Destiny 2 Season Tier List: the best & worst of Bungie's seasonal releases

Something that has become a little bit of a trend on social media in the last few weeks is many prominent members of the Destiny 2 community showing off their tier list of the game’s past Seasons.

The below list will start from where Destiny 2 entered the current Seasonal model with Season of the Forge in late 2018 and continue through until the present Season of the Chosen. One thing to note is that these rankings are relative to each other. While some Seasons might receive a D ranking this just means these were some of the weaker Seasons. I don’t think Destiny 2, as of yet, has had a truly bad Season.

Season of the Forge

Season of the Forge was by far one of Destiny 2’s best Seasons. While it may have started a little rough due to the recommended Power for the Forges being set too high, this Season saw a great Seasonal activity, a fantastic Raid, as well as many fan-favorite Legendaries and Exotics. These Exotic weapons, Izanagi’s Burden and Anarchy, are still top-tier weapons to this day.

Rank - S

Season of the Drifter

People’s opinions for Season of the Drifter can swing wildly depending on whether that person likes Gambit or not as that was the main draw for the Season. While Gambit Prime and its special ‘role’ armor was a fun addition it was still just more Gambit. Reckoning was fairly fun but didn’t contain much variety. The weapons from it were powerful though and many players spent days grinding for a god-roll Spare Rations.

Bungie have since said that it was a mistake to heavily lean an entire Season into a particular activity as it completely alienated the portion of the player base that wasn’t really interested in this mode. Season of the Drifter did add the Pinnacle weapon The Recluse, one of Destiny 2’s most powerful weapons, so it does get a small number of points for that.

Rank - D

Season of Opulence

Season of Opulence, like Season of the Forge, is another top-tier Season. Not only did it add The Menagerie, one of the best Seasonal activities to date, but also brought a new Raid, ‘Crown of Sorrow’. Many members of the community have been asking for The Menagerie to come back in some form as it had everything you needed: variety, challenging encounters, targetted loot drops, and fun weapons. While Crown of Sorrow wasn’t the most groundbreaking Raid and didn’t have the best loot, it was still a worthwhile experience.

Rank - S

Season of the Undying

Season of the Undying released during Shadowkeep and so it was slightly overshadowed. It was neat to fight Vex in the Black Garden during the Vex Offensive Seasonal activity but it contained next to no variety. When the ‘big bad’ of the Season, The Undying Mind, showed up towards the end of the Season it was met with a large amount of disappointment. This returning enemy of the original Destiny was a complete pushover and the activity progressed largely the same.

The Garden of Salvation raid was an extremely beautiful raid with interesting encounters/puzzles and had some fairly powerful weapons to boot. The raids Exotic weapon ‘Divinity’ is often still used to drastically increase Boss DPS. Garden of Salvation was technically a part of the Shadowkeep expansion though. Season of the Undying does get props for laying the groundwork for future Seasons such as Seasonal Artifacts and the Season Pass. Oh, and the Seasonal armor was pretty cool.

Rank - B

Season of Dawn

Season of Dawn was one of Destiny 2’s better Seasons although it doesn’t quite reach the heights attained by Season of the Forge and Season of Opulence. The Sundial was a great activity that was similar to the Menagerie in a lot of ways in its variety, difficult encounters, and targetted loot system. This Season also introduced the ‘Charged with Light’ mods, mods which many powerful builds are still created around. The Seasonal weapons and armor had a really unique and clean aesthetic, its shame that these will still remain sunset though.

Season of the Dawn also saw the largest and most complicated community puzzle that took over a week of constant work to solve. It was a huge misstep by Bungie that the reward for completing this puzzle was the Exotic Fusion Rifle ‘Bastion’, a weapon that had already been revealed on the Season roadmap.

Rank - A

Season of the Worthy

Season of the Worthy started out rough, really rough. Within a few hours of the Season starting there was a huge outcry on social media that there was already hardly anything to do and that the Season felt extremely bare bones. While the Seasonal activity, Seraph Towers, was fairly one-dimensional, this Season did see the return of the long-awaited Trials of Osiris. This mode did fall off pretty quickly although it has seen a resurgence in recent weeks due to the newly added weapons.

This Season did do a few things right though. The new ‘Warmind Cells’ mods were extremely powerful and like the Charged with Light mods from Season of Dawn, are still used in many PvE builds. The end of Season live event of The Almighty crashing down to Earth was also truly spectacular.

Rank - C

Season of Arrivals

Season of Arrivals was a great Season of Destiny 2. While the ‘Contact’ Public Event wasn’t anything spectacular it was great fun to see a whole heap of Guardians in the one space fighting the Taken. Umbral engrams were a new addition to the game that allowed the player to easily pick and choose what they would receive as loot. This system saw huge praise from the community, enough that Bungie brought this system back in the latest Season of the Chosen.

New ‘Charged with Light’ perks were added as well as many powerful weapons such as Falling Guillotine and the rereleased IKELOS SMG. The weekly ‘Inheritence’ missions offered a constant stream of purpose and story to the player that culminated in a fantastic final battle against Nokris.

A new Dungeon, ‘Prophecy’, was also added for free during this Season.

Rank - A

Season of the Hunt

Like Season of the Undying and the Shadowkeep expansion, Season of the Hunt was slightly overshadowed by the release of Beyond Light. The Seasonal activity ‘Wrathborn Hunts’ were extremely quick to complete which wasn’t the worst thing as they had a fairly decent targetted loot system. The problem with Wrathborn Hunts was that you needed to grind the core playlists in order to ‘charge’ the seasonal item in order to run these Hunts. This saw immediate criticism from the community as when a new Season releases you want to be able to play the new content as much as you want.

Season of the Hunt did introduce an important narrative thread with Crow, the revived Prince Uldren, joining the player in putting a stop to the Wrathborn incursion. This narrative continues in the current Season of the Chosen and is one of the better storylines Destiny 2 has seen in recent years.

Rank - C

Season of the Chosen

Season of the Chosen is another standout Season for Destiny 2. While the new Battlegrounds Seasonal activity is fairly straightforward it makes up for it by having so many enemies that it truly feels like an ongoing war between the Cabal and Guardians. The H.E.L.M is a fantastic narrative space that allows the story of the Season to progress organically, with the weekly ‘Challenger’s Proving’ questline being another avenue for story progression. The story of Crow is continued in this Season and has cemented itself as one of the franchise’s best storylines.

Two old Strikes, ‘Devil’s Lair’ and ‘Fallen S.A.B.E.R’, and a new Strike ‘Proving Grounds’ have been added this Season with the latter serving as a direct story element rather than a simple side mission. To add to this some mighty weapons were added this Season along with some really powerful perks to go with them.

Season of the Chosen is Destiny 2 at its best.