Currently, I feel as though the Iron Banner and Faction Rallies are an interesting concept, but don't deliver nearly as much hype as the D1 Iron Banner did. This I would say is largely because of two reasons: the ability to feel powerful over players of lower light levels, and the fact that your time commitment to these special once a month events would be rewarded. Though I feel as though Bungie is doing their best to try and improve these events, I would like to suggest another option that would spice up gameplay and allow for the special event/s each month to alternate between PVP and PVE. The option that I would propose is a tower defense mode. Lore-wise, I always find it interesting to hear the stories about the twilight gap or battle of six-fronts, but I find it frustrating that as players we never get to experience incredibly large battles such as these. However, if you were to implement a horde/ tower defense mode, I feel like that power fantasy could be tapped into. The way this would work is similar to the escalation protocol mode, with some slight changes. GAMEPLAY LOOP: Rather than capping out at 7 waves, the waves of enemies would continuously advance until the end of the week. (there could also be a system to make the enemies scale up in power as the week progresses, or vice versa so as to not exclude players that cant get on during the week, but this is just an option). Either way, you and some buddies (or just solo) would be able to transmat down to either the wall of the city and utilize turrets and missiles, or transmat to the front lines and utilize tanks and other vehicles. All gaurdians would use their typical loadouts and guns, and the power-ups such as turrets, vehicles, etc. would be locked behind getting a certain number of kills. (Very similar to how the valkyrie is in escalation protocol). Power ammo spawns would be more prevalent, however would be subject to the crucible ammo economy changes, so as to incentivize use of more skilled weapons like snipers, fusions, and shotguns rather than just spamming rockets. The enemies in this would be leveled up at least 10 levels above the soft-cap, allowing more invested players to get more kills which will be important later. However, this event would be helpful to under-leveled players in the same way that D1 Iron Banner was in that it would reward high level rewards if you put enough time into it. Now if this mode was to release as is, every player would simply sit up on the wall and fire snipers down onto the ads below, which isn't very engaging. In order to prevent this, I would allow the enemies to be able to inflict damage on your section of the city wall. There would be a health bar to it essentially, and every time that bar was reduced to zero you would be returned to orbit. However, when no enemy is doing damage to it, it would very slowly repair itself. (Lore-wise this would be the city's citizens repairing the wall). Because within every enemy faction there are a mix of ground troops and ranged troops, it would push players into developing interesting team comps to deal with different enemies. EX: The hive are attacking the city. The cursed thrall and regular thrall rush extremely fast and scratch at the wall attempting to get through-this would be countered by a helm of saint bubble titan with a tractor cannon pushing away and blinding thrall. acolytes and hive knights launch shredder shots and boomers at the wall. -this would be countered by several guardians with rush centered builds to push deep into enemy lines and take the enemies attention off of damaging the wall. High level Ogres inflict massive damage to the wall with their eye beams -countered by celestial hunters with snipers on the wall flinching the ogres and eventually killing them By doing something like this, you could utilize the strengths and weaknesses of each class in a way that I don't feel has been properly utilized yet in D2. Also, when it comes to revives, revives would be unlimited, however players could not respawn without revive. This would allow for a interesting gameplay decision of "do I want to push out with some teammates and take damage off of the wall, despite risking my death which could wipe our team?", or "do I play passively, preventing a team wipe, but leaving the wall exposed?". This would allow for a potentially different scenario during every play through, as well as the development of extremely strong strategies. REWARDS: Everyone knows you cant have an endgame activity without gear at the end of it. For this event, there would be perhaps 4 or 5 weapons available each season. However, these guns would be extremely customizable. The base guns would be easy to acquire, and would feature perks that deal specifically with killing large waves of ads such as kill clip, rampage, firefly, outlaw, etc. Snipers and more specialized would have more specialized perks such as triple tap for dealing with enemies such as those ogres I mentioned earlier. Anyways, the more enemies you kill in this event with the event specific guns would allow to "overcharge the gun with light". This would then give you a 3rd or 4th slot for perks (depending how many enemies you killed) and allow you to use your paracausality as a guardian to reroll perks on your gun as many times as you want. This would not only allow guns to be recognizable, but allow for true customization and development of a relationship between a guardian and their gun. In addition to this form of customization, there would also be ornaments that correspond to certain challenges within this event such as "defend the city wall for 30 minutes, for an hour" (rewarding time commitment), as well as "kill 1000 enemies/ kill 500 enemies with precision shots" (rewarding efficiency). Potentially there could be ornaments for different enemy types, such as a thrall skull on the end of your gun after getting 1000 hive kills. (All these numbers could be changed btw, but this is just as an example). In addition to these guns, there would be emblems (which Bungie has shown they're very good at implementing so far) which would display kills, time commitment, or level of success on defending the tower. Potentially there could also be an armor set, but since the enemy each time the event came around, themeing for the gear could get strange. CONCLUSION: Because randomly rolled guns, and avenues for displaying your achievements as a guardian are in high demand, this activity could potentially be very promising. It would also serve as a means for leveling up for less committed players, but would reward the highest level of play with better rolled and looking weapons (based on the loot system), as well as making it easier for better put together teams to succeed (incentivizing team play) Anyways, this was just an idea of mine of how the game could be made a little more diverse and exciting during those "special" weeks such as Iron Banner and Faction Rally Feel free to leave comments on how to improve this idea. Just trying to provide some ideas to Bungie and the community as a whole :)