader, here are the ways you can boost your Iron Banner rep gain:
- Gain 100% increased rep for each Iron Banner daily challenge (opens in new tab) you complete, for matches played in that week.
- Have five Iron Banner weapons or armor pieces equipped during matches. Iron Banner armor pieces with Iron Banner transmog ornaments applied count for two, so you can also wear an Exotic.
- Equip an Iron Banner emblem if you have one. You can get the Golden Standard emblem by claiming a gold Iron Banner medal.
Altogether, this gives you an 11.0x boost to your Iron Banner reputation, which is as much as you can speed up the process. A win in Iron Banner gets you 300 xp, a loss gets you 220 xp, and each game usually takes around 10 minutes, if you also include time queuing for a match etc.
If you won 34 games and lost 40 (more losses than wins is likely in this mode) then that comes to around 12 hours to get what you need rank wise for the shader. No wonder that players are purposefully losing matches in order to farm that 220 xp to make it less of a time commitment. If past Iron Banners are anything to go by, this shader likely won’t be available again, either.
On the plus side, it’s not quite as bad as some of the armor drop rates. It took our resident Destiny 2 afficionado, Tim, “Two resets and to Heroic III on the 3rd” to get full sets for all three classes, and that’s a fair bit more than 12 hours.