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sundayswiththeilluminati · 3 years ago

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Duality

"The question becomes whether or not to fire, not where to aim." —Osiris

Type: Shotgun

Slot: Kinetic | Energy | Heavy

Element: Arc | Solar | Void

Perk: Compression Chamber - Fires a pellet spread in hip-fire or a single high-damage slug while aiming.

Trait: On Black Wings - Pellet final blows grant a stacking precision damage and reload speed buff. Precision hits with slugs extend the duration.

Ornaments: Antiquity, Binary Function

Origin & Description: Duality as a weapon doesn't quite know its own aesthetic. With a pull quote from Osiris that seems unrelated, a lore tab about hunting eliksni corrupted by Hive war god Xivu Arath, and a shotgun design that looks polished but doesn't really add up, it feels like an exotic that either got released too early or changed at the last minute. Also when you load Duality you load it with 8 shells at once, which begs a few questions. You break it open - it's a break-action, which I think is unique in Destiny - then slam in a single prepacked cluster of eight shells like a big pack of AA batteries. In fact maybe they are AA batteries and that's why the firing chamber has this orange-red glow like LEDs pretending to be a fireplace behind an odd lattice pattern.

Overall Duality's as confused as the person it belongs to: Crow, The Lightbearer Formerly Known As Uldren Sov. Given where Crow's been for the last several months I'd expect a Tangled Shore kitbash, not the Wild-West-by-way-of-elves look Duality seems to be gesturing at. Maybe Crow just has that innate Awoken sense of style; the petal-layered underbarrel does resemble the Dreaming City shotgun Retold Tale. I have no idea why the firing chamber looks like it's pretending to be a brick oven (is it supposed to be feathers?) nor why there's a wire pulled taut along the length of the barrel. I'm sure it serves some important purpose understood by people who are good with shotguns (i.e. not me.)

The glowing firing chamber looks cool but does little other than give it Solar damage; in terms of playstyle Duality's doubled nature is another entry in the archetype of "does one thing in hip-fire mode and another in aim-down-sights mode," subtype "and the two things synergize." Its two modes aren't as tightly-coupled as Symmetry, but like the names, they're related. In Duality's case the hip-fire mode shoots a wide cone of pellets that grant stacks of the On Black Wings buff on kills, which then charge up the precision single-slug shots you fire in aim-down-sights mode. That combo encourages you to knock down red-bars with hip-fire shots, then aim down sights to target a larger enemy with the increased damage. Landing precision hits - not kills - in ADS mode extends the buff's duration, so you really want to be hitting that crit spot. That means that, like the handful of single-slug Legendary shotguns, Duality wants you to either be stupidly good with shotguns or get within spitting distance of a nontrivial foe, neither of which are my forte. Some people can go sliding right up in there with a shottie, but those people are not me*.

*They're usually the people killing me. In Crucible. With shotguns.

So anyway enough about this boring shotgun. What's up with Crow? Ever since his resurrection he's been hiding out, mostly because any Guardian who catches sight of him tends to try to kill him and he doesn't know why. Uldren already had a lot of sympathy for the eliksni and Crow's outcast status only amplified it, so when he heard about eliksni being driven mad and transformed into Wrathborn on the Tangled Shore, he headed out there to see if he could help. One of Spider's people picked him up; Spider of course recognized him immediately, thought this was hilarious, and decided Crow was going to be his pet Lightbearer. He enforced the "offer" to work for him by catching and loading Crow's Ghost, Glint (née Pulled Pork), with a little insurance in the form of explosives inside his shell.

That's where we run into him when he spears a Hive Knight to keep Osiris from getting his fool head bashed in. We dance the awkward dance of knowing who he is and not mentioning it because he asks us not to ("he must have been a bad person," Crow's concluded), and long story short we fight the Wrathborn with his help, win Crow's freedom with a little clever wording and, well, then it gets kinda messy but more about that in Hawkmoon. The good news is this hapless idiot is no longer getting murdered and/or exploited by jerks on a daily basis and Saint-14 and Osiris the bird husbands have adopted him as their bird son, which is as it should be.

Crow lent us Duality as the seasonal weapon for Season of the Hunt in order to help chase the Wrathborn in said hunts, but while it's got some use in Crucible there are just more exciting shotguns out there, and once I completed its catalyst I visited Crow to give it back. But I still have questions, like, is Ghost back there preloading sets of eight shells? Where do the armatures they're packed into come from? Why the heck does it have that wire? I guess Destiny still has to keep a few mysteries from us.

Destiny 2 Compendium Armarum Exoticarum

#Destiny 2 #Duality #Season of the Hunt #Crow #another exotic shotgun I'll never use #I own a lot of shotguns for someone who doesn't use shotguns #okay it's not that cool but that's the tag so #Destiny Compendium Exoticarum #Destiny #this is the wager of existence

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