Festival Flight God Rolls and How to Get Them in Destiny 2
At Gaming News, we understand the relentless pursuit of optimal weapon rolls in Destiny 2. For Guardians seeking to dominate the battlefield with area denial capabilities in their Kinetic slot, the Festival Flight Grenade Launcher is a compelling option. Building upon the foundation laid by Stasis-powered area denial tools like the Echoes’ Lost Signal, Festival Flight arrives with the advantage of a more evolved sandbox, offering a richer tapestry of perk combinations and synergy. This article delves deep into the Festival Flight god rolls for Player versus Environment (PvE) content, providing a comprehensive guide to help you acquire and master this potent Strand-infused weapon.
Understanding the Festival Flight Grenade Launcher
The Festival Flight is a Strand-aligned Wave Frame Grenade Launcher, distinguishing itself from its Stasis predecessor. This means its projectiles detonate into a persistent area of effect, controlling space and damaging any enemies caught within its Strand energy. Its Kinetic slot placement makes it a versatile choice, allowing for synergistic pairings with powerful Exotic weapons or utility in your Heavy slot. The Strand affiliation also opens up unique interactions with Strand keywords like Sever and Woven Mail, adding another layer to its tactical application.
While the Solstice event is the primary avenue for obtaining the Festival Flight, its inherent power lies in its perk combinations. A “god roll” refers to the ideal selection of barrels, magazines, and intrinsic perks that maximize the weapon’s effectiveness for its intended purpose. For the Festival Flight, our focus is squarely on PvE dominance, where consistent damage, orb generation, and utility are paramount.
The Quintessential PvE Festival Flight God Roll
Securing the perfect Festival Flight requires a keen eye for specific perk selections. We’ve meticulously analyzed the available options to bring you the most potent PvE configurations.
Barrel Perks: Precision and Stability
The barrel of a Grenade Launcher significantly impacts its performance, influencing projectile speed, blast radius, and stability. For the Festival Flight, several options stand out:
Quick Launch
This is a universally strong choice for Grenade Launchers, including the Festival Flight. Quick Launch provides a significant boost to velocity, meaning your Strand projectiles will travel faster, making it easier to hit distant targets and ensuring your area denial effect is deployed precisely where you need it. Faster projectiles also contribute to a more responsive feel when dealing with moving enemies.
Smart Drift Control
For those who prioritize handling and stability, Smart Drift Control is an excellent alternative. It offers a slight increase in stability, which can be beneficial for maintaining accuracy on follow-up shots or when firing rapidly. More importantly, it significantly increases velocity, often matching or even exceeding the benefits of Quick Launch, while also providing a modest reduction in recoil. This makes it easier to manage the weapon’s firing pattern and keep your area denial consistent.
Linear Compensator
While not as universally praised as Quick Launch or Smart Drift Control, Linear Compensator can still offer a viable option. It increases velocity and improves stability, though typically with a minor reduction in blast radius. For the Festival Flight, where the primary goal is consistent area denial rather than overwhelming single-target damage, the increased velocity and stability can be highly beneficial, especially in chaotic combat scenarios.
Magazine Perks: Ammunition Economy and Velocity
The magazine perk is crucial for dictating how much ammunition you have access to and how quickly it can be fired.
High-Velocity Rounds
This is our top recommendation for the Festival Flight’s magazine. High-Velocity Rounds offers a substantial increase to projectile velocity, which, as we’ve established, is critical for effective area denial. While it comes with a slight reduction in stability, the added velocity often outweighs this drawback in PvE. Faster projectiles translate to a more reliable application of your Strand effect and a greater chance of hitting multiple enemies with each shot.
Augmented Drum
As a strong honorable mention, Augmented Drum provides a larger magazine size. While it slightly decreases velocity and reload speed, the increased number of shots per magazine can be beneficial for sustained area denial or when facing large waves of enemies. However, for the Festival Flight’s core function, the velocity boost from High-Velocity Rounds is generally preferred.
The First Column Perks: Synergistic Powerhouses
The first perk column is where we begin to see significant synergistic potential emerge for the Festival Flight.
Demolitionist
This is an exceptional choice for the Festival Flight. Demolitionist grants a grenade regeneration effect with weapon kills. This means every time you dispatch an enemy with the Festival Flight, you gain a significant chunk of your grenade energy back. This synergy is particularly potent in PvE, allowing for a near-constant uptime on your Strand grenades, further enhancing your area denial and ability cooldowns.
Ambitious Assassin
A classic for tube-launched Grenade Launchers, Ambitious Assassin provides a tangible benefit to your ammo economy. When you get a kill with the Festival Flight, any remaining projectiles in the magazine that were not fired will be reloaded into the magazine. This means you can potentially fire more projectiles than what was initially loaded, effectively creating a multi-shot capacity that amplifies your area denial capabilities, much like the highly sought-after Forbearance.
Blast Distributor
This perk offers a unique interaction with your grenade stat. Blast Distributor grants a boost to your grenade regeneration when you get kills with this weapon. This effect directly contributes to increasing your Grenade stat, which in turn speeds up your grenade cooldown. For builds focused on maximizing grenade uptime, Blast Distributor provides a valuable additive benefit.
The Second Column Perks: End-Game Efficacy
The second perk column offers the final pieces to the Festival Flight god roll puzzle, focusing on sustained performance and utility.
Attrition Orbs
This is arguably the most exciting and potent perk combination available for the Festival Flight, especially when paired with Demolitionist. Attrition Orbs grants you the ability to create Orbs of Power with rapid final blows using this weapon. In conjunction with Demolitionist, this creates a powerful feedback loop: kill enemies with the Festival Flight to regain grenade energy, and rapidly dispatching enemies allows you to generate Orbs of Power, which can then be used to recharge your Super ability or fuel other build-specific perks. The synergy here is so strong that it has historically made similar perk combinations some of the most coveted in the game. We’ve observed its effectiveness firsthand, particularly on higher difficulties where enemies linger, allowing for more ticks of damage and thus more orb generation.
One For All
For players prioritizing raw damage output, One For All is a fantastic choice. This perk activates after hitting three separate enemies within a short timeframe, granting a significant boost to damage for a duration. For a Wave Frame Grenade Launcher like the Festival Flight, hitting three enemies with a single projectile or consecutive projectiles is not an insurmountable task, making One For All a reliable source of increased damage for your area denial.
Honorable Mentions: Flexible and Reliable Options
While the core god roll focuses on maximum synergy, other perks offer valuable utility and can excel in specific scenarios.
Frenzy
A consistently reliable damage perk, Frenzy activates when you are in combat, granting increased damage, handling, and reload speed. The beauty of Frenzy is that it requires no specific kills or conditions beyond simply being engaged in combat. This makes it a steady and dependable boost to your overall effectiveness, especially in longer engagements or during boss encounters where sustained output is key.
Binary Orbit
This perk provides a damage bonus after a kill with a Light subclass ability or a kill with a Light-aligned weapon. For Festival Flight, which is Strand, this means a Light subclass ability kill would activate it. While it can be a strong damage perk, its activation condition makes it slightly less universally applicable than Frenzy or One For All for a weapon that might be the primary tool for clearing groups of enemies.
The Unseen Power: Column 3 Perks
While the fourth column often garners the most attention, the third column also holds valuable options that can elevate the Festival Flight’s performance.
Demolitionist (Revisited)
As mentioned, Demolitionist in the third column is a game-changer. Its ability to refund grenade energy on weapon kills creates an incredibly potent loop, allowing for near-constant area denial and increased ability uptime. This is our absolute top recommendation for the third column.
Ambitious Assassin (Revisited)
The utility of Ambitious Assassin cannot be overstated. Its ability to overfill the magazine upon kills directly translates to more projectiles fired per reload cycle, significantly enhancing the area denial effectiveness and overall damage output of the Festival Flight. It’s a classic perk for a reason and a strong contender for this slot.
Blast Distributor (Revisited)
For those who are heavily invested in grenade-focused builds, Blast Distributor offers a direct and quantifiable benefit by increasing your Grenade stat. This can lead to faster cooldowns and more frequent grenade usage, synergizing well with the Festival Flight’s area denial capabilities.
Slice: A Niche but Potent Option
Slice offers the ability to Sever multiple targets with your melee ability. While this is a powerful Strand keyword, for a Grenade Launcher, its impact is more indirect. The direct benefit to the weapon itself is less pronounced compared to damage or ammo economy perks. However, if your build heavily relies on Strand melee interactions, it can offer a degree of synergy.
Envious Assassin: Boss Damage and Heavy Ammo Synergy
Envious Assassin grants bonus damage based on reserve ammo. This perk shines when paired with weapons that have large reserves or when you have ample heavy ammo. For the Festival Flight, its utility is more niche, primarily benefiting those who use it in boss rotation scenarios or have a robust heavy ammo economy supporting its use.
The Ultimate PvE Synergy: Demolitionist + Attrition Orbs
The combination of Demolitionist in the third column and Attrition Orbs in the fourth column is, in our expert opinion, the definitive Festival Flight god roll for PvE. This pairing creates a virtuous cycle of grenade regeneration and Orb of Power generation. As you dispatch enemies with the Festival Flight, Demolitionist fuels your grenade ability, allowing for continuous area denial. Simultaneously, rapid kills with the weapon trigger Attrition Orbs, generating Orbs of Power that can significantly boost your Super regeneration or activate other potent build-enabling perks. This synergy is so profound that it has historically propelled similar weapon combinations to the top tier of Destiny 2’s meta, even prompting targeted nerfs to their archetypes in the past. While the absolute peak of its power may have been tempered, this combination remains exceptionally strong for sustained PvE engagement.
Damage Perks: The Fourth Column Stalwarts
Beyond Attrition Orbs, the fourth column offers formidable damage enhancements.
Frenzy
As previously mentioned, Frenzy is a consistently reliable damage perk. Its ease of activation and the well-rounded stat boosts it provides make it a solid choice for players who value predictable performance. Being in combat is the only requirement, ensuring you always have a damage advantage.
Binary Orbit
This perk offers a significant damage buff after a Light subclass ability kill or a Light-aligned weapon kill. While it can be effective, the requirement for a preceding Light ability or weapon kill makes it slightly less consistent for the Festival Flight when used as a primary clearing tool.
One For All
For raw, unadulterated damage, One For All is our preferred choice when not opting for Attrition Orbs. The ease with which a Wave Frame Grenade Launcher can hit multiple targets makes this perk consistently active. Dealing damage to three separate enemies within a short window is readily achievable, leading to a substantial damage increase that significantly boosts the Festival Flight’s ability to take down tougher foes or contribute more effectively to burst damage phases.
How to Acquire the Festival Flight in Destiny 2
The Festival Flight Grenade Launcher is primarily obtainable during the Solstice event. To maximize your chances of acquiring this weapon and its desired god rolls, focus on completing the featured Solstice activities.
The Solstice Engram: Your Gateway to Rewards
During the Solstice event, specific activities will offer a Distorted Solstice Engram as a reward. You can identify these activities by hovering your cursor over them in the game’s UI; a tooltip will indicate the presence of this specific engram.
Unlocking and Focusing Solstice Engrams
These Distorted Solstice Engrams are the key to acquiring not only the Festival Flight but also other Solstice-themed weaponry and armor. The quality of the rewards you receive from an engram is influenced by several factors:
- Difficulty of the Activity: Higher difficulty settings generally yield better rewards.
- Reward Score: Achieving a higher score within the activity can improve the engram’s potential.
- Guardian Rank: Your current Guardian Rank may also play a role in the quality of the loot.
Once acquired, these engrams can be taken to a specific vendor within the Solstice event hub to be decrypted. Furthermore, as the event progresses, you may unlock the ability to focus these engrams, allowing you to target specific weapons or armor pieces, significantly increasing your chances of obtaining your desired Festival Flight god roll.
The Grind for Perfection
Acquiring a true god roll often requires a substantial amount of farming. Be prepared to complete the featured Solstice activities repeatedly, especially as you gain the ability to focus your engrams. Patience and persistence are crucial. Don’t be discouraged by early rolls that aren’t ideal; each Distorted Solstice Engram is a step closer to that perfect Festival Flight.
Conclusion: Mastering the Strand Area Denial
The Festival Flight Grenade Launcher stands as a formidable addition to the Guardian’s arsenal, particularly for those who value area denial and Strand synergy in their Kinetic slot. By understanding and actively pursuing the god roll combinations outlined in this guide, particularly the Demolitionist and Attrition Orbs pairing, you can unlock the weapon’s full potential. Whether you’re clearing out waves of enemies or contributing to sustained damage, the Festival Flight, when optimized, offers a consistent and powerful solution. Happy hunting, Guardians, and may your rolls be ever in your favor!