Destiny 2 - I don't have time to explain Bungie's MMO shooter 2.0

Translation: The guy who gives you rewards for competing in the Crucible is giving better rewards this week, but you have to be at 300 power level already.

I’m not at 300 yet, so this isn’t relevant to me, correct?

Correct, not relevant unless you’re only one or two pieces of gear away from 300. If you’re in a position where you might hit 300 before next Tuesday, don’t spend your crucible tokens until then.

And as a more general FYI, the Faction Rally is live again. Pledge to the faction with the coolest shaders and make everyone mad when Dead Orbit wins again!

Oh nice! Does Dead Orbit have a scout rifle as a reward again? If so I’ll join Dead Orbit again.

DO has a grenade launcher, FWC has a fusion rifle, and NM has a sword.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the sword sways people toward NM. I saw reddit grumble that the grenade launcher wasn’t very good (because they’re all scared DO will win again), but I don’t know the specs of any of the weapons or really have any idea what’s worthwhile.

I’ll pledge one guardian to each so I can buy whatever wins on the cheap, but my priority will be FWC since I didn’t get any of their shaders last time around.

It’s always about the shaders.

What are shaders exactly? Like new textures for your ship and your character?

Where do you go in the interface to see them? If I loaded up the first Destiny, will I have Shaders there as well, now that I know they exist?

Think of them as buckets of paint. If you bring up your main inventory screen (showing your guardian and what you currently have equipped or with you), “right-shoulder-button” over to the next inventory screen. At the top it will show any engrams you have that you haven’t decrypted yet. Below that will be a grid of—I don’t know what to call this—“stuff” that isn’t weapons or armor. Vendor tokens, planetary materials, gunsmith materials, etc.

D-pad down and it will cycle that grid to the next screen, your inventory of mods. Those are the blue or purple mods you can apply to weapons and armor.

D-pad down again and it will cycle the grid to your shaders. They’re stacked, you might have 3 of one and 75 of another (hello Avalon Teal). If you press Triangle (maybe Y on Xbox?) you can preview what it would look like if you applied the shader to your entire armor set, although know that they’re single use and each piece of gear requires another copy of the shader. So you’ll need at least 5 of a given shader to paint yourself head to toe (helmet, chest, arms, legs, class item).

You have to go to the invidual pieces of gear to actually apply them. And yes, you can also apply them to ships and sparrows.

Shaders existed in D1 as well, but there they weren’t consumable. You could switch the shaders applied to your armor as often as you liked without using them up, however they were also applied at a character level, not at a gear level, so if you equipped the “Chatterwhite” shader, it didn’t matter what helmet you put on, it would be white as long as you had the Chatterwhite shader in your single shader slot.

Interesting. I’ll have to go see what this does to my ships. I don’t know why anyone cares what your character looks like. It’s a first person game for god’s sake. But one thing I’m looking at all the time is my ship. Having a good looking ship is really important, just for my sanity and having peace of mind.

Annoyingly, it does require a little glimmer to apply a shader each time. And fancy ships actually cost a lot of glimmer to apply a shader, relatively.

Pick one. You can’t have both.

I’m level 12 now. Haven’t been playing much, but it’s pretty fun so far. When do I get the ability to fuse weapons together? I’m loosely following @instant0’s progression template, saving the story missions for when I have nothing else to do.

I’m sure this has been asked 417 times, but, how do I join the clan?

Legendary and Exotic weapons and armor (purple and gold icons) can be infused with other gear that has a higher power level. You take the lower level equipment you want to keep, look at its details in your inventory, and there’s a little box with an icon I can’t describe well, black and gold pattern. Hover over that, and it will show all eligible items you can infuse into it. The low level item you want to improve gets increased to the power level of the item you destroy through the infusion (you can only improve legendaries and exotics, but you can also use rares—blue icon—as fodder for the infusion).

It costs glimmer and a few legendary marks, varying slightly depending on what’s being infused into what.

As far as I remember there’s no level requirement, you probably just don’t have many (or any) legendaries or exotics yet at level 12.

@Hotfreak The link above should work for requesting an invite to the Qt3 clan.

Meanwhile, if you want to grind as much as you can out of the Faction rally in a hurry, this works:

In about 90 minutes I maxed out my FWC rewards (rank up every 20 tokens, you stop receiving equipment rewards from the factions after rank 30, so 600 tokens needed in total).

Pretty good chance this will get patched out quickly if it’s something Bungie can do server-side. You might have a day or two if they actually have to push a hot-fix for it.

It’s still a very tedious 90 minutes.

Thanks for that explanation. I have an exotic but no legendary marks.

I’ve also sent a Clan request.

I appreciate the help!

You get legendary marks every time you dismantle legendary weapons or armor, which seems pretty rare at first, but someday you’ll be swimming in them. The early marks you find are probably better saved for purchasing exotic gear from Xûr if he’s selling something good (you need ~25 for an exotic from him depending on the type of gear).

You don’t need to really worry about infusing your weapons and armor until around the time you’ve got the marks to spend on it though. If you have a legendary gun or space-pants you love and can’t afford to infuse (or don’t have the right stuff to infuse into them) just keep moving on to higher level gear for the time being and then come back to it when you’ve got the necessary materials.

Finally got around to trying Coldheart (actually had a second one drop). Immediately hated it and will probably never use it again. Wish I could trade it for something I’d actually use.

Got everyone to base power level 300 last week, actually got everyone in color coordinated gear with the right mods for 305 for all today.

Nice one.

Did the Raid + Gauntlet Challenge mode(using the hardmode tactic) yesterday, smoothest run so far, Think we completed it all in 2 hours.

Finally hit 305 on my PC Hunter, and 299.1/299.3 on my Titan/Warlock.

Hopefully Dead Orbit wins again, but if not, I have one for every faction. Only need to grind rank 30 on my Warlock and I should be done for this week.

Prestige Nightfall still remains to be done this week, last two weeks it was quite doable and it seems this week will be even easier, provided we don’t get stuck. Problem so far has been that its just me and a clan member doing prestige, so we always need to find a PUG 3rd party, and their quality varies somewhat.

So glad B.NET is split EU/Americas so I have split friends list, but at least its quick to switch. Been playing NA since launch since most of the clan is there. Even the clan roster only shows players from the region you picked…

I got totally punked earlier. An exotic engram drops, but it is 5 power below me. No sweat, I could still get something great out of it. Nope, it’s the same chest piece I am wearing (Actium War Rig) only 3 power less. After that, I open a bright engram and get the ornament for my most-desired exotic (Sweet Business). Then I’m out doing heroics and bump into somebody wielding SB for the first time. All this, of course, on top of Xur selling it the week before PC started. It’s like the game is going “pbtbtbtbtbttbt” at me.

Yep, that definitely sounds like Destiny.