Destiny Patience and Time Guide

Destiny Patience and Time Guide by Halcyon87

So you’ve decided to invest in a shiny, new Patience and Time. Yay! You can be the super ninja sniper you’ve always kinda wanted to be! Now what?

Well, you’ve got to see its strengths and weaknesses first:

• Unlike Ice Breaker, this thing will not regen ammo. Even worse, you can only carry 13 – thirteen! – rounds for quite a while. So selectivity comes into play until the second branch of the upgrade tree.
• Like Ice Breaker, the scope is fixed. Abandon all hope of turning it into a close range rifle like your Epitaph 2261 or The Supremacy.
• The camo is…strange. It is NOT indefinite once it activates – after 8 seconds, you’ll go back to being totally opaque. If you take a shot while invisible, it’ll turn off. However, if you take a shot in the 3 second time span between when you ADS and when you become invisible, the timer for invisibility will not reset. I play it like this: take a shot, disappear, take another shot. Y’know, like me at parties.
• For PvP, the scope glare exists even when invisible. So don’t think you’re totally undetectable hiding behind a rock in First Light. I will find you, and I will kill you.

Okay. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, it’s time for the upgrade tree.

Your first branch will be the barrel upgrades: Field Choke, CQB Ballistics & Aggressive Ballistics. At first glance, Aggressive Ballistics seems like the better choice, with the “predictable” recoil and the enhanced impact. But I’m a huge fan of CQB Ballistics because 1. it brings the recoil down to a level that rivals Praedyth’s Revenge and 2. range doesn’t matter at all when you can kill a Fallen Captain across the Mothyards. It’s a sniper rifle. It’ll always have range.

The next main upgrade you’ll get is the Third Eye perk. It’s mainly good to see if anyone’s sneaking up on you inside P&T’s effective range. Third Eye’s hard to use otherwise.

After the first damage upgrade, you’ll come to the second branch: Snapshot, Fitted Stock, Field Scout. I loathe Snapshot on a sniper without a short range scope. If you’ve chosen CQB Ballistics in the first branch, your stability will have been maxed out, so Fitted Stock is pretty meh. So that leaves you with Field Scout. After trudging through strikes with a measly 13 rounds, having an increase to 24 – and a mag size increase to 6 – is a godsend. You can two-shot anyone/anything in less than 3 seconds with the maxed out stability.

I mainly outlined P&T’s camo earlier, but TL;DR: takes 3 seconds to charge, camo time is finite (8 seconds), disappears when a shot is fired during invisibility. Your scope is slightly expanded when invisible as well.

If you still like/love it after all that, fill out the final branch.

• Really good against: Fallen Captains, Ascendant Knights, Harpy Zealots.
• Crappy against: Minotaurs, anything without a determined weak point.

When I first got it, I sniped from cliffsides in the Mothyards & Forgotten Shore to get a feel for it. So if you’re unsure if you’d like it or not, try it out there.

TL;DR: P&T’s main perk is a little underwhelming, but overall it’s a great sniper for long-range PvE missions, any missions that involve Fallen and/or tons of unshielded majors, and the large Control/Clash maps in PvP.

Note: Sniper Rifles do not have damage drop off.