Once upon a time, the Buzzard sidearm was a neat little pocket pistol that didn’t do anything extraordinary. Fast forward to Season of Defiance and the Buzzard sidearm is considered a must-have for sidearm enthusiasts. In this Buzzard Destiny 2 God Roll guide, we’ll go through a few rolls that you might want to pick up for both PvP and PvE.
Note that you don’t need the adept version of the weapon to get the most out of the Buzzard. A regular god roll is just as good as an adept god roll. But you’ll still want to get the adept version for further customization to your play style.
This is also the last time this season that you will be able to get the Buzzard Destiny 2 sidearm through Nightfall runs.
Buzzard Base Stats
These are the weapon’s stats before any perks are applied:
- Impact: 49
- Range: 36
- Stability: 67
- Handling: 51
- Reload Speed: 30
- Zoom: 12
- Rounds Per Minute: 300
- Magazine: 15
The first thing people need to know about the Buzzard Destiny 2 sidearm is that it’s no Drang. It has a zoom of 12, that’s one less than Drang. The good news is that you don’t have to choose one over the other. Drang is in the energy slot while the Buzzard sits comfortably in the primary slot.
It is worth noting that the Drang has a major leg up on the Buzzard on account of its 71 handling while the Buzzard only has 51 handling. In terms of sidearms, that’s a night and day difference. On the bright side, Buzzard has a small advantage in terms of Stability. This is also significant in close-range encounters.
How to Get the Buzzard Destiny 2 Sidearm
To get the Buzzard Destiny 2 sidearm, you’ll need to complete runs of the Nightfall-featured mission. It is a chance drop at the end-mission chest so it’s never a guarantee. You can vastly improve your chances by doing higher-difficulty Nightfalls.
Once you’ve unlocked the weapon by getting a random roll, you can then focus the weapon by visiting Commander Zavala at the Tower to get your preferred god roll without having to do dozens of runs.
Buzzard Perk Pool
3rd column perks
- Encore
- Fourth Time’s the Charm
- Compulsive Reloader
- Pulse Monitor
- Perpetual Motion
- Overflow
4th column perks
- Frenzy
- Vorpal Weapon
- Multikill Clip
- Rangefinder
- Kinetic Tremors
- Swashbuckler
Buzzard God Roll for PvP
- 1st Column: Corkscrew Rifling
- 2nd Column: Ricochet Rounds
- Range Masterwork
- Perpetual Motion + Rangefinder (Always active build that doesn’t require a kill to become better.)
- Encore + Rangefinder (Snowball build that gets way better after the first kill. Works even better with Hammer-forged Rifling.)
The Buzzard Destiny 2 sidearm was clearly meant to be a PvP weapon. The weapon’s perk pool is clearly leaning toward it. Rangefinder may work for now but that’s going to change in the near future. So you may want to a roll with Swashbuckler in your vault as a substitute should Rangefinder find itself nerfed to the ground. At the very least, Swashbuckler will give you stacks of damage increase from melee kills and kills with the weapon.
Buzzard God Roll for PvE
- 1st Column: Fluted Barrel
- 2nd Column: Ricochet Rounds
- Range Masterwork
- Overflow + Kinetic Tremors (This combo allows for near-constant activation of Kinetic Tremor.)
- Perpetual Motion + Kinetic Tremors (Stacks of Perpetual Motion grant stats in Stability, Handling, and Reload Speed. All the stats that matter in a PvE sidearm. Kinetic Tremors is almost mandatory at this point.)
Kinetic Tremors is the clear favorite here. Your other option is going to be Frenzy as it gives the weapon more damage, handling, and reload speed the longer you stay in combat. If you’re going with Overflow, you may want to go with Extended Mag to push the magazine to its 20 cap.
The thing about Kinetic Tremors with this sidearm is that it’ll only trigger after shooting a single target with 12-15 bullets. Most of the time, you’ll be single targeting a yellow bar to activate Tremors. Red bars will not usually do as the Buzzard Destiny 2 sidearm will kill them before activation at its perfect ranges. Once those Tremors go off, however, that’s a huge chunk of burst damage.
All in all, we don’t see many Adept sidearms these days so it’s very nice of Bungie to throw us a bone in the form of the Buzzard Destiny 2 sidearm. It’s a very good gun to run for PvP and has pulled us out of more than a few sticky situations. We are more than happy to see it through post-Rangefinder nerf. Hopefully, it won’t come to a point where we need to find another roll. (At least Drang’s craftable version allows you to swap out affected perks.)
And that’s everything we’ve got for this Buzzard Destiny 2 god roll guide. We hope you find this information useful to you in some shape or form. Good luck out there, Guardians.
Check out this video from Youtuber True Vanguard where he compares both Drang and Buzzard and what a PvP god roll would look like.