Hi there, Guardians! I've seen a lot of frustration across various online platforms regarding the melee / grenade challenge for the Iron Banner chest piece ornament. Unlocking the Iron Pledge Ornament requires you to get melee and grenade kills in Iron Banner during Season 2. It's unlocked to the Iron Truage Vest, Plate, and Vestments.

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This may just be one of the most challenging tasks in all of Destiny 2, at least as far as PVP challenges. In Destiny 1, I was a nothing manacles wearing, scatter grenade spamming voidwalker. Therefore, I could get 100 grenade kills in my sleep. That's certainly not the case in Destiny 2.

What makes this challenge unique, is that it's one of the few challenges that you won't complete organically through normal game play like number of kills or matches won. It requires a bit of strategy and possibly a change to your normal play style. That's what I love about this challenge. It requires me to think about it and to adjust my play style forcing me out of my comfort zone. If you played D1, you'll remember the class and weapon specific bounties that did the same thing. They forced you to try different approaches to your play style and in turn made you a more well-rounded player. I know I discovered new approaches to PVP after being forced to try something different that turned out to be more effective that I anticipated. I must have started and abandoned The Last Word quest a dozen times before making myself do it. Afterwards, and much to my surprise, The Last Word became one of my favorite weapons.

Back to the challenge at hand. With grenades being less powerful in Destiny 2, players typically soften opponents with a grenade and then finish off with a weapon. The best way to complete this challenge is to reverse that order. You have to soften with your gun to get an opponent just under half health and then hit them with the grenade to finish them off. As a voidwalker main, I really struggled with this early on since none of the void grenades are super powerful. I switched to Dawnblade for the first time since September of last year to test different grenades. I had forgotten how much fun Dawnblade can be so I'm glad I was forced out of the comfort zone I mentioned earlier.

I went with Dawnblade because fire bolt grenades require less accuracy than other warlock grenades. AoE grenades are too easy to miss or for players to avoid. If you get the fire bolt in the general proximity of a low health guardian, it will hit and kill them. I also changed my play style to more aggressive than usual which forced me to change my typical load out - something else I really enjoyed about this challenge. I went with a sub-machine gun in the kinetic slot. I know a lot of you already do this but for me I've never taken the time to get comfortable with that archetype of weapon. I've dismantled nearly every one I've gotten. But like The Last word, its now one of my favorites.

These tactics helped me to finish this challenge in 2 days. One tactic that worked really well for me, as a floaty warlock, was a brief aerial assault with a sub-machine gun, followed by tossing a fire bolt grenade all before my feet hit the ground. You can do the same thing with the melee but that's a little more difficult. Here's a very short video clip showing an example of that type of assault. It's not a perfect clip for this example, as you can see the opponent was already a little low and I was using Positive Outlook, but I think you'll get the idea of soften with a gun and finish with the grenade.

I hope this helps some you complete the challenge. Let me know in the comments if you have any other tips for our readers.

FIGHT FOREVER, GUARDIANS!