Returning Player Guide – Destiny 2
What Older Content is Still Worth Doing?
Although we’re onto a new era with Shadowkeep, surprisingly a lot the stuff that released over the last year or so is very much still worth doing.
Before we dive into a whole lot, if you simply want to just know the best weapons to collect for each game mode without a long-winded explanation of all the relevant content that gets you that stuff, go ahead and check out our best weapon guides for PvE, PvP, and Gambit. Now, back to the returning player guide.
Black Armory Forges
It’s worth visiting Ada-1 in the Annex of the Tower and getting familiar with the Forges. You’ll get an exotic quest for Jotuun, an extremely powerful fusion rifle that is good in pretty much all of the three core modes: PvE, PvP, and Gambit.
You can also start the exotic quest for Izanagi’s Burden, which is among the most meta weapons right now for high-end PvE content. Finally, you can try and obtain the Le Monarque, which is a really great bow if you like bows.
Forges aren’t that hard to do anymore. You simply need to work with two other guardians to quickly kill blue (phased) enemies that drop batteries.
Try not to waste time killing anything else unless you have to. Throw those batteries into the Forge at the center of the map enough times and the next round starts. At round three, a boss spawns that you need to kill.
The Menagerie and the Chalice of Opulence
The Season of Opulence introduced The Menagerie and the Chalice of Opulence, which is effectively a system where you can craft your own guns and try to grind out god rolls for the guns that you crafted in a raid-lite environment.
The Chalice of Opulence stays in your quests tab, and you can interact with it to slot in runes that you’ll get automatically from completing activities within the core three game modes (Crucible, Gambit, Strikes).
The Chalice though has to be restored to full power using Imperials to get the most out of it (unlocking additional runes so you have more crafting options for example).
Imperials can be obtained by completing the Triumphs in the Menagerie (Destinations > Minor) tab, and opening up weekly chests for glimmer at the Nessus Barge for 5K a pop.
We highly suggest pumping all your Imperials into Rune Compatibility so you can obtain all the rune combinations, and then go for Power and Efficiency.
Once you set all the runes you want to use, you enter the Menagerie on Nessus which is a matchmade raid-lite experience for six people.
While it’s slightly more challenging than your usual matchmade stuff don’t worry because it’s impossible to fail. If your team really sucks, it will just take longer.
You can check out all of the crafting combinations here. Some popular meta options include: Erentil FR4 (PvP), Beloved, and Austringer.
Old Raids
So first off, all of the old raid armor in all of the raids prior to Garden of Salvation now drop armor 2.0 variants. So if you just like the look of the older raid armor, that alone is worth running them for.
But in addition to that, there are still pretty fine weapons that drop from the older raids such as Leviathan’s Midnight Coup and Last Wish’s Chattering Bone.
Most importantly though, many of the raids are tied to important exotic weapons worth grinding for.
Anarchy from Scourge of the Past and One Thousand Voices from Last Wish are arguably two of the best PvE weapons right now in the game. A Leviathan clear is required for Legend of Acrius’ exotic quest.
While Legend of Acrius isn’t quite at the level of those two other guns, it’s still quite good. Finally, Crown of Sorrows drops Tarrabah which is a solid SMG that might rise in usage now that Recluse has been taken down a few pegs.
Exotic & Pinnacle Quests
Finally, you should definitely start taking on as many exotic quests as you can. Many of them have grindy steps that can be knocked out while you’re doing all the other catch up stuff above.
The older ones that you should prioritize above all are: Outbreak Perfected, Whisper of the Worm, Izanagi’s Burden, Jotuun, Truth (if you like PvP/Gambit), and Sleeper Simulant.
There are of course other really great weapons too that you can quest for but those will give you the most bang for your buck.
Since you’ve been gone, Bungie also added and removed something called Pinnacle Weapons. While they won’t be updated with new weapons as of Shadowkeep, you can still quest for the old ones.
These are essentially extremely powerful legendary weapons that border on being exotic. You obtain them by grinding a bunch of objectives within a certain game type.
They have been nerfed heading into Shadowkeep but a few are still definitely worth getting. For PvE content: Recluse (Shaax/Crucible), The Mountaintop (Shaax/Crucible), Loaded Question (Zavala/Strikes), 21% Delirium (Drifter/Gambit).
For PvP prioritize Recluse & The Mountaintop again, and add Recluse (Shaax/Crucible) and Luna’s Howl (Shaax/Crucible) if you like snipers and hand cannons respectively.
If you’re astute you might have noticed that Pinnacle Weapons that drop from Crucible were really important for PvE.
Bungie didn’t intend for this and thus, that is why they have revamped this going forward by getting rid of Pinnacle Weapons entirely and replacing them with Ritual Weapons which you can read about here.
